Authors: Mark Wilson
Three Years Later
North Edinburgh
2050
Chapter 5
Joey
“Again,” Jock barked.
Joey sighed, but didn’t argue and began repeating the series of exercises Jock had been teaching him. He made rotating movements of his legs over a short wall in a sweep across the wall; spin and repeat the process. The exercises Jock drilled him with were inventive, exhausting and hugely effective in developing the muscles he used when free-running through the city. Jock was a monumental pain in the ass and a hard task master but he knew how to get the best from a body.
“Good, another centimetre higher with that right calf on the sweep, Joseph.”
Joey listened and concentrated, making the adjustments Jock suggested. He’d long ago learned to trust the padre’s instructions.
In the three years since they’d left the only home Joey had ever known on the Royal Mile, Jock and he had ventured throughout most of north Edinburgh. Leaving the confines of the inner fences of the city-centre communities, they’d made their way to the outer fence-line, which ran along the city’s north bypass, and had criss-crossed from Portobello to Corstorphine, traveling into the city and out to the fence periodically. They’d mapped most of the area and encountered many of the dead. Most of all, they’d talked and they’d trained together.
In Jock, Joey couldn’t have found a more skilled mentor or a finer surrogate father. A far cry from the man he’d imagined him to be for so long, Jock seemed in his easy-going and positive attitude as happy to be free of the confines of the Royal Mile as Joey himself. As they’d travelled throughout the remains of the Edinburgh suburbs and districts, Jock had passed along lessons on survival, combat, navigation and strategy, all learned from his years as a Marine and decades as a Zombie-hunter on the Royal Mile.
They’d become a lethal team, co-ordinated in their movement through the streets they travelled and lethal in their precision in silencing The Ringed.
It had taken Joey a few weeks to get his head around silencing the dead. He’d been taught his whole life that the dead were to be revered, left to roam in peace, but long conversations with Jock and several dangerous encounters with the more aggressive, fresher dead had helped justify the silencing of the walking dead. Jock and he now saw this as a way of bringing the moving corpses to peace. To end their suffering.
The Ringed couldn’t feel pain, as far as they could determine, but who knew what went on inside their brains, if anything? They simply had no way of knowing but genuinely felt that silencing the creatures was the safest thing for the survivors in the area, and it felt like the right thing to do.
Jock mostly used his dual blades, one in each hand facing in alternate directions.
He’d aim to the temple, base of the skull or the eye. These were the three best places to penetrate the skull and sever the fragile connection needed to animate the body.
Joey had become a master with the bow. His own training regime had made him an excellent archer but Jock’s input had turned him into an almost infallible marksman. He could accurately strike even fast moving targets from a range of fifty metres and from a crouched or a standing position. They’d practiced hand to hand combat together for thousands of hours and had hundreds of lightning-fast combat sequences at their disposal to disarm, maim and to kill the living or silence the dead.
They had a handful of pre-prepared, smooth tactics and strategies they used most often to dispatch The Ringed and code words for each of them to synchronise their attack or defence. More often than not, they favoured the Donald Duck. Joey wasn’t sure where Jock had gotten his code names from but they were always a little silly. The Donald Duck involved Jock attracting the attention of the creature, whilst Joey crept behind and silenced it with a blade to the base of the skull. Very simple but effective.
In the last twelve months, they’d concentrated on teaching Joey to work with two blades. He was far from a natural with the weapons, but Jock insisted that he needed a close-range weapon for times when his bow wasn’t a good option. Joey had argued that he would simply use his bow as a staff, but Jock had countered with a nod towards his missing middle finger, so knives it was. He’d never be any use in a knife fight against a highly-skilled living person, but had become confident enough to deal with The Ringed using them.
“Right, good work, wee man.” Jock flung an arm around his charge and pulled him in for a one-armed hug. “Let’s get something to eat and get our heads down for the night.”
Still a little uncomfortable with Jock’s warmth and easy affection, Joey patted the padre on the back and smiled.
“Right, old man. Soft play?” Joey asked.
“You saw that, did you?”
Joey had spotted the former pub with attached kid’s play area as they’d trained. Clad in still-colourful padded mats, the soft play areas they frequently came across on their travels made for excellent accommodation. The play areas were normally in a fenced-off part of the building and padded to a greater comfort level than the back of a car, their usual camping choice.
“Yeah, I’ll go do a quick check around the building. You want to get inside?”
Jock raised his eyes to survey the coming storm clouds. “Good idea,” he smiled, subconsciously rubbing at his arthritic right shoulder. “I’ll get the rabbit on, son. Be careful.”
Nodding in reply, Joey did a quick check that his bow and his knives were primed and his boots laced tightly. He pulled his hood up far enough to shelter him but not obscure his peripheral vision. The checks were automatic after years of being on the road with Jock. The padre had stopped needing to remind him of these precautions months back.
Fully prepared, Joey watched Jock retreat into the pub, knife in each hand. Jock would do a sweep of the building interior before setting up their sleeping area and cooking the game they’d trapped earlier in the day. One thing they were never short of out in the suburban expanse between inner and outer fences was rabbits. The local woodland wildlife had taken the absence of humans as their cue to colonise former homes, gardens, schools and anywhere else they could feed, breed and avoid the dead.
The abundance of food was something that Joey hadn’t expected when they’d crossed the fence-line of The Brotherhood three years previously.
Jock had taught him everything he knew about survival in the no man’s land the two of them had spent their days, weeks, months and years exploring. Food, water, and shelter had become easy to find for the pair, but still they roamed looking for who knows what. They were living: not surviving,
living
. They’d met people, some good, some not so good. Occasionally they helped people out, sometimes they even had some fun. Joey had never expected to be so happy, so free.
Supressing a smile, Joey focused on stalking the perimeter of the building. As he moved silently along, staying close to the moss and lichen-covered walls, periodically he’d reach out three feet or so, stick a little tent peg into the ground and wind some cat gut around it, stretching it along to the next peg and the next until the building’s perimeter was surrounded by a line of cat gut with little bells at regular intervals. This was a first-warning device they’d cobbled together from fishing line and those wee bells that were once found in budgie’s cages which they’d scavenged from various shops on their travels. The cat gut was very difficult for the living to see and The Ringed rarely fixed their sight on anything except a meal, so it provided an effective warning device.
He and Jock were always assessing and reassessing which items were vital in their respective rucksacks. Camping and mountaineering stores on Rose Street had provided them with outdoor clothes in the first days after their departure from The Close. Joey still enjoyed the comfort of dressing in his black denims and hiking boots, but he’d traded his battered old boots for a more practical pair of Berghuas walking boots. Both had scavenged base layers, waterproofs and jackets, Joey taking a leather jacket with windproof inner layer that Jock had cursed the store for not having in his size. The leather was perfect for allowing free movement but gave none of the swooshing, rubbing noise of some of the man-made waterproof jackets.
It was a constant battle, choosing between what was essential and what wasn’t; which items were worth each of them carrying, in case they were separated, and which it was a waste of energy to duplicate. They both carried the items they agreed that they couldn’t do without and personal preferences guided their decisions for the rest.
The only exception was the pouch of Carrionite Joey had scooped up on his hurried departure from The Close, which still lay at the bottom of the rucksack. Why he’d chosen to keep the substance, Joey couldn’t say.
Completing his sweep, Joey returned to the pub’s entrance, closed and barricaded the door behind him, and walked towards the flickering lights of Jock’s fire at the rear of the large room. Noticing a few of The Ringed with damaged temples, he assumed correctly that Jock had silenced them. Crouching, he stole a quick glance at the condition of them. They were pretty old and decayed. Mostly dried out, they’d reached that point in the decomposition process where the decay seemed to halt. It was one of those unexplained things they’d noticed on their travels. The creatures would decay to a certain point and then remain in that state. It made it very difficult to guess when the person had died. With Ringed like these ones, usually the best sign of when they’d turned were the clothes they wore. These two were dressed in the striped uniforms of soft-play attendants, with plastic
My name is John, My name is Evie
badges still visible amongst the rags.
Mostly they’d encountered newly-dead out in no man’s land. Lots of children. Joey couldn’t get his head around why anyone would choose to bring a baby into this world but obviously plenty of them had.
His own mother had
. Pushing the thought away, he noticed the smell of rabbit cooking and continued along to the soft play area.
“You enjoy that, son?” Jock nodded at the small pile of bones beside Joey, picked clean of all traces of muscle.
“Yeah. You do the best rabbit, Jock. Will have to get you to teach me.”
Jock grinned. “Aye, that’d mean you actually cooking once in a while, Joseph.”
“I caught it,” Joey shrugged. Then he asked, “Jock? When are we going to head south?”
Jock ignored him and gnawed on a femur, tearing the last little strips of thigh off.
Joey had brought up the possibility of returning to the city-centre and continuing on to the city’s south side several times over the last few weeks but Jock had been cold on the idea, brushing him off with reasons to stay in the northern suburbs. Joey decided to push a little harder this time.
“I think that it’s worth the journey. We can check in with The Brothers, make sure they’re managing all right without you keeping the faster Ringed limited. After that, we can explore the southern fence-line and zig-zag our way across the suburbs.”
“No,” said Jock, cutting off the next justification from Joey before he could offer it.
Joey quickly hid the anger that had flashed before Jock could see it. Not that there was much danger of him noticing, he hadn’t looked up once. Jock’s manner reminded Joey of the old Jock; the scowling creep who’d skulk around the Royal Mile, watching him. Watching over him as it had turned out. Lightening his tone, attempting something between cheeriness and seriousness, Joey continued.
“We could see Alys for a while too. Pass on some of the things we’ve learned out here. We do owe her, Jock. I owe her.”
Jock threw the bone he’d been working on into the fire. As he looked at Joey the fire between them danced in his eyes.
“I’ve been south before, Joseph. Bad…”
Jock stopped for a second and massaged his closed eyelids with his index fingers. When he looked up, he’d decided what to say.
“Bad people live there.”
Joey relaxed, confident that he could now convince Jock to go south.