Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (15 page)

Three Months Later

Late March, 2052

Edinburgh Castle

Chapter 15

Fraser Donnelly

“Thank you for agreeing, Dr Ramsay. I know that it’s very much outside your comfort zone, but the Dutch government insists that we send an expert on the hybrid. You know
Yersinia edinburgis
better than anyone in the lab team.”

Angus Ramsay positively beamed at Donnelly.

“I’m delighted to be asked, gaffer. I feel like Indiana Jones,” the scientist gushed.

“Quite,” Fraser said. “So let’s recap, shall we?”

A nod from Ramsay.

“The Dutch authorities have the body of the infected woman in a category five lab, sealed in an air-tight plastic body-bag. Any personnel who’ve been in contact with it have worn a biohazard suit. The creature has had its brain stem severed and is quite inert.”

Ramsay nodded along, the excitement on his face amusing Fraser.

“You are to collect the creature. With the assistance of the Dutch team you will ship it back to Britain in a private jet equipped for the transport.”

Ramsay’s eyes lit at the mention of the jet.

“At this time we have confirmed no bites, no transmission of the
Yersinia edinburgis
pathogen. This is merely a tidy-up operation. Low key. No media, no public knowledge that the infected was ever there.”

Ramsay nodded along. Face stern for a moment, he asked, “And the Dutch believe that the infected woman was washed to Amsterdam after reaching the Firth of Forth?”

“Yes,” Fraser said. “A very improbable set of circumstances but one we had thought we’d been prepared for. The gap in the underwater barriers caused by the bridge collapse has been seen to.”

“When do I leave?” Ramsay asked.

“Right now, Professor.” Fraser handed him a Holo-Phone and some documents. “These are your credentials and this is a secure comm-device. I’ll call you when the meeting has been arranged. Until then, enjoy the city.”

Ramsay shook his hand and left, practically skipping through his lab doors.

Fraser retrieved his Holo-Tablet and pinged a message to his contact at the UN, Seb Gallant, currently preparing the team in Amsterdam.

Five hours. Agent is en route.

FD

Thousands of tonnes of heavy steel and concrete barriers and weapons lay in storage in a Zeeburg warehouse. Several teams of soldiers stood ready also. In little over five hours, they’d be used to form a quarantine fence around central Amsterdam, roughly following the S100 ring-road. The action would save a lot of lives and be praised for its speedy effectiveness by various European government leaders and the media in the months to come.

The Quarantine Minister would resign amidst apologies and assurances. A freak, unforeseeable breach in the underwater defences would be blamed for the presence of a single Ringed.

The Secretary-General of the UN would issue placatory words and heap more praise on its member countries for having learned the lessons of Edinburgh and taken the necessary steps to move quickly should another outbreak occur.

Images and feeds of the people inside the quarantine zone would be streamed almost immediately.

The launch of a new show was always a stressful but invigorating experience.

Chapter 16

Jennifer

The smell of her coffee brewing invigorated Jennifer. It was one of those wonderful little minutiae of life she hadn’t realised how much she had missed. Those moments that refreshed or comforted or consoled. Jennifer swallowed the hot, sweet coffee with a grateful heart, enjoying the warming effect on her body. In a former life she’d have complained that it was freeze-dried rather than fresh. Here, today, her coffee, rescued from the freezing depths of the dungeon storerooms, was a miracle of taste and stimulus and the perfect accompaniment to the beauty of the low-rising sun.

From her post in the lower courtyard, Jennifer watched as the latest refugees from the inner-city zones arrived. Each wave of people had been taken to the Castle by the Ramsay Place route to minimise disruption to The Brotherhood. Not that they expected the Brothers to show their faces. With Joey’s departure some years before, it seemed unlikely that any of their number would follow his lead and leave the safety of the crypts to visit the surface, aside from collecting Jennifer’s tribute from The Gardens.

 
The group ambling past her were to convene in the Castle’s Great Hall, where Jennifer would welcome them and her Rangers would document each new arrival in their census. Following induction they would be escorted up into their new accommodation inside the National War Memorial Building. Those who were able and willing would be assigned duties in the Castle grounds.

The group, comprised of mostly middle-aged men and women, with only a few pre-teen children scattered throughout, had lived in the grounds of a former camp site at Seafield for the last fifteen years. The site was fenced-in and benefitted from acres of good soil in which the small community of around one hundred people had grown potatoes, peas and oats, as well as raised pigs and goats. Like most of the communities now housed in the Castle grounds, they had refused the offer of sanctuary offered to them by two of Jennifer’s longest-serving Rangers.

Without exception, each of the scores of communities they’d approached these past three months had refused, at least initially. The Rangers, Joey, Alys and some of the many refugees who’d volunteered to leave their new home in the Castle to try to convince others to seek sanctuary there had had to work hard to convince the varying zones’ residents that they meant them no harm. That Somna and The Exalted truly existed and that they were an imminent threat to their homes and their lives.

For those communities in sight of the Castle, convincing them of the existence of a safe sanctuary in the grounds had been an easier task. They could see for themselves that the Castle’s flags had been raised from the inside.

For the further-flung communities in the east, west and part-way south, the Castle was not visible and persuading them that it was indeed available as their new home had proved the most difficult task of all.

Many had made their way towards Castle Rock out of curiosity, fear of the coming danger, or simply because they needed hope of a better place. Thousands had not.

Jennifer felt a pang of real physical pain inside when she thought of the people who would not accept their offer of protection. In a city sealed by barriers, inside and out, mistrust and fear of one’s neighbour had become deeply rooted in the survivors’ psyche.

She and her daughter, as well as a hundred or so Rangers and Joseph MacLeod, had committed themselves to ensuring that Somna’s path brought him straight to the Castle with as little contact with the outlying communities as possible. But the simple fact was that they could not and would not save everyone The Exalted encountered on their route.

Alys was expected back at the Castle later that afternoon. She was meeting James Kelly out at North Bridge, the latest in a series of liaisons they’d arranged to plan for Somna’s arrival in the city. So far, James had kept his end of the deal, passing Alys updates on Somna’s preparation and likely strategy.

 
Jennifer wasn’t sure how she felt about James’s reappearance. The last time they’d seen each other, she and the rest of The Gardens’ women had forced the men out of their community. James had been a good man, back then. God only knew what he’d turned into to survive in The Exalted. Alys clearly liked her uncle and trusted him. Today’s meeting with him was arranged because Alys needed to ask him to relay intelligence to Somna that would encourage him to come straight to the Castle.

It was a slim hope, that they could press The Exalted directly to their battlefield, but it was all they could do for those communities who had refused their protection. Driving Somna to Castle Rock was also their best hope to defeat the tribe.

Of the communities yet to be invited, The Sick Kids was most important to her daughter. Jennifer had agreed to accompany Alys, along with Joey, out to The Sick Kids’ zone.

Having heard of the state of mind of the little community’s matriarch, Irene, and the influence she held over the younger children, Jennifer doubted that The Sick Kids could be convinced to step out from the security of their home. The group of children believed that when one of their number reached adulthood at eighteen years old, they must be banished before they turned into a Zombie.

Having failed to convince Irene that only bites transmitted the infection, in recent days Alys had discussed with her mother whether bringing them to the Castle by coercion was the answer, but none of them wished to forcibly remove the children. If they couldn’t be convinced, they’d have to fend for themselves, no matter how much it hurt her to walk away from the little ones.

As the group from Seafield trailed up the hill towards the Great Hall, a stumbling girl of around four years of age tripped over a prominent cobble. She recovered her footing before falling but lost grip of her stuffed toy, which bounced off the ground and came to rest at Jennifer’s feet.

Scooping up the dirty brown rabbit, she crouched down to make eye contact with the girl and handed her back her toy.

“What’s your name?” she asked the kid.

“Alice,” she said, taking her stuffed friend back from the strange lady.

“Good name,” Jennifer smiled. “And his?” She nodded at the bunny.

The kid relaxed a little. “He’s a she. Her name is Bella.”

Jennifer placed a hand on the girl’s cheek.

“Welcome to your new home.”

Watching the girl disappear up the craggy hill with her family, Jennifer turned her thoughts to the list of tasks she had to tend to that day. Food stores were looking good. The Gardens’ farms continued to produce fresh and dried goods in enough mass to provide for everyone in the Castle grounds.

With the coming of spring, a large section of the lower Courtyard had been cleared of its stone surface and spring vegetables planted in its place. Only thirty percent of The Gardens’ residents had evacuated to the castle. This would remain the case until Somna reached the outskirts of the city-centre. The Gardens weren’t on the route to the Castle that they planned to coax him along and, as such, were at low risk, provided that The Exalted could be dealt with on Castle Rock.

That left The Brotherhood to deal with. Joseph had insisted that he would approach them when the time was right.

Accommodation inside the Castle was comfortable and, in many cases, much more so than for those left behind. Most were rehomed in the various bunks of the former soldiers’ barracks. Hundreds of makeshift beds and seating areas had been built throughout the National Monument Building and various other large, solid stone structures around the grounds. There was more than enough space for all of the refugees and plenty of food to go around. The Castle walls were secure, with three sides of the fortress surrounded by the high, impassable rock of the dormant volcano that formed Castle Rock. The refugees inside were working hard to improve the already good living conditions and to contribute where they could in building, farming and fortifying the main gates. Many commented that, despite the coming threat of The Exalted, they felt safe, perhaps for the first time since the city fell.

 
If only we could have convinced more of them of that.

Jennifer shoved the morbid thought away and began scanning the list from the armoury. Consisting of around a dozen flares and nine blank cartridges for the light cannon, fused before the quarantine for the one o’clock gun, and fifteen medium-sized barrels of gunpowder, the armoury was their best hope of defeating The Exalted, but only if they could be led to the Castle Esplanade.
 

If the explosives failed to eliminate the entire tribe, then close-combat would be their only remaining option for preventing The Exalted from taking the Castle. Given that the Royal Mile area had been fenced off by The Brotherhood for over two decades now, and that a huge portion of the city’s infected had now congregated in Newhaven, Somna would have all of the opportunity, time and manpower he needed to fashion a ram with which to breach the main gate.

It was a unique and pivotal moment in the history of the dead city. Everyone felt as though they were approaching a tipping point; that the city’s dynamic was about to shift irreversibly once more. The atmosphere crackled with the coming storm. They hoped that this time they would be the architects of their own destiny.

Entering the Castle’s Great Hall, Jennifer took her position in front of the massive fireplace that in any other setting would have dominated the entire room. Here, in this room of strong-beamed high ceiling, once-red sprawling walls lined by a series of knights’ suits of armour still holding swords and axes, and dangling chandeliers, the gargantuan hearth seemed perfectly proportioned.

Looking over the frightened faces of those congregated, Jennifer consciously forced herself to radiate warmth and authority. These people needed to know that they were safe, valued and welcome.

This type of public speaking, the openness and warmth required, didn’t come easily to her. The first of these meeting that she’d held hadn’t gone particularly smoothly. Her brusque manner – a consequence of her nerves and over-eagerness to show strength – succeeded in cowering the assembled refugees, rather than reassuring them. Now, after fifty-two such gatherings, she’d welcomed three thousand, two hundred and sixteen people into the Castle and become accustomed to the emotional platitudes and logistical information she had to convey to the groups of hardy but scared people.

Some days, more than three thousand people seemed a huge number to care for. Other days, they seemed so very few: thirty-two hundred from perhaps twelve thousand survivors of a city that had been home to half a million people before the plague. At best guess, courtesy of James, The Exalted numbered five thousand.

Five thousand killers, survivalists, rapists and psychotics, each of them a Bracha – or worse.

All the Castle’s inhabitants could do was work with what they had.

Jennifer watched her daughter and Joey move further along the overgrown street up ahead. Glancing up she noted Sciennes Road.
We’re almost there.
It felt good to roam her city once again. Alys was right: she’d limited herself by remaining exclusively in The Gardens for so long. However, her community was strong and thriving, so few regrets lingered.

Joey leapt onto the bonnet of a rusted Toyota by the side of the road and used his momentum to bounce up onto a phone-box. Alys followed a half step behind, joining the boy in a sideways cartwheel, her from the Toyota’s roof, him from his loftier perch. The two laughed and ran off together towards the vehicular barrier in front of the Hospital for Sick Children.

Several months had passed since Jennifer had unloaded her history on Alys and Joey. She felt strangely freed by giving them the brief insight into her time in the city. In truth, she felt like a fraction of her old carefree, pre-plague self, but that was a lot closer to who she’d been in that past life in years. Sunshine was peeking through the cracks of the walls she’d erected to survive. Not much, but enough to nurture the seedling of hope these two amazing young adults had allowed her to germinate.