dEaDINBURGH (13 page)

“Some fun, eh?” Joey asked, retrieving an arrow from the eye socket of a Zom dressed in a tattered, weather-beaten nurse’s uniform.

Alys slipped her Sai into the sheaths on her thighs. Ignoring his question, she nodded in the direction of the hospital’s gates.

The stone pillars and walls of the gates still stood but the metal of the gates had either been torn down or had rotted. To close the gaps where the gates once stood, someone had parked four large food trucks across the entrance and packed sandbags around the space between ground and truck. It wouldn’t hold against the living, who could just move some sandbags and slip under, but it’d keep the dead from entering the hospital grounds just fine. Joey suspected that whoever was holed up inside the hospital probably didn’t have many visitors with a pulse. The horde of Zoms they’d dealt with to get there would deter most travellers.

No heroics
. The phrase struck him suddenly. Jock would have been pretty angry at what he’d just done to get to a hospital that had probably been looted decades before.

“I’ll go first,” he told Alys. She always resented it when he took point, but swallowed her reflexive need to lead, simply because he had the long range weapon. Pushing a few sandbags aside, they both slipped through the gap. Joey was in a ready position in a second once they reached the inner line, scanning around for signs of people, dead or alive, whilst Alys replaced the sandbags behind them.

“Clear,” he called.

Alys drew her Sai. Moving into point, she led him up the stairs and through the broken glass entrance. The sound of groaning faded behind them.

Chapter 14

Alys

Once inside, Alys shifted her Sai so that the handles rested firmly in her palms and her index fingers lay along the hilts. She wanted the extra reach as the corridors ahead had several twists and turns. Pausing to read the faded lettering on a map of the hospital, she opted to take a left turn towards the main building when a flicker of movement caught her eye on the right. Pointing her right Sai in the direction, she indicated to Joey to go slowly and quietly.

Hugging the corridor’s walls, they moved along, slipping silently along the dark corridor, Joey with blades in hand and bow tucked away, watching their rear. They were wary but not particularly afraid. The Ringed didn’t do stealth; their groans were involuntary and the smell of decay that emanated from them warned of their presence more often than not.

 
Alys stopped suddenly as a shadow slid across the gap at the bottom of the double doors she’d been moving towards. The shadow moved quickly, smoothly and with purpose. That meant a living person. Joey was facing the other direction so she lashed out a quick, gentle kick to his heel to signal that he should stop. She peered through the darkness at the gap under the door. Silently swapping positions she gestured to Joey that he should look through the gap. His night vision was far better than her own.

“There are two people there; small, fast,” he whispered to her.

She tugged on his sleeve and made a circular motion with her index finger, indicating that they should swap positions once more. When back in point, Alys slid silently up to the door and held up three fingers to Joey behind her, slowly retracting them one at a time in a countdown.

They crashed through the double doors, weapons raised. Two children, no older than ten, dropped a pile of plates they’d been carrying, screamed and ran. The smashing of the plates echoed along the corridor long after their screams disappeared into the ward up ahead.

“Your face did that,” Joey said.

“That scowl of yours would scare the dead.”

Alys threw a few colourful phrases his way and hid a smile.

“Let’s go say hello,” she said, following the kids along the corridor.

Taking an L-shaped corridor along to Ward One, they walked deliberately and slowly, weapons sheathed but accessible.

“Hello there,” Alys called along the corridor. “We’re sorry for scaring you. We won’t hurt you.”

They heard shuffling from deep at the rear of the ward.

“We just want to talk to you, maybe have a look for some medicines in the hospital and then we’ll leave. Is that okay?” Alys said gently.

“Let’s just go.” Joey tugged at her shoulder.

Shrugging him off, she told him, “No, Joey, they’re just kids. They might need our help.”

She saw his eyelids flicker and knew what he was thinking. She cut him off before he could say it.

“No heroics, I know. But if not us, then who? Who’ll help them?”

She could see the surprise cross his face, just for a second, before he hid it.
Why were they all so surprised when she showed that she cared?
Her mother was the same, but Jennifer’s expression was always more one of disdain. Did they think she was made for violence and nothing else?

“They might not need any help, Alys. They seemed fine.”

She turned away from him. “We’re going to make sure, okay.” It wasn’t a question.

Alys moved through the doorway onto the ward, ready to call again, when a young and shaky voice called out.

“What age are you?”

“We’re both eighteen,” Alys answered instantly.

Whispering came from behind some curtains at the rear.

“You’re adults,” a different voice said, an older one, a girl.

Alys smiled at Joey who had a
what the hell
look on his face.

“Yes we are. Almost, but not quite, I suppose,” she said with a hint of humour.

“Are you hungry?” called the second voice.

“I’m starving,” shouted Joey. “I could eat a scabby dog.”

Alys punched him in the arm, the usual spot.

“You’ll scare them.”

“You eat dogs?” a third voice asked, an even younger one this time.

Alys glared at Joey to keep his mouth shut.

“Why? Have you got one for me? Is it a Jack Russell? I love a nice barbecued terrier, so I do.”

The youngest kid cried, “Nooooo. Don’t eat ma dug,” and appeared from behind the curtain, looking crushed.

Fifteen older children stepped out, laughing at Joey’s remark.

The oldest-looking one, maybe sixteen or so, bent down to bring herself face to face with a three-year-old who was clutching a stuffed dog to her chest.

“He was only joking, Natalie. He won’t eat Dougal.”

Turning to Alys, she held her hand out. “I’m Irene” she said with a sad smile. “Sorry, but we’re a little wary of adults around here… Since they all tried to eat us.”

The group of kids all snapped their attention towards Alys, looking like they half expected her to suddenly decide that she did fancy biting one of them after all.

“You think that all of the adults became...”

“Biters,” Irene interrupted. “All of them. They got them out, the kids who were here in the beginning, on bite-night. At least that’s what we were taught.”

“Only kids allowed,” little Natalie piped up.

Alys smiled at the little girl with the stuffed dog and back to Irene again. They thought that the plague only affected adults.

Alys felt Joey’s surprise and resented him for it as she knelt down in front of the timid three-year-old, took one of her hands and kissed the back of it.

“See? I’m nice and warm and I’m only nearly an adult. You’re safe with me, sweetheart. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.”

Little Natalie insisted on taking Alys for a tour around the section of the hospital that the kids inhabited. So she wandered off with her and a group of the younger kids, leaving Joey with the teenagers.

 
She was surprised to discover that the little group of children, thirty in total, actually had a pretty decent standard of living. The hospital still had running water and even had a functioning hot water system, heated by solar panels on the roof. The water was recycled rainwater and wasn’t likely to run dry any time soon. Perhaps most surprising was that the kids – they called themselves The Sick Kids – had access to limited electricity which they used mainly for special treats, like watching old discs they called DVDs on little televisions built into the ward walls.

Alys had never seen a television before, and despite Joey’s best attempts at an explanation, she was no more enlightened. Of course his explanation was second-hand from Jock. Joey had never seen a live screen before either. Neither of them had ever had any access to electricity.

The kids explained to her that the television never received a signal and neither did any radios they had. The only contact they had with the outside world was when the older kids went on supply runs. Generally they stayed within a small radius, but had been forced to venture further recently, leading to a horde of Zombies following them back home a week or two ago. Alys explained that the horde outside wouldn’t be a problem in future and suggested some new ways that they could use to sneak around for supplies more discreetly.

Despite their confinement and ingrained distrust of adults, The Sick Kids were very open about their lives and seemed happy. They wanted for little, despite looking very pale and sun-deprived to Alys eyes. She thought that she saw signs of rickets in a few of them and made a metal note to suggest that they use the gardens surrounding the hospital more frequently to soak up whatever sun Edinburgh had to offer. The grounds were secure enough for that.

On returning to Ward One, Alys found Joey surrounded by most of the kids, animatedly telling stories about some of the people he’d met on his travels with Jock. The younger kids laughed until they were in tears, doubled over at his description of a guy he’d met who thought a panda was his wife. The teenagers were playing it cool, but she could tell that they’d been laughing too and would be repeating the tale to each other later in the day. Several of the older girls played with their hair and blushed every time Joey looked in their direction. All were amazed at his description of Jock as an old man, clearly astounded that he hadn’t turned.

As the evening wore on, they asked The Sick Kids about the possibility of finding some medicine or other medical supplies in the building. The kids explained that they did have some supplies but had none to spare, insisting that they’d exhausted whatever stocks had been in the hospital to fill their own store.

Irene turned out to be as nearly a good a storyteller as Joey. As the oldest she was in the odd position of being in charge, but also being next in line to have to leave according to the rules that The Sick Kids Lived by. She gave them the thirty-year history of The Sick Kids, guilelessly. Alys sensed that a lot of what had been passed down through each shortened generation had been lost or altered to the point where no one really knew anymore how they came to be the community they were.

As Irene told it, the kids who’d established the boundaries and claimed the hospital as their own had been patients who’d been forced to fight for their lives against the very adults who’d been treating their illnesses just hours before. Irene explained to them that a small group of around fifteen had survived the initial outbreak. Witnessing mainly adults running around trying to eat kids, they assumed that adults were the only hosts and systematically cleared the hospital of all infected. Any kids who’d been bitten were either silenced or, more often, pushed out onto Sciennes Road. The founding kids essentially barricaded themselves in a little community, shunning all adults. They called them
biters
, but allowed other kids to enter the hospital once they’d been checked for bites.

Once a Sick Kid’s eighteenth birthday came, within a few days they willingly left to save their family and friends from what they expected to turn into. When asked what became of the people who left and wandered out into the world without supplies, food, water, or any real survival skills, the kids looked puzzled and replied,
“They just do what all the other biters do, they don’t need those things.”

Alys had asked, “What if they don’t turn? What then?”

“Every adult becomes a biter,” Natalie had said. The certainty of the
fact
made something break a little inside Alys. She didn’t reply. What could she say? They lived in an insular little world where kids got older and were banished. The kids who remained were either descended from the original group of children or were kids whom they’d encountered on supply runs.

Deciding to stay the night at the younger kids’ insistence, Joey and Alys made a little bed each for themselves in a single unit that had once been used to isolate chest infection patients. As Joey lay on the camp bed and Alys sat up reading by candle light in the rusted hospital bed, squeaking the rubber under-sheet every time she moved. Joey giggled, assuming that she’d farted. Alys hid her tears for The Sick Kids behind the book she read.

When she’d composed herself and was certain her voice would be steady, she spoke.

“What do you make of all this – these kids and how they live?”

Turning to his side to face her, Joey propped himself up on one arm, exposing his archer’s chest a little. Alys’ eyes were instantly rigid on one word on page eighty-seven of her book.