dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) (16 page)

Chapter 9

Tricia

“Do you remember when I taught you to ride your bike?”

Marty shrugged. “Course.”

“See, when I said I was holding the back of the saddle? Well, na… it was all you.”

Marty eyed his sister, genuinely aggrieved at the disclosure.

“Ya fuckin cow. I thought you had me.”

Tricia laughed, sending a hacking cough racking through her. When she’d recovered, she wiggled her eyebrows at him.

“You did good, blondie,” she whispered. “Martin, do you remember the Christmas Dad was away?”

He nodded, moving his eyes to the vibrating planks of wood nailed across the store window. “Aye. I do. You made that day for me, Trish.”

Tricia nodded. “I know. Had to.”

Pain flashed between their eyes as the unspoken history stabbed at their memories. Absent Dad. Drunk Mum. They’d had only each other. Dinner, gifts, a sneaky dip at the old man’s whiskey. They’d had a brilliant day in the end. Bloody Marty had taken the tenner she’d given him, spent one-seventy-nine on a selection box for her and kept the change. Tricia had bought him a DVD and couldn’t care less that he’d pocketed most of the agreed-upon amount.

“We’re not going to make it back. You know that, right?” Marty asked, emphasising the word
we.

Tricia sat up from the makeshift bed of foam tubes they’d strung together. Just as they had as kids, they’d lain talking, planning and laughing for hours on their bed, despite the clawing from outside. Scanning the door, she noted that it was now moving a good inch in and out of its frame with the tireless battering it was receiving from The Ringed outside.

Almost one month they’d been holed up in the little shop, a former Scottish clothing store up near Castlehill. The pink and white ‘Ness’ sign of the storefront had offered little hope that any useful resources were there to be found. But, as at least a thousand Ringed hunted them along The Royal Mile and Grayson and his Brothers had taken refuge in Mary King’s Close, closing the heavy doors and leaving the siblings to die on the cobbles, they’d had little option but to take shelter inside the tartan-filled store.

Perhaps they might have made an egress in the first week or so, before the number of Ringed increased to the thousands currently clambering, clawing and snarling at the shop door. Drawn by the clamour of their reanimated brothers, The Ringed had flocked relentlessly to the area, mindlessly following the last source of food sensed nearby. Those at the rear of the rabble simply followed their brethren.

Tricia’s pneumonia had kept them rooted in place. Marty found crates of Pot Noodles in the shop’s storeroom and packs filled with litres of bottled water. God only knew why they were there, but the dried noodles and water kept them from starving and allowed Tricia to begin to recover from her infection.

The door was going to give way, and soon. Neither of them doubted this. It was just a question of when. That their improvised reinforcements had held so long was a miracle. A flicker of hope remained in each of them that Grayson might send assistance, or perhaps their father might make a rescue. Neither eventuality was realistic: Jock would never make his way through the hordes along The Mile, not alive at any rate, and Grayson had his new home. He simply didn’t care that they were nearby. Perhaps if they became infected Grayson would tend to them as his dogma seemed to demand. The notion made the siblings laugh.

There was a single chance for escape. The rear exit, a slim window at head height from the basement and free from the attention of the gathered horde of The Ringed at the front of the building, was too narrow for Marty. That they’d had this six weeks together to love each other, to discuss old times and simply say goodbye, was another miraculous gift.

For a fortnight, Marty had begged Tricia to leave. She would never leave her brother. Not while a breath remained in either of them. Marty understood and accepted. They would die here in this former clothing store, food for the dead.

The door sagged in at the top-centre, tearing the dusty air with a slash of bright light and the terrible sound of irreversible and fatal damage to the wood.

Marty was on his feet instantly, his eyes darting to the window.

“Tricia, please,” he pleaded.

She stood. Her face was a lesson in poker etiquette. “No.”

“Fuck ye, then,” Marty almost whispered.

He shot down into the storeroom as the door panels began to pop. Tattered and ragged fingers snaked through the new gaps, tearing flesh as they forced themselves through.

Marty reappeared, face red with exertion, eyes grim and determined. In his hands he had a lighter and a bottle filled with liquid, a rag stuck in the neck.

Pulling the little ornamental table from the window and toppling the sun-bleached mannequin, Marty pulled free a board they’d used to strengthen the window. Tricia screamed at him until she felt her throat rip in the exertion. Marty picked up a hammer, one of their only remaining weapons. Smashing the glass, he made an empty space where the window had been.

“What the fuck are ye doing, Martin?” A cough racked Tricia once again as the remaining infection in her lungs and the damage to her throat cracked her voice and made her choke on blood.

Her brother grinned, lit the rag and forced his arm though the gap in the boards, now filled with grasping hands and clacking teeth. He threw the bottle into a high arc over the heads of The Ringed who were crushing each other against the store front in lines ten-deep. Marty screamed as teeth tore the skin, fascia and muscle from his forearm. The bottle sailed over the dead, falling to a fiery splash a metre behind them.

Martin pulled his arm back through the boards, clutching tightly at the section where arterial blood sprayed. He pressed his eyes to the gap, watching row after row of The Ringed turn towards the fire, or follow each other through its flames, immune to the pain of the searing heat.
 

Tricia was on her knees, tears burning a path along her cheeks in grief. Bulleting towards the door, Marty loosed his forearm from his right-handed grip and began pulling the boards free from the doorway. His blood fountained, his face paled grey as he worked. Tricia tore the floor as she ran to him, arms around him, pulling at his chest. She didn’t care that they would die, or become one of
them.
She just didn’t want to do it without her brother. Martin elbowed her roughly back, sending her skittering three feet backwards into a rail of clothes. His face was tortured.

Marty did something simple. Simple but truly, innocently good. Something only her brother would do. Martin smiled at her through his own tears, mouthed “I love you,” and opened the door. Stepping out onto the cobbles of The Royal Mile.

Tricia raced to the open doorway. Her brother was perhaps fifty metres away already, running along the three-metre gap he’d made between the buildings and The Ringed. The infected had already sensed him and were beginning to turn in waves toward Marty. As a horde of The Ringed enclosed her brother, Tricia’s heart ripped inside her. She fell to her knees as her the dead brought him down at the arches of the City Chambers.

Her father’s voice in her head cut through the agony.
Move, fucking move.

Tricia Stevenson did move.

She re-entered the little store at a sprint, ignoring the rising pain in her lungs. Reaching the rear window, Tricia dragged a plastic crate along the dusty floor, placing it under the narrow, horizontal pane of glass. Pushing the window out and up, Tricia took half a second to hope that somehow Marty would be racing through the door, that he would fit through the window with her and his distraction had saved them both. That he hadn’t been bitten… that he wasn’t dead. The word in her mind brought her violently to her knees.

Five badly shredded men and women dragged their partially crushed and devoured bodies through the shop towards her as Tricia took a full second this time to thank her brother. Standing, Tricia decided that her brother wouldn’t die for no reason.

“I love you, blondie,” she rasped before scrambling up the wall and out into the grass-filled alleys beyond.

Staggering through Crewe Toll, Tricia pulled at the tourniquet around her elbow with her teeth and free hand. She roared as the pain shot along her arm into her chest. The lancing pain brought her to a knee. She cursed loudly, rose for perhaps the eleventh time and ploughed onward through the crushing rain coming at her from every direction. Scottish rain. She’d been roaming vaguely west since leaving the city-centre and the remains of the Kirk. It had taken nine days to reach the Canongate Kirk after she’d left the little shop on The Royal Mile.

Through back alleys, closes, gardens and tunnels, Tricia had moved silently, taking rest when her fading infection forced her to. All she found when she reached her destination was ashes, death and heartbreak. From a darkened close, she watched newly-risen Ringed shuffle in and around the grounds. Some were burned, some badly mutilated by what must have been a legion of the dead. Many wore faces she recognised.

What had brought so many here?

Whatever it had been, barely twenty of the dead wandered the streets around the Kirk now.

Her heart breaking at the apparent loss of her mother and father, Tricia stepped out into the street, intentionally allowing her feet to make a noise the few scattered Ringed who remained would respond to. Pulling her hammer free from a belt loop, Tricia walked slowly at the nearest infected.

The woman, Jane McCready, had eaten dinner a few times with the Stevenson family. She was kind, gave more than she took and always wore a smile for those she met. Jane McCready’s worm-coloured lips were pulled tightly back from her gums in a twisted mockery of the warm smile her face previously wore.

As Jane rushed at her, Tricia sidestepped, elbowing the woman in the spine as she passed her. The move was not intended to cause pain to the dead woman, which was impossible. Tricia merely wanted Jane face-down. The shiny steel of her black-handled hammer flashed for a second on the low sun before smashing through the bone and soft matter of Jane McCready’s skull.

Tricia crouched on her back with one knee, taking a moment to confirm that the vicious spark that reanimated the dead had been snuffed. Rising to her feet, Tricia Stevenson welcomed her next assailant, and the next eight after him. Finally, unable to catch her breath or raise her hammer, Tricia, rage not even close to spent, decided that she wouldn’t die here today, no matter how much she wished it. There’d be other Ringed to kill another day.

Dragging her heavy legs she disappeared down a close. Speeding as her breath came back, Tricia zig-zagged through a few buildings and up several staircases. The Ringed didn’t do well with stairs. Eventually, confident that any pursuing Ringed were far behind, she stared into the horizon, deciding which part of the city she would head for.
Anywhere but here.

Tricia’s journey west had presented her with ample opportunities to relieve herself of the anger that threatened at times to rob her of not only her reason, but her will to survive. She’d killed dozens of The Ringed in the last few days, always in locations with plenty of escape routes, never more than a few at a time, slow ones. Dozens dead and she wasn’t feeling any less pain in her soul. Dozens sent to true death and not a scratch on her until she’d sliced her right forearm on a tin of fucking peaches that morning.

She didn’t know the area well, but was looking for the Western General Hospital, hoping that she’d make it before she bled out and that she’d find some bandages and antibiotics. Rounding a hedge-lined turn into Groathill Road South, Tricia found a dry spot, shaded beneath an oak tree. She rested her butt on the pavement and her back against a little wall surrounding a white bungalow. Intending to consult her street map, Tricia closed her eyes for a second, enjoying the respite from the rain. A moment later she face-planted the tarmac path. The tourniquet on her arm loosened, allowing her blood to flow freely into the gutter.