Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (5 page)

Chapter 5

Joey

The midday sun burned coldly, low on the horizon, and made long gangly spectres of the shadows as Joey worked his way along Groathill Avenue. He hadn’t seen a single soul on his journey, living or otherwise, and was beginning to wonder if somehow he was the only person left in this part of the city. Aside from Alys and a handful of others, that’d suit him just fine.
It’d put a crimp on viewing figures,
he thought bitterly.

Coming to a stop outside a little brick bungalow, he scanned the place. Suzy’s place stood out amongst the neighbouring houses. To either side the homes were virtually collapsing. Hedges, trees, grasses and plants grew wild, penetrating the structures and shattering the bricks. Windows long gone, the open brickwork teemed with wild flora and fauna. Birds nested, foxes hunted. Nature had gleefully reclaimed the former homes within half a decade.

Suzy’s place couldn’t be more different in appearance. Six-foot-high railed fences surrounded her property, scavenged from a nearby council supply depot and erected by Suzy herself after the quarantine. Safe behind the fences, Suzy kept her lawn short and her flowerbeds full of bloom in summer. The building itself, small and constructed from solid sandstone, was carefully maintained and sound. To the rear of her bungalow, in raised beds, Suzy grew vegetables of various types: potatoes, leeks, onions, legumes. Her greenhouse was filled with fruit and salad plants, and the rear of her garden, safely guarded by impenetrable fences, held a chicken coop. She grew pretty much everything she needed to be self-sufficient.

Figuring that Joey could use the home comforts, Jock had first brought him here perhaps a month after they’d left the city-centre. Jock and Suzy, so similar in many ways, had been friends for decades.

Joey reached behind himself and pulled an arrow from his quiver. Sliding it into place, he smoothly drew and loosed it. Sailing through the bars of her fence and clunking into her front door just below her letter box, the arrow vibrated for a second or two. Whilst he waited for Suzy to respond, Joey rested his rear against the badly-rusted shell of a Toyota Aygo that still had a few splashes of red paint visible on interior metal.

After a few minutes, during which time she would have confirmed it was Joey from a vantage point in the attic window, Suzy pulled open her front door and free-wheeled down the access ramp towards her heavily-chained gate.

“What did I tell you about damaging that bloody door?” she barked at him, hiding a smile.

“Sorry, Suzy. I’ll fix it.”

“Too right you will, Joseph.” She did grin this time as the gates swung open.

 
The way she said his name,
Joseph
.

Just hearing it, just seeing her, brought every suppressed scrap of grief for Jock screaming to the surface and out.

Since Jock had been killed, barely months past, he’d been focused on Bracha. Finding Bracha, training with Jennifer, going south. He hadn’t allowed himself to express the utter devastation, the grief and loss he felt for Jock. The man had taught him everything he knew. He owed Jock everything and felt truly lost now that Suzy’s presence had somehow made the loss of him more real.

The sense of abandonment he felt was threatening to cut his world apart. Impossible to contain, his anger, fear, despair and his grief brought him to his knees, his head falling onto Suzy’s lap. In the arms of this good, tough, kind woman, who was as close to Jock as he could ever be again, Joseph MacLeod allowed every emotion he’d shut tightly in a little box in his soul come out in a tsunami of wailing and tears.

Suzy understood in an instant that her old friend was gone. She closed her strong arms around the boy and let him grieve.

Hands clasped around a mug of ginger tea, Joey shook his head and apologised for perhaps the tenth time.

“Don’t know what happened, Suzy.”

She batted his concerns away with her hand.

“Don’t be daft, son. You came to the right place.” She laid a hand on his right knee, giving him a few more moments of silence.

After he’d collapsed into Suzy’s lap, she’d moved him gently into her home and listened attentively but unobtrusively to him telling her of Bracha, Jock’s murder and of his and Alys’s trip to the south. Aside from a few gentle questions to confirm or clarify details, she’d simply let him speak and rid himself of all the anger and emotion he’d locked away so tightly. At the mercy of his emotions, the deluge, the need to vent, and against his better judgement, he’d told Suzy everything.

Sitting with his almost-empty mug still tightly in his hands, Joey took a very deep breath and tried to imagine the air as strength flowing into him. The technique, taught to him by Jock, of course, worked. At least a little.

Glancing up at Suzy, he whispered quietly.

“Thanks, Suzy.”

Giving a firm little nod, as if he’d decided something, Joey shifted from the too-soft armchair onto the carpet. Sitting across from Suzy, he looked up at her.

“You’re taking it all pretty well.”

She gave a little shrug.

“Disnae make a bit ay difference to me, son.” A half smile played on her lips as she spoke. “We’re all still in here. Nobody’s comin’ tae save us. Nothing’s changed.”

“That’s what Alys said,” Joey replied. “Doesn’t it make you angry, even a little? That they’re watching us, maybe right now?”

Joey didn’t really believe that, of course. Routinely cleaned, and sanitised using herbal products, Suzy’s house grew none of the moss, lichens or grasses that characterised most buildings in Edinburgh. The lino floor of the kitchen, whilst faded, was clean. The other floors had been stripped to bare wood and varnished. Waxed regularly they sparkled, certainly in comparison to most surfaces in the city.

No dirt or detritus lay in or around her home. No blood or bodies remained. Suzy’s home was one of the only buildings he’d visited in which he was fairly sure there would be no or few cameras. He wouldn’t have told her of the UKBC or dEaDINBURGH if he’d thought that anyone would hear.

Suzy gave a non-committal shrug again. “Who cares? Let them watch.”

Joey’s eyes narrowed as he scanned her face. She meant it: Suzy truly didn’t care. The centre of her world hadn’t lurched in response to the revelation as his own had. She accepted it so passively that Joey wondered for a moment if she truly understood. But obviously she did, perhaps better than he himself. She was from the world out there.

Spinning her wheelchair around a hundred and eighty degrees, Suzy crossed the room and disappeared into her kitchen. A few moments later she returned with a little leather bag that Joey recognised as her ‘doctor’s bag’. That’s what she’d called it on his last visit when he’d needed some stitches in a knife wound to his shoulder.

“Let’s get that toe of yours looked at, Joseph.”

Pulling his sock off, she tutted at the mess of the wound.

“Great way to get a blood infection, ya clown,” she said testily, surveying the inflammation around the wound where his toe used to be. “Didn’t you tend to this at all?”

“Just basic stuff – moss and spider’s webs. There was no time.”

Suzy’s eyebrows raised. “You were taught better. You should’ve made time, son.”

He didn’t argue. There was little point. She was right.

Suzy worked at his foot for around an hour. Cleaning, trimming dead flesh, disinfecting and wrapping in sterile dressings. Joey did not make a sound.

 
“You’re good with pain.”

She indicated to him to get his upper body stripped of clothes. As she tended to an array of minor and a few deep cuts on his arms and shoulders, she spoke quietly to him.

“Your generation are, y’know.”

“What?”

“Good with pain,” she said again. “I suppose you’ve had to have that mentality. It’s normal for your age group.”

Joey nodded, feeling waves of tiredness wash over him once again.

“Yours is much tougher than my generation.” She paused from her first aid and pointed to her flexed biceps. “Not just here,” she pressed the same finger to her temple, “but here as well.”

Joey stayed silent but gave a sad smile.

“People of the old world, people my age I suppose, they think that this is still their world.” Suzy jutted her chin at the window, indicating the city outside. “This place belongs to your generation in a way that mine can’t begin to relate to or understand. The young are simply better equipped to deal with the reality of everyday life here.”

Suzy wheeled herself over to the fireplace. Jabbing at the burning wood, shifting the logs around, she spoke with her back to Joey as she watched the sparks float around the wood she’d disturbed.

“All of these older folks, the ones who were here when the dead rose, they're so badly damaged, so grief-stricken and utterly devastated at what they think they’ve lost that they're simply shadows of their former-selves. Ghosts of who they see in their mind’s eye as the real them.” 

Suzy prodded at a big chunk of wood and swore loudly when a shower of sparks fanned into her face. Shoving the log back into the flames, she continued, “Did Jock tell you about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

 
“Yeah. He reckoned most people in the city are affected by it. To some degree or another.”

“He was right,” Suzy said. “Well, for us oldies at any rate.” She smiled. Suzy hardly ever conceded to age. “Some are lost in a fantasy of what the world is. Few see it for exactly what it is. Some turned to religion, even founded their own belief system.” 

They shared a smile, but left it unsaid.
The Brotherhood. 

Suzy continued. “Some have indulged all that's base and wrong and see this world as permission to do so. They see the plague and the quarantine as vindication, perhaps as opportunity, to set free all those rancid worms that once crawled beneath the surface when civilisation still existed. Very few used what happened to this city to become better people than they ever were – or perhaps wouldn't ever have been – in the old world.”

Spinning her chair around to face Joey, Suzy looked deep into his eyes.

“Around ten years after the quarantine, after the diseases we’d conquered with antibiotics and vaccines had killed all they would, we had a spate of suicides. People sort of accepted that this was all there was. That no-one would be coming to take them home. The realisation was a powerful shock to their sense of reality. For hundreds, maybe thousands, it triggered the urge to kill themselves. I guess that it just seemed preferable to learning to live in the place they’d found themselves in. The perceived loss of
civilisation
– television, internet, mobile phones, social networks, shopping, gossip, celebrity worship. The loss of these things was far too great for so many. It blinded them to the very real, very dangerous, yet in some ways exciting, life that was available to them in the quarantined zone.”

“Is that how you saw it, Suzy? As an opportunity for a better life?” Joey asked.

Suzy laughed loudly. “Not exactly. But that’s a long story.”

Joey smiled and motioned for her to continue.