Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) by Mark Wilson Read Free Book Online

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.
    “So yeah, for most, there were simply too many things and people to regret not having. Too much damage and hurt done to their perception of what made them a whole person. What made them… valid.”
    Suzy, in a chair for decades, leaned heavily on the word valid .
    “For a large portion of the early survivors, though, something else was driving them to end their own lives: the things they'd done to survive to that point, the acts they'd witnesses and participated in. The people they'd become. These things weighed heavily on them because they couldn't let go of the notions of morality and sin and decency engrained in them during their former lives. These people simply couldn't exist as what they were. They could not come to terms with who they had to be in order to survive this city.”
    Suzy lowered her eyes.
    “The ones that could… that did remain,” there was no pride in this for her, just cold fact, “some of them have not a trace left behind of the person they were. No real attachment to the things or the people they once held so dear. They’ve taken those experiences, those memories and values that they once believed defined them and locked them tightly somewhere in a dungeon inside themselves.”
    Joey