dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

or around the room, wondering at what they wore and where they were. Michelle’s eyes teared-up as they flitted from one face to another. Some were scared white. Others shook their heads, certain, as she herself was, that they’d awake somewhere warm and familiar at any moment. Most were starting to panic as they became fully awake. None of them looked to be anything other than very ordinary, very scared people.
    One man started laughing loudly, causing Michelle to jump at the suddenness and intensity of his Sid James-esque bray. In other circumstances she’d have laughed along with the man and described his laugh as the dirtiest she’d ever heard. Today, in this place, the man’s laugh was the sound of his sanity rustling as it left him and broke against the white walls. Today the laugh was truly terrifying and corrupting to the tenuous grip on reason held by the room’s inhabitants.
    Michelle shut the noise out and focused on a group of seven people who still lay prone near the only door visible to her. A few others had started to move towards them also, drawn by their relative stillness. As Michelle drew closer, she noticed that the members of the group of adults and children weren’t as still as they’d seemed from the other side of the room. They were twitching and jerking, although only slightly, like someone in the depths of a nightmare. Michelle felt a laugh of her own escape. Irony always had made her laugh.
    Pushing her way gently past the little group of stunned observers gathered around the apparently sleeping people on the floor, she mentally swatted away the mist of a thought that was beginning to surface and placed a hand on the nearest boy’s forehead. The boy was burning up with fever. A quick glance at the other sweat-soaked faces in the group confirmed that they all were feverish. And then she saw the wounds.
    Michelle’s eyes widened with horror as her subconscious pushed harder and filled her mind’s eye with thousands of images of people she’d seen in the same condition. People in the latter stages of infection. People who’d been bitten. Infected.
    Without guile or embarrassment she pulled the filthy clothes from her body and searched every visible inch of herself for bite marks. She pulled a man who stood next to her close and asked him to look in all the places she couldn’t see. Without asking, she pulled his shirt and trousers from him. Too stunned to protest, he allowed her to check for bites. Word spread, quickly. Within minutes everyone in the room was naked and checking each other for any signs of broken skin.
    Eventually each of the room’s occupants silently dressed once more, relief smashed aside with returning panic. Why? Why were they here? In the next five seconds three things happened to make their questions the last thing they needed to worry about.

 
     
    Chapter 5
     
    Early Spring
      2032
     
     
    A loud clang rang out and bounced around the tiles of the room. Many of the people jumped in fright. Some of them disappeared, dropping through the large trapdoor that had fallen open six feet from the pristine white floor into a barely-lit tunnel below, forming a slippery white-tiled ramp into the darkness.
    Many of the people in the room stood and gaped into the darkness, but only for a single second. Only until the loud scream of a child at the rear of the group snapped everyone’s attention around to the feverish group of almost-dead at the main doors. Now fully risen they were attacking the people closest to them with a bottomless, vicious hunger that tore flesh from bone and limb from socket. All of those present had seen the show . It didn’t need said, but one man, the still-laughing man, felt the need to shout out the obvious.
    “We’re in dEaDINBURGH.”
    He was positively gleeful – until a newly-reanimated Ringed tore his throat out with its clawed hands and devoured the flesh.
    Like a wave of pestilence The Ringed moved throughout the room, tearing, biting