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

and clawing with the strength and speed of the newly risen at the room’s panicked occupants.
     
    Michelle MacLeod saw none of this. As soon as the trap door had slammed down into the darkness, she’d become a blur of movement. No thought, just deed. Launching herself along the tunnel, Michelle shouldered each of the people in her path aside. Leaving them in a wake of bewilderment, she cut through the darkness, one hand grabbing the loose waist of the men’s trousers she wore into a fist, the other reaching out in front of her, searching through the darkness.
    Her fingers cracked against a wooden panel, causing a jolt of nerve pain to lightning up her arm and the panel to dislodge. A slice of very strong sunlight lasered through the gap she’d made. She saw the dust and dirt she’d swept along with her swirl around in the biblical shaft of light that cut through the tunnel’s blackness and took a second to shout back to the other people, if people they still were.
    “This way. There’s a way out.”
    Shouldering through the panel of MDF, Michelle clattered onto the earth outside and shut her eyes against the brightness of the day. Beneath her eyelids, her eyes still hurt, such was the intensity of the Edinburgh sunshine and the contrasting darkness of the tunnel. Placing a hand over her closed eyes, she gave her pupils the dangerous few seconds they needed to contract and then tentatively peered from beneath her eyelids.
    The world was a cacophony of colours in the air and in the flora and fauna. She looked into a wild part of the countryside. Trees and bushes, grasses and shrubs, all filled with bright berries, flowers and fruit, shone alongside a straight, concrete path cutting through the beauty of the landscape. The fauna, perhaps a hundred yards along the path, hadn’t noticed her yet, but with the screaming coming along the tunnel behind her, their desiccated faces and mouldering teeth would turn her way soon.
    Michelle blinked stupidly into the sun and let out a quiet sneeze. She’d always been a sun-sneezer. Her friends had mocked her playfully for it, but she’d always liked the trait she shared with her mother. In this place it was no longer a cute quirk of genetics: it was a bloody liability.
      Her eyes darted to a meadow to her right and picked out the unmoving body of a dead, truly dead, Ringed. She moved with speed towards the partially-rotted pile of bones and decayed flesh that not even the maggots feasted on.
    Picking up the fleshiest part she could see – badly putrefied quadriceps – Michelle covered her exposed flesh and already rancid clothing in the black, jelly-like fluids of the decaying Ringed. She coated her face, and carefully applied congealed fluid that had once been blood as though it were her favourite make-up. Taking her time, she flicked away the little clots that threatened to make her vomit despite the state of cold calculation her mind had entered, and smoothed foul, blackened paste-like flesh over her own skin, raking it through her hair as though she were applying the most luxurious of oil treatments. When Michelle had finished her task she looked as though she’d fallen into a container of rotted offal.
    Taking a belt from the trousers of The Ringed she’d coated herself in, Michelle tied it around her waist, gathering the folds of fabric together before hurting her waist with the tightness of the leather. She shut herself off to the loud moans of dusty hunger and the wet tear of cracked teeth on living flesh coming from the cycle path at the tunnel’s exit.
      Nothing to do. Nothing I can do. Just move.
    Years of images flooded her mind once more. Information on operations she’d been privy to as a board member of the UKBC flooded her mind, along with detailed layouts, blueprints and maps of the dead city.  
    Subconsciously she placed her hand above her slightly swollen uterus, absorbed strength and purpose from it, decided on a destination and used the other gift