Free dEaDINBURGH by Mark Wilson

good section to bring Steph out to for her first trip.
    What her journey with her cousin had taught her so far was that the younger girl simply wasn’t ready to be outside of The Gardens’ fences. Steph was too loud, too clumsy, too trusting of others to make for a good Ranger. She couldn’t pay attention to the simplest instruction and walked along completely oblivious to the many useful items, signs or places they passed. Of course this meant that the kid was oblivious to the dangers also. Essentially Steph treated being in the larger area of the inner fence that circled around Princes Street, down Lothian Road and along Clerk Street and The Bridges like a holiday outing rather than the precarious exercise in scavenging, mapping and networking that it was. They’d be travelling home by a more direct route tomorrow.
    It wasn’t Steph’s fault that she was so flippant in her approach to life. Steph’s mother, Alys’ Aunt Fiona, hadn’t included her in Jennifer’s survival programme. Fiona firmly believed that children should be children and run and play whilst they still wanted to. Her sister, of course, disagreed and had convinced all of the women in The Gardens that the days when kids could be free and innocent, protected from life’s hardships, had died with the city and left with the men. She convinced all but her own sister to enrol their children in her programme, but had succeeded in enrolling Steph in combat class in which she was at best a middling student.
    Time had proven Jennifer correct in her strategy. The Gardens was a thriving community of women and a few young men, who’d been children of its first inhabitants, able to fend and provide for themselves. They were also more than able to defend themselves thanks to Jennifer’s foresight.
    A spirited twenty-year-old when the plague-ridden corpses of Mary King’s Close had been released from their four-hundred-year entrapment, Jennifer Shephard had pulled and dragged her younger sister through the streets of Edinburgh. Moving them from group to group, Jennifer latched on to the most able people, the ones who would not only protect the girls but who could teach them to survive. Ex-soldiers, police officers and outdoors-types were made use of, drained of all they could teach and dumped for the next most useful category.
    Right from the outbreak Jennifer hadn’t expected to be rescued from the dead city and set about her single-minded mission to learn what she could to survive, to fight. By the time her group had colonised The Gardens some ten years later, Jennifer was a fearsome, if inflexible, leader determined to protect everyone she travelled with.
    Alys wasn’t sure when, why or how Jennifer had driven the men out. She’d heard stories from some of the older women who’d travelled with the Shephard sisters in the early days about rapes and sexual bullying. She’d heard that the men took what they wanted, in return for their ‘protection’. They’d apparently thought themselves in charge due to their perceived strength. Alys had heard that her mother had shown them what real strength was.
    She had no idea why her father had left along with the rest of the men and simply had to accept that her mother must have had a good reason for banishing them. Maybe she didn’t have a choice. It was all just rumour and hearsay. Alys had given up asking Jennifer years ago about her father or any of the other men. Jennifer simply wouldn’t tell her anything, other than that they weresafer this way. Stronger.
    It was hard to argue with that. In the time she’d been a Ranger, Alys had encountered dozens of communities, established within the large inner fence. They ranged from a handful of strangers banded together and living in buildings, including the basement flats of the many townhouses, to whole families who’d joined other families and formed fenced-in communities not unlike the one at The Gardens. Some were religious, some purely pragmatic. Some had