Free dEaDINBURGH: Origins (Din Eidyn Corpus Book 3) by Mark Wilson

terror and the river of blood and madness flooding their way, the men managed a tight grin.
    “Keep your knickers, Jimmy,” said Spike.
    All three men continued their sprint, feeling the crowd and the enemy thin out as they crested a little hill before High Street swooped down to Holyrood.
    They skidded to a halt just after the cobbles end at the entrance to a former church. Looking around at the people running past, James gasped.
    “What the hell is going on here?”
    Cameron shook his head and blocked a young man about to clatter into James, sending the man sprawling onto the tarmac. The guy regained his feet instantly and sprinted on without ever looking back.
    “They seem like they’re infected, near as I can make out,” Cameron said.
    Harry laughed, but there was no humour in it.
    “They look sick to you, Cameron?” he asked.
    Cameron shrugged and opened his mouth to reply when one of the people who seemed to have gone insane came tearing along the street. The three soldiers watched in horror as the assailant pulled down an elderly woman and ripped at her throat, arms and legs with his teeth.
    Clinically, James started counting. He reached thirty when the madman tore himself away from the dead woman and snarled, sending blood and flesh spilling onto the concrete. He… it lashed at another passer-by, a middle-aged man this time, and began tearing at his face.
    James continued counting. At fifty seconds, the elderly woman jerked up. Moving smoother and significantly more quickly than she had before the attack, she sprang from the ground and fixed her eyes on them.
    All three men watched the transformation take her, burning away the frail pensioner. They stood open-mouthed and inert. A first for the unit.
     
    Cammy was the first to recover, but only by milliseconds. The trio, with a new vigour and previously untapped speed, resumed their run towards Holyrood Palace.

 
    Chapter 3
     
    Jim and Spike run further ahead of me, but only by a few metres. I hang back a little to cover the rear. We’re a mile, maybe less, from the Palace and seem to have left the lunacy behind us for the moment when a woman runs from a side alley out into Spike’s path. She’s carrying a child and is stumbling. Her left leg bears a deep bite. Spike reaches out to catch her and she hands him the infant. We form a defensive formation around them and nervously scan the area as Spike accepts the woman’s screaming child. She looks deep into his eyes. It’s obvious that she recognises him and is desperately grateful that it is him who she’s handed the love of her life to.
    No words but a thousand emotions pass between them before the woman, tears streaking like mercury, turns and runs off into the same alley she came from. I hear James counting again. He reaches forty and we run again. Despite his passenger, perhaps because of the newly-orphaned baby, Spike runs quicker than ever.
     
    To our left the heavy doors of the Canongate Kirk, a chapel, grind open. A man, dressed in black denims and shirt, who looks like a priest but moves like a soldier, steps out and waves us in.
    “Keep running,” I yell, but Harry skids to a stop. He’s caught sight of the people inside the chapel who’ve risked their own safety to offer us a haven. All three of us scan the entrance. Their fortification is ridiculously inadequate. They haven’t even closed the outer gates.   When the legion of infected behind us reaches this place, the hundred or so people inside this building will be overwhelmed and devoured.
    I see the change in Spike’s eyes and yell at him.
    “No. We’ve a mission.”
    He simply shakes his head, nods down at the screaming infant in his arms and enters the chapel, thanking the tall man in black as he passes the threshold. James comes up behind Spike, eyes steely and determined. For a fraction of a second I think that he agrees with me – that we’ll have to clock Harry over the head and drag him out of there.
    That fraction of