Like Pompeii on a Bad Day
The peak of Arthur's Seat.
As Cooper was starting a day that would lead to him being beaten up by a pixie, Morrigan was finally strong enough to make her move.
The uileupheist dragons, that had expanded to five hundred feet long and a thousand feet wide and were still growing had been joined in darkening the skies by ravens called Boobrie, that were big enough to fly off with a full-grown cow in each claw.
Without being told, the dragons and ravens started to move in unison, acting as air support, as the army outriders spurred their horses into a trot. A long and wide phalanx followed as it wended its way down the hill led by a pipe band. Morrigan was immediately behind the pipers, with her standard bearers on each side surrounded by her personal bodyguard. Four men, each one precisely six feet in height, carried her throne as her head druid, Elliot D. Roebuck, walked a reverential ten steps back, with his priests and priestesses behind him followed by the choir of a thousand voices, singing her praises to the tune of the battle hymn the pipers were playing. On the other side of the column, keeping the same respectful distance, were her generals followed by their adjutants, who were all captains, or higher. On the outside were the Calvary on their armoured war horses.
Infantry in their thousands trailed back into the distance. Shield bearers and pikemen first, followed by those armed with claymores and battle-axes. In the middle were the pack animals, cooks, smiths, armourers and carpenters (there were no medics as the wounded would either heal on the march or be left behind). Archers followed by donkeys towing a trebuchet brought up the rear.
By the time Morrigan was two, winding, miles away the end of the phalanx was just starting to move, and every one of those superhumanly powerful people would happily die an agonising death just to save her from a paper cut.
When they marched through the Royal Mile it looked empty, which was what the official, top secret, briefing documents said, stating that, “Infection ground zero,” (as they’d designated it) was deserted after all the residents went to join the others on Arthur’s Seat.
The truth was that there was no way to know exactly how many of the city’s population were of Celtic descent and therefor subject to Morrigan’s commands, and that was without even factoring in tourists and students into the equation, but it was more politically expedient to pretend they didn’t exist and leave them to die.
Which was how Sofia Conti came to be spending a wet Sunday afternoon sitting uncomfortably with her back pressed hard against the rough, stone wall of a narrow close clutching a three-foot long piece of scaffolding with a steak knife wedged in one end and tied tight with electrical cable, a bag of stale sandwiches rested on her lap as the phalanx marched past.
As she waited for a chance to make a break for home, she thought back to how it had all started: she was a five foot six, twenty-two-year-old Italian with long, black hair and a gymnast’s build. It was less than a week since she’d graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in geology, and life had been good.
She had been scheduled to fly out on Friday, to start her gap year, visiting volcanoes around the globe (part of the reason she’d picked the University of Edinburgh was the extinct volcano at the city’s heart) but that was before the Tuesday riots had closed the airport indefinitely.
After drowning her sorrows with a bottle of Sambuca, she fell into bed on Wednesday evening, only to be woken with a start just after midnight by the sound of marching feet and the skirl of the pipes echoing loudly from nearby, she shrugged her shoulders, decided the Edinburgh Festival must have started early and went back to bed, putting her head under her pillows, to muffle the sound.
It was nearly noon by the time she got up and decided that she needed something more substantial than a Pot Noodle, which was all the food she had left in her flat.
It was unusually quiet when she stepped out of the St Giles Street tenement building, to go round the corner to Deacon Brodies pub (a four-minute walk from Edinburgh Castle) for a hair of the dog and lunch.
The pub was closed and people were milling around in a daze, seeming not to notice the brown-haired, twelve-year-old in her school uniform sobbing quietly as she sat on the steps that led from the cobbled street to the pavement,
“What is wrong, child?” Sofia said. Although she still had a faint Italian accent, when she spoke it was with the perfect enunciation that few native speakers ever master.
The girl looked up, startled, and wiped the tears from her eye with a hanky pulled from her green school blazer pocket, “Didn’t you hear the noise last night?” She sniffed.
“I thought it was just some sort of avant-garde street theatre.”
“Mum and dad chanted a weird word, I think it was a name, then ran away faster than I could follow, never seen them move that quickly. Never seen anyone that quick before,” which, when she realised the significance of what she’d just said, would be one hell of a way to find out she was adopted.
“I’m sure they just went to see what the commotion was,” Sofia said.
“When I got to the Royal Mile I saw skeletons marching along, playing green, glowing bagpipes and drums. You don’t believe me, do you? I’m telling the truth,” she said, starting to cry again.
“No, of course I believe you,” she lied, “I am Sofia, what is your name?”
“Izzy MacDonald.”
“Well, Izzy MacDonald, let us go to the police station, they will find your parents and sort everything out,” she said with more cheerfulness than she felt. She just wanted to grab some lunch and go back to bed instead of being stuck with the child she was leading to her red Alfa Romeo Giulia that was parked at the side of the road. Sofia was the eldest of six and liked children it was just that her hangover had a different opinion at the moment.
They sat in awkward silence as she pulled out and headed north along the deserted street whilst the one o’clock gun boomed out, the car radio played quietly in the background.
The newsreader repeating the government line about foreign invaders using germ warfare to gain a foothold on British soil, he said they would be repulsed in a matter of days, the authorities had still not named the guilty party, although the North Koreans were desperate to take the credit.
A few minutes later they were driving along Queen Street, a prestigious part of the city, being home to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It runs parallel with Princes Street, with about three hundred yards between them. At the East end is one of the seven hills of power, Calton Hill.
When they got close to the roundabout at the top of Leith Walk, they passed beyond the hill, the limit of Morrigan’s total mind control, but not being Celts, they felt nothing. Sofia slowed as they approached an army barricade made up of double-decker buses in their maroon and white livery. She pulled up close to one of them and opened her door.
“Stay in your vehicle,” a young army cadet shouted, hurrying over.
“I am glad to see you,” Sofia said, employing her most seductive smile.
“Turn your car around and return to your home,” the cadet, who looked barely seventeen, said.
“I have a child here whose parents are missing, and we just need to get to the Police station in Gayfield Square!” She said pointing at a side street a few yards ahead on the left.
“I’m sorry, ma’am…”
“I am not a ma’am,” she snapped, interrupting, “I am a miss!”
“As I tried to tell that gentleman, no-one gets in or out of the infection zone,” he continued, gesticulating towards a crashed car imbedded in the side of a bus where paramedics in biohazard suits were fitting the driver with a neck brace before lifting him onto a stretcher.
“What infection? What zone?” she blanched.
“Don’t worry about it, if you’re not sick by now then you’re immune and there’ll be a food drop into the castle esplanade later on today,” he said, he was wrong about the last part, although he didn’t know it, “for the present, our advice is to go home and wait for further instructions.”
“Well, at least take the child,” she said, pointing to Izzy.
“I’m sorry, ma… miss, I really am, but I have my orders: no-one gets in or out.”
Sofia lapsed back into to her native language long enough to spew out an impressive range of Italian invective as she spun the car around and sped away, her tongue going faster than her wheels. When she calmed down, she realised that it had to be a bad sign when they were using children to man the barricades.
Back in her one-bedroom flat, she made up a bed on the settee for Izzy with spare pillows and blankets. The promised supplies never appeared, and by Friday morning hunger drove them all to break into cafes and pubs for food and drink.
At first everything was fine, there was plenty to go around and they all helped each other. Then, someone found a shotgun in an abandoned flat and decided that being trapped with limited supplies and no help in sight entitled them to a bigger share.
By Saturday, they’d found more weapons, ranging from katanas and machetes to crossbows and pistols, and two rival factions emerged taking over whole tenement buildings at opposite ends of the Royal Mile.
That was why she got her length of scaffolding and a steak knife tied together with cable from a toaster. It wasn’t the greatest as a weapon, but it was all that was available.
A deafening rattle dragged her back to the present as the trebuchet trundled past over the cobbles. She’d been trapped there for hours. It was getting dark and she hurried back to the flat, to make sure Izzy was safe before the Mad Max wannabes came out to play.
Morrigan had ensconced herself in Edinburgh Castle’s Governor’s House where she sat on her throne looking out of the window, watching the same evening sun as Sofia.
Nearby her druids were converting the twelfth century St Margaret’s Chapel into a temple to her glory, which involved tearing down all the religious iconography and smashing the stained glass windows.
Once they’d finished the head druid, Elliot D. Roebuck, had the garrison’s twenty-seven remaining soldiers’ arms and legs tied to spikes driven into the walls.
One by one he took a claymore and gutted them, solemnly reading their dying spasms, looking for favourable portents. It wasn’t the most accurate of methods, but they had run out of virgins. When he was satisfied, they threw the headless bodies over the parapets, keeping the skulls to boil and decorate her throne.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the castle, anything invented after the Middle Ages was being ripped out and destroyed with superstitious zeal, once they were finished, the wheelbarrow was the nearest thing they had to modern technology.
Morrigan had rested since they arrived, building up the strength she needed to start the next stage of her military campaign. When she was ready, she sat bolt upright on her throne, grasping the armrests, and started to whisper. It was a long string of words in a form of Gaelic so old that only the gods remembered it.
The words seeped down into the extinct volcano that the castle was built upon. As they flowed into the ley line, they melded into one cohesive force, its power growing exponentially with every second it was in there. Then it exploded into the heart of Arthur’s Seat with a pressure not seen in over three hundred million years, starting an unstoppable chain reaction.
Sofia and Izzy were sitting in the flat making disgusted faces as they chewed on stale sandwiches when the earthquake struck. The room shook violently, sending the TV crashing to the floor as the bookshelves collapsed around her. A book on volcanology flew off the shelf, just missing Sofia’s head, which she thought was taking irony a step too far.
As they picked themselves back up, there was a deafening roar from outside. Sofia shouted, “Fanculo!” as she raced to the window. The top of Arthur’s Seat exploded, sending a volcanic cloud spewing high into the air. She turned and grabbed Izzy’s sleeve, “Dobbiamo andare ora!” She shouted.
“Not Italian, in English!” Izzy sobbed, hopping from foot to foot before she was even sure what she was crying about.
Sofia took a deep breath, “We have to go now,” she said, dragging Izzy towards the door, grabbing her makeshift spear along the way. The crazies had stolen all the older cars parked on the street for ram raiding purposes, but had left the newer ones like her’s (that was a year old with a high-end engine immobiliser) alone.
Outside they saw a volcanic cloud shooting twenty miles up into the atmosphere, blotting out the setting sun and plunging Edinburgh into darkness.
“This is happening far too fast, we need to get under cover,” she said. As they climbed into her car Arthur Seat spewed its contents higher and higher; fragments of hardened lava cooling and hailing down.
Outside there were screams and grunts of pain as bullet-sized pieces of lava ripped holes in flesh and shattered the bones of those who’d rushed out to see what was happening. The lucky ones died fast, from a blow to the head or a vital organ. At least they wouldn’t have to lie helpless as the heat of the approaching molten lava ignited their flesh and burnt them alive.
Fragments of igneous rock hit the car like a thunderous drum roll. The windscreen, side and rear windows shattered into spiders’ web patterns. The roof dented, the interior fabric ripping at the seams under the screech of buckling metal. Izzy whimpered and stuck her head between her knees as Sofia threw herself over her trembling body. As the deluge continued, she prayed silently to St Januarius, the patron saint of volcanic eruptions, that the roof would hold.
All over the city the sulphurous hail clogged any open water, polluting the reservoirs, when it stopped, an unnatural silence fell and Sofia sat up, taking in the carnage all around, there wasn’t much blood even though the lava had cooled it was still hot enough to cauterise the wounds.
She desperately grabbed at the buckled door’s handle, before taking off a shoe to break the shattered window when it wouldn’t open, leaning her head out and vomiting into the gutter.
Dents covered the car, looking like a hundred golfers had used it for target practice, but once she recovered she turned the ignition key, anyway. The engine rattled, and stuttered, but didn’t start. “Come on,” she said through gritted teeth. As she tried again, the engine coughed and spluttered into life.
“Wait, what about them?” Izzy said, grabbing Sofia’s arm and pointing at the survivors writhing in pain.
“There is no time to save them,” Sofia said, looking like she was about to throw up again as she knocked the windscreen out with her shoe, “It’s all happening too fast, we can leave and live or stay and die with them, that is the only choice we have,” they drove in grim silence, bumping over the rocky surface as the anguished moans faded into the distance.
With the ash cloud overhead and street lights out, all they had left to steer by was one working headlight. She took a right turn too fast and smashed into a car sideways on before screeching away through Teviot Place, passed the burnt out Anatomical Museum.
“Where are we going in such a very big hurry?” Izzy said, feet wedged against the dashboard as she shook in fear.
“As far from here as we can, what should have taken days has happened in minutes.”
“How do you know so much about this?”
“I was born five miles from Vesuvius and as a little girl I used to lie in bed at night with my head under the covers obsessing about what lava would sound like flowing up to my bedroom window, which is why I am going to be a vulcanologist one day.”
Seismic shocks interrupted her, sending the car swerving across the road. Each side of them the gutters cracked and split into gaping trenches, the ground shakings violently.
“But having said that,” Sofia said after she regained control of the vehicle, “that is a new one on me,” to be fair to her, it was a new one on everyone, Morrigan was creating drains to keep the buildings she wanted to loot, and people she wanted to subjugate, safe from the lava and to isolate them from anybody who couldn’t leap a ten-foot-wide chasm over bubbling lava, which was easy for even the weakest of her thralls.
All the checkpoints were unmanned and after she navigated through the last chicane and hit the long, straight Corstorphine Road she let out a sigh and briefly smiled at Izzy before she put her foot down, “Relax,” she said, “it will only be a couple of minutes before we are clear of the city and free from this nightmare.”
As she spoke, a twelve-inch ball of pumice hit the bonnet with a loud clang. Sofia spun the wheel in a panic, sending the car into a skid before it slammed sideways into an abandoned van.
The airbags deployed, burning the top layer off of her skin where she gripped the steering wheel. They both gasped as they hit them in the chest, knocking the wind out of them. The smell of propellant gas filled the car for a second as the bags deflated. They sat stunned for a moment, steam gushing out of the radiator.
Over the road, they could see front doors ajar and garden gates swinging back and forth. Whatever had scared the residents away had happened before the trenches opened. The van they’d hit looked like something massive had stepped on it, almost flattening one end.
There was a moment’s silence before balls of pumice started to fall two or three at a time, one bouncing through the broken back window, the light stone grazing the back of Sofia’s head, “Quick, under the car!” she shouted, diving out of the side window and rolling under the vehicle. When Izzy didn’t join her, she rolled back out again. The child was still sitting in the passenger seat, her knees under her chin, hugging her legs.
“What is wrong?” Sofia said.
“It’s too much,” she sobbed, “I can’t do it. It’s too much,” she said as she rocked back and forth.
“Listen,” Sofia said, sitting in the passenger seat, as more bits of pumice hit the roof, “I will not lie to you, people are dying all over the city right now and it would be easy for us to do nothing and join them. But as the old saying goes, ‘When life gives you lemons you spit citric acid in its face’.”
“That’s not how it goes, at all,” Izzy laughed.
“I know, but I prefer my version,” Sofia said as she climbed out the window again and held a hand out, which Izzy took reluctantly.
As they lay under the car, fingers in their ears in protection against the deafening noise, the sky opened and thousands of stones rained down all at once.
After a few minutes, the noise slackened off and stopped. As they climbed out from under the car, they saw pumice scattered all over the road, but most of it had rolled to the sides, down into the chasms. The downpour had caved in the house roofs and there wasn’t an unbroken window left anywhere in sight. Except for a buckled roof and even more bodywork dents, the car had escaped relatively unscathed, although it would never move under its own power again. Because of the angle that the pumice stones fell, the back seat was full, but the front was relatively unaffected.
They had just started walking towards the outskirts when they heard a cacophony of animal noises coming from Edinburgh Zoo, a hundred yards up ahead, big cats roared as other animals squealed, screeched and growled, loudly enough to indicate that they were no longer in their cages and enclosures.
Before they had time to think about it, something huge and barely visible in the gloom leapt high over the zoo entrance, landing in the middle of the road, kicking up chunks of tarmac as its four hooves dug in. Its feet were so big that it could have used smart cars as roller skates.
Izzy let out a scream, as what looked like a gigantic goat turned to face them, illuminated by the beam of the remaining headlight. It had long, curved horns and white fur soaked with blood. It gripped the limp form of a fully grown lion in its jaws.
With a grinding of bones and chewing of flesh, it swallowed the big cat in two gulps and stalked slowly towards them.
“What’s that? What the hell is that?” Izzy screeched, as they moved backwards slowly the way they came.
“I have no idea,” Sofia said, “but I think it has got us marked down for dessert.”
It was a púca, a shape-shifter that could take the form of any four-legged animal. It put its head down, ready to charge, bits of flesh and striped tiger skin impaled on its razor-sharp horns.
They ran back to the car and dived through the side windows, yelping as they landed on hard pumice. As they huddled together in the passenger seat, the púca was discovering that its head was too massive to fit through the gap where the windshield used to be.
It put its horns against the driver’s door and started to push, they covered their ears to block out the noise of squealing tyres and tortured metal. As they were being inched towards the massive drop, Izzy started to cry and wrapped her arms around Sofia.
Although it only had a rudimentary intelligence, the púca knew that soon they would have a choice between falling into the abyss or being eaten alive, Sofia rummaged frantically under the pumice stones in the back seat, she grabbed her makeshift spear and stuck it in the beast’s huge eye. It bellowed as it jumped back. Cold iron would have killed it… if it had been a fairy, and not a shape-shifter. As it was it shook its head furiously, the spear flying free.
It put its head down, preparing to charge and drop them into the hellish abyss when it roared in pain, staggered back and spun around. As it moved, behind it they saw a soldier leaning on a Challenger 2 Battle Tank, smoke drifting from the barrel of his sniper rifle as the beast was caught in the tank’s headlights. He fired again, hitting the shape-shifter in the midriff.
It stumbled sideways but didn’t fall. Once it was clear of the car, they all opened up. The tank cannon barked as six machine guns chattered. The púca exploded, flesh and fur flying in all directions. When the smoke cleared what was left of it looked like a shrivelled and yet newborn foal.
“Anybody hurt in here?” an army medic said, running over to the car as evacuating trucks and armoured personnel carriers rolled past.
When they both said that they weren’t he helped them out, which wasn’t as easy as it could have been, because Izzy refused to let go of Sofia. They climbed into the back of an ambulance, where they were handed blankets. As a doctor checked them over, the vehicles started to move again, joining the tail end of the convoy.
The army withdrawal had begun when a mudslide of scalding volcanic debris, mixed with steam, started rolling down Arthur’s Seat, accompanied by lightning that lit the cloud of volcanic ash as lava spewed into the air.
It flowed over the slopes, picking up speed as it went, setting Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament on fire, along with any building the lava touched.
Back in the castle Morrigan sat enthralled as she witnessed the entire spectacle of death, pain and suffering through supernatur