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DUSK WAS SETTLING IN over the United Kingdom and for the first time in a very long time, the city of Edinburgh was quiet. Fires still burned in the rubble, casting their eerie glow on the smoke-blackened facades of the few buildings that remained standing, but it was quiet.
And with the quiet came the implied threat of what may come next.
From her vantage point on the Half-Moon Battery, the woman looked beyond the gates of Edinburgh Castle and down the Esplanade and its rows of wooden stakes, a severed ril-galas head mounted on each. A message to the occupying force that Edinburgh Castle remained free.
"How long are you going to stand there, Mister Hutchings?" she said, not turning from her vigil.
A man stepped out of the shadows, shaking his head.
"No one can ever catch you by surprise, can they?" he said. Like the woman, Hutchings was dressed in civilian clothing under military grade body armour and tactical vest, with an X6 sidearm strapped across his chest and a Caliburn submachine gun in his hand.
"That’s why I’m still alive."
No one knew the woman’s real name. She’d never told anyone who she was. It was irrelevant, she’d said – it didn’t matter who she’d been before the world had ended, it mattered who she’d been in the year and a half since. When she had first become prominent in the resistance, they had taken to calling hear Headhunter due to her tendency to decapitate dead ril-galas and leave the heads out in the open as very clear warnings to the enemy. That name had very quickly been shortened to Hunter, which had stuck ever since. But beyond the fact that she was Asian, no one knew a thing about her.
"Have the boys light the bonfires and start up the music," said Hunter, tugging at her shemagh as her long hair whipped in the cold Scottish wind. "And I want the sniper teams and their spotters on the walls tonight. Two hour shifts, continuously."
"Expecting trouble?"
"Listen to the city."
He frowned, listening to nothing but the sound of crackling fires.
"Shit."
"The ril-galas are up to something," she said.
And as far as they could ascertain, with the fall two weeks ago of Stirling Castle to the north, Edinburgh Castle represented the final bastion of human resistance in Scotland. If something were brewing, there was little doubt as to what the target would be.
"Sound a full lockdown as well. I don’t want the civilians milling about."
Nodding, Hutchings hurried away to relay the orders.
Shaking her head slightly, Hunter took another long look out over what remained of the city. She had never been to Edinburgh prior to the ril-galas invasion, but from what she could glean from its rubble, it had once been a beautiful city. Maybe one day it would be again, but Hunter doubted it, just as she doubted many of Earth’s cities would ever be the same – or even be rebuilt at all. When she’d first arrived, she’d been told that before the ril-galas had set up a forward operating base in Holyrood Park, the population of Edinburgh had been just over five hundred and fifty thousand. The current population of Edinburgh Castle hovered around nine hundred, some military and some civilian – a line that was becoming more blurred every day – and while the foraging parties they sent out daily were still encountering other pockets of survivors, they were becoming fewer and fewer. Assuming that other population centres were suffering a similar fate, there would neither be enough manpower left to rebuild Earth’s cities, nor enough of a population base to make it necessary.
Though she never admitted it to anyone, Hunter knew that they weren’t fighting the ril-galas to save Earth – they were fighting to keep themselves alive long enough for an evacuation. Because even though she had no religious faith whatsoever, no belief in any god or higher power, there was one thing – one person – she did believe in.