Dawn Of The Dreadfuls Part 18

Elizabeth nodded somberly, unsure which memory disheartened her more: a stricken Emily Ward shuffling toward her, bloated and rank, or her own failure to end the girl's curse with a swift slice of the sword.

"I'm afraid you haven't been right yet," she said. "It's this way."

She led him up the lane that led to Longbourn, and Meryton beyond.

"Thank you. Once again, I find myself indebted to my native guide." Dr. Keckilpenny nodded at the katana at Elizabeth's side. "And it rea.s.sures me to see you've brought something a tad more formidable than that wee stickpin you were using the other day-not that you didn't use it as well as one might. I've managed to misplace my pistol, you see, and my net here isn't going to do us much good if we happen upon a zombie herd. So our lives could be very much in your dainty hands."

"It flatters me that you seem so sanguine about that, Doctor. And surprises me. Not all are so liberal in their thinking when young ladies take up the sword."

"For anyone who has made a serious study of The Troubles, it is not liberality but simple good sense. Clinging to the old ways in times such as these would be like..." Dr. Keckilpenny rolled his eyes heavenward and chewed at his lower lip. "A drowning man clutching a brick? Does that make sense? Metaphors are not my forte."

"I beg to differ. That one was rather good."

"Really? Thank you. I shall have to use it again sometime, provided I can remember it."

They took their next few steps without speaking. But Dr. Keckilpenny, rather like Elizabeth's mother, seemed averse to silence, and soon he looked over and said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me why anyone should wish to capture a zombie?"

"I thought it obvious, given your interests. You want to examine it. Observe it at close quarter. Learn from it."

"Precisely!" The young doctor flashed one of his toothy grins. "Then you don't think me mad?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "Curiosity hardly makes one mad."

Dr. Keckilpenny's smile grew so broad Elizabeth almost wondered how his lean, narrow face could contain it.

"What a splendid sentiment! And so, so rare. I should translate it into Latin and declare it my motto. Now, how would that go? Curiositas non novo a vir rabidus, perhaps? I'm not sure. I was always so much better with Greek, but it doesn't look nearly so good carved into marble."

To her surprise, Elizabeth found herself laughing.

"Ahhhh," Dr. Keckilpenny said, "now you think me mad."

"Not at all. Though I suppose I could ask why you'd bother making a study of the unmentionables. We have a chronicle of The Troubles at home, and from what I've read-"

"Which one?"

"Pardon?"

"Which 'chronicle of The Troubles'?"

"Gibbon's A Complete History of the Most Tragic and Awful Events Following the Rise of the Sorry Stricken from Their Graves and the Ensuing Horrors Which-"

"Yes yes yes, I know it well." Dr. Keckilpenny waved a long hand before his face, as if dispelling an unpleasant odor. "Rubbish, every word. But do go on, please."

"Well, according to Mr. Gibbon, the greatest minds in England tried to study captive dreadfuls when the strange plague first appeared, the only result being that many of those great minds were very quickly ripped from their vessels and devoured."

"a.s.suming all that's true-and when it comes to the history of the plague, I've found that to be a foolish thing to do-" Dr. Keckilpenny paused just long enough to wink and put a finger beside his beaklike nose. "I would point out that we are now in the nineteenth century. Time has marched on, and knowledge with it. The menace may have returned, but there are modern men of science ready to confront it. And this time, science shall prevail."

"Perhaps. I think I know, however, how my mmm-"

The word Elizabeth had said so often, so freely of late-master-stuck in her throat.

Was it that she was beginning to see Geoffrey Hawksworth as something less than a master... or something more?

She brought a fist to her lips and coughed demurely until she could carry on.

"Ah, how my instructor in the deadly arts would respond to that. Science, he would say, has created no weapon more dependably lethal than a sharp blade wielded by strong hands."

Dr. Keckilpenny gave Elizabeth the same look of amused bemus.e.m.e.nt she'd seen a thousand times on her father's face.

"Oh?" he chuckled. "Well, I should very much like to see how your instructor would fare with his sharp blade and strong hands were he up against a single man armed with a-"

There was a sharp crack, and a little burst of dirt and gravel flew up a few inches from Elizabeth's right foot. Elizabeth and Dr. Keckilpenny stared down at the newly dug pockmark in the road, then stared at each other, then stared straight ahead.

A soldier was before them, perhaps forty feet off, a musket clutched in his hands and a puff of smoking floating off above his head. It was the same sentry who'd challenged Elizabeth and Jane and Mr. Bennet when they'd approached Netherfield Park that morning.

"Uhhhh... who goes there?" he said.

"I am not a military man, so you might want to take this with a grain of salt," Dr. Keckilpenny replied. "But in my experience, one asks that before one shoots."

"Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir. It was an accident, Sir."

"Think nothing of it, Corporal Holmes. What's a little crossfire between friends?"

"It's Private Jones, Sir. And thank you, Sir. It won't happen again, Sir."

"Good, good. We'll just be on our way, then. Miss Bennet?"

The doctor bowed and swept an arm out toward the road ahead.

"Actually, this is where we leave the lane anyway," Elizabeth said. "We'll need to cross this meadow and go over that knoll to reach the lake."

Dr. Keckilpenny pivoted so his arm was now stretched out toward the hill beyond. "Lead on."

The close call with a musket ball squelched, for a time, anyone's taste for banter, and it wasn't until they were halfway across the field that Dr. Keckilpenny looked back over his shoulder and said, "I suggest we return by a different route."

Elizabeth glanced back, too. Three other soldiers had joined Pvt. Jones, drawn by the sound of gunfire, no doubt. The sentry was simultaneously gesturing at Elizabeth and the doctor and squinting down into the barrel of his Brown Bess as if he'd lost his ramrod in it.

"I agree," Elizabeth said. "Though I wouldn't worry overmuch about being shot by mistake, since most of the soldiers I've seen have neither the skill nor the inclination to fire their muskets at all. I know that you said you're not a military man, yet don't you find it queer that Captain Cannon should come to Hertfordshire with such poorly trained troops?"

"I do when I let myself notice it. Unfortunately-or, perhaps, fortunately-my mind is rather like a microscope or a spygla.s.s: It can focus with great clarity upon one point, but all else is consequently blocked out. And for the past two months, my focus has been on zombies."

"Two months?" Elizabeth said. It hadn't been one since Mr. Ford crashed his own funeral. Apparently, Dr. Keckilpenny was as haphazard with dates as he was with names.

"Yes, and the most fascinating months of my life they've been!" the doctor enthused. "To think I once believed I'd never see a zombie. Their very existence flies in the face of science, and now we've been given a second chance to answer all the old questions. What could reanimate the flesh of the dead? What drives the resurrected to feed on the living? Why only people? Why only in Britain? Why are you taking out your sword?"

It took Elizabeth a moment to realize this last was not one of the "old questions" but a very new and immediate one: She'd drawn her katana without even thinking about it.

"I...," she began, not knowing what words might come next. And then there it was, rising up from the level of instinct and pure sensation to tangible, relatable thought. "I smell something."

They'd stopped halfway up the wooded rise blocking the way to the lake, and Dr. Keckilpenny turned a wary gaze to the top of the hill.

"Or some things, I warrant," he whispered.

He looked at Elizabeth again, and the two of them simply stood there, gazing into each other's eyes, until, at a signal from neither, they both turned and started up the hill again at precisely the same moment. They moved slowly, choosing their steps with care, and when they reached the crest they crouched down, Elizabeth on one side of an old, rough-trunked elm, Dr. Keckilpenny on the other.

Below was the lake. Beside it, three figures.

One sat on the bank, back propped against a rotted-out log. The other two were stooped over it, scooping something glutinous and oozy from the top of its head.

"Excellent," Dr. Keckilpenny said under his breath.

Elizabeth shot him a horrified glower. Then she stood and started toward the water.

"Miss Bennet, wait... stop, please... Elizabeth!"

The doctor might as well have not spoken at all. The only sound Elizabeth heard was the awful moist smacking of the unmentionables' mastication. All she saw was the crimson-streaked pulp disappearing into their rotten maws. All she felt was her katana in her hands, and then the air streaking through her hair as she charged down the hill. And the only man she was thinking of was Lt. Tindall and the self-righteous sneer she longed to wipe from his face-and every other face that might sneer at her and her sisters.

"HAAAAAAAA-IEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!".

The nearest of the zombies sprang toward her, its mouth still oozing half-chewed goo. It had been a woman not so long ago. Now it fought to fully free its desiccated, purple-mottled arms from the tangles of its shroud, the better to get its clawlike fingerbones into Elizabeth's eyes.

Elizabeth took its arms off at the elbows with her first swing of the sword. The second took off its head.

And it felt good.

She had killed una.s.sisted. She was a warrior, and a thousand times more worthy to call herself such than the lieutenant and his b.u.mbling redcoats. She turned to face the other unmentionable's charge feeling indomitable, unfettered, free.

Which made it all the more of a shock when the net came down over her head and the leather straps cinched tight, pinning her arms to her sides. A jarring jerk tugged her off her feet, and she lost her grip on her sword as she crashed to the muddy bank on her backside. She could but watch, helpless, as the oncoming zombie-a male with gray, dirt-streaked skin that had yet to decay enough to fall away from the bone-lunged at her, its black tongue waggling obscenely.

Then the dreadful, too, was splashing down into the mud, its hands inches from Elizabeth's feet. The thing flailed at her, wailing, yet it could come no closer.

The straps around her loosened, the net lifted away, and Dr. Keckilpenny bent down and offered Elizabeth his hand.

"I'm terribly sorry about that," he said, "but if you'll recall, I wanted one of them alive... as it were."

Elizabeth pushed herself up without the doctor's help. When she was on her feet, she noticed at last the bear trap clamped around the dreadful's ankle and the short length of chain staked to the log beyond. She saw, too, that the body from which the unmentionables had been feeding wasn't a proper body at all: It was simply clothes stuffed with straw topped by a chamber pot "head."

In the pot were the b.l.o.o.d.y, mashed remnants of a human brain.

Despite all she'd seen the past few weeks, Elizabeth blanched and looked away. She tried to hide her revulsion by pretending she was merely retrieving her katana.

No more than a minute before, she'd felt invincible. Yet now that seemed so long ago she could barely believe it ever happened, and all she could feel was disgust-as much for the pride that had momentarily blinded her as for the grotesque lumps of flesh clotting the chamber pot.

"Your bait, Doctor," she said, careful to keep her voice from wavering. "Is it what I think it is?"

THE THING FLAILED AT HER, WAILING, YET IT COULD COME NO CLOSER.

Dr. Keckilpenny nodded. "Every zombie's favorite delicacy. Nothing but the real thing would do, so I brought along my own supply. Don't ask me where I got it. Suffice it to say, the first thing one learns in medical college is how to acquire one's own specimens."

"And now you have another." Elizabeth turned to the slavering dreadful writhing on the ground nearby, its arms stretched out to paw uselessly at the muck and leaves between them. "What do you propose to do with it?"

"I propose," Dr. Keckilpenny said, the old gleam firing up again in his eyes, "to turn 'it' back into a 'him.'"

CHAPTER 26.

AFTER SOME QUICK (and, thanks again to Jane, courteous) debate, a subject was settled on for the experiment the Reverend Mr. c.u.mmings had agreed to. Since it wouldn't do to unduly disturb a respectable member of the community, the party would remove itself to a far corner of the parish grounds and pay a call on a connectionless pauper woman who'd been planted there three months before. This had the added benefit of seclusion, the gravesite being further removed from the road.

All the same, before a single spade bit into the earth, Mr. Bennet insisted that the tent canvases the troops had brought be strung up around the grave.

"It wouldn't do to have our trial here observed," he explained while the soldiers argued over the best spots to pound in their tent pegs. "We have been spared panic in Meryton, thanks to complacency and ignorance. It is to our advantage to preserve that just a little longer, if we can."

"In my experience, complacency and ignorance usually do a fine job preserving themselves," Lord Lumpley yawned, idly eyeing Jane as he leaned against a mausoleum nearby. "But if you feel you must put up your little dressing screens..."

"Why, though, Father?" Jane asked. "What advantage could come from hiding the truth?"

"He wishes to avoid another Birmingham," Ensign Pratt chirped. The junior officer was doing his best to loom up over his men as they began hammering pegs into the ground, but given his size, looming over anything larger than a dachshund was an impossibility. "People fleeing in huge mobs, clogging the roads, falling prey to the dreadful swarms."

"Not just falling prey to them. Feeding them." Mr. Bennet gave Ensign Pratt an approving nod. "I'm glad to know you're old enough to have at least read of The Troubles."

"Might have a hard time putting up those tents, Sir," one of the soldiers reported. He waved his hammer at a peg he'd just pummeled into the turf with one blow. "Ground here's all marshy like."

"I'm sure they'll hold, Roper. Carry on." The ensign looked over at Mr. Bennet. "At least it will make for quick digging."

"That it will," Mr. Bennet said, poking a toe into the spongy sod. "For everyone."

He threw his daughter a somber glance that moved her hand to her sword.

Ensign Pratt frowned, but Mr. c.u.mmings didn't even seem to notice anything was amiss, for he'd been busy leafing through his Book of Common Prayer in search of something appropriate for such an uncommon occasion.

Lord Lumpley, on the other hand, couldn't help but notice, given that his eyes rarely strayed from Jane. He straightened up and began backing away from the others.

"Well, now that we've got this under way, no doubt there are other matters I could be attending to around the village. Perhaps Miss Bennet and I might-"

"h.e.l.lo," Roper said, seemingly speaking to the tuft of gra.s.s he was kneeling over. "One of my pegs is coming back out."

"What's that you say?" Ensign Pratt asked, moving over to take a look.

"I would advise stepping back, gentlemen," Mr. Bennet said.

"Yeah... right you are, sir," Roper said-just as a hand burst from the earth, a tent peg piercing the palm. Gray fingers clamped themselves around the man's ankle.

Roper shrieked immediately and with much enthusiasm.