Dawn of the Dreadfuls Page 25

  “Papa?” Elizabeth said.

  Mr. Bennet just put a finger to his lips and shook his head. He was letting her sisters sleep. But why not her?

  The soldiers were gone from their positions along the hall, and when Elizabeth and her father reached the foyer, she saw why. The whole company was packed in there together, bayonets affixed to their Brown Besses. Ensign Pratt was at the back, his cherubic face as round and pale as a full moon. In front, by the door, was Capt. Cannon in his wheelbarrow, turned to face his men.

  “… been telling yourselves you’re not ready for all this,” he was saying. “Because you lack training. Because you lack experience. Poppycock! What does that count against what you are. Englishmen! And not just that. Londoners! Young, tough ones who’ve already faced on the streets of Spitalfields and Camden and Limehouse foes more implacable, more cunning, more tenacious than any mere shambling rotter! Footpads, sneak thieves, pimps, degenerates—now those are fiends to fear! So you’re not good at marching. So you don’t know a field marshal from a major general from the company cook. I don’t care, and neither should you. Because by God, you boys already know how to fight! And mark my words: This day, you shall!”

  The soldiers were cheering as Elizabeth and her father started up the stairs. When the Bennets were about halfway up, the captain noticed them and said something to his Limbs, who stood beside him looking weary and grim.

  Right Limb looked up at Mr. Bennet and saluted.

  Elizabeth’s father nodded solemnly as he carried on up the staircase.

  “Papa, what is going on?” Elizabeth asked.

  “You will soon see, my dear. I have arranged for box seats.”

  The rooms on the second floor were overflowing with huddled guests from the ball, all still in their mussed finery. Though Elizabeth didn’t see her mother, she knew she was among them somewhere. Mrs. Bennet’s snores were quite distinctive.

  Up ahead, toward the end of the hall, Elizabeth saw Lt. Tindall speaking earnestly to her sister Jane.

  “… honor-bound to do all I can to protect your person … and your purity,” Elizabeth heard him say as she and her father walked up. His back was to them, and so absorbed was he in his own words that he didn’t notice their approach.

  Jane was blushing and looking away.

  Mr. Bennet cleared his throat.

  The lieutenant turned around.

  “Oh. Is it time?”

  “I believe so,” Mr. Bennet said. “Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  “We have daylight, we have muskets, we have the element of surprise. We won’t need luck.”

  The young officer offered Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth a bow, turned back to Jane and boldly kissed her hand, then pivoted and marched off toward the staircase.

  “There goes a brave man,” Mr. Bennet said to Jane, and he continued watching her for a long moment even after she’d replied with a simple “Yes.”

  “Is His Lordship ready?” he finally said.

  “He should be. He asked if I could come in and help him with his stockings perhaps half an hour ago. He was almost fully dressed then.”

  Mr. Bennet cocked his right eyebrow. “Almost?”

  Elizabeth cocked her left. “Help him with his stockings?”

  “Yes. His dressers are all downstairs guarding the …” Jane flushed pink again. “I said no!”

  “Of course, you did,” Mr. Bennet said. “Now, perhaps we should—”

  The nearest door swung open.

  “Would you have a look at these breeches, Miss Bennet?” Lord Lumpley said, his attention fixated (as usual) on his own nether regions. “They seem puffy in all the wrong … oh. Good morning, Mr. Bennet. Miss Bennet. I didn’t realize the moment had arrived.”

  “It has,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “I see. You may as well step in, then. We wouldn’t want to miss it, would we?”

  The baron moved back to let the Bennets into his large—and, to Elizabeth, sickeningly empty—bedchamber. Every other part of the house was packed near to bursting, yet His Lordship had been allowed to keep an entire room to himself. Elizabeth knew there was good reason: The night before, he’d complained more about the invasion of the lower classes than the damned, and concessions had to be made. Yet it still rankled that his room was now filled with nothing more than some furniture, scattered clothes, and a few poorly concealed bottles of gin.

  “I drew these back a crack to have some light to see by,” the baron said, walking over to a set of long, emerald green drapes. “I wasn’t up to taking a good look out, though. Not before I’d had my morning tea and toast.”

  “I’m afraid we ran out of water for tea some time ago,” Mr. Bennet said. “The food’s all gone, as well.”

  “Oh?” Lord Lumpley pouted, then shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing to hold us back then, is there?”

  He drew the curtains aside, revealing a pair of glass doors. Just beyond was a shallow balcony and, beyond that, Netherfield’s long front lawn bathed in the crimson light of dawn. When the baron opened the doors, a sound like a thousand moans or the lowing of a vast herd of cattle swept into the room.

  The four of them stepped onto the balcony.

  Scattered here and there over the grounds were dozens of ragged, staggering figures—easily two hundred in all, if not three. It was easy to tell the first wave of sorry stricken from their victim recruits. Half the dreadfuls looked moldy and rotten, and they hobbled on legs that had barely enough flesh to hold the bones together. The other half one could have almost taken for living, so natural was the pallor of their skin. Their faces were slack and often blood smeared, however, and many had gaping cavities where their organs had once been.

  When they saw Lord Lumpley and the Bennets, they began drifting toward the balcony, some of them shrieking or gnashing their teeth.

  “My God,” the baron gasped. “Just look what they’ve done to the topiary.”

  Elizabeth tore her horrified gaze away from the unmentionables just long enough to point it at him.

  “Surely, Captain Cannon doesn’t think he can just march out and kill so many unmentionables,” she said. “His men are outnumbered at least three to one.”

  “The captain doesn’t intend to kill them all,” Mr. Bennet replied. “He merely seeks to distract them. He very wisely had the stables sealed last night in addition to the main house. Captain Cannon plans to draw the main horde off so that someone can get inside and—presuming the dreadfuls haven’t already broken in to feast upon the horses—saddle a mount. That someone would then ride west to look for a battalion of the king’s army on the march from Suffolk. If all goes well, a rescue party might very well reach Netherfield before we’ve either starved or been eaten.”

  SCATTERED HERE AND THERE OVER THE GROUNDS WERE DOZENS OF RAGGED, STAGGERING FIGURES—EASILY TWO HUNDRED IN ALL, IF NOT THREE.

  “If all goes well,” Elizabeth said.

  Her father nodded. “Very, very well.”

  There was a great mass of yowling dreadfuls clustered beneath the balcony now, and looking down at them Elizabeth saw a few familiar faces scowling back.

  “Not Mrs. Ford!” Jane exclaimed. “And all the Elliots and Dr. Long, too? Oh! And what a beautiful child!”

  Staring straight up at them with large, round, gray-rimmed eyes was a little girl not much younger than Lydia. She neither screamed nor moaned but instead merely gazed at them plaintively, as if hoping someone might come down to play with her. The blood smeared around her mouth and hands, however, made it plain the kind of games she would have preferred.

  “We could only reach so many in time. And even then, some refused to come with us,” Mr. Bennet said, practically shouting now to be heard over the din of the dreadfuls.

  He reached beneath his cutaway coat, produced a flintlock pistol and said something to Elizabeth she couldn’t quite hear.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘The diversion for the diversion has gone on long enough!’”

  He poi
nted the pistol at the sky but then changed his mind, leaned over the balcony, and aimed at the little girl.

  “Why waste a bullet when it might offer deliverance?”

  Both Elizabeth and Jane started to say something, but neither got out a full word.

  Their father pulled the trigger, and the zombie child toppled over backward. For a moment, Elizabeth could still see its pure-white dress beneath the milling feet of the other dreadfuls, but before long even that was blotted out by the throng.

  A flurry of movement caught Elizabeth’s eye, and she looked up to find that the front doors of the house had been opened. The soldiers were charging out through them, hurling themselves like a great red lance bound for the heart of the lawn. Lt. Tindall led the charge, while Capt. Cannon was at the center of the column, his cart swerving and tipping treacherously as the Limbs maneuvered it around and over the bloody cornucopia of body parts and well-gnawed bones left over from the night before.

  With a deafening roar, the zombies turned and hurtled after them.

  “Why aren’t we out there, too?” Elizabeth asked. “We should be joining the battle, not watching it.”

  Her father glanced over at her and, worn and worried as he was, managed to look almost pleased at the same time.

  “The deadly arts have their place, but volley fire—that’s what will do the greatest damage to a herd. Get them clumped up together on an open plain, and you can mow down dozens like so many weeds.”

  The soldiers had stopped now and were trying to form themselves into a box—four lines facing outward, each two rows deep, the first kneeling, the second standing. The unmentionables gave them little time to arrange themselves, however, running in madly no matter how torn and mangled they might be, and the lines wavered and broke into chaos each time they almost seemed set.

  “They can’t even get into formation to fire,” Elizabeth said. “If we were with them—”

  Mr. Bennet shook his head, eyes still fixed on his daughter. “Your sisters and I are being held in reserve, at the captain’s insistence. But a volunteer did go along… .”

  “Oh, Lizzy. Look!”

  Jane thrust a finger toward the soldiers, and Elizabeth saw a swirl of black and pink twisting and twirling within their ranks. It bounced away from a break in the line straight into another before flipping itself over a dreadful’s head, spinning then springing then spinning again.

  “Master Hawksworth!”

  Elizabeth grabbed the balcony railing as if about to vault herself over and into the fray.

  Her father made no move to stop her.

  “If anything goes wrong,” he said, “we are the last line of defense for every soul in this house.”

  “Lizzy, you mustn’t,” Jane began, but Mr. Bennet silenced her with a raised hand and a hard stare. Then he looked at Elizabeth again.

  She let go of the railing.

  There was a staccato blast from out on the battlefield, and the men there sent up a “Huzzah!” They’d got off their first volley, and twenty dreadfuls went down at once.

  “‘If anything goes wrong,’” Lord Lumpley scoffed. “Look at that! We probably won’t need any reinforcements at all!”

  Half the fallen zombies got back up and immediately began lumbering toward the lines again.

  “Well,” the baron mumbled, “not many, at least.”

  Mr. Bennet was still watching Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth was still watching Hawksworth.

  She recognized most of the moves—the Bounding This and the Leaping That and the Soaring What-Have-You. They were all jumps and twirls and rolls, and they were beautiful, marred only by a rushed, uncontrolled sloppiness whenever Hawksworth had to actually throw a punch to escape a dreadful’s grasp.

  He never so much as unsheathed his katana.

  “He’s not bad, but he’s not good, either,” Mr. Bennet said. “He moves well, yet he has no fire for a fight. He never has, I’d say. His master obviously sent him to us because all the more, ah, ardent warriors were needed elsewhere. Why do you think he couldn’t admit that to us?”

  “Pride,” Elizabeth said.

  “Perhaps,” said her father.

  The soldiers sent up another cheer even as more unmentionables poured out of the woods and around the sides of the house. A huge black stallion was galloping up the drive, headed for the road. On its back was what looked like a red-clad leprechaun holding on for dear life.

  “Ensign Pratt?” Elizabeth asked.

  Mr. Bennet nodded. “The lad’s small enough to ride at Ascot. It was thought the younger ones, like him, would have the best chance.”

  “Oh, no!” Jane cried.

  There were dreadfuls all along the drive, and a big, burly, fresh one had grabbed hold of the horse’s tail. Its grip seemed utterly unbreakable: Though the zombie lost its footing, it didn’t let go, and it was soon being towed toward the road, chewing on the stallion’s tail the whole time.

  The horse slowed, then stopped and reared, and Ensign Pratt was thrown from the saddle. He scrambled to his feet just in time to dodge the dreadful that had grabbed his steed. It was after him now, and other unmentionables began closing in from all sides.

  But they weren’t alone.

  Geoffrey Hawksworth came bouncing out of the soldiers’ square, careening over and around scores of dreadfuls. He was headed for Ensign Pratt.

  As Elizabeth watched him, she found her heart pounding, her skin atingle. Hawksworth had been looking to her to teach him courage. Yet he’d had it within himself all along. All he’d needed was the right moment to take action and be redeemed. And that moment had arrived.

  Hawksworth was closing the remaining distance at a sprint. Elizabeth kept waiting for him to draw his katana, begin hacking off heads, but instead he just raced up to Ensign Pratt … then dashed past him, to his horse.

  He threw himself onto the stallion’s back and snatched up the reins. As he galloped off, a dozen unmentionables converged on the ensign. A moment later, they were going their separate ways again, each with its face buried in a hand or a foot or a gob of oozing innards.

  Hawksworth never looked back. When he reached the road, he turned the horse west and dug in his heels.

  Elizabeth leaned against the banister again, this time because she needed the support.

  So much for redemption … .

  “Egad,” Mr. Bennet muttered. “Even I thought better of him than that.”

  Lord Lumpley leaned against the banister, too. “He can’t send anyone back for us. You realize that, don’t you? Even if he finds Lord Paget, he’ll just tell him we’re all dead.”

  Jane gaped at him. “Why would he do that?”

  The baron hacked out a bitter laugh. “There’s really not an evil bone in your body, is there?”

  “We saw what he did,” Elizabeth explained. “We know his shame.”

  She watched Hawksworth and his horse become a black speck on the horizon and then disappear behind distant trees. Far, far too late she’d recognized the fault within the man—perhaps because all that was outward about him was so very pleasing. It was a mistake she would never make again.

  She turned back to the battle.

  Clouds of thick, white powder smoke were drifting up over the field now, for the soldiers on two sides of the square were firing off volleys regularly, and the corpses—the still ones, that is—were heaped up before them to such a height they formed a makeshift rampart as high as a man’s chest. The troops in the other two lines, however, were fighting off zombies by hand, and more of the undead were pressing in on them all the time. If the odds had been three to one when the battle began, they were easily six to one now.

  “It was all for naught,” Elizabeth said. “Why don’t they retreat into the house?”

  Her answer came as the scream of a horse off to the left. The rider no doubt screamed as well, but this was drowned out—and it couldn’t have lasted long, anyway. The soldier was quickly pulled from the saddle, and within seconds he
was butchered as efficiently (if not as tidily) as in the most modern abattoir. The proceeds were divided among a score of ravenously gorging unmentionables.

  No one else made it out of the stables.

  The soldiers fought on, buying time for a deliverance that didn’t come. They lasted much longer than Elizabeth would have predicted, but they couldn’t last forever. Eventually, one of the lines buckled completely, and zombies poured into the center of the square. The other three lines dissolved soon after, the red of the soldiers’ uniforms—and spurting blood—mixing with the dirty-shroud brown and decaying green and gray of the dreadfuls.

  Elizabeth saw Capt. Cannon’s Limbs ripped away and devoured.

  She saw him trying to fight off unmentionables with head butts until his stomach was ripped open and his steaming bowels stuffed into furiously working mouths before he’d even stopped writhing.

  And she saw Lt. Tindall facing the house, staring at Jane beside her as he put a flintlock to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. He was keeping his word: They wouldn’t find him pounding on a window the next morning, ravenous for the very thing he’d died to protect.

  Jane turned away with a sob.

  Elizabeth placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder.

  Lord Lumpley bolted from the balcony and out through the bedroom.

  “Seal the doors!” he cried as he flew down the hall. “Seal the doors!”

  “No!”

  Elizabeth started after him.

  Her father caught her by the arm.

  “He’s right,” he said. “Damn him.”

  He let Elizabeth go.

  She ran out to the hall, but she wasn’t trying to stop the baron now.

  “How many made it back?” she asked when she reached the top of the staircase.

  Down in the foyer, men were busy nailing boards across the front doors again. None of them had the heart to answer. Not that they needed to.

  There wasn’t a red coat in sight.

  __________________

  CHAPTER 36

  THERE WAS NO DIVISION between upstairs and downstairs now. There couldn’t be, with the soldiers gone. Everyone was needed at a window or door with a gun or a sword or a knife or a poker or even just a leg from a broken chair. Tradesman, yeoman, gentleman, seamstress, fishwife, farmwife, lady—they all fought side by side, for surely the dreadfuls would be equally democratic. They would eat anyone and everyone.