Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls (22 page)

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 unassisted. She
was
a warrior, and a thousand times
more worthy to call herself such than the lieutenant and his bumbling 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 bloody, 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.’”

__________________

AFTER SOME QUICK (and, thanks again to Jane, courteous) debate, a subject was settled on for the experiment the Reverend Mr. Cummings 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. Cummings 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
un
common 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—”

“Hello,” Roper said, seemingly speaking to the tuft of grass 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.

“Fire! Fire!” Ensign Pratt squealed, leaping away pointing at the hand—and now wrist and forearm—jutting up from the ground.

Roper tried to flee, but the fingers remained locked on tightly. All he could do was limp in circles, screaming, as his fellow soldiers scrambled to collect their muskets, which had been propped up in a neat pyramid several yards away.

“There’s no time for that,” Mr. Bennet said. “Jane, your katana, quickly. Lord Lumpley, Mr. Cummings, if you would kindly help me steady Private Roper.”

“Ummm,” came the baron’s reply.

The vicar instinctively began reading aloud from the book in his hands.

“D-dearly b-b-beloved, we are g-gathered together here in sight of G-G-God, and in the face of this congregation, to j-join together this man and this woman in holy mmmmmatrimony . . .”

“Wrong verse, Mr. Cummings,” Jane said, and once her father stepped in to stop Roper—alone—she took out her sword and cut him free.

Mr. Bennet helped the soldier hobble away from the slime-oozing stump left sticking out of the ground, at which point a soldier ran up and shot it, to no discernible effect.

When Roper looked down and saw the rotten, ragged-fleshed hand still holding fast to his ankle, he began screaming all over again.

“There, there, lad. Pull yourself together.” Mr. Bennet patted him
on the shoulder. “As long as you’re not attached to the part with the
mouth
, you’ve nothing to—”

“Papa!”

Another hand had thrust up from the ground to grab hold of Jane. It was directly behind her, clasping the hem of her gown, and there was no way she could turn to get a clean swing at it.

“Fire! Fire!” Ensign Pratt cried again.

Several of his men rushed over and pointed their muskets in the general vicinity of Jane’s feet.

“No!” Mr. Bennet bellowed.

“Fire! Fire!”

Up till now, Lord Lumpley had been too shocked to do more than gawk. Yet something—pure irritation with the unworthies around him, perhaps—broke through his horror.

“Oh, shut up, you poxy-faced git!” he roared. “You won’t help the lady by shooting her damned legs off!”

The soldiers froze. Not only did the nobleman have a point, they were unsure how to react when their commander was called a “poxy-faced git.” The situation, like so many they’d faced of late, hadn’t been covered in their training.

“His Lordship is quite right,” Mr. Bennet said, and he unsheathed his sword, waved the soldiers away, and cut off the hand grasping his daughter’s dress.

“I am
not
poxy faced,” the ensign mumbled, throwing Lord Lumpley a petulant glare.

“Well,” Mr. Bennet sighed, “it appears the vicar’s permission wasn’t necessary, after all. The dead are nearly done disinterring themselves.”

Two oozing, squirming stumps now poked out of the soil. Directly between them, a small mound was forming as something new sought to bloom.

“‘Th-this is translated c-closely from the following prayer in the Sacramentariam of S-Saint Gregory,’” Mr. Cummings said, glassy eyes
glued to his book, “‘which is presented to the reader that he may j-judge the manner in which our Reformers made use of the liturgical commmmmpositions of this gr-great mmmmm-man.’”

“I think you’re reading footnotes now, Mr. Cummings,” Jane said with remarkable gentleness, considering that she was, at the time, endeavoring to pry a hand off the hem of her dress with the point of a sword.

“Let the vicar read what he would,” her father told her. “I doubt if anyone could find the perfect prayer for consecrating
this
.”

He knelt down near the flailing stubs. They were wriggling their way farther from the earth while the little swelling between grew larger.

Any second now, the top of the dreadful’s head was going to break the surface.

“Obviously, I have miscalculated,” Mr. Bennet said. “Usually one can count on a steady rate of one-and-one-half feet per week, but our friend here is arriving ahead of schedule. Perhaps my mistake was in backdating from Mr. Ford’s conversion, when the plague might have in fact arrived much sooner. Ahhh, well. It’s not my first mistake, and I can only hope it won’t be my last.” He shrugged and turned to the soldiers clumped together nearby. “If someone would be so kind as to fetch one of the smithy’s hammers, please. So that I might make a demonstration.”

Half the soldiers whirled away to do as he asked, desperate for any excuse to put distance between themselves and the unmentionable about to sprout like some ghastly flower. The other half simply stared with their mouths agape.

“Papa, we are being watched.” Jane nodded at the road. “By Mrs. Long and her nieces, I believe.”

“Then it may as well be all Meryton, I’m afraid.” Mr. Bennet waved to their far-off audience. “Hello, there! Just enjoying a lovely little morning picnic! Would you care to join us?”

The women scurried off down the lane.

One of Ensign Pratt’s men returned with a heavy black hammer just as the ground split open to reveal a tuft of mud-clogged hair.

“Thank you.” Mr. Bennet took the hammer but made no move to use it. “Tell me, My Lord—I find I’ve lost track of the social calendar. The spring ball at Pulvis Lodge is set for tomorrow night, is it not?”

A scaly forehead, alive with writhing worms, rose out of the moist loam, as did the sound of low, muffled moaning. Yet still Mr. Bennet remained crouched mere feet away, doing nothing.

“The ball, you say?” The baron looked back and forth from the unmentionable to Mr. Bennet, seemingly unsure which he found more alarming. “Yes, yes—tomorrow, it is. Do you wish it canceled?”

More soil crumbled aside, and eyebrows became visible. They were followed a moment later by the eyes themselves—bloodshot, bulging, and wild with hate or hunger or both.

“Quite the contrary,” Mr. Bennet said. “I merely think it should be moved to a new venue. Someplace larger affording better protection for the guests.”

“Aren’t you going to do something about that?” Ensign Pratt yelped, pointing at the dreadful wriggling its way from the grave. The thing’s nose (what was left of it) was now above ground, and the handless arms were visible up to the elbows.

“When the moment is right,” Mr. Bennet said.

Mr. Cummings began reading aloud from what appeared to be the prayer book’s introduction.

“It has been the awwww-bject of the editor in preparing for the public the present edition to increase the utility of our admirable l-lliturgy by rendering it more generally and completely unnnnnnderstood. . . .”

“Are you saying you want
me
to host the ball?” the baron said. “You press your luck, Bennet.”

“Indeed, I do.”

The head was now out far enough to reveal the chalky, desiccated face of an old woman. The unmentionable’s contortions were growing wilder as the dirt loosened around it, and the ground began to swell up
where its shoulders would, before long, pop up into the sunshine.