The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (25 page)

They had worked together, in absolute silence, kneeling in the dirt and scraping out their own temporary graves one scoop at a time. Those graves weren't particularly deep: After all, they hadn't needed to be. Just deep enough to fit a human body, with enough dirt on top to cover it from all but a careful inspection...but not so much that it would take more than a minute to crawl out of it again.

Jamelia had issued her psychic commands and then watched each of her soldiers go to work, breaking into small groups and excavating a grave for each of them. Then one corpse had obediently climbed into the hole and allowed the others to push the dirt back on top of it, tamping it down with their bony feet. This process was repeated over and over again, until finally the last corpse had been interred. Their commander had sealed its grave personally, and had then wandered around the village, assessing the handiwork of her men.

If the enemy should come in daylight, the ruse will be uncovered in a heartbeat. But this was a deliberate tactic, and no tactic was without its inherent risks. A good commander was unafraid of taking those risks, but always made sure that they were calculated, and were never taken lightly.

Jamelia was a very good commander.

She was gambling on the British force being led by a vampire. Hopefully the vile Wellesley himself, but at the very least one of his senior underlings, one whose loss would prick at his pride and perhaps goad him into acting rashly during the decisive battle that she knew must soon be fought. Vampires meant a night attack, and a night attack meant that the accursed British were hardly likely to spot the disturbed patches of earth that dotted the landscape both in and around the village.

So far, it seemed as if her gamble had paid off. From her hiding place inside the village hall, she had heard the far-off crunch of splintering wood on the outskirts of Talwada, followed by the cries of the redcoats as they cleared each home.

The heavy thud of boots had gradually worked its way closer toward the center of the village. The vampire commander must know where it was that she was hiding, Jamelia reasoned, and that was why she could hear the redcoats fanning out to encircle this place. Then she had heard two men that she took to be the most senior officers conferring, right outside the barred doorway.

They were going to burn her out, it seemed. The tigress gave a grudging smile at that, thought, Sound tactics.

The enemy soldiers had taken the bait. Now it was time for the trap to be sprung.

And so she had, impelling her underlings to exhume themselves. She didn't know how many men the British had sent — at least a battalion, she fervently hoped — but it mattered little either way. She had spent her entire adult life training as a warrior, in the singular at first, but ultimately rising to the level of supreme commander of the Tipu Sultan’s entire army. She knew that the main strength of the British was their superlative discipline when fighting in close-knit ranks, pouring volley after volley of massed musketry into the enemy formations until they were broken and butchered.

None of which would help them here, in the death trap that she had so cleverly and painstakingly engineered.

Nichols broke the spell that seemed to hold the half company, stunned, in its thrall.

"To arms, lads!" Grasping the musket fore and aft, the CSM buried the bayonet’s point in the throat of the closest creature, an aged woman dressed in a light sari. Her head and torso was uncovered, and with her arms she worked on levering herself out of the makeshift grave. She hissed when the blade punctured her neck, and when Nichols yanked the weapon out again, it was accompanied by the sound of air escaping from the new hole in her trachea.

With a grimace, Nichols reversed his grip on the Brown Bess and used three vicious strokes of the weapon's butt to batter the creature insensible. He did not stop until brain matter was visibly leaking from the crushed and ruined cranium. Gasping for breath, the CSM allowed himself a moment to look around and take stock of the situation.

The dead rose from their hiding places with a laconic insouciance that was almost mocking:
We have no need to hurry,
it seemed to say,
because we are so many and you are so few, and in the end you shall all join us anyway.

In the darkness, Nichols didn't know exactly how many of the damned things there were...but this whole thing smelt like an ambush. The creatures had been lying in wait under the ground ever since they had entered the village — and also during the Captain's lone reconnaissance run — which implied that they were being controlled somehow, for want of a better word. He didn't know how that would even be possible, but what other explanation was there?

And he was willing to bet that Jamelia was the culprit. Dan's mind raced, thinking ahead. If the tigress was able to direct the walking corpses somehow, then she would have brought as many as she possibly could along with her.

They had walked headlong into a trap after all, damn it. Well, no sense crying over spilled milk now.

"Get into the bastards, Shadows! Get 'em while they're still coming out of the ground!"

Answering cries went up, from many different directions out in the darkness. The shlurping noises that accompanied them suggested that the bayonets were getting plenty of elbow grease. Sickening thuds were followed by the cracking of bones. As Dan had already proved, the stock of the Brown Bess made for an excellent bludgeon.

Dan ran off in the direction of the closest cooking fire, banking on the idea that the firelight would help him at least see his adversaries better. He could see flames in the near distance, somewhere ahead of him toward the end of the long, straight street or lane on which he stood. Making a bee-line for it, he had gone no further than twenty or thirty feet when his left foot caught itself on something solid.

Unable to help himself, the CSM tripped, and found himself falling. His right hand maintained a death grip on the musket; he released the barrel with his left, and threw it out in front of him, groping blindly in the inky blackness for a way to break his fall. It didn't much matter. He hit the ground hard, scraping layers of skin from the surface of his palm. Unable to brace that arm in time, he slammed hard into the ground. The air rushed out of his lungs with a whoosh.

"Christ!" Nichols swore. His right knee was screaming at him. It had taken the initial brunt of impact, and it was making no bones about the fact.

Then he felt the fingers close around his right ankle.

The grip was strong; almost impossibly strong, like a steel trap closing about his lower limb and squeezing mercilessly. A strangled cry told him just exactly what it was that had grabbed him and made him stumble.

"Get your mucky fingers off of me, you unholy bastard!" Dan lashed out with his left boot, flinging the sole of his boot in the creature's vague direction. His first attempt missed, but when he drew it back in and kicked out again, the foot slammed hard into something soft and squishy. Whatever it was (Dan assumed it was the thing's face) cracked open like an egg.

The grip didn't slacken even fractionally. Strong jaws closed around his ankle, trying to push their way through the tough leather boot. Gritting his teeth, Nichols took a firm grip on the musket once more and jabbed the bayoneted muzzle between his feet.

Slam. Slam. Slam.

The third time turned out to be the charm. Dan felt the unholy creature's head come apart; felt bone crumple, crack, and shatter; felt something hot, soft and fluid splash the underside of his sweat-slick jaw, before dribbling down his neck and underneath his collar.

The grip instantly slackened.

Still clutching the musket, the CSM used it as a crutch to lever himself up and onto his feet once more. His knee throbbed like the very devil, but a quick test told him that it was still load-bearing. Satisfied, Nichols progressed from a hobble to walking gingerly, determined to reach the cooking fire as quickly as he could. Glimpses of shadowy figures kept on occulting the flames. Some were patently his own men, the long, straight outlines of their muskets plainly visible.

Others were patently not.

Thirty feet to go. Twenty. The thing almost took him by surprise, lurching at him out of a side alley between two houses. Something warned him, some primal instinct or soldier's sense, and as he passed the mouth of the alley he brought the Brown Bess up and across his body, shielding it from whatever monstrosity lurked there.

It was a redcoat, or at least it had been once. For exactly how long it had been dead, he really couldn't say. The jacket was ragged and torn, he could tell from its silhouette. The thing's head was cocked almost ninety degrees to the right, as though it's neck had been snapped and it simply didn't care. When the thing extended its arms out toward him, Dan could see the gleam of bone poking through the rotted flesh at the fingertips.

The senior NCO was overcome with a wave of sudden revulsion, which he managed to divert into becoming a source of anger instead. Growling like a cornered animal, Nichols took two steps back and drew the musket along with him, then swung it forward again, stepping off from his right foot and turning the swing into a thrust. The thrust was fueled by raw adrenaline, and didn't miss its mark. The bayonet buried itself all the way up to the lugs in the creature's belly.

The reanimated corpse refused to take the hint. Wailing and groaning plaintively, the thing swatted and swiped at Nichols with its hands, trying desperately to grab hold of the hot, fresh meat that was being dangled ever so tantalizingly out of its reach.

Dan struggled not to gag as the waves of rancid breath rolled over him. He turned his face to the side, feeling his gorge rising with every passing second. The reeking excrement of London's sewer system, festering in the still air of a hot July day, didn't smell nearly as bad as that.

"Bastard," he hissed, grasping the Brown Bess so hard that his fingers blanched white. Ignoring the agonized wails of desperate hunger, the CSM planted his feet firmly, bent his knees just a little for balance, and then twisted the musket like a corkscrew, first one way and then the other. If it felt any physical pain, the corpse gave no sign; it continued to struggle, but couldn't get any closer because the dripping ruin of its abdomen and lower ribs were pushing up hard against the weapon's muzzle.

"Bastard," Dan repeated. "Bastard. Bastard.
Bastard!
Why won't you just lay down and bloody well
die
!"

With that, he put his chin to his chest, closed his eyes tightly, held his breath, and then pulled the trigger.

It was, he would think to himself much later, when he finally found the time to reflect on the events of this night, a damned good thing that he had taken those crucial steps to protect himself. A barrage of viscous black fluid splattered across his face, peppering it with gobs of clotted old blood and rubbery chunks of viscera.

The muzzle flare lit up the world beyond Dan's eyelids, accompanied a split second later by the shriek of expanding gasses exiting the muzzle.The creature was blown off its feet and blasted backward, flying through the air to slam hard against the mud brick wall on the opposite side of the street. Nichols' ears were ringing in the aftermath of the controlled explosion, and so he did not hear the
crack-crunch
of the monster's ribs shattering with the force of impact.

Dan ran one hand across his face, wiping away the worst of the mess. He gingerly opened his eyes again, blinked two or three times, and peered into then semi-darkness at what looked like a heap of abandoned rags. He took four or five hesitant steps forward, saw that the creature, incredibly, was still moving. All of its innards were gone from the lower chest down, and were glistening in the cold starlight like the leavings from a butcher's shop at the end of the day. The jaws still snapped and bit, though not quite as vigorously as they had before, he fancied.

Time to end this.

One thrust with the bayonet was all that it took. The blow was perfectly placed, driving the point of the bayonet through the creature's gaping lips. There was a scraping sound, somewhat akin to the screech of chalk on a blackboard, as the tempered steel grazed the edges of its teeth. Ignoring it, Nichols kept going, extending the thrust out as far forward as his arms could reach.

Once the sharpened point entered its brain pan, the thing finally stopped struggling.

Planting a foot on top of its chest for a little leverage, Dan jerked the bayonet out again. It took a couple of attempts, but came free soon enough. The CSM couldn't pinpoint exactly when he had stopped breathing, but now that the immediate crisis had past, he began to gulp down the sweet, sweet air with racking gasps.

Now that was a little too close. He laughed, more as a means of relieving the tension than because anything was funny. It was a nervous reaction, Dan knew, his body's response to the immediacy of a grotesque and violent death: One that he had dodged only by the slimmest of margins.

More gunshots sounded, coming from all across the village.

The men were fighting for their lives.

Favoring his tender knee, the CSM took off once more in the direction of the closest cooking fire. There was work to be done this night. Bayonet work, for the most part, and if the Shadows were going to breakfast in Hell tomorrow, then it wouldn't do to keep the Devil waiting...