It would be anyone’s guess who or what might come wandering through the area where we had set up for the evening. So even though I want Jane to get some rest, I appreciate her company here in the stillness of the night. Four blades are always better than two.
Once I am satisfied that things are as safe as they can be, we make our way back to the front of the house and the crates there. I have no sooner sunk onto one, adjusting the corset to keep it from digging into my hips, when Jane says, “Tell me about New Orleans. Or Nawlins.”
She is making fun of me, but I am too tired to even pretend to be cross about it. And if tales of my hometown can distract her from whatever it is going on between her and Jackson, I am happy to oblige. “What do you want to know? It is like most of the Lost States: miserable in the summer, slightly less so in the winter, and the dead chomping after you all the time.”
“How does such a place exist? Felt like Baltimore was only survivable because come winter the dead lay down and you could spend all of the spring harvesting them. Without such a culling . . .” Jane trails off, and I know she is mentally trying to calculate how large the hordes must grow in the Deep South.
“Nawlins’ canals trap many of them,” I say, my voice low. “After the dead rose, the people of the bayou were pretty well protected. The dead cannot swim, and the natural water currents would drag them out to sea by the thousands. A few folks got the idea that that same mechanism might be used to fortify the city, so they got to building canals. The ones used by the shipping industry had always been an important part of the city, so dredging new ones was not as hard as it might sound. And the city has stood ever since.”
“Wait, are you saying that the entirety of the city is made up of waterways? You don’t have any walls? Or bobbed wire?” Jane’s voice echoes the awe and surprise of most people when they first see the city.
“Nawlins is at sea level, pert near below sea level in a few places now,” I say. “There are the sea walls, too. They used them to keep out the storm surge during hurricanes in the old days, but now they also keep out the dead. Between the brackish water, which speeds along the decay of any dead that get caught in it, and the city patrols, it is enough to keep the city safe. Movement inside and outside the municipalities is tightly monitored, and there are ferrymen who will secure your passage into each area. Yellow fever is a bigger danger than the dead, the way folks tell it. I grew up in the French Quarter, and Maman used to say that nothing was prettier than the Mississippi sweeping away the dead in the morning.”
Jane snorts—so loud that I almost do not hear the terrified whinnying of the horse.
We jump to our feet. “Shamblers,” she says.
“Get everyone up,” I say, unsheathing my swords. For once, Jane does not speak, just heads inside the cabin while I make my way silently around the side of the building, hoping that I am not too late for the poor animal.
The eastern edge of the land is sliding to pink as the sun begins to rise, but there is enough moonlight to see a group of lumbering, grasping figures trying to climb the corral to get to the horse. Those are not rustlers—their strange, jerking movements mark them as only one kind of creature.
The dead.
I count seven dead before they turn their attention to me, deciding I am likely the easier target. They are fast, recently turned, and I have barely swung my sword to decapitate one before another is upon me.
My Mollies are not about flash and dash, like Jane’s sickles. There are no spins or kicks or any kind of full-body theatrics. The Mollies are about discipline. Keeping two swords moving at all times, marking the interlocking patterns and defending while also ending the dead—decapitation being the preferred method for such a task—it is all a difficult endeavor, one that requires an inner tranquility. That is why I love the weapon. There is nothing that brings me greater joy than killing the dead, and the only time my brain quiets, where my fears and worries seem far away, is when I wield the swords like an avenging angel.
Moonlight catches on my dancing blades as I step forward, swinging them through necks, removing heads and working the perimeter. The Mollies are not the kind of weapon you would want to use in a crowd; they shine in one-on-one combat, a quick and efficient weapon to put down a single target, and I have to keep moving so as not to be overrun. But by the time Jane comes back with Jackson, I have felled the lot of them.
And I did it all while wearing a corset. Stick that in your eye, Jane McKeene.
“You okay?” she asks.
I nod. “There were seven of them, fresh turned. I cannot tell whether these were folks from Summerland, but there are surely more on the way. As soon as the sun is up, we should move.”
“I’ll take another look around the perimeter and make sure there ain’t any others,” Jackson says. He moves off, gun drawn.
I wipe my swords off on the long dress of one of the dead. It is hard not to think of her as a woman—some homesteader, or maybe a fine Eastern lady—who found herself out on the prairie hoping for a new life beyond the terror of the woods. One of the women I met at Summerland had spoken about Kansas as being the new Promised Land. “Any place where you can see the dead coming is a blessing. All of this flat, nearly barren earth is a godsend.” Of course, seeing the dead coming does not mean that a body is safe, but I was not about to dash her dreams.
And now, this dead woman, so recently grasping and hungry, is nothing more than a dress to clean my sword. I sometimes wonder if people would hope less if they knew it was inevitable that it would end in tragedy.
I shake the thought and turn my attention to Jane, taking the opportunity to let her notice that I harvested seven all by myself and while wearing a corset, but she is just scowling at the bodies like they have somehow personally wronged her. “What has got you so vexed?” I finally say.
“Do you think we’re killers, Kate?”
The query catches me off guard. Not because it is a line of thought I have not considered before now, but because I am not used to Jane wanting to discuss moral quandaries. After all, she rebuffed my efforts to discuss her killing of Sheriff Snyder but moments ago. She has always seemed to me to be a person of uncompromising beliefs, even if she and I disagree on the nature of those thoughts.
More important, Jane’s question tracks too closely to my own train of thought, and I am uncomfortable with the coincidence. “What do you mean? You think I am morally compromised?” My heart begins to pound, and the old anxiety returns, the fear of judgment, of failing, of not being enough. I never expected to feel that with Jane. I have never expected her to find me . . . inadequate.
“No, that ain’t it; I just been wondering if putting down the dead, doing what we have to do to survive, well . . . if it makes us bad. And not going-to-hell kind of bad, because I ain’t sure I believe in all that folderol, but bad like old, dead Sheriff Snyder. Are we murderers?”
Jane talks so fast that I am having trouble following her, and I take a deep breath before I answer. I do not want my words to be inadequate, because I know she needs to talk about what happened with the pastor and the sheriff back in Summerland. After all, it has been less than a day since Sheriff Snyder pointed a pistol to my temple and promised to end my life. But this is a conversation of another sort, although I truly believe the two matters to be linked. I do not understand Jane’s mind well enough to be sure I will not provoke her into some sort of irrational nonsense in response.