“Mr. Carr, you may be a genius, but you have very little common sense. I hope you live long enough to regret this.”
And then I grab Lily’s hand and run out the door.
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
—JANE—
Chapter 21
In Which I Err
No one in Nicodemus seems much inclined to save their own fool necks.
Sue and I are running from home to home, shouting about the coming horde, but no one answers or even peeks through the curtains to see what the fuss is about. We pause long enough to put our ear to a couple of doors, and it’s clear that there are folks there. Just no one that wants to come out.
“Come on, enough of this,” Sue says. “We can’t save those who ain’t interested.”
It pains me to leave anyone behind, but Sue is right.
“Well, then I suppose there’s nothing for it but to find the rest of our folks and get out of town.” For a moment I wonder where the Duchess and her girls are. And little Thomas. Were they at Gideon’s house? I hate leaving them behind, but it’s only a matter of time before the streets are thick with the dead, and I have no intention of being in Nicodemus when that happens.
I follow Sue down the streets, each one dust and clapboard, and as we round a corner we’re met by a horde of undead. They’re only a few feet away, but they haven’t noticed us quite yet, and we freeze.
“How did the dead get into town already?” I whisper.
“That is a mighty fine question,” Sue says, readying her scythe. “It couldn’t have been that breach in the wall. But more important, where do they think they’re going?”
I slowly draw my sickles, but even the small motion is enough to attract the attention of one of the shamblers. She lumbers toward us at a run, more following, and I pause as I recognize a few of the faces. My heart thunders in my ears, and a keening that ain’t the moans of the dead starts up in my brain, like the sound a wounded animal makes when it’s just asking you to finish the job and put it out of its misery. It’s a grief wail, and it takes me a long moment to realize the sound is actually coming from me.
Because running toward me, hair loose and drool streaming from her mouth, is the Duchess, with Sallie and Nessie not far behind.
Seeing them puts lead in my feet and drains the fight from my body. My hands fall to my side, and I take half a step back, not because I’m scared but because I am already too close to breaking to handle this. What is the point of fighting if everything you care about ends up devoured? For the first time, I can’t see a way forward, and so I freeze.
It’s a hesitation we can’t afford.
“Jane!” Sue yells, bringing her scythe up and across.
There are too many for her, and I am half a step behind, moaning like a broken thing.
“What’s the matter? What are you doing?” She falls back enough to give herself some more space to work with and grabs me by the front of my dress, shaking me. “You have to fight!”
The jostling is enough to break through a small bit of my pain. I blink away my tears and spring into action, but it’s like I am a being wholly separate from my body. Part of my brain is trying to understand just how the soiled doves could have ended up turned, and part of me is raging against everything, all of it. What kind of miserable world is this when everyone you give a fig about can end up a monster?
I begin to move through the dead, ending their misery even if I know there will be no end to my own.
I tell myself I am doing the Duchess a favor as I separate her head from her body, her fiery hair catching the sunlight as her head rolls off toward the boardwalk. I tell myself the same again as I put down Sallie, pretend I am sending her off to her eternal reward.
But when I get to Nessie, and as I part her head from her body, I don’t see her. Instead, I see Jackson in those final few moments, the new day’s sun catching his yellowed eyes, the boy I loved wrought into a monster right before me.
I hate this miserable world, every last thing about it, and I take that grief and pain and rage and direct it where it needs to go. I slash and tear and scream.
But if I am all frantic bladework, Sue is constant and rhythmic, and she begins to sing “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” as she works:
My faith looks up to Thee,
Thou Lamb of Calvary,
Savior Divine;
Now hear me while I pray;
Take all my guilt away;
Oh, let me from this day
Be wholly Thine.
Sue’s voice is deep and even, and even though I don’t much believe in salvation I find comfort in her singing.
My swings slow, become more deliberate. But as I kill the rest of the turned people of Summerland, working with Sue to put them down, all I see is Jackson, my guilt and regret a tangible thing, so that by the time we’ve finished I’m covered in shambler blood and tears.
As soon as the last body falls Sue rounds on me. “Jane, what is going on? You nearly left me out to get swarmed! You off your oats since coming west?”
I shake my head. “Sue . . . I’m tired. I’m tired of all this killing and mourning and hoping for safety that doesn’t exist.”
Sue raises her eyebrows at me. “Are you having another one of those existential crises you told me about?”
I laugh and use a cleanish part of my skirt to scrub at my face. “I can’t believe you remember that.”
Sue rests the hilt of her scythe on the body of a shambler and tilts her head at me. “Aw hell, Jane, I remember most of what you say, even if I know to only believe about half of it. But that doesn’t tell me what’s gotten into you.”
I gesture weakly at the dead that litter the ground, cluttering up the dirt lane. “Those are my friends, some of them at least. I think that destroyed gate is the least of our worries, now.”
Sue looks down at the bodies, her deep brown skin going to a shade closer to gray. “Jane, I ain’t smart, but I’ve been here in town for a good while. There ain’t no way a shambler got in here who could have turned this group of people, open gate or none. The rear gate ain’t been down long enough.”
I shake my head, trying to think of how this could have happened. How could so many people have turned shambler within the city walls? Especially without any kind of undead presence. It ain’t a riddle I have an answer to.
A thin cry comes toward us, and we look back down the street, past the dead. My penny is an icy weight against my neck, and next to me Sue takes a sharp breath.
“Sweet Jesus,” she says.
The thing about the dead is they can move fast when they’re fresh turned, but only as fast as their legs could have carried them in life. And well, little ones don’t move that fast. Especially if they ain’t all that good on their feet.
Thomas, sweet Thomas, lurches toward us.
The dead ain’t got any nurturing instincts, and they’d most likely left him behind once they’d scented a meal nearby. Now that the fighting has passed, it’s easy to see the barn door hanging askew a little way down the lane. These dead folks must’ve been locked up in there, and there’s only one way that could have happened.