“Go, we can take care of this,” I say to Carolina and Juliet. I am not nearly as sure as I sound, but they nod and hurry away.
Jane is already striding decisively toward the water’s edge. “Stay behind me and let me work. As long as I move slowly they should be no problem. Just take care of the ones that get past. Don’t tax yourselves.”
“Well, ain’t she bossy,” Sue says. But it becomes clear why Jane barked out such an order as the first few restless dead draw even with her.
It takes the undead a good bit of maneuvering to navigate through the weeds and onto firmer land. A couple slip and fall in river mud, the same as any heedless person might, but Jane does not run up to them to end their forward progress. Instead, she waits, and whistles a merry tune as they regain their footing and stalk toward her. They are not lurching and grasping for her the way they might a regular person. Instead, they walk right past her, one going so far as to bump into her before Jane swings her sword around and takes off his head.
Shock washes over me as I see Jane was not exaggerating about the side effects of Gideon’s vaccine. She is completely invisible to the dead. It is like she does not even exist to them.
She throws a roguish grin over her shoulder at me and even has the gall to give me a saucy wink.
But then there is no time for anything but work.
More restless dead are gaining the bank, and Jane takes down better than half of them, her movements slow and deliberate. Sue and her big sword very nicely work cleanup on the ones that scramble through the grasses too quickly for Jane to decapitate. I quickly see that I am extraneous, and I instead track the progress of the wagon train as it makes its way past us and up the road. As I watch, it turns toward a bridge, crossing and heading away from the river.
Within a few minutes, the fifty dead have dwindled to only a few, and the bank is thick with blood and bodies. Jane wipes her sword off on a woman’s fine velvet dress and sheathes it before rejoining Sue and me. We all head back to the wagon train.
“I thought the plan was to follow the river,” Jane says, pointing to the train beginning to cross the nearby bridge, the column stretched out like a cat sunning its belly.
“It was,” Sue says.
Without oxen and heavy loads we can move faster than the wagon train, and we catch up to our group quickly. Lily runs to greet us, and she freezes.
“I thought you were dead,” she says, giving Jane a terrified look.
“I am,” Jane says, voice flat.
Lily does not quite know what to do with that, and the parade of emotions that flit across her face echo the way I am feeling by the minute: angry, then sad, then cautious, and finally, concerned.
“Lily, is there something amiss?” I ask.
She grabs on to the lifeline I throw her with both hands, turning her attention back to me. “Upriver, the water is filthy with shamblers!” she says. “Juliet says we need to head away from the water.”
Jane’s face goes stony, and she strides ahead to where the middle of the wagon train is crossing a long bridge now crowded with Chinese and Californios pointing to the water. They hold pickaxes and shovels, and I realize that we must have stumbled upon one of the work crews building levees along the river. It was the talk of San Francisco, where the people of the city were eager to have more predictable travel to Sacramento and to lure more people to the state. The project was intended to make more of the area alongside the river conducive to farming by alleviating the massive flooding. A lack of workers and soaring costs had delayed the project; it was now slated to be completed in 1890.
“Tomás!” Jane yells, and the small boy comes running over. We approach the nearest Californio, who looks to be in charge of the day laborers, and, with Tomás interpreting, we inquire what happened. He relays the story of the dead appearing in the water—ten yesterday, a few more this morning, and now more than a hundred of them.
Sure enough, the water churns with the dead. The current is a bit too swift for more than a handful to gain the bank, and without the curve of the river that benefitted the dead behind us they cannot maintain their footing. Either way it is clear that they are coming from somewhere upstream.
Jane thanks the man for his time and we catch up with the wagon train, which is now cutting a path away from the river to the north. A few dead try to lurch after the train, and we easily dispatch them. We walk in silence for a few moments, Tomás and Lily eyeing each other suspiciously, the little dog hopping sideways and barking whenever one of the restless dead get too close. We are almost rejoined with the wagon train when Jane utters the question on all of our minds.
“What the hell is going on upriver?”
No one responds, of course. We do not know anything more than she does. But I hope the answer is one that does not spell our doom.
When the Devil’s Bride ran up against Alfred and Lucy Brampton, a couple of no-good swindlers who had left a trail of dead and broken hearts in their path, she did not hesitate. Reports are that she walked into a saloon that the couple frequented, asked their names, and shot them down before either could respond.
And good thing, to be sure, for the Bramptons had a wagon full of colored children, stolen from their parents, that they had planned on selling into slavery.
Had she known this about these fiends? Or had her heroism been a happy coincidence?
—Western Tales, Volume 47
—JANE—
Chapter 37
In Which Our Plans Change
Predictably, the topic of conversation on the wagon train runs to the dead. How could it not? Most of these folks came west to escape shamblers, to find new lives away from the killing and dying. Of course, it ain’t like they haven’t seen the restless dead in California before. Just not like this, fresh and fast and ravenous. The dead in the ocean were old and raggedy, easily dispatched by beach patrols. The old shambler that wandered the landscape here was usually an oddity, a prospector or trapper that died in the wild and came back without any kin to plant a nail in their forehead.
But this was something completely different, the beginnings of a horde, flowing down the river, out to sea. Assuming the river did not bend fortuitously and provide a landing spot for them and their endless hunger.
Yes, the people of California had fled the dead, yet here it all was, pursuing them like Pharaoh harrying Moses and the Israelites across Egypt. Only in this case the Red Sea seems to be in on the chase. I wish I was surprised, but I ain’t. Seems to me whenever anyone finds but a little bit of peace, the dead inevitably show up to wreak their special kind of havoc.
It’s nice a body can rely on something these days.
We veer away from the river, a panicked hustle that can only be maintained for an hour before Juliet has to call a halt as older folks and kids begin to drift too far back. We’re heading due north instead of the more northeasterly route that would have taken us to Sacramento, and that vexes me. Something is causing the dead in the river, and even though I pray that it’s just an overrun boat like Carolina Jones suggested, I fear that Gideon has laid waste to yet another town in the course of his despicable experimentations.
I take a deep breath. We’ve stopped next to a placid stream that burbles and sings, and the landscape is beautiful, but the direct opposite of how I feel.