Her father made no move to stop her.
“If anything goes wrong,” he said, “we are the last line of defense for every soul in this house.”
“Lizzy, you mustn’t,” Jane began, but Mr. Bennet silenced her with a raised hand and a hard stare. Then he looked at Elizabeth again.
She let go of the railing.
There was a staccato blast from out on the battlefield, and the men there sent up a “Huzzah!” They’d got off their first volley, and twenty dreadfuls went down at once.
“‘If anything goes wrong,’” Lord Lumpley scoffed. “Look at that! We probably won’t need any reinforcements at all!”
Half the fallen zombies got back up and immediately began lumbering toward the lines again.
“Well,” the baron mumbled, “not many, at least.”
Mr. Bennet was still watching Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was still watching Hawksworth.
She recognized most of the moves—the Bounding This and the Leaping That and the Soaring What-Have-You. They were all jumps and twirls and rolls, and they were beautiful, marred only by a rushed, uncontrolled sloppiness whenever Hawksworth had to actually throw a punch to escape a dreadful’s grasp.
He never so much as unsheathed his katana.
“He’s not bad, but he’s not good, either,” Mr. Bennet said. “He moves well, yet he has no fire for a fight. He never has, I’d say. His master obviously sent him to us because all the more, ah, ardent warriors were needed elsewhere. Why do you think he couldn’t admit that to us?”
“Pride,” Elizabeth said.
“Perhaps,” said her father.
The soldiers sent up another cheer even as more unmentionables poured out of the woods and around the sides of the house. A huge black stallion was galloping up the drive, headed for the road. On its back was what looked like a red-clad leprechaun holding on for dear life.
“Ensign Pratt?” Elizabeth asked.
Mr. Bennet nodded. “The lad’s small enough to ride at Ascot. It was thought the younger ones, like him, would have the best chance.”
“Oh, no!” Jane cried.
There were dreadfuls all along the drive, and a big, burly, fresh one had grabbed hold of the horse’s tail. Its grip seemed utterly unbreakable: Though the zombie lost its footing, it didn’t let go, and it was soon being towed toward the road, chewing on the stallion’s tail the whole time.
The horse slowed, then stopped and reared, and Ensign Pratt was thrown from the saddle. He scrambled to his feet just in time to dodge the dreadful that had grabbed his steed. It was after him now, and other unmentionables began closing in from all sides.
But they weren’t alone.
Geoffrey Hawksworth came bouncing out of the soldiers’ square, careening over and around scores of dreadfuls. He was headed for Ensign Pratt.
As Elizabeth watched him, she found her heart pounding, her skin atingle. Hawksworth had been looking to her to teach him courage. Yet he’d had it within himself all along. All he’d needed was the right moment to take action and be redeemed. And that moment had arrived.
Hawksworth was closing the remaining distance at a sprint. Elizabeth kept waiting for him to draw his katana, begin hacking off heads, but instead he just raced up to Ensign Pratt . . . then dashed past him, to his horse.
He threw himself onto the stallion’s back and snatched up the reins. As he galloped off, a dozen unmentionables converged on the Ensign. A moment later, they were going their separate ways again, each with its face buried in a hand or a foot or a gob of oozing innards.
Hawksworth never looked back. When he reached the road, he turned the horse west and dug in his heels.
Elizabeth leaned against the banister again, this time because she needed the support.
So much for redemption . . . .
“Egad,” Mr. Bennet muttered. “Even I thought better of him than that.”
Lord Lumpley leaned against the banister, too. “He can’t send anyone back for us. You realize that, don’t you? Even if he finds Lord Paget, he’ll just tell him we’re all dead.”
Jane gaped at him. “Why would he do that?”
The baron hacked out a bitter laugh. “There’s really not an evil bone in your body, is there?”
“We saw what he did,” Elizabeth explained. “We know his shame.”
She watched Hawksworth and his horse become a black speck on the horizon and then disappear behind distant trees. Far, far too late she’d recognized the fault within the man—perhaps because all that was outward about him was so very pleasing. It was a mistake she would never make again.
She turned back to the battle.
Clouds of thick, white powder smoke were drifting up over the field now, for the soldiers on two sides of the square were firing off volleys regularly, and the corpses—the still ones, that is—were heaped up before them to such a height they formed a makeshift rampart as high as a man’s chest. The troops in the other two lines, however, were fighting off zombies by hand, and more of the undead were pressing in on them all the time. If the odds had been three to one when the battle began, they were easily six to one now.
“It was all for naught,” Elizabeth said. “Why don’t they retreat into the house?”
Her answer came as the scream of a horse off to the left. The rider no doubt screamed as well, but this was drowned out—and it couldn’t have lasted long, anyway. The soldier was quickly pulled from the saddle, and within seconds he was butchered as efficiently (if not as tidily) as in the most modern abattoir. The proceeds were divided among a score of ravenously gorging unmentionables.
No one else made it out of the stables.
The soldiers fought on, buying time for a deliverance that didn’t come. They lasted much longer than Elizabeth would have predicted, but they couldn’t last forever. Eventually, one of the lines buckled completely, and zombies poured into the center of the square. The other three lines dissolved soon after, the red of the soldiers’ uniforms—and spurting blood—mixing with the dirty-shroud brown and decaying green and gray of the dreadfuls.
Elizabeth saw Capt. Cannon’s Limbs ripped away and devoured.
She saw him trying to fight off unmentionables with head butts until his stomach was ripped open and his steaming bowels stuffed into furiously working mouths before he’d even stopped writhing.
And she saw Lt. Tindall facing the house, staring at Jane beside her as he put a flintlock to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. He was keeping his word: They wouldn’t find him pounding on a window the next morning, ravenous for the very thing he’d died to protect.
Jane turned away with a sob.
Elizabeth placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder.
Lord Lumpley bolted from the balcony and out through the bedroom.
“Seal the doors!” he cried as he flew down the hall. “Seal the doors!”
“No!”
Elizabeth started after him.
Her father caught her by the arm.
“He’s right,” he said. “Damn him.”
He let Elizabeth go.
She ran out to the hall, but she wasn’t trying to stop the baron now.
“How many made it back?” she asked when she reached the top of the staircase.
Down in the foyer, men were busy nailing boards across the front doors again. None of them had the heart to answer. Not that they needed to.
There wasn’t a red coat in sight.
CHAPTER 36
THERE WAS NO DIVISION between upstairs and downstairs now. There couldn’t be, with the soldiers gone. Everyone was needed at a window or door with a gun or a sword or a knife or a poker or even just a leg from a broken chair. Tradesman, yeoman, gentleman, seamstress, fishwife, farmwife, lady—they all fought side by side, for surely the dreadfuls would be equally democratic. They would eat anyone and everyone.
For a time, at least, the unmentionables had full stomachs (those that still had them), and the assaults on the house tapered off while they enjoyed their picnic on the lawn. When the attacks began again, they were sporadic and easily beaten back. At first.