“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.
By nightfall, however, the onslaught was once again relentless, and hardly five minutes went by without a board somewhere giving way. It took Elizabeth nearly half an hour just to walk down a hallway with a bust of the Prince Regent—which she intended to drop onto the zombies from a second-story window—for every few steps she had to set down the prince and pull out her sword and add to the collection of freshly severed limbs lined up along the wainscoting. One would-be intruder was particularly persistent, managing to squirm its way inside even after all but its head and chest and left arm had been sliced away. A woman in a tattered yellow ball gown smashed a chamber pot into its face as it slithered after Elizabeth, slowing it for a moment. When it whirled on the lady, hissing, Elizabeth was finally able to slice through the top of its skull, and its brain-filled crown fell forward onto the floor looking like a hairy bowl of porridge.
BY NIGHTFALL, HOWEVER, THE ONSLAUGHT WAS ONCE AGAIN RELENTLESS.
Elizabeth sheathed her katana and looked up at the woman who’d helped her—and was shocked to find that it was Mrs. Goswick.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Goswick shook her head. “No. Thank you, Miss Bennet.”
When Elizabeth finally got the Prince Regent upstairs and out a window, she was only mildly disappointed that it was too dark to see the damage he did down below. It was a cloudy, moonless night, sparing her the sight of the zombie host ringing them in. At last count, it had been nearly a thousand strong.
“Do you think he made it?” Mary asked, stepping up to the window with a large, lumpy satchel. She reached in, pulled out a blue croquet ball, and hurled it down into the darkness. “The Master, I mean?”
Elizabeth helped herself to one of the balls and threw it out the window with all her strength. A second later, there was a sharp clunk followed by the sound of something heavy falling to the ground.
“Does it really matter?” Elizabeth said.
Mary started to toss out a mallet but seemed to change her mind when she found its heft to her liking. She leaned it against the wall, then pulled out a ball and whipped it into the night.
There was another clunk, and a zombie wailed.
“I suppose not,” Mary said.
She and Elizabeth kept throwing croquet balls until they were all gone, at which time Mary announced that she was off to look for loose bricks. She took the mallets with her to hand out downstairs.
Elizabeth lingered a moment at the window, wondering if she might take advantage of a quiet moment to slip up to the attic and, if not apologize to Dr. Keckilpenny, at least assure herself of his well-being. She still felt a fondness for the man, despite the things she’d said the last time she’d seen him, and a part of her longed to put any awkwardness between them to rest.
But then someone screamed “They’re coming through the wall!” and she was running for the stairs with her sword in her hand.
It turned out to be a small hole—little more than a crack in the plaster just big enough for four broken, bloody fingers to wriggle into the drawing room. But it was going to get bigger.
“They’re scratching away the mortar between the building stones,” Mr. Bennet announced. “When they get enough of it out, they’ll be able to pull out the stones themselves.”
“And the walls with them,” Elizabeth said.
Her father nodded, then hacked off the wriggling fingers.
“Lizzy,” he said, “bring Lord Lumpley, Mr. Cummings, and Dr. Thorne to the front hall, if you would. Your sister Jane, as well, if she’s not with His Lordship. There’s a difficult decision before us, I’m afraid, and I’d prefer if it were made in council.”
Minutes later, there they all were, gathered before the main doors even as the dreadfuls outside kept knocking upon it in their clumsy, insistent way.
“Gentlemen,” Mr. Bennet said, “we are running out of time.”
He spoke loudly, obviously not just addressing the baron, the vicar, and the doctor but everyone scattered around the foyer and lining the halls nearby.
“Oh, my goodness! Running out of time, you say?” Lord Lumpley widened his eyes and slapped his hands to his round cheeks. “Whatever could make you jump to such a conclusion?”
“If it’s the food supply you’re thinking of, Mr. Bennet, I’ve an idea about that,” said Dr. Thorne. (It was fitting that he should bring up food, actually, as his blood-smeared surgeon’s apron made him look like a particularly sloppy butcher. Which, in a way, is what he was.) “We’ve actually got all the meat we could possibly need, if we just looked at it as the dreadfuls do. At least a dozen of my patients died of shock after I removed a tainted limb, and of course I immediately took the next step and removed their heads, as well. The plague won’t take hold in them—so why just toss the bodies out a window?”