by Lia Habel
“It’s Michael!” I cried, watching as he and Issy pushed the door open and stumbled in. The writhing arms of the undead followed them. Michael turned and forced the door back at them, and Vespertine quickly moved to help. Still, they couldn’t close it entirely. The dead were clogging the gap.
“Don’t stop pushing!” Michael grunted. “Shoot them, Miss Roe!”
I only had four arrows left, and shooting them in the arms wasn’t going to do any good. Thinking fast, I ran to one of the suits of armor—one that happened to be holding a smallish double-headed battle-axe. I slid it out of its bearer’s metal fist. “Everyone get out of the way!”
Michael’s eyes widened when he saw what I meant to do. He echoed my cry. “Everyone over here, behind the door! Get your weight on it!” Isambard joined the others in their efforts.
And with that, I ran to the door and started swinging.
The sound the axe made as it bit into the limbs of the zombies was sickening, wet and savage. It wasn’t a neat chopping sound like you might hear at the butcher’s—it was violent and mean. The zombies screamed in rage. I closed my eyes, clamped my mouth shut, didn’t even breathe as I wailed away on them. I didn’t stop until I heard the door shut and felt the axe land on wood.
“Go get that table! Everyone move!” Michael shouted.
I slowly opened my eyes and looked down. My clothes were covered in blackened blood, and there was a pile of slimy severed flesh on the floor in front of me.
Oh, God.
I dropped the axe and rushed over to the fountain, splashing myself, scrubbing at my skin. Everything around me ceased to exist. I heard nothing, I saw nothing. It was like the world was contained within a boiling teakettle—kettles go quiet just before they start to whistle loudest. Wasn’t this how Lord Ayles got sick? When Dearly’s blood got on him? Is that what he said on the screen? I couldn’t remember. Oh, God, what had I done? Why wouldn’t it come off?
I didn’t even notice that I’d ducked my head underwater until Michael pulled it out by my bun. I gasped for breath.
“Miss Roe? Miss Roe?”
“I’m all right,” I coughed out.
Michael’s hands slid over my face. I opened my eyes to look at him. “Are you sure?” he asked. He looked terrified.
I could feel the frigid water dripping down my neck. “I had to get the blood off.”
He nodded, and I could see that he was worrying about the same thing. I reached out to him, my hands going to his chest, his arms. “Are you all right? Were you bitten?”
Michael shook his head and said, “I’m … fine.”
The way he said it, I knew Issy wasn’t.
I turned. Isambard was helping Vespertine to pile things in front of the door. Neither one of them was very strong, and they had to roll and scoot the items along the floor rather than lift them, even as a team.
Isambard’s shirt had a bloom of blood on the left sleeve.
I ran over to him. Vespertine stopped moving, brushing her bangs out of her face.
“Issy!”
He looked at me, his eyes somehow lifeless. “One bit me, Pam.”
I captured him in my arms and he didn’t fight it. He started to cry. I stroked his hair and whispered, “It’s all right.” I knew it wasn’t, but it was all I had to give him. “It’s all right. Nora will come soon … we’ll try to call her, okay? We’ll get up on the roof. We’re not far from the church. Nora will know what to do, she’ll find us.”
“It hurts, it hurts,” he sobbed.
“How do you know she’s coming?” Vespertine asked, dropping her hands. Her voice had taken on a dull tone.
“She told me she would come,” I said, not willing to let go of my little brother. I could hear the zombies—the things that’d tried to eat him—beating on the door.
“But how do you know?” Vespertine prodded. “I mean, it’s not as if Miss Dearly has her own personal air force. Or is she coming by ground? Did she tell you anything? How do you know?”
I almost crushed Issy, my arms contracting as I screamed over his head, “Because she told me she would! Maybe you don’t have anyone you can count on, maybe you don’t have anyone you love, but I do! Nora said she was coming, and she’ll come if she arrives here to die, I know she will!”
“Ladies, calm down!” Michael said. I took a breath and concentrated on comforting my brother. “We can’t stay here. They’re still trying to get in. We need to make our way to the roof. And we can probably arm ourselves while we’re here as well.”
Vespertine gave him her attention. “Would any antique weapons on display still be functional? The guns, I mean?”
Michael shrugged. “It’s worth a look, right?”
Vespertine glanced down the hall. “Right, then. I know they keep maps at the visitors’ desk.” She started in that direction without another word.
Isambard had gotten his tears under control, but I held onto him regardless. I looked up at Michael. “Thank you for going out to get him. Thank you for everything.”
Michael reached into his jacket and pulled out another handkerchief. “This one is for your brother,” he said as he offered it. I took it in understanding.
“Here, Issy, show me your arm. Let me wrap it up.”
“I found it,” Vespertine called out. “ ‘Weaponry Through the Ages,’ third floor.”
I took the battle-axe with me, though not for defense. Rather, I used it to smash open museum cases along the way. In case of emergency, break glass. Each time I did, an alarm would ring for about a minute or so and then stop, possibly switching into silent mode. I wondered if anyone was even monitoring the alarms. I decided not to bet on it.
On the second floor we passed a gallery of costumes, and I broke in to help myself to clean clothes—nothing fancy, simply bits and pieces from the historic military garb on display there. Striped trousers, another man’s shirt, a leather waistcoat. I grabbed another shirt for Issy, too.
I changed in the public restroom and scrubbed myself again, this time with the rose-scented soap from the dispensers. I hadn’t tasted any blood and I hadn’t breathed any in. I checked my skin for cuts but found none. Hopefully I’d be okay. I didn’t feel ill. Isambard looked sick and sweaty, but that was to be expected given what he’d just gone through, so I ignored it.
We eventually made it to the third floor. At the head of the stairs the five-hundred-year-old Corpus Clock, or Chronophage, was mounted. It was one of the few things the people known as the Britons had managed to get off their island before it disappeared forever. The seconds scrolled rapidly past on it, measured in blips of blue light. A giant grasshopper on the top of it opened its jaw widely as each second progressed, and then swallowed it down.
Eating time. Fitting.
“This is what I’m talking about,” Vespertine said as we entered the weaponry hall and started our search. She pointed at a case. In it sat a weapon with a barrel a little wider than that of a large gun, fitted with leather straps to attach to an arm. It was displayed, conveniently enough, next to a wooden box full of gunpowder and the round lead balls it was meant to fire.
“ ‘Personal Arm-Mounted Cannon,’ ” she recited from the card. “ ‘Proto-rift offensive weaponry with a decidedly Punk flair. Good example of the fading influence of Victorian aesthetics on Punk style in the Later Period, as demonstrated by the minimal engraving on the barrel,’ blah blah blah, give me the axe.”
I handed it over, and she hurled it through the glass. Michael borrowed it next, having found some blunderbusses and ammunition in the case next door.
“Pam,” Isambard said. He pointed to another case, this one containing a contraption of tooled brass and gold. It was open-work, pieces of coggy clockwork exposed—Punk, definitely.
“It’s an automatic crossbow,” he said, reading the card. “Fires up to five bolts at once.”
I didn’t need to hear any more. Pulling him back, I picked up the axe from the floor where Michael’d left it. I broke the
glass and helped myself to the crossbow and its quiver full of arrows.
“I’m going to test this,” Michael said, aiming for the staircase. We all got behind him, and I couldn’t help but admire the figure he cut just then—his shirt loosened invitingly at the collar, his jacket casually open, his sandy hair in disarray as he pointed his weapon bravely at an invisible foe.
Unfortunately, the gun didn’t work.
“Blast!” He looked at it, brow furrowed. “Go ahead, Miss Mink. I’m going to try some of the others in the case.”
“Sure,” Vespertine said as he retreated. Isambard helped her strap the cannon on her arm, and she messed with it for a moment, figuring out that she’d have to feed one ball in at a time from behind. She got it all set up—but it didn’t fire, either. She clicked the thumb trigger again and again in irritation.
Michael still wasn’t having any luck. He tossed another useless blunderbuss back into the case. “What, do they make a habit of ruining perfectly good guns before they go on display? Why would they do that?”
“Maybe it’s a safety concern.” I loaded one of my old arrows into the crossbow, after figuring out how to open it. I aimed for the stairwell. It went off without a hitch, the arrow disappearing into the darkness. “This works. Here, Miss Mink. I’ve got my other bow. Take this one.”
As I passed the crossbow over to her, Isambard said, “I hear something.”
I turned to look at him and saw that his attention was fixed on the stairwell. I listened. At first I couldn’t hear or see anything unusual, but then I noticed that the dim light spilling up from the second floor was wavering, as if something was passing through it.
“They got in,” I whispered. Issy made a little sound of fear.
“Quiet,” Michael said, lowering his voice. “We have to go.”
Vespertine glanced at the ceiling. “Take a right. The map downstairs said the building is symmetrical. We can get to the staircase on the other side and head up from there.”
We moved cautiously toward the opposite end of the hall, bunching together.
Of course the sweet strains of the Princess Kitten theme song had to regale us then.
The others cringed; Vespertine aimed her crossbow at me, but thankfully didn’t shoot. I’d tucked my phone into my canvas gauntlet and couldn’t fish it out in time to catch the call. “Come on, come on, come on!” I squealed. The ring tone seemed to go on forever, only to stop as soon as my anxious fingers touched the phone.
Beside me, Isambard gasped. “Pam! They’re coming!”
I looked up. The shadows of our dead stalkers were playing over the wall in front of us.
“Go!” Vespertine yelled.
Once more we ran. The phone kept going off, but I couldn’t get to it. I knew it had to be Nora. Once we got to the other stairwell, I paused for a few moments to dig it out.
“Miss Roe, come on!” Michael said.
“One second!” I opened the phone and looked at the screen. I redialed the origin number, then started clambering up after him.
It picked up on the first ring. “Pam?”
I clung onto the banister. “Nora! We had to leave the church!”
“I can see that! We’re right above it! Where the hell are you?”
I expected to be killed at any moment. The fact that Henry and I made it a few long, groddy days more seemed to me infinitely miraculous.
Then again, it was the season for miracles, was it not?
We were kept in the longhouse. We were given water only on the second day. I managed to administer our injections without attracting any attention—a full syringe for both of us. Merry Christmas, medication for all!
But we had no time to talk, no time to formulate a plan. We had only ceaseless, empty hours, which Averne filled with ranting and violent threats. It grew tedious. It also gave me hope. My guesswork and teasing had obviously filled him with real paranoia. He could be manipulated. This was promising.
I kept a close eye on him. He took his meat cooked, every time, eating with his back to us. He drank from bottles he removed from a nearby crate—alcohol, I could smell it. Without a working circulatory system, unless he had a pump inside his body capable of washing that alcohol up to his brain, he certainly couldn’t enjoy the effects of it. I suppose he could have been using it as a poor man’s preservative.
But I was more willing to bet that he was alive.
It seemed that Averne swung daily between fits of manic activity and periods during which one could be forgiven for thinking he was truly deceased. With his scarf in the way, sitting in the shadows, I couldn’t tell these quiet moments from sleep. That’s probably why he wore it. He probably wanted to throw his undead troops off. It had certainly thrown me off.
We didn’t dare attack him. I might be a zombie, but I was also an old man with one leg. Henry was freshly dead and had already lost an arm. Averne could probably take us, unless we used the explosives—and we both knew where that brilliant idea had gotten us before.
When Averne was not threatening us, he devoted himself to his maps. I could hear him muttering to himself as he pored over them, his fingers pushing out the crumpled edges of the paper. It sounded like he was making grossly overzealous plans, or deciding just how he would place his troops during the mass vaccinations he assumed would come. Occasionally he would work some zombification multiplication on scratch paper in order to figure out how long it would take to convert a village, a town, a city. I wasn’t sure if he was computing this in order to make plans to contain an outbreak or to create one.
The evening of Christmas Eve, he decided to speak to me again.
“Is your daughter infected?” he asked out of the blue. He was lit from behind by oil lamps, his silhouette hidden by the back of his chair.
“Not that I know of,” I said honestly.
He laughed harshly. “All the better.” Averne took a deep glug from his bottle. “Mine was. And my son. And my wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.” He set the bottle down. “You meant for this to happen. But you have to understand, it doesn’t feel like honest warfare—the thing you’ve made feels like a personal curse. When I took my men and left the front lines, and got home, to find that I had to kill my family, it felt as if you had personally reached out and turned my life into a living hell.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. “I don’t think that’s a very rational way of looking at things, Major.”
“I gave up being rational long ago.” He slid his hands within his cloak. “Now my only wish is to get out alive. You’ve seen what’s happened to my men.”
“You did that to your men.”
Averne coughed. “It happened so fast. Yes, in the beginning we acted like foolhardy schoolboys … myself especially. It was a way of confronting the thing, of poking a stick at it like one might some strange ooze in the jungle, of becoming unafraid. But I never meant for all of this to happen. For all of my men to die …” He tugged on his scarf. “Who was it that said, ‘Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth?’ Do you feel you wear a mask now, Doctor? Do you accept your new face? Your death mask?”
I exchanged glances with Henry. “I accept it,” I said. “And I have told you the truth.”
“No, you haven’t.” Averne picked up his bottle again. “But that doesn’t matter. When I have the vaccine, I’ll have the proof I need. Just like Wolfe said. I can return to my people with honor. Perhaps the anti-Victorian spirit will be rekindled.” He shrugged. “At the very least, I get to kill you and your daughter. I think I’ll kill her first. Then you’ll get to watch your child die, just like I did.”
I did my best not to think of my daughter and my friends back at the base. I knew if I let my mind wander too far in that direction, despair would kill any resolve I had remaining.
Averne went on drinking.
* * *
On Christmas morning Henry took a chance.
We were awoken in the wee ho
urs of the morning by a massive crash. I opened my eyes to see that Averne had sent his desk toppling, scattering his maps and blueprints on the salt. I reached out and touched Henry to wake him, sensing that we’d best prepare ourselves for more than the usual madness.
Averne advanced over to his radio equipment. As I realized that he was going to use it, I swear I saw a nimbus of light glowing around him. This was it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Henry curling his legs to the side, preparing to sit up.
Averne reached into his scarf and pulled out a narrow folded piece of paper. He nearly tore it in his urgency to get it open. Once he had it unfolded, he pulled an oil lamp over to read it by, and began adjusting controls on the ancient radio set in front of him.
“Wolfe,” he said sharply as he twirled the dial. He didn’t bother with the headset. “Wolfe, you’d better be there. I need to know what’s going on. Wolfe? Listen, you bag of pus! Listen to me!”
Henry rose to his feet and helped me to mine. Averne didn’t notice. “I’ll take c-care of him.” There was a fire in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. I watched as he flicked my folded coat open with his single hand and carefully drew one of the vials out. He then slowly made his way toward Averne, approaching from the back and side.
“Wolfe!” Averne grabbed the headset and put it on, having finished with the dials. “Wolfe, come in! You’d better be doing your job! I need to know where we are!”
With that, Henry grabbed Averne’s scarf and tore it free.
Behind it was a worm-skinned, sickly looking man with a scraggly beard and mustache. He might’ve been hale at one point, but his flesh was now toneless, his teeth yellow, the skin around his nose inflamed. He opened his mouth to scream and curse at us, and Henry leveled his arm back and let him have it. Averne fell from his chair to the salt and clawed at it, attempting to push himself up.
“Monsters!” he bellowed, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. “Demons from hell!”
Before he could get up, Henry sat on his chest and jammed the test tube halfway into his open mouth. “Break that glass, you’re d-dead.” Henry held onto the other end of the tube, keeping it firmly in place. Averne’s eyes widened and he stayed where he was. It was an unconventional ring through the nose, but it worked.
