The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Instead, Dea Boom performed a split-S manoeuvre to disengage. Unable to hear if the firecrackers had gone off or not over the roar of her engine, Mink triggered her smoke cartridge anyway, and performed her aerial version of ‘The Dying Swan’ despite her attacker having passed up the chance to fire. Instead, Dea headed west. Becky paused her narration of the life-and-death struggle in mid-sentence. Dropping the megaphone, she took up the Very pistol at her feet, shoved in a new flare, and fired it into the sky. This one was red, indicating the display had gone awry and all pilots were to scramble for clear air before regrouping. As the other aircraft separated and staged north of the showground, Becky took up the megaphone and said, with not a sign that this was all anything but planned, ‘And there we see Miss Dea Boom in Buzzbomb perform a perfect split-S disengagement, allowing Miss Mink to escape with her dignity intact.’ She added in an electrically boosted sotto voce, ‘Although perhaps not her tail plane.’ She pointed at the smoke trail, and the crowd laughed, even while they tried to figure out the joke.

  In the air, Miss Virginia was furious. The show had gone beautifully so far, and to have one of the real crowd-pleasers fall apart like that was madly frustrating. She did not, however, hold Dea Boom responsible, at least not without proof of wrongdoing. Her first thought was a mechanical failure, and Dea had broken off from the staged combat for safety’s sake. That still didn’t explain what was so fascinating about the western horizon, though. In any case, they couldn’t progress without Buzzbomb rejoining the formation, so Miss Virginia testily signalled to Daisy to form up into a staggered V and to pass the message. It was hardly necessary; they had flown so long together that they could almost foretell one another’s thoughts. As soon as the Queen of the Desert was in position on the Spirit of ’76’s starboard aft quarter, Striking Dragon was taking position in the port aft, still trailing the last of the smoke from its canister.

  Dea Boom was behaving oddly, simply flying back and forth, northeast to southwest and back again as they approached. Perhaps a mile beyond, the landscape grew dark under the shadow of the thunderhead. They had all noticed it in the air, but had all discounted it as being too far to be a problem during the display. It seemed to have come on towards the town with strange rapidity, they now realised.

  Miss Virginia signalled to her wingwomen to fall back as she flew on alone to parallel Dea. At a range of perhaps ten feet between their respective wingtips, a short conversation in mime took place.

  Miss Virginia pulled an exaggeratedly mystified face and mouthed, What?

  Dea pointed down and replied, Look!

  Miss Virginia opened some space, dropped back, and lost a little height before winging over enough to see the ground. All she could see were fields, probably with cabbages in the majority. She’d seen a lot of those over the previous two days. Cabbage fields with scarecrows and nothing else.

  She was just realising that she didn’t remember seeing any scarecrows at all on her crop-spraying jobs—and did they really need this many?—when she saw one stumble on the rough open ground and fall. It got back to its feet slowly, watched her circling entomopter with a slow, almost mechanical turn of the head, then continued walking towards the town, the showground, and the train.

  Zombies. Hundreds of them, arranged in a ragged line a mile wide.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Miss Virginia Montgomery. ‘My dear God.’

  The shadow of the cloud swept across her then, across all the entomopters, but it was less an occlusion of light and more a spreading of dark. Where it fell, the air itself held a tint of a horrible thin shade of violet that has no place in any world upon which one might want to bring up children. It was alien and unwholesome, smelling of dread and tasting of madness. It bloomed across the town, the showground, and the train.

  At 14:35, with the sun up and storming down rays of purifying light that pitter-pattered hopelessly upon the darkness, the vampire Horst Cabal awoke. He awoke in fear and mourning for a death too close, and with tears filling his eyes. He awoke with the name of his brother, Johannes, on his lips.

  Chapter 11

  IN WHICH THE HAMMER FALLS

  It was daytime. It was impossible. Dark, overcast in some way he couldn’t quite understand, but it was daytime. Horst threw open the door and leaned heavily on the jamb as he tried to take in what was happening in the confused world outside.

  The first thing that didn’t happen was that he didn’t burst into flames. Sunlight was falling on him, but its purifying power to remove spiritual aberrations like him from the world in a fount of dust and agony was gone but for a slight, unpleasant prickling. It was as if the sun’s ferocity had been somehow drained away, and this was all it could do to discomfort him, like receiving impolite personal comments in the post from a great white shark. He could almost feel the frustration in it.

  The sun was up, but it looked the wrong colour; not how he remembered it at all. But everything looked wrong. The grass and trees looked diseased, the people at the showground were washing around making a dull roar, the sky seemed strange and alien, dominated by a great cloud that, he noted with the disinterest of the otherwise distressed, was moving against the wind.

  Somebody said ‘Horst?’ and for a moment he thought the voice was in his own head, a filament of the confusion that swirled there, but then he heard it again, and looked up. Alisha was standing directly over him, looking down from the carriage roof, astonishment written in her expression.

  ‘How are you awake?’ she demanded. ‘It’s only mid-afternoon!’

  He tried to speak, but there were too many things going on inside his head, an inability to talk to somebody whose head appeared upside-down from his current position being too much to process in his disrupted intellect at that moment. He jumped down, took a couple of steps, and turned. Yes, that was much better. Now she was the right way up and had a body, standing on the train carriage roof, and so helped him anchor down his sanity a little in the high wind that was blowing through his mind.

  ‘I don’t know. Something’s wrong.’ The prickling of the ineffectual sun made his shoulders twitch at the formication. ‘Everything’s wrong. What’s happening? What’s happening to me? Johannes … he’s going to die.’ He swung drunkenly about to face the showground, thoughts boiling in cascades of irrelevance in his head. He could see one of the entomopters was landing—the Spirit of ’76, he could identify it by its silhouette—while the others milled in a stack. He couldn’t see what was happening through the mass of the crowd for the next few seconds, but his grasp on time was reduced to events rather than progressions, and he knew only that it took as long for the next thing to happen as it took him to crouch on the gravel, close his eyes, and try to squeeze the pandemonium from his thoughts.

  Then he heard Miss Virginia Montgomery’s electrically amplified voice crackle out over the lowing of the crowd, and he raised his head to listen, but kept his eyes shut. This refracted version of reality, he had discovered, was less upsetting when one didn’t have to look at it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ came her voice, distant and echoed, ‘please disperse from this area as quickly as you safely can. Do not go to the west. I’m sorry…’ The crowd were suddenly if understandably restive. ‘I’m sorry, there is no time for explanations, but the town is in danger and must be abandoned immediately.’

  Still nothing happened; the crowd did not disperse, nor panic, nor do anything of import but mutter, and wonder aloud amongst itself whether this was all part of the show. The lack of action was obviously clear to Miss Virginia, too, judging by her uncompromising tone when the megaphone clicked back into life.

  ‘Zombies. Okay? Zombies. There are several hundred zombies closing on the town from the west. You think that cloud overhead is natural? You think a little travelling aeroshow like ours can do a thing like that? Get your asses out of town and just make sure you’re heading east, northeast, or southeast. Just so long as it’s got east in it, you should be okay. They’re not fast, but they’re no
t nice, and they will be here in maybe quarter of an hour. So … move!’

  Becky came running up, heading for the locomotive. When she saw Horst, she stopped and gawped at him. ‘You’re out! In the day … I thought … Somebody said you were…’

  ‘He is,’ Alisha called down to her. ‘We’ve seen something like that cloud before. This one’s fifty times the size, though. Do you need help getting the engine going?’

  ‘The firebox is lit,’ said Becky. ‘We were planning on leaving as soon as the show was over. It’ll take a while to get us moving, though.’

  ‘How long to load up the entomopters?’

  Becky shook her head. ‘They’re flying on. We’ll meet up with them up the line. Yes, I could use your help.’ Without waiting for a reply, she carried on running for the locomotive, Alisha heading there, too, along the carriage tops.

  ‘Mr Cabal,’ said the major as he stepped off the roof access ladder and dropped onto the tracks. ‘We may need to defend the train, both against these creatures when they get here and, before that, from people wishing to leave the town.’

  Horst forced his thoughts into some sort of order and rose painfully to his feet, the weight of the light bearing down upon him. ‘We can take a good few,’ he said, feeling and sounding sick and weary. ‘Room on the freight cars. If we can, we should.’

  The major looked off at the crowd, who finally seemed to have been motivated by the possibility of being chewed upon by the recently dead. Unhappily, Miss Virginia’s motivational technique had also generated a degree of panic. However, her bellowed commands to ‘Walk! Just walk! They’re zombies, for crying out loud! If you start walking now, you’ll outpace them. You do not need to run!’ seemed to take the wind out of any putative hysteria.

  Haskins nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, old chap. We should take everyone we can. The whole point of the Dee Society is to protect the commonplace world against supernatural threats. Just not very used to doing it quite so publicly.’

  He and the professor set off to winnow out those from the crowd, now belatedly heading eastwards in a great confused flock, who could not make good time. There was no panic, just a lot of confused people who were given to understand that going that way was preferable to going the other way. They had heard the words ‘several’, ‘hundred’, and ‘zombies’, all of which were individually comprehensible. Even country folk had heard about zombies. They might call them by other, local names, but when the newspapers spoke of a necromancer being strung up somewhere or another for crimes against humanity, God, and nature, the usual generally acknowledged term for the frightful monstrosities that the criminal had raised from the slumber of cold clay was ‘zombie’. They tended to be individual, however. An undead servitor shuffling around an isolated house, or a mute killer created for the express purpose of revenge, or—in one infamous case—a children’s entertainer. The idea that anyone would have the resources and the will to raise not one or two, or a dozen, or a hundred, but hundreds of zombies was beyond the ken of the common mind. Thus, they were unable to entirely digest the threat at anything beyond a superficial level. The situation was dreamlike, the response faux somnambulistic. As the walking dead shambled in from the west, so the walking living shambled out to the east.

  Horst pushed his way through the crowd to reach the showground as quickly as he dared, the discomfort of the daylight threatening to distract him from the limits of human resilience; it would be far too easy to inadvertently elbow somebody’s sternum through to their spine in a moment of absent-mindedness. By the time he reached the ground’s railing, he was more worried about doing it advertently. They were a flock, he saw now. Stupid sheep on two legs with vacant expressions, stinking of sweat and beer, and the only good thing about them beating in their arteries. Three days he had gone without blood. Three long days, and here he was surrounded by ambulatory bags of the stuff. He clenched his jaws and tried not to listen to the voice that was quietly but insistently pointing out that what with all this chaos and a wave of undead killers closing in, a sheep or two could go missing from this flock and none would put the blame anywhere but with the zombies.

  It was tempting. It was sorely tempting.

  He leapt the rail easily and ran for Miss Virginia. She was just climbing back into the cockpit as he reached her, burning a little more of his strength away to blur through the distance. When he appeared by the entomopter, she started with surprise. ‘Dear God, boy, but you can move,’ she snapped to cover her startlement as much as to air the obvious.

  ‘How far away are they?’

  ‘Less than a mile now.’ She frowned. ‘Ain’t you supposed to burst into flames or something?’

  He looked up at the cloud. ‘I did last time I was caught out in the sun,’ he agreed. ‘That thing, however, is changing the rules.’

  ‘In a good way?’

  ‘I think waking me up is just a side effect. Last time we saw a cloud like that, flying, acid-dripping limb-things came out and tried to kill us.’

  Miss Virginia glanced apprehensively at the cloud; she remembered the encounter with the creatures that attacked the train a few nights previously all too well. The thought of being under a swarm of things that dripped acid was unappealing. ‘I have to get airborne,’ she said abruptly, and finished climbing into the cockpit.

  As she strapped herself in, she said, ‘You’d better get going, too. Once Becky gets a head of steam up, she won’t be hanging around.’

  Horst didn’t answer; he was watching a tatterdemalion of a figure walking across a field not even a quarter of a mile away. The vanguard of the dead was almost upon them. ‘I’m going to try and give her the time she needs,’ he said, and then he was gone.

  As he sped, conserving his strength so that he merely travelled at an impressive sprint rather than an impossible blur, he was already asking himself questions about what was about to happen. Was he right in thinking that zombies would provide less of a challenge than werebadgers and acid-dripping weird things? He certainly hoped so, as there were an awful lot of them coming. Was the cloud there as some sort of enabling mechanism for the approaching horde, or was it going to be spitting out further examples of otherworldly fauna before long? From his perspective, the former was certainly the more preferable, but he didn’t really believe it for a moment. And finally, were the zombies so far gone that he couldn’t drink from them? Whether the answer to that one was yes or no, he couldn’t tell yet, but he was sure that whatever the answer, he wouldn’t like it.

  He leapt at the fence at the end of the showground closest to the town while still some twenty feet distant, landed on the uppermost bar with both feet, and powered himself into a broad jump with enough impetus that the wood was breaking as he left it. He sailed in a graceful arc that ended less gracefully in the lead zombie’s chest. They went down in a shower of fetid viscera that assured Horst that zombies would not make good blood donors, and that he was going to have to find yet another change of clothing shortly.

  He stood for a moment, up to his shins in complaining revenant, and wondered how he should proceed. He could see the untidy picket line of zombies now only a couple of hundred yards away, their wide spacing narrowing as they converged to close on the showground and the town, and confined by the strictures of the terrain. At the moment they were too far apart to offer immediate aid to one another if one were attacked … no, that was saying too much for their motivations. They would not come to one another’s aid, but they would move to attack anybody they saw, and if that somebody happened to be fighting another zombie at the time, the effect would be much the same. While he might be able to take on one, two, or several simultaneously, he didn’t fancy his chances if he ended up layered in them.

  Speed, then, was of the essence, but speed cost him blood, and his reserves were low. He looked at the retreating crowd, now draining down the highways and byways to the east of the town like the dregs of a popular uprising after the militia show up. There were stragglers, he saw. Nobody w
ould notice the loss of one. Then he saw that the stragglers were in fact being shepherded and directed to the Flying Circus’s train, and he felt ashamed. Alisha, Major Haskins, and Professor Stone were helping those who could not escape quickly enough by reason of age or handicap, usually attended by desperate family, while Horst had been wondering who would make a suitable meal. He saw Haskins lift an old woman and run as fast as he could to take her to the relative safety of the train while the zombies grew ever closer. There was steam rising from the locomotive already; Becky had managed to build pressure quickly, and the locomotive probably had enough to get under way. Yet it waited while the Dee Society agents did their work. It was selfless and heroic, and Horst felt more angry with himself than he had ever felt before.

  Out, he said to the wheedling voice within. The voice of predation and depravity whose tone he had at first had trouble telling from his own. Now he could taste the inhumanness of it on his tongue, and it made him want to spit with revulsion. Out. I am done with you. You are what the Ministerium Tenebrae believed me to be. You are what I am not. Out. Be quiet. I am done with you.

  And, as if to underline the intensity of his feelings and the sincerity of his intent, he blurred out of vision, reappeared beside a zombie some hundred yards away, and punched its jaw into the next field. Presently, the rest of the skull followed.

  * * *

  Alisha paused in her efforts to get as many as possible aboard the train. She had feared Becky working alone wouldn’t be able to get the train ready quickly enough, but the crew of one of the other trains in the sidings were helping in return for passage away from the oncoming army. Alisha was just wondering if it was time to break out the heavy guns to deal with the first wave of attack when she saw zombies starting to explode without the aid of explosives. For a moment she thought that the gases of putrefaction were overwhelming them in some sort of chain reaction whose mechanism evaded her yet gave the satisfying sight of zombies blowing apart as if it were an open day in a piñata test facility.