Dread Nation

by Justina Ireland

  That actually happened to Momma when her husband, Major McKeene, returned from the War between the States, which inevitably turned into a war against the dead. Of course, I ain’t ever planning on getting married, much less to a war hero that got changed to one of those restless dead, but you never really knew what was in store for you. I’m sure nobody ever expected the dead to get up in the middle of a pitched battle and start eating people, which is what they did at the Battle of Little Round Top. And no one expected those dead boys to bite their buddies and turn them as well. But that’s the way life goes most of the time: the thing you least count on comes along and ruins everything else you got planned. I figure it’s much better to just be all-around prepared, since the best defense is a good offense.

  That’s why I’m smuggling my six-shooter under my skirts. We ain’t supposed to carry firearms when traveling into town, but I’m always ready for someone to try and take a bite out of me. Especially at the university. Everyone knows that academics are the most ruthless cutthroats around.

  What I ain’t prepared for is the look that Katherine gives me from the other side of the carriage. My dress ain’t all that nice compared to hers. She is tucked into a pretty blue frock with a big flounce in the back. It’s not a bustle, on account of the fact that Miss Preston finds them hideous and banned them from the school, but the cut of the gown makes it look like she’s wearing one. It’s a lovely dress, especially with the way the corset cinches her waist to nearly nothing.

  I fiddle with the curly mass of my bangs and slouch down, feeling like the plainest girl ever next to the fashion plate that is Katherine Deveraux. If I didn’t hate her before, I am absolutely positive I despise her now.

  “What happened to your hair?” Katherine asks, breaking the not-so-companionable silence. My face heats as she stares at it, her light eyes taking in every flaw and faux pas. I try to sit up a little straighter, but that just causes the bodice of my dress to strain against my rib cage. Katherine’s eyes narrow. “And why aren’t you wearing your modesty corset?”

  I take a deep breath and muster up all my bravado. I am not going to let spoiled Katherine Deveraux get the better of me. “Why, Kate, don’t you know? This is the way the ladies are wearing their hair these days. It’s called the Fritzi Fall. Very popular in New York City, and no one would be caught without a bit of frizz in Paris.”

  Katherine grits her teeth. “Katherine. Not Kate. I’ll thank you to use my given name.”

  I swallow a smile and shift, settling back against the seat. “As for a corset, well, every woman knows that wearing one of those things is pretty much suicide if you want to be able to fight effectively. A punctured lung if a stay goes awry, lost flexibility . . . I mean, how are you going to be able to do a reverse torso kick if you can’t even breathe?”

  That wasn’t so much a lie as a half-truth. I had no idea what most women did outside the confines of Miss Preston’s. We didn’t wear true corsets. Instead, we bound our breasts with a fitted undersmock called a modesty corset. It was supposed to mimic the support of a corset without yielding too much in the way of flexibility. But wearing the thing is blazes hot in the summer, so I spend most days forgetting mine. I can perform our daily drills better without it on, improper or not. It’s not like the Lord saw fit to endow me with huge bosoms like he did Katherine. Plus, I like being able to breathe when I want.

  “Jane McKeene, only you would think that we’d run into any shamblers in the heart of Baltimore—” Katherine stops short and studies me with a narrow-eyed gaze, her eyes settling back on my head. “Is that my bonnet? The one I lost last month?”

  “Kate, the day I go around pinching your scrap bonnets is the day I dance a jig naked in the dining room. No, this ain’t your bonnet.”

  That is a bald-faced lie. It is most definitely her bonnet. I nicked it from her during our school picnic last month out of nothing but pure pettiness. But I ain’t about to give it back to her right now, not with my hair acting the way it is. This bonnet is the only thing keeping me from looking like a startled chicken.

  Katherine purses her lips in a perfect imitation of Miss Anderson’s lemon-eating face, but she doesn’t say anything else, and that’s when Miss Duncan climbs in with a smile. “Well, it looks like we are ready.” She rings the bell in the carriage, and the thing lurches forward like it’s drunk on rotgut. We settle back into our seats and begin the slow trek to the university.

  While Miss Preston’s is housed in an old university, it ain’t the same university as where we’re going. I don’t know how many universities there were before the dead walked, but there must have been a few. The one we’re headed to is the kind where doctors learn to cut people open. I guess back in the day, when the dead first rose up, all of those future surgeons were pretty quick to figure out that cutting off the head of a shambler was the way to keep them from rising yet again. Either way, most of the students in that university survived, while the one where we go to school became a bit of a slaughterhouse. Most of those fancy folks were studying philosophy and such, and from what I can tell they made fine shambler chow.

  That was lucky for us, I guess. Not many girls get to go to school in such a nice building. A lot of the Negro girls’ combat schools are in old plantation houses, while the boys’ combat schools are in abandoned military barracks. I heard that in Indian Territory they tried to send Natives from the Five Civilized Tribes to combat schools, but they quickly figured out what was what and all ran off. The Army was too busy fighting the dead to chase them, so the government gave up and just focused on us Negroes.

  I guess that’s another thing Miss Preston’s has going for it. No one runs off, because we have nowhere to go, and we have very nice accommodations, bloodstains notwithstanding.

  While we travel, Katherine and Miss Duncan chatter on about the professor’s theories on why the dead rise and whatnot. I ignore them and stare out through the bars, watching the forest roll past. The trees have been cut along the road, felled and burned. That’s to give travelers a fighting chance out here on the byways. The dead ain’t like bandits. They ain’t going to come jumping out of the underbrush. Instead, they’ll come lumbering out of the woods like drunken farmhands. That ten or twenty feet of clear-cut land on either side of the road gives travelers enough warning to shake a leg or make a stand. Here in the great state of Maryland that usually means making a stand, since it ain’t no picnic running up and down them hills.

  The rate of survival when a mob of dead set in on a settlement ain’t good, according to the headline I saw in the paper. But Maryland has been declared one of the safest states, on account of our work patrols and the very active militia, with Washington, DC, being nearby. I’ve heard in places like Pennsylvania it’s a lot harder to get around, except for in the winter, when the dead lie down and become dormant. That’s why great former cities in states like Georgia are pretty much ghost towns these days. It’s always shambler season in Dixie. General Sherman’s March to the Sea, where he and his men marched across the South, burning and putting down the dead, wasn’t much more than a temporary setback for the shamblers. The waves of dead are like dandelions. Just when you think you’ve beaten the weed, it pops up somewhere new. The Lost States of the South are called that for a reason.

  We move along the road, the engine chugging and wheezing up the hills, the carriage rocking back and forth. Outside, near the wood line, there’s movement.

  “Shambler,” I say, interrupting Katherine and Miss Duncan’s conversation.

  “Where?” Katherine leans forward to see out the window.

  I point past the bars, to where a little white girl with blond pigtails stands on the side of the road. She wears a flowered dress with a pinafore and her mouth gapes, a toothless black hole. The ponies are too loud for us to hear her raspy moans, but as we pass she jogs after us a bit, her yellow eyes locked on mine.

  We’re quickly past the shambler, and Katherine sits back in her seat. Miss Duncan frowns. “I’ll le
t the patrolmen know when we get into town. Rare to see shamblers this close to the city. I do hope the Edgars made it home safely.”

  “The Edgars?” I ask.

  “The women who observed your training earlier today. Grace and Patience Edgar and their mother, Wilhelmina Edgar. They’re newly arrived from the Charleston Compound and were interested in engaging a couple of Attendants.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Edgar said they’ve seen a few undead around their property of late,” Katherine interjects. “I imagine they’re likely being spooked by a couple of shadows, but if it finds them looking for a few girls from Miss Preston’s, I’m certainly not going to tell them otherwise.”

  I roll my eyes. She’s obviously showing off for Miss Duncan. Of course Little Miss Perfect stayed to talk to the fine ladies. She’s practically the image of the Attendants they’re always advertising in the paper, the Negro girl holding short swords and smiling prettily: LADIES! DON’T GO IT ALONE! KEEP YOUR SELF SAFE WITH A MISS PRESTON’S GIRL!

  “Mrs. Edgar told me the same thing.” Miss Duncan looks back down the road, her lips pursed in thought.

  “But she can’t be right, can she?” Katherine asks. “Mayor Carr has declared Baltimore County safe for months now.”

  I turn my head around. “The Survivalists would have you believe they saved Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston single-handedly if you listen to them long enough. It’s all that ‘America will be safe again’ nonsense—”

  “Please, Jane, how many times must I tell you, there will be no talk of politics,” Miss Duncan admonishes gently. “That is entirely too coarse a subject for young ladies to discuss, even ladies of color.”

  I sit back and cross my arms, biting my tongue on the hundred things I want to say in response. As Miss Duncan and Katherine resume their conversation, I reach into my shirt and touch my penny. It’s a luck charm Auntie Aggie gave to me before I left Rose Hill, and it hangs on a string between my bosoms. It’s warm at the moment, as it usually is; but there’s a small bit of magic in it, and when it goes cold, I know I’m in danger. I flick at the penny and eye the other two women in the carriage before I go back to staring out of the window.

  I know you probably worry about the number of undead out here in the East, but Baltimore County is the safest in all the country. They say so in the newspaper, and you know the paper would never lie.

  Chapter 3

  In Which I Relate My First Encounter with a Shambler

  When I was little, back at Rose Hill, I used to sneak out of the kitchen, away from Auntie Aggie while she and the other aunties worked to feed all of the hungry mouths on the plantation. Once they were distracted I’d tiptoe out past the ovens and slip away to freedom in the fields.

  Rose Hill mostly grew tobacco, which Momma and a couple of the bigger field hands would ride into town to trade for cloth and other essentials. Early on, back before I can remember, Momma had tried growing tomatoes and other vegetables; when it became obvious that her small bundle of tobacco was worth more than all the food combined, she switched. Momma is savvy like that. The dead may have risen and we might have been living in the end times of Revelation, but folks still wanted their tobacco.

  The tobacco plants grew tall, and the leaves were broad and green. In the summer I could duck down and run through the rows undetected, which is what I did on this particular day. My goal was always the same: find the other kids, the ones that got to run the fields because their mommas weren’t ladies who owned the plantation. The kids I liked best would be near the barrier fence at the far side of the tobacco fields, so I made a beeline for that patch of trouble.

  A barrier fence is the line of security between shamblers and the rest of us, and Rose Hill had three such fences: white-painted fence rails that had been our original property line and weren’t more than pretty decoration, a dense forest of wooden poles with sharpened ends implanted in the ground at an angle that worked like stakes to impale any shambler enterprising enough to get to it, and, at the outer edge, a wall of five-strand bobbed wire that was our primary defense against the dead.

  Once or twice a day the stronger men would go out to the bobbed wire and end any shamblers tangled up in it. Momma would have them bring the corpses in and burn them for the compost pile. If there were any valuables on the bodies, Momma and a couple of the men would sell them in town, bringing back something fine. One time there was a shambler that musta been a fine lady, since she was decked out in gold and jewels. Momma used the baubles to buy several hogs, and that was how Rose Hill came to have pork chops every Sunday after the Scripture was read.

  But I didn’t much care for that business. I was more interested in the children who hung out playing games in between the fences. I scrambled over the white split rail fence and carefully picked my way past the sharpened stakes of the interior fence. And there, between the safety of Rose Hill and the danger of the outside world, were the plantation kids.

  Everyone on the plantation but Momma was a Negro, all excepting for Mr. Isaac. There had been other white men, once upon a time, but after the dead rose they’d either ran off or turned shambler. Mr. Isaac was different; he came to Rose Hill after the war. He lived on the plantation because he was married to Auntie Evelyn and relations between Negroes and whites were frowned upon. Momma didn’t much care for, as she called it, “the spiteful leanings of biddies with too much time on their hands,” and welcomed folks into the house staff as long as they didn’t make too much trouble and were happy to work hard. So Mr. Isaac and Auntie Evelyn lived on Rose Hill with a passel of boys, the worst of which were the twins.

  Auntie Aggie said twins were an ill omen, and anyone who knew the Isaac twins would agree. The boys were light-skinned, lighter than me, sandy-hued with unnervingly blue eyes. They always had a scam running, like the time they’d stolen a watermelon from the garden and climbed up a tree to share it, or the time they’d let loose all the dogs as a distraction so they could run off to fish in the creek on the north side of Rose Hill.

  The Isaac twins were always up to no good.

  They were my favorite people in the whole damn world.

  “Hey there, Jane!” called Ezekiel, Zeke for short.

  “Aww, Jane’s here, now we’re gonna get the strap for sure,” said his brother Joseph, who was saltier than Lot’s wife.

  “I snuck off!” I said, as the other kids began to give me dirty looks. “Ain’t no one know I’m gone. What’re you doing?”

  Each of the kids held a stick, the end sharpened, and had the look of someone with a secret.

  “None of your business. Go back to the kitchens,” Joe said, picking up a rock from the dusty ground and throwing it at me.

  The rock missed by a mile, but the one I picked up and flipped back at Joe didn’t. It hit him right in the middle of his forehead, and as he cried out I picked up another rock.

  “Next person throws a rock at me is getting what for right in their eye,” I said, shaking with anger.

  “No one’s going to throw any rocks, Jane. You should come with us. We’re going to kill the dead.” Zeke smiled wide and handed me a sharpened stick. While Joseph was prickly and hostile, Zeke was all smiles and warmth, the kind of person people liked to be around. And he had the best ideas. It was no wonder Joe was so tetchy. Who would want to share such a wonderful brother with everyone?

  I took the stick. “What do you mean, kill the dead?”

  “There’s a shambler stuck in the bobbed wire. We’re going to kill it.”

  “That ain’t a good idea.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew it was the wrong thing to say. But I couldn’t help it. I liked trouble as much as the next kid, but this seemed different. Dangerous.

  “We’re gonna kill it so that we can go on patrols with the rest of the grown-ups,” Zeke said with a grin. “No more chores for us!”

  “You can stay here, Jane. No one wants you tagging along, anyway,” Joe said.

  I set my jaw. Whatever Joe said, I was going to do th
e opposite, just to spite him. “I’m coming. You probably ain’t found a shambler, anyhow.”

  “Oh, it’s a shambler all right,” Zeke said. “You’ll see.”

  We marched in silence, along the line of the fence rails. A few of the kids began to whisper excitedly, but a single glance back from Joe shut them up real quick. My stomach surged and gurgled, roiling with hot dread. I’d heard Momma and the other farm hands talk about how the dead worked, how they came out of the brush, overwhelming the unwary and wary alike. That was what made shamblers so scary: even when they were predictable, they could still surprise you.

  As we rounded the corner a loud moan split the air. There, twisted up in the bobbed wire, was a shambler.

  We stopped, and all the celebration and shouting died down real quick. I’d always imagined the dead as some kind of monster: mouth gaping as they came to eat you. But the shambler caught in the bobbed wire looked almost normal: a white woman with long brown hair pinned up on her head, wearing a day dress of green linen. The skirt was torn, and her petticoats showed through. Her eyes were the yellow of crookneck squash, and the nails of her grasping hands had been broken down, her fingers covered with dirt. Still, I recognized her.

  “That’s Miss Farmer. Her family owns Apple Hill Plantation,” I said. Miss Farmer hadn’t cared for me—she thought Negroes shouldn’t be allowed in the house, since we were dirty—but she loved Momma’s blackberry jam enough that she came to call every so often, when it was safe to travel.

  “She ain’t nobody no more,” Joe said, poking her with a stick.