Deathless Divide

by Justina Ireland

  While the others begin to talk amongst themselves, I motion to Katherine and Sue, and point to the prints. They both share a look, something I’m not privy to passing between them.

  “Do you think—” Katherine begins.

  “That it was Sheriff Redfern or Miss Duncan?” Sue says. Her expression is hard. “I don’t know.”

  “What are you two about?” I ask.

  “I am going to find Miss Duncan,” Katherine says, ignoring me. “If it was not her, she can help us talk to the council. And if it was . . .” She trails off with a sharp shake of her head and dashes off.

  “Just what is going on?” I demand.

  Sue waves me off. “Later, right now we need an exit plan.”

  I huff but say nothing, because she’s right.

  Sue walks over to Ida, drawing her attention away from her conversation with Lucas and another girl I don’t know. Sue gestures at the gaping hole in the perimeter fence. “Do you think you and the rest of the patrols can guard the breach while we send up the alarm to folks?”

  Ida nods. “We still got folks back on the other side of town as well. If a few folks will stand guard Lucas and I will go round the rest of the patrols up.”

  It’s about as good a plan as any. “Grab whatever supplies you can find as well,” I say as they run off.

  Sue nods her agreement. “The quicker we quit this town, the better.”

  Sue and I wave to the girls guarding the breach and begin jogging toward town. I give Sue a little extra elbow room as she runs with her scythe. Her dark face is pensive. “This place has more plots than a graveyard.”

  I snort. “I never took you for the conspiracy type, Sue.”

  She shrugs. “You ain’t the only one who’s been through a trial these past few months.”

  I sigh. “True enough. Come on, let’s try to save a damn town. Again.”

  The crown of the wise is their riches: but the foolishness of fools is folly.

  —Proverbs 14:24

  —KATHERINE—

  Chapter 20

  Notes on Foolhardy Endeavors

  I hurry toward Gideon’s house, mindful of both the smell and sound of the dead. Perhaps it is just my imaginings, but the horde sounds closer now that I know the rear of the settlement is vulnerable. The mystery of the destroyed gate picks at me, but not nearly as much as the rising panic over our newly discovered vulnerability. It steals my breath and sends my mind hurtling down path after path of imagined disaster. It is the worst sort of time to fall into one of my worrying fits, but the more I try to push away my questions and fears the greater they grow.

  Could it really have been Miss Duncan behind the breach in the wall? What kind of person would so wantonly destroy that gate? And if it was her, what was her goal? At some point the horde will find their way to the opening. Is it possible that we are playing into the hands of some larger plot? I have a plethora of questions and not a single answer, and so I hurry until my breath comes in gasps.

  Truthfully, I cannot imagine Miss Duncan destroying the gate, no matter what Sue says about our instructor’s strange behavior. But I want more than just the Mollies strapped to my back when I confront her, just in case.

  By the time I thunder up the steps to Gideon’s house, the whalebone and cotton of my corset is not enough to tamp down the fear blooming in my chest. I enter the house without knocking and find Gideon in the sitting room, his head in his hands.

  “Gideon. Is something amiss?” I ask.

  He looks up at me with a stricken expression. “I’ve made a mistake. A grave one. And now, all of you are at risk.”

  I want to take the time to draw the story out of him, but there isn’t time. “Do you know the rear gate is down?”

  He nods. “Yes.” His answer is short, and the tension that rides his frame leads me to believe that there is much he is not saying.

  “Have you notified the council? What is being done about it?”

  “As far as I know, nothing. The rest of the council doesn’t know about it yet.”

  I blink, and my chest tightens with panic. “What? Why not?”

  Gideon’s gaze slides away from me, but the guilt is writ large in his expression. “I destroyed the rear gate, with some help. I . . . I was hoping that my mistake would take care of itself if provided with the proper opportunity.”

  I collapse into a nearby wing chair, my worry too heavy to keep me upright. “Gideon. I need you to explain to me what is happening. Slowly.”

  He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “The people from Summerland were willing to be vaccinated, but I was running low on my stores of the vaccine, so I decided to try a faster method of distilling the serum. And I made a miscalculation somehow . . .” He pauses, but it’s not a sentence that needs finishing. After a moment, he continues. “It was one, then another, then . . . It was a bloodbath. I managed to escape, to bolt them into my lab. But there was no way those flimsy walls would hold them for long.”

  Gideon scrubs his hand across his face and I am rooted to my seat by my horror. He either does not notice or does not care, he is so fixated on the telling of his tale.

  “What about the patrols from Summerland? And the girls from Baltimore? Why did you not ask them to help you put the dead down?”

  He shakes his head. “I asked Callie to help me, but we panicked . . . I . . . we panicked. The dead instinctually gather, and the rear gate is not all that far from my laboratory. I was hopeful that, given a path to the rest of the horde, they would head in that direction.”

  I struggle for breath and jump to my feet. “You’ve killed us,” I say, everything slowing to the rhythmic beat of my heart. The panic has honed my rage, and I want to throttle Gideon. “You have killed us all.”

  He says nothing, and I take that to mean that our conversation is at an end. Any minute the dead will come a-knocking, whether it is the horde outside or the results of Gideon’s failed experiment, set loose upon the town, and I have faith in neither man nor science to save what is left of us.

  “Lily!” I shout, all manners forgotten, and she comes thundering down the stairs, fully dressed, a rifle clutched in her hand and her brother’s knife strapped to her waist.

  “Is it the dead?” she asks.

  “Ain’t it always?” I say, as Jane might. And with that, a new thought springs forth, stealing my breath anew: Jane and Sue have no idea what they are about to run up against. I swallow hard and wave Lily toward me. One thing at a time. “Come on, we have to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gideon says. Anguish coarsens his voice, but all I can think about is the danger he has put us in. The world is terrible enough without the addition of men like Gideon Carr.

  I cannot bear to listen to him one more moment. “Is that what matters now? Your absolution?” He does not answer, so I yank a saddlebag off its hook next to the front door and run into the kitchen. I fill the bag with day-old biscuits and whatever other food I can grab. “Somehow, Mr. Carr, I do not think you being sorry negates the very real danger you have put us in.”

  I cannot even consider the lives he took at this moment. Those angry people, desperate to get their share of the vaccine. I had no love for the Summerland folks, the drovers and well-to-do white folks who let Jane and Ida and the rest of the patrols keep them safe for months, but they did not deserve to die. If I let myself envision their last moments, I will be swept away in a wave of despair and I do not have time for that right now. I can only focus on the one thing: getting provisions and getting the hell out of Nicodemus.

  There is a canteen on the counter and I fill it quickly at the kitchen sink, pumping hard and fast. My anxiousness is a familiar friend, and this time it is most definitely warranted. The dead are going to quickly overwhelm the town, especially if they are already inside. Considering their numbers, fighting them would be like trying to dam up a waterfall with matchsticks.

  And I, for one, am not fond of foolhardy endeavors.

  Once I have grabbed what provi
sions I can along with the rifle sitting near the kitchen door, I throw the bags over my shoulder and turn to where Gideon still stands in the living room, hands fisted. His head is down, and my fear and anger are so great that I cannot help but volley one last parting shot.

  “Mr. Carr, you may be a genius, but you have very little common sense. I hope you live long enough to regret this.”

  And then I grab Lily’s hand and run out the door.

  Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,

  Passing through nature to eternity.

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  —JANE—

  Chapter 21

  In Which I Err

  No one in Nicodemus seems much inclined to save their own fool necks.

  Sue and I are running from home to home, shouting about the coming horde, but no one answers or even peeks through the curtains to see what the fuss is about. We pause long enough to put our ear to a couple of doors, and it’s clear that there are folks there. Just no one that wants to come out.

  “Come on, enough of this,” Sue says. “We can’t save those who ain’t interested.”

  It pains me to leave anyone behind, but Sue is right.

  “Well, then I suppose there’s nothing for it but to find the rest of our folks and get out of town.” For a moment I wonder where the Duchess and her girls are. And little Thomas. Were they at Gideon’s house? I hate leaving them behind, but it’s only a matter of time before the streets are thick with the dead, and I have no intention of being in Nicodemus when that happens.

  I follow Sue down the streets, each one dust and clapboard, and as we round a corner we’re met by a horde of undead. They’re only a few feet away, but they haven’t noticed us quite yet, and we freeze.

  “How did the dead get into town already?” I whisper.

  “That is a mighty fine question,” Sue says, readying her scythe. “It couldn’t have been that breach in the wall. But more important, where do they think they’re going?”

  I slowly draw my sickles, but even the small motion is enough to attract the attention of one of the shamblers. She lumbers toward us at a run, more following, and I pause as I recognize a few of the faces. My heart thunders in my ears, and a keening that ain’t the moans of the dead starts up in my brain, like the sound a wounded animal makes when it’s just asking you to finish the job and put it out of its misery. It’s a grief wail, and it takes me a long moment to realize the sound is actually coming from me.

  Because running toward me, hair loose and drool streaming from her mouth, is the Duchess, with Sallie and Nessie not far behind.

  Seeing them puts lead in my feet and drains the fight from my body. My hands fall to my side, and I take half a step back, not because I’m scared but because I am already too close to breaking to handle this. What is the point of fighting if everything you care about ends up devoured? For the first time, I can’t see a way forward, and so I freeze.

  It’s a hesitation we can’t afford.

  “Jane!” Sue yells, bringing her scythe up and across.

  There are too many for her, and I am half a step behind, moaning like a broken thing.

  “What’s the matter? What are you doing?” She falls back enough to give herself some more space to work with and grabs me by the front of my dress, shaking me. “You have to fight!”

  The jostling is enough to break through a small bit of my pain. I blink away my tears and spring into action, but it’s like I am a being wholly separate from my body. Part of my brain is trying to understand just how the soiled doves could have ended up turned, and part of me is raging against everything, all of it. What kind of miserable world is this when everyone you give a fig about can end up a monster?

  I begin to move through the dead, ending their misery even if I know there will be no end to my own.

  I tell myself I am doing the Duchess a favor as I separate her head from her body, her fiery hair catching the sunlight as her head rolls off toward the boardwalk. I tell myself the same again as I put down Sallie, pretend I am sending her off to her eternal reward.

  But when I get to Nessie, and as I part her head from her body, I don’t see her. Instead, I see Jackson in those final few moments, the new day’s sun catching his yellowed eyes, the boy I loved wrought into a monster right before me.

  I hate this miserable world, every last thing about it, and I take that grief and pain and rage and direct it where it needs to go. I slash and tear and scream.

  But if I am all frantic bladework, Sue is constant and rhythmic, and she begins to sing “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” as she works:

  My faith looks up to Thee,

  Thou Lamb of Calvary,

  Savior Divine;

  Now hear me while I pray;

  Take all my guilt away;

  Oh, let me from this day

  Be wholly Thine.

  Sue’s voice is deep and even, and even though I don’t much believe in salvation I find comfort in her singing.

  My swings slow, become more deliberate. But as I kill the rest of the turned people of Summerland, working with Sue to put them down, all I see is Jackson, my guilt and regret a tangible thing, so that by the time we’ve finished I’m covered in shambler blood and tears.

  As soon as the last body falls Sue rounds on me. “Jane, what is going on? You nearly left me out to get swarmed! You off your oats since coming west?”

  I shake my head. “Sue . . . I’m tired. I’m tired of all this killing and mourning and hoping for safety that doesn’t exist.”

  Sue raises her eyebrows at me. “Are you having another one of those existential crises you told me about?”

  I laugh and use a cleanish part of my skirt to scrub at my face. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

  Sue rests the hilt of her scythe on the body of a shambler and tilts her head at me. “Aw hell, Jane, I remember most of what you say, even if I know to only believe about half of it. But that doesn’t tell me what’s gotten into you.”

  I gesture weakly at the dead that litter the ground, cluttering up the dirt lane. “Those are my friends, some of them at least. I think that destroyed gate is the least of our worries, now.”

  Sue looks down at the bodies, her deep brown skin going to a shade closer to gray. “Jane, I ain’t smart, but I’ve been here in town for a good while. There ain’t no way a shambler got in here who could have turned this group of people, open gate or none. The rear gate ain’t been down long enough.”

  I shake my head, trying to think of how this could have happened. How could so many people have turned shambler within the city walls? Especially without any kind of undead presence. It ain’t a riddle I have an answer to.

  A thin cry comes toward us, and we look back down the street, past the dead. My penny is an icy weight against my neck, and next to me Sue takes a sharp breath.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she says.

  The thing about the dead is they can move fast when they’re fresh turned, but only as fast as their legs could have carried them in life. And well, little ones don’t move that fast. Especially if they ain’t all that good on their feet.

  Thomas, sweet Thomas, lurches toward us.

  The dead ain’t got any nurturing instincts, and they’d most likely left him behind once they’d scented a meal nearby. Now that the fighting has passed, it’s easy to see the barn door hanging askew a little way down the lane. These dead folks must’ve been locked up in there, and there’s only one way that could have happened.

  Someone must have done the locking. And I don’t need more than two guesses to figure who it could be.

  Sue hasn’t moved, and her scythe ain’t any good at putting down one tiny little boy, anyway. So I walk forward to the thing that was once Thomas, swallow the scream that wants to well up, and end it.

  “Told you this town was no good,” comes a voice. “There’s too much scheming about for a body to live in peace.”

  I whip around at the interruption, but Sue is scow
ling into the distance, puzzling out something on her own and paying me no mind.

  And so I turn my attention back to Jackson.

  He stands a little ways down the lane with his arms crossed, dead scattered at his feet. It has occurred to me that I see him because I’m going mad, because there ain’t no other explanation, but that doesn’t mean he is full of nonsense.

  Besides, I could use a little otherworldly guidance right about now.

  “Those dead will be inside the town proper in about a quarter of an hour,” my personal haint says, digging a cheroot out of a breast pocket and lighting it up. I swear I can almost smell the sweet smoke. “That Gideon fellow might have some interesting tricks for slowing down those dead, but ain’t nothing stopping a horde that size. Nicodemus is finished. Don’t forget you made a promise. Best keep it or I will harry you the rest of your days.”

  I squint as one of his vest buttons glints and blinds me for a moment, and the next I see, Jackson has dissipated into sunshine and dust.

  “Jane! Sue!”

  Katherine and Lily come thundering around the corner running at full tilt. They skid to a halt when they see the carnage around me, and Katherine raises her gloved hand to her mouth in horror. “Oh my God.”

  “God ain’t got nothing to do with this,” I say. “This is all the province of man.”

  “You do not know how right you are,” Katherine says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It was Gideon,” Katherine says, expression somber. “He said there was a miscalculation.”

  “That’s a hell of an error in arithmetic,” Sue says, mumbling a quick prayer to herself.

  “His serum? It turned them shambler?” Lily’s eyes are wide, and a host of emotions flicker across her face before settling on disbelief.

  “I knew it. I just knew it,” I say, voice hard, stamping my foot. “That boy is a damned dangerous fool. And if I get the chance, I swear I’m going to make him pay for what he’s done here.”

  “Later, Jane,” Sue says. “Where’s everyone? Ida? Callie? Lucas? We need to shake a leg, that horde ain’t gonna wait forever.”