Sue’s eyes go wide, and then she nods. “I don’t much like where this is going, but it’s a Jane-quality plan.”
This time, the mention of her name fills me with pride. I cock an eyebrow at her. “Where do you think I got it from?”
The contraption speeding down the road gets nearer, and louder. Soon, we can see that it’s a pony, larger than any I’ve ever seen before, with a shambler catcher on the front and great billows of black smoke filtering out of the chimney as it speeds along the road. It nearly draws even with us before it comes to a halt, the hiss of steam shattering the relative peace of the landscape.
A man leans out of the driver’s compartment, waving happily. His skin is deeply tanned, and I cannot quite tell whether he is a white man or some other pedigree entirely. The cars he hauls behind him are empty, as if he is on his way to make a pickup. But where on earth could he be going?
His smile is genuine as he takes in the motley crew standing on either side of the road. “Hello there, fellow travelers. Might you be able to tell me what territory this is?” His English is slightly accented, but I cannot tell what his original language might be. It sounds as though it could be French, but what could an Acadian be doing this far west?
I give him a polite smile and nod. “This is Kansas, but if you are heading west, I fear you might want to rethink your plans. My household and I have just fled the settlement of Summerland due to it being overrun by an undead horde, and have been imperiled ever since.” The insinuation is clear, and he nods at the group standing around, mouths shut and eyes hooded with distrust. As much as I hate pretending to own other human beings, all of us are smart enough to know that danger comes from many directions, and the dead are but one. Slavers still work these uncivilized lands and sometimes the appearance of a certain kind of order is enough to keep people from resorting to their baser instincts.
“Well, miss, you’re in luck, because I was just on my way to find y’all.”
I pause, and the air grows thick. “I am sorry, sir, but whatever do you mean?”
“I’m from Fort Riley, and a few days ago we received an S-O-S out of Summerland. Would’ve been here faster, but I ran out of fuel. And, well, buffalo chips are hard to come by now that the dead have taken to harrying the herds.”
A sense of relief, strong and profound, washes over me. My legs are nearly weak with it. Finally, for once, something has gone in my favor. “Good sir, I do believe you have saved us.”
The man grins, and his low chuckle is anything but reassuring. “You should wait until you see Fort Riley before you say that. Why don’t you have your people climb aboard while I navigate a path to turn this thing around?”
I nod and turn to Sue. “Please get everyone on the . . . well, I suppose it is a pony.”
She moves off and pretends to start bossing folks around, and the man climbs down from the driver’s car and comes to stand next to me.
“Are all these people yours?” he asks, his tone conversational. But there’s something in his eyes that makes me wary, and I lift my chin, haughty as I answer.
“They are indeed. I had a plantation in the east. Kentucky. Rose Hill Plantation, it was called. Perhaps you have heard of it?”
He shakes his head. “No, I haven’t. What brought you out west?”
“The dead,” I say, sighing. “Always the dead. Why, this frontier is such a mean place that we have been left to travel on foot. And I have not had a new dress in ages.” I say pouring on my accent, sweet as a mint julep. “I had a mind to find a new homestead out here on the plains, but as you can see the pickings are slim.”
The man nods, but it is clear from the shrewd look in his eye he is considering everything I say. “Pardon my forwardness, but I don’t see a ring on your finger.”
“That is because I am a widow,” I say, quickly. “My husband died on the trek west. My girl Sue minds me.”
“If you have an Attendant, why carry swords? Seems to me that a lady such as yourself shouldn’t have such a need for so base an occupation.”
My stomach drops as I realize my mistake, but instead of getting defensive I look down my nose at the man, crossing my arms. “Sir, I beg your pardon for being so forthright, but just how long have you been out here on the frontier?”
The man begins to laugh. “Not long enough, apparently. Only a few weeks. I came north with a group from Nawlins, looking for a new life.”
I purse my lips. “Well, it has evidently been long enough that you have forgotten your manners.”
The man’s face reddens. “Mighty sorry to overstep, miss, the swords just look, um, well used.”
“You, sir, are going to find that even a maiden must protect herself out here. Between the dead and the elements, survival is only of the fittest.”
The man does not say anything, but there is a sly look in his eyes that I do not care for. “Captain Shaw is just going to adore you.”
And with that, I am less certain of our rescue.
A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop;
a black beard will turn white; a curl’d pate will grow bald;
a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow:
but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon;
or, rather, the sun, and not the moon,—for it shines bright,
and never changes, but keeps his course truly.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
—JANE—
Chapter 23
In Which I Am Saved
A headache is the first thing I know. It pounds through my temples, rhythmic and heavy, like a marching band with nothing but a drumline. I breathe through the pain, trying to open my eyes, half of me just wanting to drift back to sleep, forget the whole damn consciousness thing.
It’s the sound of the dead that pulls me from my stupor.
I force my eyes open. Sunshine pours through a nearby open window, bright and harsh. It takes me a moment to realize I’m inside a house, on a settee. It ain’t nowhere I recognize at first, and I sit up in a blind panic, immediately regretting the move. My head swims, and I fall back with a groan. My mouth is hot cottony dryness and everything aches.
“I wouldn’t try moving around too much just yet. You’ve got a fever, and you’re going to need at least a few days to adjust.”
The voice is familiar, but it ain’t until I struggle into a sitting position that I realize who sits in the nearby wing chair. Gideon’s hands are behind his head, and his long legs are crossed at the ankle. His spectacles sit on a nearby end table and I get the impression that he was dozing in the chair, watching over me, waiting for me to wake. The notion makes me more than a little uncomfortable.
“Is this hell?” I ask, my throat scratchy and the words hoarse.
Gideon laughs, the sound bitter. He’s aged since I saw him last. There are dark circles under his eyes, deep lines bracketing his mouth. “No, it’s Nicodemus.”
I look around a bit more slowly, and this time I recognize the furnishings of Gideon’s house, even if my presence in the place doesn’t make a damn lick of sense.
“But . . . I got bit.” My brain is slow, and I’m trying to piece together what happened. I remember collapsing on the floor of the cell in the sheriff’s office, staring up at the ceiling as the bite overtook me. And then I remember—
Nothing.
“I got bit,” I say again, and Gideon smiles, the expression indulgent.
“I know, Jane,” he says. His tone is teasing and warm. “But you survived. Did I not tell you? My vaccine works.”
“Try telling that to the Summerland folks.” I might be half dead, but I ain’t about to pretend that I don’t see Gideon for who he is. And the fact that I’m sitting here with him in a room that is well appointed while the dead meander outside is setting off every alarm bell I have. There is something very wrong with every damned thing about this situation, and I for one ain’t about to pretend otherwise.
The mirth drains away from his face. “That
was a . . . mistake.”
“No, it was a choice, Gideon. You took advantage of their fear, all for your damn experiment—” I start to heave, and Gideon springs up, dropping a bucket down next to me. I retch, a disgusting greenish black concoction that doesn’t look like any vomit I’ve ever seen before. In that moment, I think I’d rather be dead.
Bright side: at least my mouth ain’t dry anymore.
Once I’ve finished, Gideon says, “You’re going to feel terrible for the next few days as the infection works its way through your body.” He carries the bucket into another room and comes back with a cup of water. I have never seen a more delicious offering. I’m Eve and the cup is her cursed apple and I make the mistake of reaching for it with my left hand. Pain explodes up and down the limb, and I discover that the stink of putrefaction ain’t just coming in the window from outside. It’s coming from under the makeshift bandage around my forearm.
I drop my arm, unbalancing myself and nearly falling off the settee. Gideon catches me, gently setting me upright, and tears spring to my eyes, the combination of his attention and the agony of my arm loosening my hold on my emotions.
“Easy, there. Easy. You’re alive, but just barely. You’re going to need to rest and regain your strength. Trust me, it’s going to be a while before you go overthrowing any more frontier regimes.” He says it like all of this is a lark, a poker game and he’s just pulled four aces.
“Why are you in such a good mood?” I grumble, reaching for the water with my right hand, my good hand, and downing it so fast that it nearly comes back up.
He just smiles as he takes the cup and goes back to the kitchen to refill it. I lean against the back of the settee and focus on breathing. Turns out that when you’re mostly dead, doing any sort of living is harder than getting a shambler to waltz.
I turn my head to the side and look out the windows. The dead meander through the streets, walking in slow patterns that mean nothing to me. But what is of notice is that not a single one seems inclined to come through the window and try to take a nibble out of us.
Gideon returns and hands me the cup of water. I sip it this time and tilt my head toward the window, where dead seem completely unconcerned with us. “What’s that about?”
He takes his seat once more and puts his spectacles on. It’s like those glasses change him somehow. The mirth drains away and he sits a bit straighter, his brows knitting together as he speaks. “The antibodies the vaccine has helped to create in your blood are now fighting off the infection, and one of the side effects of that process, I’ve discovered, is that the dead are no longer a threat. Something about it suppresses the feeding instinct. I haven’t had the time or opportunity to parse out why yet. Basically, they see you as one of them. Well, us. They see us as one of them. Or, two of them?”
I remember his limp, the brace he sometimes wears. “You got bit.”
He nods. “A year ago, back in Baltimore. I was assisting Professor Ghering in the lab—I had been experimenting with my own variations on his serum, and I made a fatal error. I was bitten . . . but instead of dying, I survived. I went through much of the same suffering you went through, and when it was over, I had a terrible scar—and an immunity to the dead.”
I laugh low, the sound bitter. “All this time they’ve been saying that Negroes are immune to the bite of the shambler, and here it was that white folks held the key to surviving the bite.” A thought passes through my mind and I look up. “Unless you’re really a Negro?”
The question causes Gideon to stiffen. He adjusts his glasses, taking them off again and cleaning them before resettling them on his face. His hair is long enough now that his curls fall into his eyes, and he pushes them back impatiently. “I am not. But it wouldn’t matter. Human anatomy is identical across color lines.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m still thinking about all the colored folks who have had their lives stripped away from them for a lie told to keep certain folks safe. Meanwhile, Gideon and his like are traipsing around the country without a care in the world, turning people left and right in pursuit of science. “Is this why you bolted in Summerland? And why you kept to the back of the fight when we had to take on the dead?”
Gideon nods. “I think it might also be why the dead’s behavior changed that night of the skirmish. Something about my presence maybe muted the feeding response. I haven’t quite puzzled out the limits of this, yet.”
I finish my water, and gesture toward the window with my empty glass. “I don’t suppose any of your other test subjects survived?”
He face goes blank, his expression flat. “You were the only person I found that wasn’t dead or turned.”
I laugh, the sound harsh and bitter. “So you murdered an entire town as an experiment.”
His expression is stricken. “My vaccine works, though.”
“On me!” I yell, leaning forward and nearly falling off the settee again. “Who else, Gideon? Who else?”
He bites his lip and shakes his head. “I had tried to tweak the formula to potentially lessen the aftereffects of a bite. The ones you’re experiencing now. But the process is delicate, and when I had to make a new batch in haste . . . Something must have gone wrong. As I said, it was a mistake.”
“You turned the folks from Summerland! The Duchess! And poor, poor Thomas!” My voice cracks as I remember his small frame, shuffling down the street, growling like an animal. “How is any of this worth whatever it is you’re after?”
“It will be,” he says, eyes wide. “Trust me on this. It will.”
I want to believe him, to fall into whatever madness sweeps him along, but I can’t. I’m tired of watching folks die.
“Maybe the damn thing just doesn’t work, have you considered that? Perhaps you and me are a goddamn fluke, immune on our own, and it has nothing to do with your serum.” Yelling feels good despite my pounding head and all over malaise, so I keep at it. “You didn’t listen to me or anyone else, you risked the lives of every person in this town and everyone who managed to survive Summerland on a hunch! Because you were so certain that you were right even though you didn’t have a lick of solid evidence to prove your point. I ain’t a scientist, but even I know that one success does not prove a hypothesis true!”
My outburst leaves me retching once again, and Gideon gets the bucket, just fast enough at sliding it under me that I don’t vomit all over my boots. He steadies me while I empty my stomach, holding my braids back out of the way until I’m finished. It might be a tender moment if I weren’t so furious.
I fall backward, and tears leak out of my eyes. Gideon puts the bucket away and brings me another cup of water, one which I nurse while he begins to pace, his long legs taking him back and forth across the small room. Three steps left, and then back, and then left again. Watching him gives me something to focus on besides my roiling emotions and traitorous flesh. I’m so mad, so broken inside that I can’t even speak anymore. It’s like someone took out all the things that made me Jane—all the good parts, and the bad—leaving nothing but rusty razor blades in their place. And everyone I’ve ever cared about is either dead or in the wind. If they even made it out of Nicodemus alive. And if they did, what then? I remember how that horde harried us all the way from Summerland, and we’d had a wagon to make the going faster. There’s little chance that they could outrun that horde on the open plain, and that thought makes me wish I had truly died. Maybe this is what despair feels like, a slow descent into an infinite abyss.
I’ve failed everyone.
“You’re right,” Gideon says, and my head snaps up, terrified that he can now add mind reading to his list of talents. But he wasn’t responding to my dark thoughts. He hasn’t stopped pacing, and his hands gesture wildly as he speaks. “I did jeopardize this town based on faulty science. I should’ve been more precise. I have to control for strength, maybe elapsed exposure time.”
“Good on you,” I say, voice clogged with tears. “You learned a damned lesson. I’m sure the fine, de
ad folks of Nicodemus would be thrilled to know that their town was not destroyed for nothing. Maybe we can have a party, invite the dead folks from Summerland as well. It’ll be a potluck. Come one, come all, to the first annual celebration in honor of Gideon Carr’s experiment yielding a useful result! It’ll be marvelous.”
The more I talk the angrier I get, and my hands itch for a revolver, or even a sharp rock to bash his head in. I grip the cup in my hand. It’s tin and will no doubt crumple on such a hard head, but I’m willing to give it a try.
Gideon spins on his heel and comes toward me in a single explosive movement and I draw back, an instinct that brings back memories of my violent father, Major McKeene. For a second, I’m afraid I’ve pushed Gideon too far, and he’s going to take his feelings out on me with his fists.
But then he falls to his knees in front of me. “You’re right. I have done the unforgivable. I have to find a way to right this, to atone, to ensure the sacrifices of the people of Summerland and Nicodemus were not made in vain.”
“There’s only one sort of justice for what you’ve done here. And as soon as I can hold a blade again, I’m going to give it to you. I swear to everything holy, I will.”
His eyes swim with tears, and he reaches for my good hand, clasping his fingers around both it and the cup of water. It’s too familiar for the time we’ve known each other, but I don’t pull away. I’m so empty inside, all hollowed out rage and despair, that this single bit of human contact feels like a balm to my soul.
I hate him, but I also don’t want to be alone.
“I’m sorry, Jane. I’m sorry I put you through this. I’m going to be a friend to you, I promise. Please say you forgive me?”
I don’t get to answer him, because a single shot rings out, shattering the window glass and kicking up feathers as it rips through the chair Gideon just vacated.
Deathless Divide Page 19