Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

CHAPTER 33

OSCAR BENNET’S OLD DREAM, the one about his daughters fighting beside him in the honorable warrior way, was about to come true at last. He knew that when the moment arrived, however, only part of him would be able to appreciate it. The other part—the vast majority of him, in fact—would be too busy trying to keep his entrails inside his own stomach. So he paused to savor the moment now.

They were all lined up with him before the manor house: Mary, Kitty, and Lydia, who’d left Longbourn to track him down as he’d swept through the countryside forging his little diaspora; Jane, there over the objections of Lord Lumpley (who didn’t wish to be parted from his bodyguard) and Lt. Tindall (who insisted that his troops could do what needed to be done without endangering “those whose dainty hands should never have been soiled by instruments of war”); and finally Elizabeth, standing at the end of the line with Geoffrey Hawksworth quite literally looming up behind her, just as he’d loomed a little too large all through her training.

Mr. Bennet had his doubts about them all. Yet when he’d announced that the Bennets would be the last line of defense, guarding the front door while Capt. Cannon’s soldiers nailed wooden slats over the windows, his daughters’ only hesitation before following him outside was to collect their favorite weapons.

Long ago, he’d broken his vow to the Order to raise his children in the warrior way. They seemed poised to redeem his honor now, though. He could die a happy man. And very soon, he might.

It started with the occasional blast and flash of gunfire out by the road, where Lt. Tindall had stretched out his own thin skirmish line. The screaming followed, some human, some not, and not long after came the lieutenant’s far-off cries: “Stand your ground!” and “Hold fast!” and finally “Hold, damn you! Hold!” Then the soldiers started streaming back across the long, moonlit lawn. One by one and two by two they came, all of them sprinting wild-eyed toward the Bennets and the house.

“LieutenantTindall,” Jane said, taking a hesitant step toward the road.

Elizabeth stepped with her. “Perhaps we should—”

“No,” Mr. Bennet said. “The Enemy will come to us in its own good time. There is no reason to rush, and every reason not to.” He looked back over his shoulder at the little figure pacing nervously before a group of frantically hammering soldiers. “How much longer?”

“A few minutes,” Ensign Pratt squeaked. “If only this bloody house didn’t have so many bloody windows!”

“Language,” Mr. Bennet chided.

“Sorry, Sir. My apologies to the ladies.”

Lydia leaned in close to Kitty and whispered something, and they both giggled. Mr. Bennet found it comforting, somehow. The two of them would still be gossiping and laughing as they crossed the River Styx.

The first of the fleeing soldiers rushed past and darted through the front door.

“They have sent boys to do the work of warriors,” Master Hawksworth grumbled.

“Yes. It has been known to happen,” Mr. Bennet said. He pointed at a far corner of the lawn. “Ahhh, the guests of honor arrive at last.”

One of the men running toward them had a peculiar, herky-jerky quality to his stride, and his head was bent so far to the side it appeared to be resting horizontally atop his right shoulder. As he came nearer, it became clear he wasn’t dressed as a soldier. He was chasing one.

Mr. Bennet brought up his crossbow, took a moment to squint down the stock, and squeezed the trigger. The bolt shot across the lawn and buried itself in the dreadful’s forehead with an audible thunk.

“It appears the first kill of the night goes to me,” Mr. Bennet said as the unmentionable tumbled to the ground. “Sorry to be selfish.”

Within moments, there were zombies enough for all. Some ran from the shadows, some staggered, some crawled. Some were men, some women, some children. Some wore ragged shrouds, some bloody clothing, some absolutely nothing. Yet they all had one thing in common: They were headed toward the house.

“Remember your training, and we shall triumph!” Master Hawksworth bellowed, waving his sword above his head. “Battle cries, warriors! Battle cries!”

The girls brought up their katanas and screamed in unison.

“HAA-IEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Bennet said. “Haiee.”

He’d never put much stock in battle cries, actually, but they did seem to help the beginners. And his daughters, inexperienced as they were, showed no sign they might turn and flee inside as the soldiers had. They looked frightened, of course, with pinched, pale faces and wide eyes. Yet their feet were planted firmly in battle-ready stances, and their weapons didn’t waver.

Mr. Bennet nodded his approval, then turned back to the wave of death sweeping toward them. The swiftest dreadfuls were but a dozen strides away now, and he brought one down with another bolt before handing his bow to a soldier as he flew past blubbering hysterically.

“Put this in the house for me, there’s a good lad.”

He drew his sword just in time to slice the head off a zombie wearing the black robe and mortarboard of a university don.

“The Hawk and the Dove, Master?” he heard Elizabeth say, and he spared a glance her way, curious to see how Hawksworth reacted.

The Master was doubled up with his hands wrapped around his right leg.

“Ahhhh! My knee! Again! Blast!”

It had been the same earlier that day, when they’d spotted their first small herd of unmentionables. Hawksworth’s “old sparring injury” had hobbled him, for a time.

“Master!” Mary cried, and she put a bullet through a dreadful’s head and cleaved another’s in two to reach the young man’s side. “Do you need help?”

Hawksworth swiveled, grimacing, and began limping toward the door. “I will be fine. But, alas, I’m useless to you now! Try to carry on without me!”

“Go, all of you!” someone shouted. “For God’s sake, get inside!”

Mr. Bennet turned back toward the lawn. Lt. Tindall was weaving wildly up the gravel drive, all of his attention on Jane even as one unmentionable after another swiped and lunged at him.

Mr. Bennet started toward him, but a brief encounter with another mindless, slobbering don proved to be a distraction. By the time a second mortarboarded head was at his feet, Jane and Elizabeth were already on either side of Lt. Tindall, rushing with him toward the house along a newly made lane of crania, arms, and torsos.

Mr. Bennet’s chest went tight with pride even as he beheaded a groaning old woman with her intestines hanging out through a hole in her nightgown.

“Finished in the back!” he heard Capt. Cannon call out.

“Finished in the front!” Ensign Pratt yelped.

“Capital,” Mr. Bennet said. “Girls, I do believe a retreat is in order.”

Unmentionables kept coming at them as they backed toward the door, with more continuing to step out of the woods. There were too many to count—at least while chopping away at a new neck every few seconds—but Mr. Bennet thought he spotted at least half a dozen clad in red jackets and white cross belts.

The second he and the girls were inside, soldiers slammed the door shut and began nailing up boards to hold it in place.

Lydia and Kitty sheathed their swords and fell into each other’s arms, laughing. It wasn’t their usual giddy, frivolous tittering, though. They were laughs of disbelief and relief to find themselves still alive.

A hand settled lightly on Mr. Bennet’s forearm.

“Papa?” Jane said. “How did we do?”

Mr. Bennet glanced at Master Hawksworth, who was sitting, legs spread out, back propped against a wall. Both Elizabeth and Mary were leaning in over him.

“You were splendid,” Mr. Bennet said to Jane. “But there are tests yet for you to face.”

“What?” Capt. Cannon said. “Limbs! Pace!”

Right Limb and Left Limb began wheeling him around the foyer so he could scowl at panting, shame-faced soldiers.

“I’d say your daughters have already proved themselves more warrior than many another here.”

“If I’d had more men, it would have looked different,” Lt. Tindall protested. “So many were held back in the house.”

“One doesn’t fight dreadfuls in the dark, Lieutenant,” Capt. Cannon snapped. “When we face them again on the battlefield, it will be on our terms. Now, let us see to the—”

“I would have words with you, Cannon,” Mr. Bennet said. “Alone.”

“Limbs. Halt.”

The two men looked into each other’s eyes a moment. Mr. Bennet’s were full of rage; the captain’s, remorse.

“Limbs, to my chambers. Lieutenant, see to it there’s a man—or a lady—at every window and door. It’s going to be a long night.”

The pounding began before he’d even finished. One fist thumped against the door, then another smashed into a window, then another started in, and another and another and another until the whole house rattled and seemed to shudder. Some of the villagers packed into the rooms nearby screamed in terror, and their cries were answered by screeches from just outside.

“We must have calm!” Capt. Cannon roared. “The next person I hear shrieking will be put outside with the other banshees!”

The screaming stopped, for a time. As the captain and Mr. Bennet moved off into the north wing, they approached the room where Dr. Thorne, the company’s gruff old duffer of a surgeon, was seeing to the wounded.

“You’re lucky, boy. That’s not a bad scratch at all,” the doctor was saying as they passed by. “You’ll only lose the arm up to the elbow.”

Mr. Cummings could be heard offering comfort by reading haltingly from his Book of Common Prayer. It seemed to be a selection from the table of contents, however, and it was soon drowned out by the sound of sawing and all the attendant lamentations.

When they reached the bedroom Capt. Cannon had commandeered for his headquarters, the soldiers guarding the windows were dismissed and Left Limb and Right Limb positioned in their place. The captain was left in the middle of the room in his cart. Mr. Bennet, although offered a seat, chose to stand directly before him.

“Are you sure you want your men to hear this?” Mr. Bennet said, nodding at the Limbs.

“By necessity, I have no secrets from them.”

“So they know already that which has been withheld from me?”

Capt. Cannon nodded slowly, head hanging. “They do.”

“Then you have grievously insulted me, Captain. When you first arrived in Hertfordshire, I greeted you as a comrade. Yet you were deceiving me from the very beginning.”

“Yes. And how it has weighed on me!” the captain cried out in anguish. “You are a good man, Bennet, and I have treated you shamefully. I welcome the opportunity to expunge some of my guilt by acknowledging my dishonor now.” He took in a deep, shuddering breath before going on. “Your suspicions are correct. I have been wooing your good lady wife.”

Mr. Bennet nodded impatiently, opened his mouth, and then froze, utterly dumbstruck.

A softly wheezed “What?” was all he could get off his lips.

“Prudence was the one true love of my life,” Capt. Cannon went on. “The one love Fate allowed me before I became as you find me. When I saw her again, it was as if parts of me that were long dead suddenly sprang to life again. I became, in those precious moments I could be with her, some semblance of my younger self . . . my whole self, so long lost to—”

Mr. Bennet held up a hand.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “What?”

The captain blinked at him. “You didn’t suspect?”

“No! I was talking about the dreadful hordes. You’ve known all along that the strange plague has spread far beyond Meryton. As far as I know, we’re the last to see its return, not the first. It’s why the War Office could spare only one company of new recruits commanded by callow youths and an officer who has, to be blunt, seen better days. It’s why some of the unmentionables I saw tonight obviously came from Cambridge and companies of soldiers other than your own. It’s why you already had your men preparing boards for the windows and doors. It’s why the mails and hackney coaches haven’t been . . . my God, really? You’ve been dillydallying with Mrs. Bennet?”

“Yes. Courting her with all my heart.”

“When you knew we were probably all about to die?”

“In which case there would be no opportunity later.”

“But . . . why?”

“As I said. Because I love her. And should you fall in the days ahead and I survive, I fully intend to claim the happiness that chance has denied me the last twenty years.”

“You assume Prudence would marry you?”

“Can you truly say you have been so attentive and loving a husband she would stay in mourning all her remaining days?”

Mr. Bennet gaped at the man a moment, put a hand to the side of his head as if to assure himself it was still there, then waved his confusion away and tried to focus on what he thought mattered most.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the dreadfuls?”

“Orders. The War Office was desperate to avoid a panic in the Home Counties. You remember The Troubles. People try to flee, the roads become clogged, the dreadfuls descend, and before long you’ve got one thousand zombies where before you had one hundred.”

“Yes, yes, I remember. Tell me—”

Mr. Bennet had a dozen more questions he wished to ask, but he realized they all really came down to one thing.

“Is there any hope for us?”

It was a question that could be answered with a yes or a no, of course, and Mr. Bennet found it instructive—if not encouraging—that Capt. Cannon didn’t use either word.

“The North is overrun. If you didn’t have friends in the War Office, even my one company of untrained London urchins would not have been sent to your aid. Lord Paget is moving a battalion over from Suffolk to reinforce the capital—to think anyone was worried about Napoleon at a time like this!—but I can’t say for certain where he is at the moment. Assuming he hasn’t met with disaster already, however, his column might be in or near Hertfordshire, and if we could get word to him somehow he might decide to send reinforcements.”

“‘Might,’ ‘somehow,’ and ‘might’ again,” Mr. Bennet said. “It is little to pin our lives on.”

Capt. Cannon shrugged. “Yet it is something.”

Mr. Bennet nodded, then sucked in a long, deep breath.

“You know that my code of honor demands your death,” he said.

“Of course. And you know that, shamed though I might be to have betrayed the trust of a worthy man, a soldier does not face death without defending himself. My Limbs stand ready to act as my seconds.”

“Of course.”

Something began scratching at the planks over the nearest window.

“And yet,” Mr. Bennet said, “this does not strike me as an opportune time for a duel.”

“Nor I.”

The scratching grew louder and was soon joined by the sound of clumsy pawing from another pair of hands.

“I propose, then, a gentleman’s agreement,” Mr. Bennet said. “For now, we will continue to work together. If we are both alive in two days’ time, however, we may do our utmost to kill each other.”

“Done. Right Limb, shake the man’s hand.”

And so they shook.