Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1)(10)
“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 the 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.
The shambler growled and reached for him. Joe danced out of the way, much to the delight of everyone.
Even me.
I ain’t sure why we thought poking the shambler with our sharpened sticks was a good idea, but everyone started doing it, creeping in close enough to stab the creature and then dancing out of the way before her hands could reach us. The game might have gone on longer if the dead Miss Farmer hadn’t managed to pull herself free.
Bobbed wire ain’t a long-term fix for a shambler wanting in to the plantation. Since they don’t have any kind of survival instinct it’s no big deal for them to eventually pull themselves free of such an entanglement, ripping off great big swatches of themselves to do so. And this is exactly what the undead Miss Farmer did. One moment she was jammed up in the bobbed wire, the next she was stumbling toward us, half her dress and a good bit of arm skin left behind on the fence, which now listed to one side.
Most of the kids, myself included, screamed and ran. I took off for the field of sharpened sticks, knowing that would slow the undead woman down. But when I looked over my shoulder I realized that not everyone was with us.
Joe was standing right where he’d been, not moving, frozen in the path of the dead woman and her gaping maw. The boy had always been a bully, and the thing about bullies is they never learn how to run like the rest of us do. So Joe stood his ground, sharpened stick at the ready, convinced he was going to kill that shambler.
At some point in the woman’s lunge toward Joe he realized that a stick wasn’t much of a weapon against the dead, but it was too late. Joe was about to be shambler chow.
If it hadn’t been for Zeke.
It was Zeke that slammed into Joe, pushing him out of the way of the woman. It was Zeke the woman bit, sinking her teeth deep into his throat. It was Zeke that cried out like a wounded animal, trying for a few precious moments to push the much heavier woman off him as she tore away a great chunk of flesh. And it was Zeke that let out one soft, anguished cry as his life bled out into the dirt of Rose Hill, the sound almost indistinguishable over the noise of the dead Miss Farmer feeding.
“Joe!” I yelled, and the boy looked at me, expression distant and caught somewhere between grief and horror. I ran back to where he’d landed, pulled him to his feet, and dragged him by the hand through the field of sharpened sticks, to the safety of Rose Hill.
As we ran back we passed the patrol coming to put down the dead. I didn’t stay to watch; I’d seen enough carnage for one day. They say when they got there Miss Farmer had started on Zeke’s face, and that two of the men vomited before they even got to putting her down and driving a nail into Zeke’s head so he wouldn’t come back.
Momma gave Zeke a proper burning, and gave Mr. Isaac and Auntie Evelyn his ashes. Joe ran off a few years later, presumably to one of the combat schools, and so their heartbreak was complete, Auntie Aggie clucking her tongue and saying, “Told you them twins was an ill omen.”
It took me a long time before I left the safety of the main house, and I never ventured to the borders of Rose Hill again, not until I came to Miss Preston’s years later. I learned two valuable lessons that day.
One: the dead will take everything you love. You have to end them before they can end you. That’s exactly what I aim to do.
And two: the person poking the dead ain’t always the one paying for it. In fact, most times, it’s the ones minding their own business who suffer.
That’s a problem I still don’t have an answer for yet.
One of the finest parts of attending Miss Preston’s is all the friends I’ve made. Momma, you would not believe the camaraderie and esprit de corps in these hallowed halls.