A Plague of Zombies

Page 5

There was an infantryman posted at either end of the terrace, as he’d expected; Robert Cherry was nothing if not meticulous. On the other hand, the bloody sentries had plainly not seen Rodrigo entering his room, and he wasn’t at all pleased about that. Recriminations could wait, though; the nearer sentry saw him and challenged him with a sharp ‘Who goes there?’
‘It’s me,’ Grey said briefly, and, without ceremony, dispatched the sentry with orders to alert the other soldiers posted around the house, then send two men into the house, where they should wait in the hall until summoned.
Grey then went back into his room, through the inner door, and down the dark service corridor. He found a dozing black servant behind a door at the end of it, minding the fire under the row of huge coppers that supplied hot water to the household.
The man blinked and stared when shaken awake but eventually nodded in response to Grey’s demand to be taken to the governor’s bedchamber. He led Grey into the main part of the house and up a darkened stair lit only by the moonlight streaming through the tall casements. Everything was quiet on the upper floor save for slow, regular snoring coming from what the slave said was the governor’s room.
The man was swaying with weariness; Grey dismissed him, with orders to let in and send up the soldiers who should now be at the door. The man yawned hugely, and Grey watched him stumble down the stairs into the murk of the hall below, hoping he would not fall and break his neck. The house was very quiet. He was beginning to feel somewhat foolish. And yet …
The house seemed to breathe around him, almost as though it were a sentient thing and aware of him. He found the fancy unsettling.
Ought he to wake Warren? he wondered. Warn him? Question him? No, he decided. There was no point in disturbing the man’s rest. Questions could wait for the morning.
The sound of feet coming up the stair dispelled his sense of uneasiness, and he gave his orders quietly. The sentries were to keep guard on this door until relieved in the morning; at any sound of disturbance within, they were to enter at once. Otherwise …
‘Stay alert. If you see or hear anything, I wish to know about it.’
He paused, but Warren continued to snore, so he shrugged and made his way downstairs, out into the silken night, and back to his own room.
He smelled it first. For an instant he thought he had left the tin of bear-grease ointment uncovered—and then the reek of sweet decay took him by the throat, followed instantly by a pair of hands that came out of the dark and fastened on said throat.
He fought back in blind panic, striking and kicking wildly, but the grip on his windpipe didn’t loosen, and bright lights began to flicker at the corners of what would have been his vision if he’d had any. With a tremendous effort of will, he made himself go limp. The sudden weight surprised his assailant and jerked Grey free of the throttling grasp as he fell. He hit the floor and rolled.
Bloody hell, where was the man? If it was a man. For even as his mind reasserted its claim to reason, his more-visceral faculties were recalling Rodrigo’s parting statement: “Zombie are dead people.” And whatever was here in the dark with him seemed to have been dead for several days, judging from its smell.
He could hear the rustling of something moving quietly towards him. Was it breathing? He couldn’t tell for the rasp of his own breath, harsh in his throat, and the blood-thick hammering of his heart in his ears.
He was lying at the foot of a wall, his legs half under the dressing table’s bench. There was light in the room, now that his eyes were accustomed; the French doors were pale rectangles in the dark, and he could make out the shape of the thing that was hunting him. It was man-shaped but oddly hunched and swung its head and shoulders from side to side, almost as though it meant to smell him out. Which wouldn’t take it more than two more seconds, at most.
He sat up abruptly, seized the small padded bench, and threw it as hard as he could at the thing’s legs. It made a startled oof! noise that was undeniably human, then it staggered, waving its arms for balance. The noise reassured Grey, and he rolled up onto one knee and launched himself at the creature, bellowing incoherent abuse.
He butted it around chest height, felt it fall backwards, then lunged for the pool of shadow where he thought the table was. It was there and, feeling frantically over the surface, he found his dagger, still where he’d left it. He snatched it up and turned just in time to face the thing, which closed on him at once, reeking and making a disagreeable gobbling noise. He slashed at it and felt his knife skitter down the creature’s forearm, bouncing off bone. It screamed, releasing a blast of foul breath directly into his face, then turned and rushed for the French doors, bursting through them in a shower of glass and flying muslin.
Grey charged after it, onto the terrace, shouting for the sentries. But the sentries, as he recalled belatedly, were in the main house, keeping watch over the governor, lest that worthy’s rest be disturbed by … whatever sort of thing this was. Zombie?
Whatever it was, it was gone.
He sat down abruptly on the stones of the terrace, shaking with reaction. No one had come out in response to the noise. Surely no one could have slept through that; perhaps no one else was housed on this side of the mansion.
He felt ill and breathless and rested his head for a moment on his knees, before jerking it up to look round, lest something else be stealing up on him. But the night was still and balmy. The only noise was an agitated rustling of leaves in a nearby tree, which for a shocked second he thought might be the creature, climbing from branch to branch in search of refuge. Then he heard soft chitterings and hissing squeaks. Bats, said the calmly rational part of his mind—what was left of it.
He gulped and breathed, trying to get clean air into his lungs to replace the disgusting stench of the creature. He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d seen the dead on battlefields, and smelled them, too. Had buried fallen comrades in trenches and burned the bodies of his enemies. He knew what graves and rotting flesh smelled like. And the thing that had had its hands round his throat had almost certainly come from a recent grave.
He was shivering violently, despite the warmth of the night. He rubbed a hand over his left arm, which ached from the struggle; he had been badly wounded three years before, at Crefeld, and had nearly lost the arm. It worked but was still a good deal weaker than he’d like. Glancing at it, though, he was startled. Dark smears befouled the pale sleeve of his banyan, and, turning over his right hand, he found it wet and sticky.
‘Jesus,’ he murmured, and brought it gingerly to his nose. No mistaking that smell, even overlaid as it was by grave reek and the incongruous scent of night-blooming jasmine from the vines that grew in tubs by the terrace. Rain was beginning to fall, pungent and sweet—but even that could not obliterate the smell.
Blood. Fresh blood. Not his, either.
He rubbed the rest of the blood from his hand with the hem of his banyan, and the cold horror of the last few minutes faded into a glowing coal of anger, hot in the pit of his stomach.
He’d been a soldier most of his life; he’d killed. He’d seen the dead on battlefields. And one thing he knew for a fact. Dead men don’t bleed.
* * *
Fettes and Cherry had to know, of course. So did Tom, as the wreckage of his room couldn’t be explained as the result of a nightmare. The four of them gathered in Grey’s room, conferring by candlelight as Tom went about tidying the damage, white to the lips.
‘You’ve never heard of zombie—or zombies? I have no idea whether the term is plural or not.’ Heads were shaken all round. A large square bottle of excellent Scotch whisky had survived the rigours of the voyage in the bottom of his trunk, and he poured generous tots of this, including Tom in the distribution.
‘Tom—will you ask among the servants tomorrow? Carefully, of course. Drink that; it will do you good.’
‘Oh, I’ll be careful, me lord,’ Tom assured him fervently. He took an obedient gulp of the whisky before Grey could warn him. His eyes bulged and he made a noise like a bull that has sat on a bumblebee, but managed somehow to swallow the mouthful, after which he stood still, opening and closing his mouth in a stunned sort of way.
Bob Cherry’s mouth twitched, but Fettes maintained his usual stolid imperturbability.
‘Why the attack upon you, sir, do you suppose?’
‘If the servant who warned me about the Obeah man was correct, I can only suppose that it was a consequence of my posting sentries to keep guard upon the governor. But you’re right.’ He nodded at Fettes’s implication. ‘That means that whoever was responsible for this’—he waved a hand to indicate the disorder of his chamber, which still smelled of its recent intruder, despite the rain-scented wind that came through the shattered doors and the burnt-honey smell of the whisky—‘either was watching the house closely, or—’
‘Or lives here,’ Fettes said, and took a meditative sip. ‘Dawes, perhaps?’
Grey’s eyebrows rose. That small, tubby, genial man? And yet he’d known a number of small, wicked men.
‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it was not he who attacked me; I can tell you that much. Whoever it was was taller than I am and of a very lean build—not corpulent at all.’
Tom made a hesitant noise, indicating that he had had a thought, and Grey nodded at him, giving permission to speak.
‘You’re quite sure, me lord, as the man who went for you … er … wasn’t dead? Because by the smell of him, he’s been buried for a week, at least.’
A reflexive shudder went through all of them, but Grey shook his head.
‘I am positive,’ he said, as firmly as he could. ‘It was a live man—though certainly a peculiar one,’ he added, frowning.
‘Ought we to search the house, sir?’ Cherry suggested.
Grey shook his head reluctantly.
‘He—or it—went away into the garden. He left discernible footmarks.’ He did not add that there had been sufficient time for the servants—if they were involved—to hide any traces of the creature by now. If there was involvement, he thought, the servant Rodrigo was his best avenue of inquiry—and it would not serve his purposes to alarm the house and focus attention on the young man ahead of time.
‘Tom,’ he said, turning to his valet. ‘Does Rodrigo appear to be approachable?’
‘Oh, yes, me lord. He was friendly to me over supper,’ Tom assured him, brush in hand. ‘D’ye want me to talk to him?’
‘Yes, if you will. Beyond that …’ He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the sprouting beard-stubble on his jaw. ‘I think we will proceed with the plans for tomorrow. But, Captain Cherry, will you also find time to question Mr Dawes? You may tell him what transpired here tonight; I should find his response to that most interesting.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Cherry finished his whisky, coughed, and sat blinking for a moment, then cleared his throat. ‘The, um, the governor, sir …?’
‘I’ll speak to him myself,’ Grey said. ‘And then I propose to ride up into the hills, to pay a visit to a couple of plantations, with an eye to defensive postings. For we must be seen to be taking prompt and decisive action. If there’s offensive action to be taken against the maroons, it will wait until we see what we’re up against.’ Fettes and Cherry nodded; lifelong soldiers, they had no urgent desire to rush into combat.