I swallow a smile and shift, settling back against the seat. “As for a corset, well, every woman knows that wearing one of those things is pretty much suicide if you want to be able to fight effectively. A punctured lung if a stay goes awry, lost flexibility . . . I mean, how are you going to be able to do a reverse torso kick if you can’t even breathe?”
That wasn’t so much a lie as a half-truth. I had no idea what most women did outside the confines of Miss Preston’s. We didn’t wear true corsets. Instead, we bound our breasts with a fitted undersmock called a modesty corset. It was supposed to mimic the support of a corset without yielding too much in the way of flexibility. But wearing the thing is blazes hot in the summer, so I spend most days forgetting mine. I can perform our daily drills better without it on, improper or not. It’s not like the Lord saw fit to endow me with huge bosoms like he did Katherine. Plus, I like being able to breathe when I want.
“Jane McKeene, only you would think that we’d run into any shamblers in the heart of Baltimore—” Katherine stops short and studies me with a narrow-eyed gaze, her eyes settling back on my head. “Is that my bonnet? The one I lost last month?”
“Kate, the day I go around pinching your scrap bonnets is the day I dance a jig naked in the dining room. No, this ain’t your bonnet.”
That is a bald-faced lie. It is most definitely her bonnet. I nicked it from her during our school picnic last month out of nothing but pure pettiness. But I ain’t about to give it back to her right now, not with my hair acting the way it is. This bonnet is the only thing keeping me from looking like a startled chicken.
Katherine purses her lips in a perfect imitation of Miss Anderson’s lemon-eating face, but she doesn’t say anything else, and that’s when Miss Duncan climbs in with a smile. “Well, it looks like we are ready.” She rings the bell in the carriage, and the thing lurches forward like it’s drunk on rotgut. We settle back into our seats and begin the slow trek to the university.
While Miss Preston’s is housed in an old university, it ain’t the same university as where we’re going. I don’t know how many universities there were before the dead walked, but there must have been a few. The one we’re headed to is the kind where doctors learn to cut people open. I guess back in the day, when the dead first rose up, all of those future surgeons were pretty quick to figure out that cutting off the head of a shambler was the way to keep them from rising yet again. Either way, most of the students in that university survived, while the one where we go to school became a bit of a slaughterhouse. Most of those fancy folks were studying philosophy and such, and from what I can tell they made fine shambler chow.
That was lucky for us, I guess. Not many girls get to go to school in such a nice building. A lot of the Negro girls’ combat schools are in old plantation houses, while the boys’ combat schools are in abandoned military barracks. I heard that in Indian Territory they tried to send Natives from the Five Civilized Tribes to combat schools, but they quickly figured out what was what and all ran off. The Army was too busy fighting the dead to chase them, so the government gave up and just focused on us Negroes.
I guess that’s another thing Miss Preston’s has going for it. No one runs off, because we have nowhere to go, and we have very nice accommodations, bloodstains notwithstanding.
While we travel, Katherine and Miss Duncan chatter on about the professor’s theories on why the dead rise and whatnot. I ignore them and stare out through the bars, watching the forest roll past. The trees have been cut along the road, felled and burned. That’s to give travelers a fighting chance out here on the byways. The dead ain’t like bandits. They ain’t going to come jumping out of the underbrush. Instead, they’ll come lumbering out of the woods like drunken farmhands. That ten or twenty feet of clear-cut land on either side of the road gives travelers enough warning to shake a leg or make a stand. Here in the great state of Maryland that usually means making a stand, since it ain’t no picnic running up and down them hills.
The rate of survival when a mob of dead set in on a settlement ain’t good, according to the headline I saw in the paper. But Maryland has been declared one of the safest states, on account of our work patrols and the very active militia, with Washington, DC, being nearby. I’ve heard in places like Pennsylvania it’s a lot harder to get around, except for in the winter, when the dead lie down and become dormant. That’s why great former cities in states like Georgia are pretty much ghost towns these days. It’s always shambler season in Dixie. General Sherman’s March to the Sea, where he and his men marched across the South, burning and putting down the dead, wasn’t much more than a temporary setback for the shamblers. The waves of dead are like dandelions. Just when you think you’ve beaten the weed, it pops up somewhere new. The Lost States of the South are called that for a reason.
We move along the road, the engine chugging and wheezing up the hills, the carriage rocking back and forth. Outside, near the wood line, there’s movement.
“Shambler,” I say, interrupting Katherine and Miss Duncan’s conversation.
“Where?” Katherine leans forward to see out the window.
I point past the bars, to where a little white girl with blond pigtails stands on the side of the
