“Jane.” I startle at the light touch on my shoulder, spinning around. Bloodlust still sings in my veins, and it’s no easy thing to shut it off so quickly. Mr. Gideon jumps back, hands up in surrender. “You did it. They’re all dead. Again.”
I wipe the back of my sleeve across my forehead, smearing viscera across my face. A quick glance down reveals that my sickles are covered in shambler’s blood, and I give them a quick spin to clear some of it off before scrubbing my face clean with my sleeve. “We got a casualty count?”
“Not yet. A colored boy and a drover are walking the line and counting how many of those bodies used to be folks we know. Are you okay?”
I grimace, even though he can’t see it in the low light. “Mostly. This could’ve gone better. I saw at least four people go down myself.”
“It also could’ve gone a lot worse.”
“Tell that to those who died.”
A growl comes from over my shoulder. I spin around to remove the shambler’s head but its skull explodes, the monster falling back to the ground. I turn back to the tinkerer, who is very calmly reholstering his pistol.
“So, you can use that thing after all.” My ears ring from the gunshot, but it’s preferable to being dead.
Mr. Gideon’s lips twist into a hint of a smile, the low light casting interesting shadows across his pale face. “So it seems.”
“You know your serum don’t work, right? Just in case you were still wondering.” I gesture toward the shambler with a fresh hole in its head, thanks to Mr. Gideon. It’s poor Cary, the Georgian. “That’s one of our boys. He started the battle human.”
Mr. Gideon says nothing for a long moment, his lips pressing together in a thin line. After a long moment he finally speaks. “The sheriff isn’t going to let you forget that you took over his little battle.”
I shrug, taking the change of subject in stride. “No, he ain’t. But I’ll worry about that after I’ve cleaned up and had a good night’s rest. Right now I’m more concerned with making sure no one turns.”
“And if they do?”
“What do you think?’
“My vaccine works,” he says, taking off his spectacles and wiping them with a handkerchief.
I laugh. The man is more stubborn than a shambler. “Then consider me insurance.”
He nods. “I do not envy you, Miss McKeene.”
“Not many people do, Mr. Gideon. Not many do.”
I hope you will understand my giving my heart to another. Someday, if not today, you will see that this life is nothing without people to love.
Chapter 34In Which I Am Overcome by Dread
When I was five, my momma tried to drown me.
She thinks I don’t remember, that I was too young to recall the way she told the girls to draw her a bath, and how she put me in my best dress, the white one she’d used for my christening. By that point in my life it was too short to be decent, hitting me somewhere around my knees. But those were in the early days of the undead plague, when a trip into town could mean death by shambler, and we had to make do with what was at hand. That christening gown was the finest clothing I had.
After the big, deep, claw-foot tub was filled—too full for a little girl, almost too full for a grown woman—Momma sent the girls away. Then she called me over.
“Janey, sweetness, can you get in the tub, please?” I’d wondered why her voice sounded so strange, hoarse and broken, more like a bullfrog than my sainted Momma. I’d climbed into the tub without hesitation, standing in the water uncertainly. The christening gown rose up and swirled around my hips, the warm water hitting me at my belly button.
“Janey, I need you to sit down.” Momma’s voice was stern, but still there was a quaver of uncertainty there.
“But Momma, it’s too deep.”
“Nonsense. It’s just the right amount of water. Go ahead and sit down, sweetling.”
I hesitated, sinking down into a crouch. Momma had done the rest, lunging toward me and pushing me down, water sloshing all over the fine floor as I went under.
This is where my memory gets hazy. I remember holding my breath, my lungs screaming for air, Momma’s hands on my chest. But more than anything I remember the feeling that I had done something wrong, that this was my fault.
It was my fault that I’d barged in on Momma and her fine lady friends who were visiting from Frankfort, even though I’d been told to stay out of the sitting room.
It was my fault that I’d beamed when Miss Davenport, Momma’s loathsome cousin by marriage, had mentioned what a precocious child I was and how familiar my features seemed.
Most important, it was my fault that my skin was brown and Momma’s wasn’t and that she had the terrible misfortune to love me anyway.
I don’t remember much after that. Auntie Aggie came in and pushed Momma to the side, lifting me up and thumping me on the back as I coughed up the water I’d swallowed. Momma had sobbed and Auntie Aggie had scolded her, wrapping me in a blanket and taking me down to the kitchens where she made me a cup of warm milk sweetened with honey. But it didn’t matter.
For the next few months I lived in fear of my momma, and I never let her give me another bath. I loved her, even after that, but I knew better than to trust her the way I had before. She was like a dog that had bitten me, and you only need to be bitten once.
I get the same uneasy feeling when I see Sheriff Snyder the next morning, after telling him
