Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

CHAPTER 13

THE NEXT MORNING’S training began with the usual laps and dand-baithaks for everyone: for mustering on time instead of showing their devotion by arriving early; for breathing too loudly during morning meditation; for having their sparring gowns laced too tight; for having their sparring gowns laced too loose; for, in short, whatever Master Hawksworth could think up. The flimsiest of all the infractions was assigned to Mr. Bennet, who was sent outside to run a hundred sprints across the grounds—backward—for supposedly blinking too frequently.

“Remember: Even one wink of the eye gives The Enemy time to strike,” the Master said. “Now, go!”

Mr. Bennet had lingered a moment, expressionless, before bowing and heading for the door.

It seemed to Elizabeth that Master Hawksworth relaxed a bit whenever her father wasn’t around. He was less likely to dole out punishments from a corner of the dojo, leaving most of the actual demonstrations to Mr. Bennet, and more likely to take off his coat and vest and move. Sometimes, he merely demonstrated new stances. But other times—the times Elizabeth and her sisters loved most—he flew around the room showing off “ninja fighting styles” with names like the Striking Viper and the Tiger’s Claw.

So it was to be this day.

“The time has come for the Way of the Panther,” the Master said, stripping down to his shirt sleeves. “The panther is powerful, but supple. Quick, but controlled. Fierce, but poised. You, too, must be all these things. Like so.”

He bounced off the walls demonstrating the Panther’s Pounce. He sprang up into the rafters demonstrating the Panther’s Bound. He whirled in blurred circles demonstrating the Panther’s Swipe. And the girls watched in awe. His movements were so graceful, so beautiful, Elizabeth could imagine them more on the stage of a French ballet than in the middle of any battlefield.

And then the Master stopped dead in the middle of the dojo, suddenly still and stiff, not even breathing hard, and announced that it was time for the death move: the Panther’s Kiss.

He looked into each of the girls’ faces, lingering longest on Elizabeth before moving on to Jane.

“You,” he said, and his eyes went sliding back to Elizabeth even before his head turned toward her, as well. It was as if the two parts of him weren’t quite in alignment—clockwork gears no longer in mesh. “Up.”

“Yes, Master.”

Elizabeth stood, stepped forward, and let Hawksworth take her by the arm and spin her around so she was facing her sisters. Then he let go and slipped back behind her.

“The Kiss begins like this,” Elizabeth heard him say. “Notice how I move slowly, smoothly. Not lunging but sliding—gliding in, so as not to startle my prey.”

Something squeezed Elizabeth’s waist, hard, like a corset being over-tightened. By the time she realized it was one of the Master’s muscular arms wrapping around her, pinning her own arms to her sides, she felt his chest—his whole torso—brush up against her back.

“The left arm first, here, to prevent escape,” Master Hawksworth said, pulling Elizabeth tightly against his body.

Elizabeth saw Mary stiffen and lean forward, taking in the demonstration with a peculiar intensity. Lydia and Kitty, meanwhile, were stifling grins, and even sweet Jane had a wicked gleam in her eye. It had been a hard time for them all, with many a tear, and Elizabeth would’ve been glad for the chance to give them some amusement if she hadn’t been so mortified.

“Then the right arm,” Hawksworth said. “Like this.”

He stretched his other arm out straight over Elizabeth’s shoulder, then bent it back, back, back until it was wrapped around her neck. Her whole body was pressing into his now, from her head to her heels. It almost felt as though he were a heavy cloak draped over her, or a bed upon which she was lying.

“Then,” he said, “you squeeze.”

The pressure on Elizabeth’s waist and throat grew, escalating from (she had to admit) pleasant but discomfiting to simply uncomfortable. Instinctively, she tried to squirm, to loosen the grip ever tightening around her, but Master Hawksworth was too strong.

“The quarry cannot move . . . not even to draw air,” Hawksworth said. His head was so close to Elizabeth’s she could feel his breath blow over her ear as he spoke. “You can see why in some traditions this method goes by another name: the Python’s Embrace.”

He went on talking, but Elizabeth could catch only the occasional word—“. . . hold . . . minute . . . black . . .”—over the buzz growing ever louder in her ears and the pounding of her own heart. She could see the expressions on the other girls’ faces begin to change, their lascivious glee dying, eyes growing wide. The whole room began to go gray around the edges, a dark circle on the periphery of her vision tightening until Elizabeth seemed to be looking down a long tunnel with her sisters at the end. And then even they faded away, and all she could see was a distant smear of gauzy light.

“. . . sleep . . .,” she heard Hawksworth say. “. . . death . . .”

The light began to go out.

Elizabeth wouldn’t let it.

She brought her right knee forward, then kicked her foot back and up with all the strength she had left. It was a variation on the Fulcrum of Doom her father had taught her. The Axis of Calamity.

It found its intended target.

“Oooo!” Elizabeth heard Hawksworth say very, very clearly indeed, and the Python or the Panther, whichever, let her go, and she stumbled forward gasping for breath.

Jane was instantly at her side.

“Lizzy! Are you all right?”

“Yes . . . yes, I think so.”

With each lungful of air, Elizabeth’s world widened and brightened, until at last all the grayness was gone. And this is what she saw: Hawksworth bent over, head hanging low, hands in a most undignified arrangement. Mary was beside him, bending over to try to look him in the face.

“Master? Do you require aid?”

His first reply came out as a squeaky wheeze. Then he squeezed his eyes shut, took in a deep breath, and tried again.

“I am in no more pain than I deserve. Go. Find your father. He can take over your training while I . . . meditate on this.”

“Master,” Elizabeth said.

She started to ask what had just happened, if something had gone wrong, but she stopped herself. The student was not to question the master’s actions. She started, then, to say she was sorry for panicking, but she stopped herself again. A warrior doesn’t apologize.

Oh, how was she ever to truly talk to this man?

There was only one thing she could say, so she said it.

“How many dand-baithaks?”

“For you, Elizabeth Bennet?” Hawksworth said. “None. The fault was not yours. I let myself become . . . careless.” He turned away and began hobbling, hunchbacked, toward the darkest corner of the dojo. “We will resume the Way of the Panther in one hour. Until then, leave me.”

The girls bowed and began to file outside. Elizabeth left last, lingering in the doorway, unsure if there was more she still might try to say or more she longed to hear. Hawksworth settled himself, ever so slowly, into a stooped, cross-legged squat on the floor, his back still to her, and after a long, silent moment she moved on.

She found her sisters already gathered around Mr. Bennet.

“—and then she kicked Master Hawksworth in the . . .,” Mary was saying. Her cheeks flushed pink, and she leaned toward her father, hand cupped to mouth, and whispered in his ear.

Mr. Bennet frowned . . . yet it seemed to Elizabeth his eyes were smiling.

“Why did you do it, Lizzy?” Lydia asked as she joined them.

“Yes, tell us, Lizzy!” Kitty said. “Were you cross or simply frightened?”

“I was being strangled. Need I really explain beyond that?”

“Didn’t you hear the Master say the Panther’s Kiss can be used as a ‘sleeper hold’?” Mary asked. “That he could bring you to the brink of unconsciousness without doing you any harm?”

“It is rather difficult to hear properly when being throttled,” Elizabeth replied. “Shall I demonstrate?”

She brought her hands up toward Mary’s throat, and her sister actually blanched and hopped back behind their father.

“No, that’s quite all right, thank you.”

Elizabeth dropped her arms to her sides, ashamed. She knew it wasn’t her younger sisters she was angry at, thoughtless though they were.

“The Axis of Calamity, eh?” her father said. “I’m sure that made quite an impression on the Master . . . and perhaps, I’m beginning to think, just where he needed one most.”

“What do you mean, Papa?” Mary asked.

Mr. Bennet ignored her.

“Now, seeing as you’re back in my hands for the next hour, I’d say it’s time for something your training has, so far, entirely overlooked. Something I feel I owe you all, given the sacrifices I’ve asked you to make.”

He paused until Jane finally asked the inevitable question.

“Which is what, Father?”

Mr. Bennet smiled. “Fun. There is, you will observe, a stag striking a most majestic pose upon that hilltop.”

The girls followed his gaze to the east, and saw, not a quarter mile away, the great, antlered buck their father spoke of.

“Kiss it.”

“Kiss it?” Mary said.

“Yes. Catch it and kiss it.”

Lydia grimaced. “On the lips?”

Mr. Bennet shrugged. “Or the nose or the cheek or whatever else you might prefer.”

“You expect us,” Jane said slowly, “to catch a deer and hold it long enough to kiss it?”

“Oh, goodness me, no!” Mr. Bennet chuckled. “Not all of you. But your training has, I suspect, brought you further, faster than you think, and one of you might manage it—and whichever of you it is will get the rest of the hour off to do whatever she pleases.”

Jane was already halfway to the stag before anyone else was even running.

Elizabeth took off after the deer with no hope of actually catching it. The big buck quickly saw the girls coming, wheeled about, and bolted. How were such as they to catch one of the fleetest creatures in the forest?

Yet the distance between her and the hill disappeared with surprising speed, and even when she charged up the bluff and into the trees, she found herself hardly slowed at all. The deer kept to no path, of course, simply crashing through the bramble, and Elizabeth was soon doing the same—bursting through bushes, hurdling over streams and rocks, dodging tree trunks that flew past her in a smear of brown.

All those dand-baithaks, all those laps, all those hours meditating and sparring and wielding the weight of swords and axes and heavy wooden staffs—it was working!

All around, Elizabeth could hear her sisters laughing as they, too, discovered what they could now do. And she joined in.

The stag began to zigzag, cutting left, then right as the girls closed in. Though Elizabeth was now closer to him than ever, he grew harder to see: The chase had led them into the darkest, thickest of thickets. Soon, all she had to guide her was the sound of the buck’s flight up ahead, but then even that began to fade. Elizabeth pushed herself harder, trying to squeeze out even more speed, and when she came to a tangle of thick vines, she sought to vault herself over it with one of the Master’s moves, the Leaping Leopard, instead of sparing the extra second to go around. She sprung up high enough to catch sight of the deer again, ghostly white shapes—her sisters in their sparring gowns—converging on it from all sides.

Then her left foot caught on a vine, and she spun end over end to the earth.

She landed on her left knee, rolled, landed on her back, rolled, and kept landing and rolling and landing and rolling until she finally came to a stop against the broad base of an old oak tree. She lay there for a moment, panting, and allowed herself a small indulgence she would not have otherwise engaged in even if only Jane had been there to hear it.

“Damn.”

When she finally dared sit up and catalogue her wounds, she found, to her infinite relief, no twigs sticking from her side, no shattered femurs jutting from her thighs, no digits missing, no long strips of skin flapping loose and bloody. She could even stand up and limp around. So it only felt like she’d crushed every bone and organ in her body.

She’d raced into the forest faster than a fleeing stag. Now she began hobbling out again with all the speed of a three-legged tortoise.

Her sisters were nowhere in sight, and Elizabeth could only assume they were far off now, smothering the buck with kisses. Yet after she’d taken but a few steps back toward Longbourn, she noticed something moving off to her left—a dark shape blotting out rays of dappled sun. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who’d fallen behind.

She turned and started toward the shifting shadows. They were being cast by movement in a small glade, she saw as she drew closer. And there were two shapes.

It was Kitty and Lydia, surely, the two of them taking advantage of their father’s indulgence to pause and pick wildflowers—or gossip about her and Master Hawksworth.

But hadn’t she seen them heading the other way, mere strides behind the stag?

The thought came to her too late. The “Lydia?” was already halfway off her lips as she stepped into the dell.

Two dreadfuls looked her way.

They were on the other side of the clearing, turned toward each other, as though they’d been chatting away like two friendly neighbors. One must have been weeks if not months dead, for its clothes and flesh had rotted clear through in spots, and what remained was tattered and gray. Not much was left of its face—just clumps stuck to skull, some still heavy with thick, black hair. It had sported a beard, back when it wasn’t an “it.”

The other unmentionable was male, as well, yet it was far, far fresher. Though its skin was tinted green, it had yet to rot enough to begin falling off, and the clothes were dirty and frayed but hardly worm eaten. The mouth was set in a large O, the eyebrows arched high on its forehead. Whatever had killed it seemed to have been a considerable surprise.

Elizabeth knew the feeling. She started to let another “Damn” slip, but caught it just in time. It seemed unwise to have a curse on her lips with Judgment so close at hand.

The more decayed of the dreadfuls gurgled a sound at her, part growl, part groan, then began staggering toward her with startling speed.

Fast as the zombie was, and bruised and battered as Elizabeth was, she might have outrun it had she tried. Yet something—shock, training, or mere foolishness, she had no time to decide which—kept her from turning away.

She reached down, unsheathed the ankle dagger she’d worn to the dojo that morning, and assumed the Natural Stance. When the unmentionable was twenty feet off, she let the blade fly, and—to Elizabeth’s relieved surprise—it buried itself between the creature’s red, rheumy eyes.

She quickly decided on her next step: retrieve the dagger from the dead dreadful’s head so she could turn on the other zombie and throw it again. Unfortunately, there was a snag to her plan.

The dreadful didn’t die. It just kept coming toward her, arms out, mouth open wide, dagger handle jutting from its face.

Elizabeth didn’t even get through her mantra once—“Smooth stone beneath still AHHH!”—and the unmentionable was on her, grabbing for her shoulders and snapping at her neck. She hopped back and, for the second time that morning, set a foot streaking into someone’s nether regions.

Or some thing’s nether regions, this time. Which made all the difference.

The unmentionable’s unmentionables might have just been squashed flat, but the creature showed no sign of noticing. Instead, it merely took hold of the foot that had been planted in its mushy-rotten groin, pulled it up toward its mouth, and leaned in for a bite. Elizabeth toppled backward to the ground, unable to do anything but watch in horror as her toes approached the dreadful’s gaping maw.

Just before the zombie could launch into its first chomp, there was a loud pop, and a spray of black pulp shot from the side of the creature’s head. As slowly as a felled tree, the unmentionable tilted, teetered, and then toppled forward onto Elizabeth.

By the time she managed to struggle out from under it, she found the other zombie crouching down beside her . . . with a smoking flintlock in its hand.

“I do apologize,” the dreadful said. “It took me ever so long to get a clear shot.”