The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) (4 page)

“Sir.” With a respectful salute that the General couldn’t return, Pace hefted his musket and took off at a steady run toward the safety of the British square. He was professional enough not to look back.

Arthur took a brief moment to orient himself, striving to locate the last known position of the regimental surgery. Listening carefully, he could pick out the tell-tale sound of Doctor Reed Caldwell’s heartbeat, thumping hard beneath his breastbone just like that of the men around him. Turning in that direction, the vampire adjusted the composition of his body to become less dense, allowing himself to rise slowly and gracefully into the purple sky of dawn. He could feel his hair beginning to burn, as if an invisible torch flame was being held to it, and yet he dare not move too quickly, for he feared the consequences of jostling Campbell’s body any more than it already had been. Millions of tiny clots were already starting to form, but Wellesley could still hear the faint sound of occult blood loss, leaking from the vessels and ruined tissue within the Captain’s abdomen, chest, and pelvis. So frail, so delicate…

And so he took the burning for what it was, little more than a painful irritant at this point in time, but given just a few minutes more, Arthur knew that it would be something else entirely.

Pray God that he was not too late, for both their sakes.

CHAPTER THREE

Despite his being in possession of one of the finest medical minds to ever have served in the army of King George, Doctor Reed Caldwell was (although it pained him almost beyond measure to admit it) utterly flummoxed. His knowledge of the biological life-sciences was practically unparalleled, the result of a first rate education and a lifelong passion for and fascination with all things medical…and yet, try as he might, he was unable to unlock the answer to the mystery which plagued his every waking moment — how, and perhaps more importantly
why,
were the dead rising up and walking again?

At least, that much had been true until sunrise this very morning, when a new (and entirely more urgent) concern had taken priority in his mind, rudely shoving aside his original preoccupation. Because now, for he and his comrades staffing the regimental surgical post, it was now all about one simple thing: survival.

Theoretically, the surgical post was supposed to be located a comfortable distance behind the front line — close enough for the wounded redcoats and their native allies to be transported there to receive aid before they bled to death, and yet not so close that the non-combatant medical staff would be exposed to enemy fire, or threatened by his cavalry. Typically this did indeed turn out to be the case, particularly under the auspices of Major General Wellesley, for he was a canny officer with a meticulous eye for detail; when Wellesley sited the various parts of his army, whether combatants or non, it was done with a larger picture in mind. The supporting train had to be within arm’s reach, it was true, but also out of harm’s way, even though a contingent of troops was always detached from the main body and detailed to protect it.

That was all well and good on an ordinary day, when the army marched under cover of darkness and camped under the baleful eye of the Indian sun; and yet, today was no ordinary day, not by a long chalk. If the camp gossips were to be believed (and they were usually exceptionally accurate) then the General had been taken unawares this time. He had expected the Maratha army to be farther away than it actually was, for reasons unknown to the good doctor, and his vanguard had all but blundered into its heavily-fortified position along the banks of the River Kailna.

There had been but two choices open to him: attack or retreat. Unsurprisingly, Wellesley had chosen the former.

Unfortunately, the army’s baggage train had been halfway up the arse of the main force during last night’s march, its officers distracted by what seemed like a constant trickle of undead attacks from all sides. Such attacks were growing more frequent, and they often picked off one or two camp followers, whose hungry body would soon rise again, its sole fixation being to feast on the flesh and blood of its former cam-mates.

When the General had cast his die, riding to lead the fighting men of the army into battle against the Maratha position in what all saw to be a do-or-die gamble, the train had been left to fend for itself with little more than a handful of foot-soldiers remaining behind to guard it. For his part, Caldwell had elected to set up camp on the spot, barely half a mile away from the Kailna.

It was a decision that he would soon come to regret.

The results had been predictable: the once-sporadic undead attacks had intensified. It was as though the vile creatures could
smell
weakness and vulnerability. Perhaps they actually
could,
Caldwell thought to himself with a harsh snort born of both fatigue and despair. One would think that the creatures would be drawn to the sounds of cannon-fire and musketry that echoed across the surface of the water, he mused, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case at all. The monsters of nightmare would lumber upon the British field hospital out of the darkness, and had now succeeded in snatching away more than one of the terrified sentries, who then switched sides and joined the ranks of the damned, turning on their former comrades with a ferocity born of abject hunger.

Once battle was well and truly joined, a fresh source of meat was added to the mix. The first of this new wave of walking corpses straggled back from the battle-front in ones and twos. Some splashed across the fords, whereas others simply plowed into the cold running waters and made their way along the bottom of the riverbed, emerging up to a quarter of a mile further downstream. It mattered not a jot, for the creatures always simply reoriented themselves, turning to stumble and drag themselves unerringly toward the British camp, now enticingly stripped bare of its defenders.

Like the rest of his staff, Caldwell was running on a diet of hot tea and precious little sleep. He was no longer a young man, having not yet turned forty, but kept himself in decent fighting trim, and perhaps more importantly, eschewed the vile arrack with which so many Britons drowned their Indian sorrows. He had spent every waking moment that the army was not marching, working upon one of the three hissing, growling cadavers that were even now strapped to operating tables inside the large hospital tent, often pushing himself to stay awake until the noonday heat and sheer physical exhaustion contrived to make him snatch a few hours of precious, sweat-drenched sleep, laying on a cot in a shadowy corner of the tent. Even then, his dreams were demon-haunted and fitful, doubtless caused by the constant moans of his test subjects, who seemed to never, ever sleep themselves.

With scalpel in hand, he had worked frenziedly on the creatures, dissecting skillfully and expertly with a speed that was born of desperation. For the sturdier portions of their anatomy, Reed had reached for a bone saw, or other equally heavy implement. The process was not pretty, not even when the hacking, chopping, and the back-and-forth sawing-up of the larger structures had given way to finer, more precise cuts; it had even turned the stomach of Caldwell’s orderlies, men who were proud of their strong stomachs, inured as they were after dealing with so many lopped-off limbs and other battlefield trauma.

The first creature, known only as specimen one (the orderlies had wanted to give them all nicknames, but Caldwell had forbade it) had been saved until last, and Reed was currently hard at work on trying to uncover its secrets. After placing a heavy leather strap in its mouth and securing it tightly behind the thing’s head, in order to offer some protection against his being bitten, the doctor had incised the chest with a large Y-shaped cut, slicing the flesh from each clavicle toward the diaphragm in order to form both arms of the Y, and then bringing the edge of the blade down to circumscribe the navel. Caldwell had noticed that incredibly, the thing seemed completely immune to the pain that such a procedure should be expected to cause: its thrashings and gnawings upon the leather strap continued unabated. Black-tinged drool leaked around the yellowing teeth of what had once been Private Michael Tombs, late of the King’s 74th, as they tried in vain to chew through the coarse brown leather.

“Stop bloody struggling,” Caldwell muttered irritably, more to relieve the built-up tension than from any genuine expectation of the reanimated corpse actually understanding him.

Once the chest was opened up from clavicles to genitals, the doctor had grasped each flap of skin and peeled it back, exposing the ribs. With the help of an orderly and a little grunting and straining, Caldwell was able to crack the ribs on each side, getting the thoracic shield out of the way and granting him access to the heart, lungs, and the great vessels of the chest.

“Just the same as all the others…”

Taking a pair of iron forceps, Caldwell prodded and probed at the pericardial sac, the rubbery bag of tissue that enclosed the heart. Try as he might, he could not stimulate any sort of movement. The creature’s heart was simply not beating.

How in the Good Lord’s name was it maintaining any sort of blood pressure?

Caldwell set down the forceps and took up the scalpel. Selecting a portion of the aortic arch, he placed the tip of the blade against the rigid vessel and applied pressure, pushing gently at first, until he finally felt a distinct
pop:
the scalpel had broken through the thick vessel wall and punched into its inner lumen. He was rewarded with a small dribble of black viscous fluid, which elicited a frown. The aorta was the body’s largest, high-pressure artery. Caldwell had seen soldiers shot in the chest whose aorta had been merely nicked by the intruding ball — such men would hemorrhage to death before he could even get the chest open and attempt to staunch the wound.

Then again, if the pump wasn’t beating, the blood wouldn’t move through the aorta at all, would it? It would simply sit there, pooling, rather than flowing throughout the vasculature as it ought in an ordinary, living human. Widening the incision, the doctor placed the tip of his finger and thumb inside and parted the aortic wall with a
shlurp.

“Bring the candle closer, if you please.” Caldwell beckoned with his free hand to the closest orderly, who was holding the flickering light up above the creature’s chest. The man duly obliged, lowering the candlestick until it was hovering just above the gaping chest cavity.

Reflecting back the vessel walls, Reed found his suspicions instantly confirmed. The sticky black sludge that passed for blood in all of the creatures he had examined so far was present here, and had solidified to something that had the consistency of slightly runny treacle or blackcurrant jam. It coated the vessel walls, but wasn’t moving forward, no matter how much its owner thrashed and fought.

If only it smelled like jam,
he thought, wrinkling his nose in disgust. The foul substance smelled disgusting, almost fecal, and he resisted the urge to gag.
Not in front of the men, Caldwell: you’re made of sterner stuff than that.

Next, he turned his attention to the lungs. Neither of the two bellows was inflating or deflating significantly — and yet, the thing was obviously moving
some
air, else how would it continue to make that incessant growling noise that grated on the nerves so? No matter how many specimens he looked at (Caldwell couldn’t quite bring himself to think of them as cadavers, so long as they were still moving around) he could never get over the anatomic and physiologic lunacy displayed by each reanimated corpse. None of this made any damned
sense;
it flew in the face of every last scrap of his medical training, all of it. Devoid of both breath and heartbeat, these foul creatures should be incapable of generating any kind of movement at all, let alone something as coordinated as biting and shambling.

Dark, thick blood was already pooling at the base of the creature’s chest when Reed cut into the lung hilum. Completely severing its connection with the right bronchi, the doctor carefully The removed the lung and slopped it into a metal bowl that he had placed there for just such a purpose. He ignored the thing’s frenzied attempts to snap its head closer to his arm, sensing the hot pulsing blood and warm flesh, so maddeningly close but yet so out of reach at the same time. Angling the candlestick carefully, the orderly strove to provide the surgeon with as much light as possible, given the circumstances. A single drop of hot wax spattered onto the creature’s forehead, sizzling when it made contact with the waxen skin. If the creature was capable of registering pain any longer, it gave no obvious sign.

“The supernatural is at work here,” Reed spoke his thoughts aloud, having turned the problem about to exam its every possible facet and realizing that he could come to no other conclusion. “Some vile bloody…
sorcery,
for lack of a better word.”

“What does that mean, sir?” the orderly asked, plainly at a loss.

“What it
means,
young man, is that we are unlikely to find a medical solution to this plague…curse…call it whatever you will.” Being careful not to get blood on his forehead, he wiped sweat from his brow with the back of one sleeve. “General Wellesley might as well ask me to find a cure for vampirism itself.”

CHAPTER FOUR