The Doomsday Vault (6 page)

“You little shit!” Blue howled. “I'll fucking kill you!”

He lunged for Gavin, who didn't even think. He stepped aside and swung the knife again. It plunged up to the hilt into the side of Blue's neck. Blue's eyes flew wide-open. He made a terrible choking noise and clawed at the knife hilt with curved fingers, then fell twitching to the deck. The air filled with the stench of blood and bowel as he died.

Gavin didn't have time to react, or even think. Blue's screams summoned the rest of the men, who were only a dozen yards away. In an instant, Gavin found himself surrounded by angry pirates. Blood covered his hands and spattered across his face, and he was holding his trousers up with one hand. The other still clutched his fiddle.

“It's the fiddler boy.” “He killed Blue!” “Cut his balls off!” “Throw him overboard!” “String him up!” “Shit! There's blood everywhere!” “The captain!” “Make way for the captain !”

Captain Keene, short and stocky, shouldered his way through the crowd. He took in the scene, including Gavin's torn trousers, with a glance. “What the hell happened?”

“He killed Blue!” someone shouted.

“I'm not asking you, Biggs,” Keene bellowed.

Gavin looked at the men. His mind froze. He couldn't think. It was all too much. “I—I...,” he stammered.

“Did you kill him?” Keene asked.

“He... attacked me,” Gavin said. It was hard to talk. He wanted all those eyes to go away. “He—he shoved me against the extractor. He said he wanted...”

“Ah,” Keene said with understanding. “Well, you ain't his first, but it looks like you're definitely his last.” This got an uneasy chuckle from a few of the pirates. Gavin let himself hope that everything would be all right. Then Keene said, “But you're a prisoner, boy, and you killed one of my men.” He raised his voice. “Saw his hands off and throw him overboard.”

Shock numbed Gavin. He barely felt the fingers that snatched his fiddle away, barely noticed that he was being hauled toward the crate where he'd been playing merry music only a few minutes earlier. One of the pirates drew his cutlass. It gleamed green in the phosphorescent light. Gavin's hands were yanked down to the crate and laid across the rough wood, wrist up. The pirate raised the blade.

“Captain!”

The speaker was Stone, the pirate who had requested “Londonderry Air.” The pirate holding the cutlass halted. Keene folded his arms across a broad chest. “You got something to say, Stone?”

“He's still a boy, Captain,” Stone said. “You called him one yourself. It don't seem quite right to give him a man's punishment, sir.” He held up Gavin's fiddle. “And he plays so nice. Be a shame to lose that because he fought back against the likes of Madoc Blue. Sir.”

The hands holding Gavin down were tight enough to leave bruises, though Gavin didn't have the strength to struggle. Above him, he could see distorted stars through the pirate's clear cutlass. Keene looked at Gavin for a long moment, surrounded by silent pirates.

“Fine,” he grumbled at last. “Boy's punishment. Twenty-four lashes.”

The hands suddenly shifted from holding Gavin down to wrenching him around. His mind spun, unable to take it all in. He caught a fleeting glimpse of Stone still holding his fiddle, another glimpse of two men covering Blue's body with a piece of gray canvas, and then his wrists were being strapped to the heavy netting. Someone ripped the shirt off his back. Cold night air washed over his skin, and that broke the stupor. He shouted and struggled against the bonds, but they were too tight. The first mate swung his whip around. It slashed the air, hissing like a snake.

And then Stone was beside him, his hand on Gavin's shoulder. “Don't worry about your fiddle,” he whispered urgently in Gavin's ear. “I'll keep it safe.”

He backed away and the first lash tore a red stripe of pain across Gavin's back.

T
he lead zombie pulled the cab door open. Behind it, half a dozen other zombies groaned in an eerie chorus. Alice Michaels gave an unladylike yelp, jerked her violet skirts away, and kicked the opposite door. It banged open, and she flung herself out of the cab to the sidewalk, stumbling over crinolines and hoops. The zombie climbed into the cab, moaning and muttering. Alice slammed the door shut and twisted the cheap handle so hard it broke. The zombie fumbled with the latch but couldn't get it to work, and the possibility of simply climbing through the open sides of the cab didn't seem to occur to it. It reached for Alice with bloody fingers. Heart pounding, she backed away until she flattened against a rough brick wall. The cab driver, meanwhile, leapt from his seat and fled down an alley. A pair of zombies shambled after him. The coward hadn't even stayed to help her. Alice flicked a glance at the foggy street and stared.

Plague zombies in various stages of deterioration filled the byway. They were—had been—men and women, boys and girls. It looked to be every zombie in London. They limped and hobbled and dragged themselves through the mist, skin sloughing off their muscles, open sores festering in the dim gaslight. The hackney horse snorted in fear. Terrified, Alice pressed herself against the wall. A tiny whimper died in her throat. It was every nightmare she'd ever had come to life. The plague had taken her mother, brother, and fiancé. Now it was lurching toward her in a crowd of mottled, oozing flesh.

Screams from frightened horses and shouts of panicked people filled the air. Alice stayed perfectly still, trying to remain as inconspicuous as a woman in a ball gown could. Her breath came in quick, short pants as she tried to overcome her fear and make sense of what she saw in the street. The crowd of zombies oozed around night-delivery carts, rocking them, shoving at them—they were working together. It was impossible. Plague zombies suffered from an advanced case of the clockwork plague, a disease that attacked both body and brain. It separated skin from muscle and opened up holes in the dermis. It attacked neural tissue, creating dementia, palsy, and paralysis. Nine times out of ten, it killed. The plague was highly contagious, but only after initial contraction, when the victim was asymptomatic, and toward the end, when the victim looked more monster than human. At this stage, the victim's eyes also became sensitive to daylight, forcing a nocturnal existence that might last for a year before death finally claimed them, though most died of starvation or exposure long before then. Ironically, it was the contagious aspect of the disease that allowed plague zombies to exist within London—the police and other authorities were afraid to get too close for fear of contracting the illness themselves.

But for their contagious nature, zombies were usually harmless scavengers who looked more frightening than they actually were. They didn't have the mental capacity to work together in their final months. Yet this mob was doing exactly that.

There was a crash, and the street flooded with ale as the zombies tipped over a beer delivery van. Drovers scrambled away and fled, abandoning lorries and teams of horses alike.

And then she heard the music—low, eerie music that reminded her of a flute or an oboe. Intricate and strange, it wove in and through the crowd of zombies. She remembered hearing it earlier, as she left the dance. It chilled her blood. Alice tracked the sound to a figure standing in the middle of the plague zombie crowd. The figure wore a long brown coat with tarnished silver buttons, and a battered top hat. A white mask covered the upper half of its face. It grinned almost wider than any human should be able to grin. In its hands, the figure held a strange device that looked a bit like a set of bagpipes, but without the mouthpiece, and with a number of strange and tiny machines attached. The figure grinned and grinned, white teeth shining in the dim light. Its fingers moved across the device, and the music grew louder. The zombies jerked in unison and tipped over another truck.

“A clockworker,” Alice whispered with understanding.

Every so often, perhaps one time in a hundred thousand, the plague gave even as it took. Instead of destroying the victim's brain, the disease made it work with a wondrous efficiency. Mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry—even some forms of art—became mere toys to these rare and particular plague victims. They created amazing, impossible inventions. Every automaton in existence, for example, owed its mechanical brain to Charles Babbage catching the plague and almost overnight perfecting the analytical engine. Jean-Pierre Blanchard came down with it and swiftly designed not only the light, semirigid framework used by most airships, but also the engines used to propel them and the hydrogen extractors that pulled the necessary gasses out of thin air. Alexander Pilkington discovered how to temper glass so it would keep an edge without shattering, allowing the creation of glass blades and electric lights that didn't break.

Unfortunately, such geniuses became notoriously unstable as the disease continued to devour their brains. They went completely mad in the end; for all that they showed no other physical symptoms. Due to their penchant for complicated machinery, many people called them clockworkers. People also called them lunatics, bedbugs, fireflies, and any number of less-flattering names.

Alice grimaced. This particular clockworker seemed to have discovered how to control his plague-ridden brethren through hypnotic music. She had no idea where he'd come from or what he hoped to accomplish. At the moment, she didn't care. All she wanted, with every fiber of her being, was to get away and find her way home without touching a zombie. The ones on the street might or might not be at the infectious stage, but Alice had no intention of finding out.

Her original cab was not a possibility—that zombie was still inside it. The cab horse snorted again and tossed its head but miraculously remained where it was. The blinders no doubt prevented it from understanding everything that was going on.

The grinning man continued to play the eerie music, and two zombies shambled around the cab, one from each side. They limped toward Alice, ragged clothes seeming to fade into the yellow fog, as if they wore the mist itself. Alice was surrounded—zombies to her left and right, a zombie in the cab ahead of her, and a brick wall behind. No doorways to dodge into, no stairs to climb. Nowhere to flee. Desperately, she cast about for a weapon or a distraction, anything. The zombies shuffled closer. One was a woman in a torn house-dress. Alice fumbled under her heavy skirts in an attempt to wrench off a shoe, but the buttons were done up too tightly. Tears streamed down her face.

“Get away!” she screamed at them. “Get away from me!”

A shot cracked through the fog. The head of the zombie woman exploded like a ripe melon. An awful smell washed over Alice as the body dropped to the sidewalk. Alice gaped. A horse rode up—two horses, no, four—their iron shoes clattering on the cobblestones. One of the riders rushed at Alice, stomping over the zombie woman's corpse.

“Up you come,” the rider said, hauling Alice up behind the saddle in an awkward sideways perch. Alice, clutching for purchase and fighting The Dress, barely had time to register the fact that her rescuer was a woman in leather trousers before the horse wheeled around and cantered back the way it had come, leaving the two remaining zombies behind. Alice noted the pistol at the woman's belt.

“Who are you?” Alice demanded. “What's going on?”

“We're here to help,” the woman said. “Down you go. Stay safe, love.”

Before Alice could register the shocking familiarity of the address, the woman deposited her on the street. The other horseback riders were shooting at the zombies and working their way toward the grinning clockworker. He continued to play, then abruptly turned, caught Alice's eye, and winked. Alice took a backward step, uncertain. She was clear of the zombie mob now. She could run. But the tableaux tugged at her. Now that she was out of immediate danger, the scene turned more fascinating than frightening, and she wanted to stay. She could help somehow,
should
help. They had helped her. Still, she was half turning to flee when another thought whipped through her mind.

Louisa wouldn't run.

With that, Alice turned back, and the clockworker threw her a wide grin as he played and played. The music scraped over Alice's bones with the edge of a butcher's knife. She was the only person left on the street besides the mysterious horsemen—and horsewomen. Another rider was pushing his way toward the sea of zombies, lashing out with a truncheon and using his horse to shoulder his way through the crowd toward the clockworker. But the clockworker seemed to glide away without effort, still surrounded by a zombie mob. Their screeches and groans half threatened to drown out the ever-present music. Yet another rider was forced to abandon his horse and leap atop the overturned beer truck. The horse disappeared, screaming, beneath a pile of ragged, half-dead plague victims.

“I could use a bit of help over here!” the rider shouted as three zombies clawed slowly up the side of the truck toward him. He kicked at one, a male in a tattered opera cloak, and the zombie lost its grip.

“On the way!” the woman rider shouted back from the edge of the zombie crowd. She drew her pistol and shot one of the other zombies crawling up the truck. Blood sprayed. The zombie fell backward, dead. Alice put a hand to her mouth.

A cart careened around the corner on two wheels, its horses in a lather. It skidded to a stop not far from Alice. A young man in a dark topcoat, work boots, and twill trousers dropped the reins and leapt to the back of the cart, where he whipped a canvas cover off an enormous... thing. It looked to Alice like a calliope that had lost a fight with a steam engine. Some of the pipes had come loose, and the young man was thrusting them back into place. Alice watched with fascination. The clockworker continued pouring out demonic music that drowned out the voice of God.