One of the tenets of our instruction here at Miss Preston’s is to attain enrichment beyond the schoolhouse walls, an endeavor that often takes us into nearby Baltimore. I daresay I have learned almost as much in the streets of the city as I have in the classroom and on the practice field.
Half past five finds me running down the main corridor, hastily tying my bonnet. After a hurried dinner and a swift face-washing there was just enough time to change into the only nice dress I have before the carriage came. At least that’s what I thought, until Big Sue saw me in the dormitory.
“Aren’t you going to that lecture thing?”
“I am,” I said. I was trying to get my hair to do this front frizz thing that I saw in a fashion magazine I pinched from Miss Anderson. But my stubborn curls kept going up instead of down, and I was cursing the good Lord above for giving me hair that would’ve been better suited to sheep.
“Shouldn’t you be out there waiting on the carriage? It’s leaving at half past.”
I stopped my fiddling and turned to Big Sue. “Miss Preston told me the lecture was after dinner.”
“The lecture is at six, but the carriage is leaving at half past five. Haven’t you been paying attention? Miss Anderson and Miss Duncan’ve been talking about it all week.”
So that is how I end up running a full sprint through the school, sliding to a stop in the front yard just as Miss Duncan is closing the armored carriage door.
“Jane, how nice of you to join us. Come, you can ride along in the other carriage with Katherine and me. I’m going to head inside and see if we have any other stragglers.” Miss Duncan wears a fashionable riding ensemble, her hair curled and her creases knife sharp even in the humidity. I am now more conscious of my disastrous hair and ugly blue-flower dress.
I climb into the cab while Miss Duncan goes back into the school. Katherine sits inside, fiddling with a pair of the whitest gloves I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t say anything as I sit in the seat opposite, and that suits me just fine. I ain’t got nothing to say to her, anyway.
The pony is a newer model. It’s sort of like a train but without tracks, and the driver sits in his own protected car up front with the stove that heats the steam engine. The passenger compartment is made of steel, with bars over what would be glass windows in the wintertime. The glass has been removed on account of the heat, and although it is still powerful hot out, the beginnings of a breeze makes its lazy way through the compartment, providing a bit of relief.
I lean back in the wooden seat and try to relax. I don’t much care for the ponies; the noise they make, all that clanking and wheezing, tends to attract the dead. But it’s a long way through forested hills to get to Baltimore, and we’ll be returning after the sun goes down. Trying to travel by foot at night is a death sentence. It’s amazing how quickly the dead can creep up on you in the dark.
In the old days, carriages were pulled by horses, and that’s why we call them ponies now. Horses were big, stinky beasts that snorted steam and had eyes of fire. At least, that’s what Lloyd, the older boy that used to cobble shoes back at Rose Hill, told me they looked like. I ain’t never seen a horse. The dead are hungry, and the thing they’re hungry for is flesh. Most horses met a sad fate at the hands of the shamblers back in the early days, eaten by the very same people who’d once cared for them. Momma said that’s why you had to be wary. “Janie, you mark my words, you be careful who you trust. You never know when the man you married is going to turn around and try to take a nibble out of your neck.”
That actually happened to Momma when her husband, Major McKeene, returned from the War between the States, which inevitably turned into a war against the dead. Of course, I ain’t ever planning on getting married, much less to a war hero that got changed to one of those restless dead, but you never really knew what was in store for you. I’m sure nobody ever expected the dead to get up in the middle of a pitched battle and start eating people, which is what they did at the Battle of Little Round Top. And no one expected those dead boys to bite their buddies and turn them as well. But that’s the way life goes most of the time: the thing you least count on comes along and ruins everything else you got planned. I figure it’s much better to just be all-around prepared, since the best defense is a good offense.
That’s why I’m smuggling my six-shooter under my skirts. We ain’t supposed to carry firearms when traveling into town, but I’m always ready for someone to try and take a bite out of me. Especially at the university. Everyone knows that academics are the most ruthless cutthroats around.
What I ain’t prepared for is the look that Katherine gives me from the other side of the carriage. My dress ain’t all that nice compared to hers. She is tucked into a pretty blue frock with a big flounce in the back. It’s not a bustle, on account of the fact that Miss Preston finds them hideous and banned them from the school, but the cut of the gown makes it look like she’s wearing one. It’s a lovely dress, especially with the way the corset cinches her waist to nearly nothing.
I fiddle with the curly mass of my bangs and slouch down, feeling like the plainest girl ever next to the fashion plate that is Katherine Deveraux. If I didn’t hate her before, I am absolutely positive I despise her now.
“What happened to your hair?” Katherine asks, breaking the not-so-companionable silence. My face heats as she stares at it, her light eyes taking in every flaw and faux pas. I try to sit up a little straighter, but that just causes the bodice of my dress to strain against my rib cage. Katherine’s eyes narrow. “And why aren’t you wearing your modesty corset?”
I take a deep breath and muster up all my bravado. I am not going to let spoiled Katherine Deveraux get the better of me. “Why, Kate, don’t you know? This is the way the ladies are wearing their hair these days. It’s called the Fritzi Fall. Very popular in New York City, and no one would be caught without a bit of frizz in Paris.”
Katherine grits her teeth. “Katherine. Not Kate. I’ll thank you to use my given name.”
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 road. She wears a flowered dress with a pinafore and her mouth gapes, a toothless black hole. The ponies are too loud for us to hear her raspy moans, but as we pass she jogs after us a bit, her yellow eyes locked on mine.
We’re quickly past the shambler, and Katherine sits back in her seat. Miss Duncan frowns. “I’ll let the patrolmen know when we get into town. Rare to see shamblers this close to the city. I do hope the Edgars made it home safely.”
“The Edgars?” I ask.
“The women who observed your training earlier today. Grace and Patience Edgar and their mother, Wilhelmina Edgar. They’re newly arrived from the Charleston Compound and were interested in engaging a couple of Attendants.”
“Yes, Mrs. Edgar said they’ve seen a few undead around their property of late,” Katherine interjects. “I imagine they’re likely being spooked by a couple of shadows, but if it finds them looking for a few girls from Miss Preston’s, I’m certainly not going to tell them otherwise.”
I roll my eyes. She’s obviously showing off for Miss Duncan. Of course Little Miss Perfect stayed to talk to the fine ladies. She’s practically the image of the Attendants they’re always advertising in the paper, the Negro girl holding short swords and smiling prettily: LADIES! DON’T GO IT ALONE! KEEP YOUR SELF SAFE WITH A MISS PRESTON’S GIRL!
“Mrs. Edgar told me the same thing.” Miss Duncan looks back down the road, her lips pursed in thought.
“But she can’t be right, can she?” Katherine asks. “Mayor Carr has declared Baltimore County safe for months now.”
I turn my head around. “The Survivalists would have you believe they saved Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston single-handedly if you listen to them long enough. It’s all that ‘America will be safe again’ nonsense—”
“Please, Jane, how many times must I tell you, there will be no talk of politics,” Miss Duncan admonishes gently. “That is entirely too coarse a subject for young ladies to discuss, even ladies of color.”
I sit back and cross my arms, biting my tongue on the hundred things I want to say in response. As Miss Duncan and Katherine resume their conversation, I reach into my shirt and touch my penny. It’s a luck charm Auntie Aggie gave to me before I left Rose Hill, and it hangs on a string between my bosoms. It’s warm at the moment, as it usually is; but there’s a small bit of magic in it, and when it goes cold, I know I’m in danger. I flick at the penny and eye the other two women in the carriage before I go back to staring out of the window.