pride and prejudice and zombies:: dreadfull ever after

Part 5

CHAPTER 5

It took four days to find them. Elizabeth hadn't even realized she'd been looking for them until she stepped into a pasture and spotted them feasting on a still-kicking cow they'd somehow managed to bring down.

Dreadfuls. Lots of them.

Just what she needed.

Every day since Lady Catherine whisked Darcy and Georgiana away in her carriage, Elizabeth had passed the daylight hours tramping up and down the lush wooded hills of Pemberley. She could do nothing but wait, for her ladyship had shared no details of the disgrace that apparently awaited her. Instructions would come once all was in readiness, she'd been told. There was nothing she could do to prepare—except, the lady had hinted, to practice swallowing her pride.

So she'd taken refuge, as she so often had in her life, in long, solitary walks. Only she hadn't wished them to be so solitary, she knew now. She'd been hoping for a particular kind of company.

Elizabeth sauntered toward the zombies, an opened parasol perched on one shoulder.

It had been difficult, these past four years, watching Darcy ride off to war whenever the summons came, waiting in futile frustration for news of distant battles she should have seen—and claimed heads in!—firsthand. Georgiana had been free to join her brother, and often did. Even Elizabeth's own sisters, Mary and Kitty, occasionally fought by his side, for neither had taken a husband. (And neither ever would, if Elizabeth's mother had any say in the matter. They could be wedded to but one thing: caring for the aging matriarch of the Bennet family.)

Unmarried ladies taking up arms could be tolerated (barely) as long as Britain remained in peril. Yet for a wife to wade into battle would be an affront not just to her husband, whose duty it was to protect her, but to all English manhood. Elizabeth, despite her formidable skills, could be seen in public wielding nothing more deadly than a lace-fringed parasol.

Of course, she wasn't in public now, for no one was around to see her but a pack of dreadfuls and a few scattered cows, and they didn't count.

At last, one of the unmentionables spied her. It had been gnawing on a rubbery length of bowel, but now it dropped its meal midchew and staggered toward her. Though animals would do in a pinch, there wasn't a zombie alive (so to speak) who'd choose one over fresh homo sapiens.

The other dreadfuls took notice, and soon the whole bunch was scuttling in for the kill. They were a motley assortment, fresh next to rancid, rag-shrouded beside fashionably clothed, all united in the democracy of death.

When the nearest of the ghouls was about thirty feet off, Elizabeth stopped and calmly lifted the parasol from her shoulder. A single tug on the handle simultaneously released the razors running along the ribs and the small sword hidden in the shaft. With her left hand, she sent the top of the parasol spinning through the air to remove as many limbs as it might, while with her right hand she brought up the sword, having already picked out the first three necks it would slice through. After they were seen to, she would improvise.

It all went smoothly enough ... to Elizabeth's disappointment. Aside from one particularly dogged and shrieking she-zombie who kept flailing at her, even after both forearms and most of her face were littering the grass, there were no surprises, and Elizabeth was unable to lose herself in battle as she'd hoped. It was just like the day Darcy fell, when he'd tried to cheer her with a little nostalgic slaughter. It hadn't worked then and it wasn't working now. Even as she hacked and slashed and vaulted and kicked, her thoughts kept returning to the road not far away where her husband had fallen to a single unmentionable child. Because of her moodiness. Her perverseness. Her.