The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead by David Wake

Author:David Wake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Steampunk, Victorian, zeppelins, zombies, adventure
Publisher: Watledge Books
Published: 2013-11-18T08:00:00+00:00

Miss Georgina

Georgina followed Earnestine and they ran headlong into the yellow smog, jumping over the fat, and now dead, Frenchman. They should have saved him, tried at least. The damp linen against her face was suffocating, Georgina wanted to rip it off: she was drowning, falling deeper than ever into the cold waters of the Styx, and then she breathed, taking the air, moist from the damp cotton fabric, into her lungs.

The gap between the coaches was far easier to cross now that the train was stationary.

The smoke was worse, streaming out from a wrecked cabin half way along, and utterly terrifying. Earnestine stumbled, and Georgina was horrified to realise that her sister had stepped on someone. It was a solder in an Austro–Hungarian uniform: they’d killed their own people. Those plans they thought Earnestine had stolen must be important.

“What killed them? Plague?” Georgina asked.

“Or something. What disease would act that quickly?” Earnestine answered and her linen mask went in and out with every breath highlighting her face like a shroud.

“Influenza takes hours, doesn’t it?” Georgina was scared.

“We must get to the engine.”

“Do you know how to drive a train?”

“The steam engine is a British invention, so we ought to be naturals.”

“You can’t just browbeat a machine into working.”

“I’m sure with a little application we can manage.”

Georgina and Earnestine, keeping low, moved out into the corridor. Wisps of yellow smoke swirled as their passing disturbed it.

“It smells of garlic or Dijon,” said Georgina.

“Don’t smell it,” Earnestine replied.

They moved on, holding the material to their faces. The porter still moved, twitching and Georgina leant down to check his pulse, but Earnestine put her hand on her sister’s shoulder and shook her head. The man looked mottled, his face breaking out in blisters. His eyes snapped open, wide and unseeing, and he opened his mouth.

Georgina jerked backwards, retching: “Urrgh.”

Earnestine knew what it was: “Putrefaction,” she said. “They’ve used some chemical agent, either the substances that bring life with electricity or some reverse compound that brings about death.”

“Do you think…” but Georgina couldn’t bring herself to articulate what they were both thinking.

“The sooner we get to the engine and breath air that’s filled with honest dirt and soot the happier I’ll be.”

“Me too.”

First, they had to negotiate the poor unfortunate on the floor, which they did by waiting for his movements to create a space and jumping over him. They were very glad to reach the far connecting door. In the glass, Georgina saw her reflection and Death loomed over her shoulder. She turned, horrified, and saw an approaching demon, enveloped in a black mackintosh with a face distorted by giant, blank eyes and a snout bulged at the front. His breathing rasped as the monster pulled the poisoned air through the mask.

Georgina recognised them: “Those masks, the… beaks? Like plague doctors wore.”

“It has bug eyes… go!”

“Pardon?” said Georgina.

“Go! Go! Fly!”

They went through into the next carriage. There was death and dying everywhere, a charnel house of moving corpses. Earnestine and Georgina ran,

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