2

2

The knives and belts were out. Will Tagget brandished a big chopper as he circled Bill Drummond.

It was all prearranged. Will and his Lambeth Walk Lads had agreed to meet up with the Drury Lane Gang on the Lambeth side of Westminster Bridge where, as per custom, insults that never failed to provoke were exchanged and the gangs would give each other what for. The row wasn’t so much about territory—a bridge and a river divided them after all—as about bragging rights.

Bill Drummond of the Drury Lane Monkeys kept his only slightly smaller blade steady. Body crouched, elbow bent, his beady eyes watched for an opening. Drummond was a good bladesman, Will gave him that. But Will’s grim grin proclaimed he was better.

Across the water, the half-hour boomed from Westminster. The clock tower and House of Commons were lost in fog. All that marked the far shore were the lamps of the Victoria Embankment. Even here, on the Albert Embankment behind St. Thomas, the fog was so thick you could scarcely make out the figures that silently circled and thrust and occasionally hissed as a blade nicked flesh.

Will noted with contempt that a couple of the Drury Lane crew wore coats buttoned to the collar. His boys wouldn’t be caught dead wearing armor. They’d showed up in their best shirts, as if on the way to pick up their girls for an evening at the Victoria. Will wore a dark-blue neckerchief, neatly knotted, that did duty for collar as well as tie. Save for the scrape of feet, the occasional snick of connecting blades and the lap of water against the Embankment wall, the night was eerily quiet.

Bill Drummond swept in low and quick. Will leaned back just far enough to avoid the blade, then, as Drummond’s hand withdrew, followed with his own swipe. But Drummond knew what was coming and slipped just far enough right so the blade missed and he was in position to take another stab at Will. So the dance went. In earnest now, belts swinging from one hand while the knife hand feinted and stabbed. As serious a task as breaking into a swell’s house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The object was not to snuff your rival—the law didn’t take kindly to having to work—but to draw blood.

A scream startled them both. Will knew it instantly for one of his. Hulking Tim Peck who was fourteen but big for his size and learning the ropes. His first thought was one of the Drury Lane rotters had stuck him, but then he saw the figures shambling up the water stairs.

Though it was hard to see in the dim light—the lamp posts were invisible, so the Embankment lights seemed to float in the fog like Chinese lanterns—it was obvious something was very out of place. For one thing, the interlopers—there appeared to be five or six of them—were coming up from the river and he’d heard no dip of approaching oars. For another, they moved with a shambling gait, thick silhouettes bent, heads jutting forward, arms reaching. There was a woman among them. He couldn’t make out her face, but she appeared to be hindered by her dress which clung to her legs as if she had just emerged from the river.

The fray abandoned, those nearest the newcomers backed away. Will moved forward, Bill Drummond beside him.

“What the deuce?” Will hissed when he saw what had crashed their party. He liked to see fear in others—it caused hesitation, and hesitation was deadly in the heat of action. As for himself, he’d outgrown the indulgence at six, cast it off as impractical and inexpedient. So he was appalled to feel the icy chill of the foreign emotion sluicing through his stomach, the skin on his back crawling.

Tim was down, one of the creatures hunched over him, knees straddling his body, mangy head twisting close to his face. Grisly sounds like soft bones crunching and old wallpaper ripping from plaster reached his ears. Will stopped when he saw through parting fog what the thing was doing. It was eating Tim!

Eating him alive!

As he watched, for the first time in memory at a loss for action, the thing shook its head like a mastiff throttling a cat and a long strip of Tim’s face ripped free. Blood from the meat and water from its sopping mane sprayed the air. It threw back its head and wolfed down the meat like a hungry dog. The eyes rolled back in its head were white, covered in milky cataracts. As if it sensed his presence, it looked straight at him and, with a show of bloody teeth, hissed a warning before returning to its hideous repast.

The enormity of what he was seeing overwhelmed Will, and for a moment that stretched to eternity, he was like anybody else reduced to the lowest common denominator of human existence—fight or flight. Terror loosened his knees.

He shook off the horror. Deal with that later. A friend was down. Never mind his assailant was something out of a nightmare. He had to be dreaming. Couldn’t possibly be awake. He started forward.

A hand on his arm: Bill Drummond.

It should have done his heart good to see Drummond’s face as pale as flour, but he didn’t have time for the luxury. Tim was bleeding out—if he was even alive.

***

The survivors retreated to an abandoned warehouse. Though the big quayside doors kept the fog at bay, the air was thick with damp. Someone lit a candle, and they picked their way across a stone floor slick with moss. The brick walls were furred with mold, the iron pillars red with rust. There was little in the way of debris. Everything has its use. Even household waste is sorted for paper, rags, and metals on London’s refuse wharves before being pulverized and incinerated in destructors. Here everything the owners hadn’t sold had long been harvested—even smashed barrels and crates served for firewood on a wintry night.

The air reeked of river. Will’s shirt reeked of something fouler. He’d tangled with one of their ghastly attackers.

The melee ended in a struggle between the living and the dead. Will Tagget was a practical man and seeing daily the cons pulled on gullible shills and the chicanery politicians perpetrated on the public, he was also a deeply skeptical one. And while he gave no credence to the ghosts, vampires or other supernatural whatnots that appeared in the penny bloods, and while he would like to believe in a nurturing God who had the well-being of his lambs in his heavenly heart, his personal observation of the brutal living conditions of London’s have-nots coupled with the equally brutal exploitation by the haves discouraged any such belief. In his experience, “father figures” exploited their wards for personal benefit and beat them or cast them off when no longer productive. His stance was if something appeared improbable, assume it was a con until examination proved otherwise. What they’d encountered tonight defied all credence, yet the evidence of his senses argued for belief.

Their uncanny animation smacked of witchcraft. Their cheesy flesh came off in your hand but slowed them not at all. Some were missing eyes, as if fish had nibbled them out on the Thames’ muddy bottom. One was missing its jaw, another lacked a foot so that it lurched hideously but failed to fall. And they were quick. For all their shambling and seeming blindness, when you moved in to strike, they caught your hand or wrist and didn’t let go. And they were strong. Chauncey Bellows sported a broken wrist to attest to their strength. But it was the water that cinched it for Will. When he’d slit the throat of the creature feasting on Tim, dark blood had gushed out of the wound. But in afterthought, since it was eating Tim’s face, that might have been Tim’s blood. He’d half beheaded it, his blade ripping through muscle and cartilage so that the throat opened like a second mouth and the head lolled back connected by spine. It hadn’t collapsed but continued chomping even when its head came to rest on one shoulder. But when he ducked beneath the dripping arms of another attacker and ripped a swath of belly, sternum to navel, it wasn’t blood that spilled from the great wound along with ropy coils of guts but water. And as the putrid water rained down upon the Embankment pavers and the figure deflated, it did not fall but continued shambling forward, arms outstretched, fingers grasping, jaws chomping.

They’d inflicted damage, managed to hack the heads off two of them, but nothing stopped the creatures. The headless bodies kept advancing. The heads, lolling on their ears, kept chomping, as if possessed of a demonic hunger that knew no sating. And though they’d outnumbered their attackers twelve to six, they’d lost three of their own: Tim and two of the Drury Lane squids, Lem Carey and Jonas Falk. Worse, they’d been unable to reclaim their dead, but had left them where they lay while retreating with their tails between their legs.

They gathered in what had been a supervisor’s office. The desk was still there, a big steel thing too heavy to move, and wooden file cabinets tipped on their sides, their drawers missing, for firewood most likely, the papers taken for kindling. A length of black stove pipe hung from a wall; the pot-bellied stove that once warmed his nibs while the workers looked to their labor to warm themselves was missing, probably adorning some parlor or shop. An old mattress with a piece of rotten sailcloth for a blanket lay in a corner amongst a clutter of empty gin bottles, but no sign of the tosser.

Will’s legs hadn’t shaken this bad since he’d gone ten rounds with Bob Dundee. Though Dundee had two stone and nearly a foot on him, he’d won that battle. This one he’d lost. Looking around at the survivors’ faces in the candlelight, he wondered if his face was as white as theirs.

“Deaders,” he hissed.

“What’s that?” Drummond said.

“The fuckers were dead.”

“Not possible. Lepers . . . had to be.”

“Then why didn’t they bleed?”

Drummond had no answer to that.

“Whadda we do?” Ralph Bailey wanted to know. Ralph was a Lambeth Lad, and his face was as white as Drummond’s. “Go to the police?”

“No coppers!” Frank Peck said, slashing the air with his still dripping blade for emphasis. A line of droplets splattered Ralph’s face. Frowning, Ralph wiped them with his sleeve: though bloodless the drops reeked of guts and offal. Frank was Tim’s older brother. Far from the pallor of other faces, his was beet red. He’d beheaded one of the deaders and chopped its hands off. They’d had to pull him off another when it became apparent they were fighting a losing battle.

Drummond looked about to say something, thought better of it. Frank still wielded his dripping cutter and looked anxious to hack something.

Will held Frank’s gaze until he had the lad’s attention. “No coppers,” he agreed. He turned to Bill Drummond. “They’d never believe us. Throw us in the jug. We’ve got to warn ours.”

“I gotta go back and get Tim,” Frank Peck said. He gripped the haft of his eight-inch chopper as if daring anyone to try and stop him.

“We will. But we need more bodies and bigger knives.” Will looked at his own chopper, still seeing the deader advancing even as it trod its own guts. He turned to Chauncey. “Get the word out. Meet at”—he eyed the Drury Lane monkeys—“you know where. We’ll go back for Tim with an army. I got a feeling there’s more of them deaders coming.”

“What’s that smell?” One of the Drury Lane boys, potato-faced Alvin Pott, wrinkled his bulbous razzo.

Will had attributed the smell to the stink rising from their clothes and dripping from their knives. But the stench had gotten stronger. He looked around. Water was seeping through the plaster, trickling down the walls. Cracks appeared and the inundation increased, rivulets spilling onto the floor, reeking as only the Thames can when heavy rains flush the city’s sewers into its channels. The water spread over the flagstones, lapped against their shoes.

Harry Hodd, who stood nearest to the big window that separated the office from the work floor, said in a hushed voice, “We got company, Will.”

Coppers! was Will’s first thought. But when he looked out, his scrotum tightened and the hairs on his neck prickled as if a cold skeletal finger had touched him there.

Bloated shadow shapes emerged from the darkness. Grasping hands clawed the air. Pocked, fish-pale faces turned as one, as if they’d singled him out for attention. Several panes were missing from the window and Will heard the slop-slop of wet feet advancing. He gagged on the reek that billowed through the missing panes and rose from the seeping floor.

A sharp cracking sound startled him as the plaster split open behind him and water gushed from the wall as if the warehouse were submerged and the river was pouring in. Water ran over the tops of their shoes. The stench was unbearable.

Brandishing his blade, Frank Pike started for the door. Will put a hand on his arm.

“We gotta go,” Bill Drummond said.

The deaders were between them and the way they’d entered the warehouse on the quayside. Holding Frank back by sheer force, Will saw their numbers had increased. There appeared to be a dozen at least. They were outnumbered.

“Come on. I know another way,” he said and, shoving through the door, took off in the opposite direction. On the street side, there was a boarded-over section where someone had lifted a door. They’d smash their way out if they had to.

Water seeped up through the floor slabs. The virulent reek of shit and rotting weeds burned his nostrils. 

They almost made it.

A hand grabbed Will and spun him round, slammed him against the wall.

“Gotcha, you little shite!”

A bullseye lantern momentarily blinded him. The harsh aroma of cheap cheroot billowed into his face. The broad sneering countenance came into focus. Mutton chops. Hard eyes beneath a bowler.

Detective-Inspector Brice Lock, Lambeth Division. The Inspector had him by his shirtfront; his other hand squeezed his wrist, banged his knife hand against the bricks. He thought about wrestling his hand loose and using his knife on the copper, but only in passing. There were rules to the games they played with coppers. While it was rare sport to stuff a constable head-first down a manhole, you didn’t kill one or even stab him. Everybody got a good drubbing coming up on the streets; it toughened you up, taught you to give as well as take. But if killing a constable was crossing a line, killing a Detective-Inspector was a certain death warrant. He dropped his blade.

Lock had two uniformed police constables with him. Will knew them both. Dennis Foley, a few years his senior and from his neighborhood, was grudgingly respected. A former member of Lambeth Polytechnic Boxing Club, Foley was more than a match for any three of the local hoodlums. Foley and the Lambeth Walk Lads had a tacit agreement: so long as he didn’t catch them in the act, they would pass on opposite sides of the street.

The other copper, a lanky whippet with big feet and big hands, was a transfer from H Division. Will didn’t know his name but heard nothing good about him. Hailing from Whitehall, he thought he was tougher than Lambeth boys. That got him tossed through a plate-glass window and he’d been out of work three weeks. Since one shilling was docked from an officers’ pay for every day they were sick, the story fetched a rare smile from Will when it reached his ears.

Foley had Frank by the scruff. Will prayed Frank would drop his chopper. Foley twisted his wrist and the weapon skittered into the darkness. Whippet pursued the Lambeth Lads and Drury Lane monkeys, but being outnumbered he quickly returned.

“They got away,” he groused as if actually disappointed.

“Never mind. We’ve got the ringleader.” Lock leaned in close so his words burst moist in Will’s face. “We found your dead mate. You’re in for it now.”

“You’ll be in for it if we don’t all get out of here!” Will couldn’t resist leaning forward till he was nose to nose with the Inspector. Lock was taller so he stood on his toes.

Lock released Will’s shirtfront and raised his hand to backhand him, but Foley interrupted.

“Inspector, look!”

Lock followed the constable’s gaze.

To the Inspector’s credit, he didn’t flinch when he saw what was bearing down on him, but greeting the newcomers with snarling teeth, he drew his Webley Bulldog and fired into one misshapen face and then another. His third shot went wild as he was borne to the ground by two others, who fell upon him as more dropped to their knees and joined in the carnage.

Will’s blood ran cold. He saw what they were doing to the Inspector—they were eating him as they had Tim, stooping to bite his cheeks and arms, tearing his clothes, ripping bloody strips from his carcass and cramming them into their maws as if they were ravenous.

Will grabbed Frank’s arms, pulled him out of Foley’s grasp and ran. Whitechapel, armed only with truncheon and whistle, beat them to the open door. Foley tried to reach his superior, but Lock was surrounded. Hands ripped his clothes, teeth savaged his throat. Others attacked Foley. Nails raked his uniform. His truncheon cracked on wrists and hands and faces as he fought his way free.

Outside in the swirling fog, Whitechapel was nowhere in sight. Will and Frank ran in the cobblestone street past the warehouse’s long façade. Rapid footfalls came up behind them. Will shoved Frank ahead, growled, “Go!”

Frank glanced back. Will said, “It’s okay. Gather the troops.”

Frank sped off. Will hung back. Foley grabbed him from behind but didn’t stop. Tired of people pawing his shirt, Will slapped the hand away.

“What were those things?”

Any other time, Foley’s pallor would have put a smile on Will’s face, but Tim was dead. And Detective-Inspector Lock. The police would be seeking blood for an Inspector’s murder. No way they were going to believe a rookie or a gang member! Foley and Whitechapel would likely lose their jobs for not giving their lives for their superior—never mind that Lock was the one with the revolver.

“Deaders,” Will said, keeping stride with the taller constable.

“Dead—?”

“Not living, snuffed. They came out of the river.”

“That explains the water, the wet clothes, but dead?” He shook his head.

“For fuck’s sake, didn’t you smell them? And they keep coming. You can’t stop them.”

“The first one DI Lock shot in the head dropped.”

“Did it? That’s good to know. I didn’t stop to watch.”

Constable Foley stopped him. They were among houses now, still in the middle of the foggy, deserted street.

“You’ve got to come with me to the station,” Foley said. His normally confident voice cracked with uncertainty.

“Right, and swing for Lock’s murder!”

“I’ll vouch for you.”

“A hooligan’s gonna be a better fit for Lock’s death than deaders coming out of the river.”

Foley grabbed Will’s shirt as he started to leave. Will spun, planted his foot squarely between the rookie’s legs and, while Foley was doubled over, fled into the night.

***

With an entrance on one street and an exit on another, the public house made a convenient meeting place. The can—in his day an artful forger of snide coin and a former Wandsworth inmate, who, consequently, was no friend of John Law—for a small but steady enumeration, was the soul of discretion and sure to make a ruckus easily heard through the thin walls should said Law come nosing.

The tap was too soft to be made by any cocked-hatted Lambeth Lad. Will opened the door, glanced down the papered hall to the right and left to ascertain they were alone, then pulled her in.

Kate was tall as he. Which, as he was a little under average height and wiry—a natural for fanlight jumping and drainpipe climbing—made her a tad tall for a girl. Her yellow dress was out-of-season, more appropriate for a summer day than this fog-damp night; but it was her favorite color and matched wonderfully her straight blond hair. The blue sash around her slim waist, along with the blue shoes he’d filched for her, added a touch of razzle.

He no sooner closed the door than she was in his arms, or would have been if he’d not caught her and held her off.

“Don’t want to ruin your dress.”

She flashed him a worried smile, wrinkled her nose when she caught the whiff off his shirt, leaned in and kissed him anyway. She stood back, looked him over for damage.

“I’m all right.” He meant to sound annoyed—as he would be at anyone else rude enough to show concern over his well-being—but was secretly pleased with her attention.

“I heard about Tim. Is it true?”

Will returned to the two cane-back chairs—with a small bar table the only furniture in the room—sat. He nodded. “Tim’s dead.”

Even as he said it, he wondered if it were true—if Tim was truly dead.

Guts spilled and the creature still moving . . . heads lolling on the Embankment . . . chomping . . .

Kate lowered herself into the opposite chair, frowned. “You’ve ruined your shirt.”

“Not my blood,” he said.

Normally he would have delivered the line with a nonchalant indifference guaranteed to make a listener eager to hear the details of his latest caper—eager enough to stand him a round before the telling began. But the anger simmering behind his clenched teeth forced the words out in a growl.

Kate’s grey eyes were questioning. “Tim’s?”

He nodded.

“Tell me.”

He told her. Kate was tough. He didn’t sugar-coat the story. If the devil was coming for you, it was better to know he was coming and get ready to meet him straight on than have him sneak up on you unawares.

“And something else,” he said, pouring himself a whiskey. His hand was shaking. He forced himself to calm it.

“What?”

“Lock said ‘mate.’ Said he’d found our dead ‘mate.’”

“And?”

“We left three dead on the Embankment.”