pride and prejudice and zombies:: dreadfull ever after

Part 35

CHAPTER 35 (AN ASIDE)

Mr. Anthony Isaac Crickett of 23 Crabtree Row, Bethnal Green, Two East, London, did not lead an especially noteworthy life. A miserable childhood in a Whitechapel workhouse was followed by an adulthood stoking furnaces at the Hackney Crematorium & Glue Factory that was (fortunately) slightly less miserable but (unfortunately) rather brief.

Not that Mr. Crickett died an especially noteworthy death. When cholera swept through Two East (as it already had through Twelve and Thirteen Central and half the Souths), he succumbed to it, at the age of twenty-five, no sooner than most of his rookery neighbors, yet no later than most as well.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of Mr. Crickett and whatever chance he ever had at leaving some kind of legacy. Not so in the Age of the Dreadfuls! Mr. Crickett had no family to see to his beheading after he hacked out his last breath in his tiny garret apartment. (Even if he had, that would have been no guarantee his corpse would have been properly attended to, for the cholera was mowing down entire families at once with one sweep of the scythe.) So the strange plague gave Mr. Crickett one last go at making his mark, and he seized the opportunity with both hands—and promptly tore it limb from limb. Anthony Isaac Crickett would finally be, for the first time in his quarter-century tenure on earth, something rather special.

No, he wasn't the first dreadful to discover that London's new sewers were as comfy-cozy as any mausoleum or cave or well or pit. He simply slithered in through an accommodating storm drain and made himself at home, as did scores of his fellow unmentionables. Nor was he the first to find, once a few pesky metal grates were broken through, that the sewer system made a most excellent thoroughfare, running, as it did, under all the walls and gates and watch towers of the stratified city above. It wasn't even he who first noticed that the Glow was flowing in great rivers through the streets to pool in a vast new ocean of light—of life—not far from where the sewers emptied: that venerable old cesspool known as the Thames.

In all these matters, Mr. Crickett was merely doing in death as he'd done in life. He mindlessly followed his fellows, going where they went, acting as they acted, eating as (and now whom) they ate.

Which was how he eventually came to be chasing the Archbishop of Canterbury up and down Abingdon Street with a half-eaten liver hanging from his mouth. Like all the unmentionables that had come streaming out of the sewers a few minutes before, Mr. Crickett was crazed with lustful hunger. Never had the Glow been so intense, so abundant, so free for the taking. All around was a veritable zombie smorgasbord, and all Mr. Crickett wanted to do was eat eat EAT!

The liver he'd plucked from the mangled corpse of a standard bearer, but the brains had already been dashed and eaten, and there was simply too much fresh meat still running around on two feet for him to think of settling down to savor his meal. So on he raced after the brightest lights—the scattering remnants of George III's recoronation procession and the multitudes gathered to watch it pass by.

Mr. Crickett settled on the Archbishop because he was an old man, moving slowly. But when the clergyman looked over his shoulder and saw that a zombie wished to pick him off the buffet tray, he yelped, threw off his heavy ceremonial robes, and immediately doubled his speed. The archbishop proved quite spry after that, weaving around abandoned sedan chairs and scepters and flags and swords of state too heavy with gold scrollwork and jewels to be of real use to anybody. He was wily quarry as well, trying to dissuade Mr. Crickett both by throwing things back at him (his Bible, his high-peaked mitre, his false teeth) and by drawing the dreadful close to possible distractions (this or that writhing body being ripped apart in the street, a flock of altar boys precariously perched in a walnut tree, et cetera.).