The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

soon rise again, its sole fixation being to feast on the flesh and blood of its former cam-mates.
    When the General had cast his die, riding to lead the fighting men of the army into battle against the Maratha position in what all saw to be a do-or-die gamble, the train had been left to fend for itself with little more than a handful of foot-soldiers remaining behind to guard it. For his part, Caldwell had elected to set up camp on the spot, barely half a mile away from the Kailna.
    It was a decision that he would soon come to regret.
    The results had been predictable: the once-sporadic undead attacks had intensified. It was as though the vile creatures could smell weakness and vulnerability. Perhaps they actually could, Caldwell thought to himself with a harsh snort born of both fatigue and despair. One would think that the creatures would be drawn to the sounds of cannon-fire and musketry that echoed across the surface of the water, he mused, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case at all. The monsters of nightmare would lumber upon the British field hospital out of the darkness, and had now succeeded in snatching away more than one of the terrified sentries, who then switched sides and joined the ranks of the damned, turning on their former comrades with a ferocity born of abject hunger.
    Once battle was well and truly joined, a fresh source of meat was added to the mix. The first of this new wave of walking corpses straggled back from the battle-front in ones and twos. Some splashed across the fords, whereas others simply plowed into the cold running waters and made their way along the bottom of the riverbed, emerging up to a quarter of a mile further downstream. It mattered not a jot, for the creatures always simply reoriented themselves, turning to stumble and drag themselves unerringly toward the British camp, now enticingly stripped bare of its defenders.
    Like the rest of his staff, Caldwell was running on a diet of hot tea and precious little sleep. He was no longer a young man, having not yet turned forty, but kept himself in decent fighting trim, and perhaps more importantly, eschewed the vile arrack with which so many Britons drowned their Indian sorrows. He had spent every waking moment that the army was not marching, working upon one of the three hissing, growling cadavers that were even now strapped to operating tables inside the large hospital tent, often pushing himself to stay awake until the noonday heat and sheer physical exhaustion contrived to make him snatch a few hours of precious, sweat-drenched sleep, laying on a cot in a shadowy corner of the tent. Even then, his dreams were demon-haunted and fitful, doubtless caused by the constant moans of his test subjects, who seemed to never, ever sleep themselves.
    With scalpel in hand, he had worked frenziedly on the creatures, dissecting skillfully and expertly with a speed that was born of desperation. For the sturdier portions of their anatomy, Reed had reached for a bone saw, or other equally heavy implement. The process was not pretty, not even when the hacking, chopping, and the back-and-forth sawing-up of the larger structures had given way to finer, more precise cuts; it had even turned the stomach of Caldwell’s orderlies, men who were proud of their strong stomachs, inured as they were after dealing with so many lopped-off limbs and other battlefield trauma.
    The first creature, known only as specimen one (the orderlies had wanted to give them all nicknames, but Caldwell had forbade it) had been saved until last, and Reed was currently hard at work on trying to uncover its secrets. After placing a heavy leather strap in its mouth and securing it tightly behind the thing’s head, in order to offer some protection against his being bitten, the doctor had incised the chest with a large Y-shaped cut, slicing the flesh from each clavicle toward the diaphragm in order to form both arms of the Y, and then bringing the edge of the blade down to