Free The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) by Richard Estep

his fevered brow, “that’s an improvement.”
    The orderly who was assisting him looked aghast at the doctor’s sheer callousness. Caldwell paid him no mind. Campbell’s scream was loud, clear, and piercing, born in a place of almost indescribable agony. So far as the doctor was concerned, however, it meant only that he had an intact airway, and was moving a sufficient volume of air into his lungs that he could spare it on a verbal expression of that great pain. Air meant oxygen, and oxygen meant life.
    It was usually the quiet patients who caused him to worry.
    The doctor and his orderly were tending to their patient as best they could, given the circumstances: bouncing along in the back of an ox-drawn wagon flatbed, one whose rudimentary shock absorbers seemed to be several thousand miles past their prime.
    “Oh all right,” the doctor tutted, noting the look of discomfort still written across the orderly’s face. “Give him a bite strap, if you please. Carefully does it, now.”
    Caldwell trusted the orderly (a corporal who went by the name of Wedding) to keep his fingertips well clear of the man’s gnashing teeth as he worked the tough leather strap into his mouth. Campbell’s screams became grunts, his teeth clamping down on the bite strap for dear life. He was covered from head to toe in sweat, positively drenched in the stuff, Caldwell noted; the man’s skin was burning up underneath the palm of the doctor’s hand, and he wiped his hand absently against the linen of his dirty white shirt.
    By rights, he ought to be dead already.
    That Campbell had survived this long was nothing short of a miracle, Caldwell mused. He removed the ornate fob watch on a chain that he kept in his pocket and flipped the lid open. It was a beautiful timepiece, a gift from his father upon his graduation from university, and remained scrupulously accurate to this very day.
    A quarter past three. Remarkable.
    If the truth were told, Caldwell had expected the Scotsman to die on his table before lunchtime came around. His wounds were nothing short of horrific, inflicted by the claws and jaws of a supernatural feline beast early this morning, and the man had lost a considerable amount of blood. Reed was a surgeon of fine repute, and had sewn up the brutal gashes with his typical efficiency and expertise; the injuries had swollen and turned an angry red in color, their puckered mouths leaking a slow ooze of rancid yellow and green pus from between each set of stitches.
    The wounds were obviously infected; even a first-year medical student would have spotted that. Campbell was burning up, feverishly straining against the heavy leather straps buckled to his wrists and ankles. Coupled with the blood loss, Caldwell knew that the physiological insult to his patient’s system could end in only one way: defeat.
    A musket shot rang out from one of the native cavalrymen riding on the left flank. Caldwell glanced up in irritation. The defense of the British column seemed to be going well; things looked much less hopeless than they had at daybreak earlier that morning. Once the last vampire officer was in the ground (Major General Wellesley, leading from the front as he always did) a mortal captain named Rice had taken command. Receiving an order written by the General and delivered by an NCO, Rice had wasted no time in organizing a hasty defense – in this case, a loose infantry square some half a mile on each side – and then set about striking the camp in preparation for travel.
    Whenever smaller groups of the undead had come within musket range of the square, the closest two or three weapons had barked out, ending the threat quickly. Some clusters were larger, and those were dealt with by using that old stalwart, massed volley fire. The redcoats that formed the threatened stretch of line closed up until they were shoulder to shoulder, then on the count of three leveled their weapons and fired. The men on either side closed up ranks even