Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  “He’s already dying, friend,” I said.

  He ignored me.

  Filterhelms are pretty tough, but the worker was quite strong. After the second or third bash, we could hear the rivets start to come off.

  Phoebe gave a little squeak. “Stop him, please.”

  I sighed and stepped closer. “That’s enough, friend. He’s finished.” I pulled my filterhelm off to show him I wasn’t a hardhead. “Listen to me. We’re with the union. We’re friends. Leave that man alone and listen to me.”

  The worker kept smashing. The steel warped and the lenses started to crack and shatter. The hardhead was making horrible noises, but the worker didn’t seem to care. If anything, the sounds urged him into a greater frenzy.

  “Stop him, Mr. Schist!” Phoebe begged.

  I stepped closer and reached for the worker’s arm. A harsh chemical smell assaulted my nostrils, so pungent that my eyes watered.

  “What do you use for aftershave, formaldehyde?” I asked, covering my mouth and stepping away.

  There were shouts outside, but I hardly noticed. The Harrimen were forming up on the other side of the doors, but this bizarre worker worried me more than the detectives.

  He moaned. It didn’t sound like any language I’d heard. It was low and harsh, more like an animal than a man.

  “Do you speak English, friend? How about Gaelic?”

  He stood and started toward me.

  “Deutsch?” I asked weakly.

  “Mr. Schist?”

  “Not now, Phoebe,” I told her. “Let me explain things to the gentleman.”

  My mind reeled. What had Liutt done to these men? Were they on drugs? Maybe he’d found a way to chemically control his workers. I immediately thought of the British. The limeys had done some pretty dirty stuff in the Opium Wars. It made sense—dope your workers, make them pliant, make them calm. People who are pliant and calm don’t cause problems. They don’t form unions.

  “It’ll be okay, friend,” I told the drug-fiend. “We’ll fix you up.” MacCallard would love to hear about this. He would probably even pay a doctor to help these men. Catching a Magnate drugging his workers would be quite a coup.

  Phoebe started tugging frantically at my arm.

  I looked up in irritation and froze. The whole factory had stopped working. They were, every last one of them, staring at us.

  “Salutations,” I said loudly. “We’re from the union. Here to rescue you.”

  After a moment’s pause, they began stumbling toward the door.

  “We can’t go out this way,” I tried to explain. “Is there another exit?”

  They didn’t answer. They just shambled forward eagerly.

  The murderous scab with the funny neck started at me again. His arms were up as if he were trying to grasp me.

  “Hold on, buddy,” I said, ducking his hug. “A handshake is thanks enough.”

  When he got close to me, I could hear a hellish throbbing. A pulse like a dynamo emanated from his chest.

  Awful realization struck.

  “Something’s wrong with them!” I shouted. “They’re like Victor!”

  “You mean Dr. Liutt’s bodyguard?”

  “Yes!”

  That’s all Phoebe needed to hear. She raised the rifle, aimed, and shot the man point blank in the chest.

  He didn’t even flinch. The bullet passed through him like cheesecloth, spraying me with a fine mist. I looked down at my coat and saw by the weird light that it wasn’t blood. It was a thick black ichor, not unlike old engine grease.

  Suddenly, I knew why Victor had been wearing hardhead gear. It wasn’t because he worked for Harriman. It was to hide his identity, hide that he wasn’t human. At least not the type of human most people were used to.

  Phoebe fired again, this time at his head. Half his skull exploded, ejecting its contents in a dark cloud.

  Yet still he shambled at me, mouth agape, moaning like an idiot.

  My mind raced. The body is a machine, Lichfield told me. He was a Technocrat and a physician. I suddenly had an idea what he’d done.

  But he couldn’t have. It was impossible. It was unthinkable.

  “His knees,” I screamed. “Ya can’t walk without knees!”

  I awkwardly threw the filterhelm back over my head. The eye-pieces were askew, making me feel drunk, but I had no time to fix them.

  Phoebe lowered her aim and cracked off two shots.

  The knees of the man-thing vanished and he went face-first into the concrete but still didn’t stop. He tore at the ground, dragging his body forward, reaching for me even as his brains oozed over the side of his face.

  That’s when I heard what he was moaning.

  “Dead,” he gasped. “Dead, dead, dead...”

  Phoebe screamed.

  A large worker was on her. He grabbed her by her arms, trying to take the rifle away.

  We were surrounded. Dozens of workers reached for us with pale fingers.

  I flew at the man on Phoebe, swinging my baton wildly. Unlike Victor, this fellow didn’t have an armored greatcoat to protect his bones.

  I broke both his arms and wrenched Phoebe away.

  Soon as she was clear, she lowered the rifle and squeezed a shot into each kneecap. He collapsed drunkenly to the floor, but he kept coming.

  She looked at the one with half a skull. “What’s happening?”

  My detective’s mind summoned up Dr. Lichfield’s illicit laboratory in all its morbid detail. The tanks, the smell, the operating theater...

  “Their hearts!” I cried, thinking of the brass pump on the desk. “He replaced their hearts with something else...some kind of dynamo.”

  We backed away in revulsion. Our backs hit the door.

  They kept coming, as inexorable as a spreading fungus.

  “How’s that possible?” Phoebe asked.

  “It isn’t. It shouldn’t be.” I broke a reaching hand with my truncheon.

  Phoebe detonated a kneecap and my attacker fell to the ground, trying to grasp our ankles with his shattered hand.

  I turned and grabbed the doors. “Stay behind me.” At close range, the armor wouldn’t protect me much, but I could at least form a human shield for Phoebe.

  She ejected another cartridge and spun around. She didn’t say anything. She just nodded.

  The courtyard was full of hardheads—probably a dozen at least. However many there were, they were preferable to the factory workers.

  I crouched low, leveled my pistol, and threw the doors open.

  Chapter Twenty

  My .45 roared like a dragon. I didn’t bother aiming—Phoebe would kill enough for both of us—I distracted them by emptying my revolver in a wild barrage. She took them out with calm precision, one bullet per man.

  They returned fire, but we had surprised them. Nobody expects a pair of people to charge a dozen armed and armored men.

  Bullets cut the air around me, squelching audibly into the mass of bodies behind us. One glanced off my helmet. The sound was incredible—as if I’d dropped a frying pan inside my ear.

  Another hit my shoulder. It stung hard, like the mother of all yellow jackets, but I didn’t bleed and I could still use my arm.

  All at once, the shots stopped.

  “Saints above!” one of the detectives screamed. “The reanimants are loose!”

  There were other screams, screams of naked terror, and the men started running. />
  Phoebe and I looked at each other.

  Behind us, the entire factory shift was shambling into the dim light of the outside. Now that we could see them, now that we could really see them, our hearts stopped.

  Phoebe stared, smoking rifle in hand. “Dear...sweet...Jesus.”

  Dr. Lichfield, being a Technocrat, felt no need to beautify his insane creations. They were workers, plain and simple, so there was no attempt to make them lifelike at all. He had patched up their injuries and, where necessary, mixed and matched them from different corpses. Each of these tortured creatures was a hodgepodge of parts, a tattered mockery of the human body held together by stitches and rivets and black steel banding.

  Our momentary shock nearly got us killed. They were just steps away when I snapped out of my daze and turned to Phoebe.

  “Don’t look at them,” I ordered.

  She raised her rifle as if to shoot but I pulled her into a run. In my haste, I forgot about the marksmen. I dragged her bold as brass through the middle of the factory yard, not even sparing the rifles a glance.

  Lucky for us, the Harrimen had bigger problems.

  An alarm blared. It wasn’t a whistle this time, but a loud tinny thing, a mechanical noise-maker. It echoed over the rooftops like the roar of a landslide.

  The sound put me in mind of Gabriel and his trumpet. Lichfield was like a twisted version of an archangel, blasting his mechanical trumpet and resurrecting men to a terrible life which was no life at all.

  The Harrimen were barricading the gate from the outside, preparing for a battle with the things they called reanimants. The coachman in the topper—Stanislaus’s henchman—stood by the iron gates trying to get a look. He was bobbing his head like some weird bird.

  I didn’t dare go that way. The Harrimen wouldn’t take pity on us, given that we were the ones who released the monsters. And if Stanny were there, he didn’t know what pity was.

  We headed straight for the tower I had used before, the one which had raised the second alarm because of the dead men.

  The sharpshooter duo I had killed had been replaced by a fresh team. I could make out their profiles against the ruddy sky, four of them, crouched and waiting. Their attention was on the mob behind us, but I couldn’t expect them to ignore us once we were up the stairs and rubbing elbows with them.

  “Kill those men,” I told Phoebe calmly.

  She knelt into a firing pose and swung her rifle to bear.

  I turned and looked back at the mechano-corpses. There were dozens of them pouring out the factory doors, fanning into the courtyard.

  Liutt had replaced the entire night shift with them. That was hundreds of positions. Hundreds of corpses reanimated.

  The Harrimen began firing. They weren’t very clever with their bullets. Their preferred method was to put so much lead into a reanimant that it was weighed down and unable to move. They pumped an entire gun’s ammunition into them, reloaded, and repeated the futile exercise.

  For the first time in my life, I wished to God someone had a Gatling.

  A few of the reanimants spotted us. They slouched after us with gray faces contorted with fury. A reanimant’s shirt came open so I could see the line of steel staples keeping its ribcage closed.

  Phoebe was busy with the tower-guards, so I emptied the spent rounds from the big sixer and reached into my pockets for more. I figured it was better to reload than to bother trying the .22 or the derringer.

  The reanimants picked up speed, as if they were remembering how to run now that they weren’t crowded together on a factory floor.

  My vision was impaired by the helmet and my fingers were awkward in the reinforced gloves. I fumbled with the cartridges. They drummed the toe of my shoe like rain, scattering in the snow.

  I ripped the glove off my hand, got six more, and reloaded. The joints screamed in cold-wrought agony and I realized that I had ungloved my bad hand. I ignored the pain and this time, I didn’t drop a single one. I had three shells loaded when I heard it, that damned pulse.

  A rail-thin reanimant was on me. The whites of his eyes had gone yellow and his stomach was completely flat, like he had no guts at all. His grease-blackened fingers were almost around my neck.

  I slapped the cylinder into place and fired point-blank into the bottom of his chin. The shot wrecked his face, which meant he couldn’t see, so I easily dodged his next embrace.

  I calmly tripped him and fired my last two shots into the next pair.

  “Tower’s clear,” Phoebe reported. She gasped and began firing at the crowd behind us.

  I grabbed her by the elbow and ran.

  At the base of the stairs, I made her go up first as I loaded the other three shots in my hand. There was no door to close behind us. We started the ascent knowing they’d be on us in seconds.

  From the top we saw a crowd of reanimants surrounding our tower. Their bloodshot eyes stared upward, unblinking. Now that we were above them, we could make out copper tanks connected to their backs.

  “Try those,” I told her, pointing to one.

  Phoebe punctured one of the tanks but the reanimate kept coming. The rifle shot produced only a small green trickle from the metal canister.

  They reached the stairs and started filing in.

  Tucking the pistol in my belt, I grabbed the nearest hardhead corpse and, with a grunt and a push, dumped him down the stairwell. I sent the other corpses after him—six in all—to form a grisly barricade. I pulled off my filterhelm and tossed it down for good measure.

  The air was rank and oily, but it felt good, like I’d emerged from a prison cell into freedom. My eyes adjusted as if I had suddenly rediscovered sobriety.

  Without my helmet, I could hear gunshots all around the compound, so many that they bled together into an ocean of gunpowder. I chanced a look at the front gate and saw that the reanimants were on it. The hardhead scatterguns bellowed clouds of flechette and buckshot into the mob, but it only slowed them.

  I remembered the crawling man Phoebe shot through the head. Dead, he had moaned. Dead, dead, dead...

  “They know,” I whispered. “They know what was done to them.”

  I’d seen angry before. One time in Newark I saw a big Irishman so drunk with rage that he broke up a table like kindling and beat a man to death with it. He was so hell-bent on killing this poor bastard that even after three pistol-shots in the back he kept swinging that table leg.

  The reanimants were like that, only worse. It was as if their anger was all they had, like their rage was an endless boiler. They didn’t feel pain or satisfaction, even after they’d killed a man. They felt only hunger, a deep starving hunger to punish the living. When one human died, they moved on to the next one.

  The steel gates worked better than guns, a testament to Mr. Carnegie and his mills. Not even the reckless strength of the dead could break them. So long as the gates held, the reanimants were trapped.

  “How many are there?” Phoebe asked as she paused to reload. Her voice was louder now that I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Her fingers shook badly, but to her credit, not a single casing missed the breech.

  “Too many,” I answered.

  Abominations were gushing out the factory doors. What’s worse, some of them had gone over and started ripping the chains off other wings of the factory.

  It was unnerving to see that kind of forethought. Their rage may have been endless and unfeeling, but it was also calculated. The first ones out were going to let th
e rest loose.

  If they could think enough to open the other doors, how long would it take them to find a way through Carnegie’s fine gates?

  They would pour over Liutt’s town in a wave of putrid revenge.

  “Time to go,” I said, taking the overcoat off Phoebe’s shoulders.

  I flung it into the street outside the factory and knelt by her ankles. Before she could object, I grabbed her heavy skirt by the hem, cinched it up, and tied it off at her waist with my belt. Goose pimples appeared like magic beneath the ruffled bottom of her chemise.

  “Mr. Schist!” she gasped, trying to use the first thing at hand—a rifle—to hide her modesty.

  The image would’ve been funny, except the groans were getting louder. My corpse-barricade shifted audibly. Pale hands with cold, black fingers poked through. The mad pulse of their dynamo hearts throbbed through the floor.

  “No time for modesty,” I said, pushing her toward the wall.

  Phoebe hesitated. “You want me to run across there like a tart? For every living soul to see?”

  “They’re not technically living,” I pointed out.

  She gave me a withering look.

  I snatched my billycock off her head and put it back on mine. “Go!”

  One of the barricade-corpses tumbled loose. A reanimant lurched up into the tower. It reached for us, moaning and gasping.

  Without another word, Phoebe dashed squirrellike along the wall, rifle held sideways for balance.

  I turned and put two in the reanimant’s face. It didn’t stop his advance, but without any eyes or nose, he had no way to find us. He shambled around, groping the air blindly. When his back was to me, I kicked him hard over the edge. The fall didn’t kill him exactly—but it made moving impossible. He just wiggled his limbs and moaned at the other reanimants.

  Phoebe reached the place I had leaped across.

  “Jump there,” I yelled, pointing at the tenement building. Either she heard me or she anticipated this. The sprightly chit paused, shouldered her rifle, and made the leap. For one heart-stopping moment, I didn’t think she’d make it. She was short, after all, and fit though she was, her little legs could only jump so far.