Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  He had a small pair of scissors next to my eyeball.

  “Calm down, Mr. Schist.” His attention was on the side of my face. “You collect the most interesting wounds.”

  “Glad to amuse you.”

  “Perhaps I should offer my services to a detective agency,” he said, smiling. He pulled back a thread and deftly cut it with his shiny silver scissors.

  “I’m surprised you came back...to the hospital,” I said cautiously.

  “I stepped out for a bit, but no one’s come calling for me, so I returned.”

  I looked over at Phoebe. A row of tidy stitches closed the gash on her neck. Luckily, it was in the shadow of her chin. No one would notice the scar except under close inspection. Her wrist was bandaged as well. Given how deep the laceration was, I assumed there were stitches under there, too.

  The nurses had removed her filthy factory uniform and put on a simple white recovery gown, similar to a chemise. The soot and ash was gone from her skin and her brown hair lay in curls around her face.

  It was a shock to see her like that, a stark reminder of how young and small she was.

  “You helped us,” I said, looking back at the doctor.

  “‘I will keep them from harm and injustice,’” the doctor quoted. It was the old oath, the one by Hippocrates. Many doctors preferred Maimonides these days. I might’ve asked him if he were a traditionalist, except that I wanted to kill him.

  “Keep them from harm?” I asked, mindful of his scissors and my relative weakness. “Doctor...you’ve done nothing but harm. And your town is nothing but injustice.”

  A nurse hovered at his elbow. She glanced back and forth between us, as if the physician were dealing with a madman.

  In a way, he was.

  “Fetch some clean dressing,” he ordered crisply.

  The nurse hesitated but did as she was told. I saw her whisper something to the orderly by the door. He narrowed his eyes at me.

  I noticed then that they had absconded with the Krag-Petersson and my revolver. After a quick search, I found the weapons on a nearby bed. Someone had taken the time to unload them.

  Dr. Lichfield casually removed the blood-tube from Phoebe. To my mingled shock and horror, he put it in his arm. He sat down beside me, reversed the switches, and began pumping blood into my body, blood out of his own veins.

  “None of it makes any sense.” I closed my eyes. “Why?”

  “Why what, Mr. Schist? Why help you after trying to kill you? That’s just it—I tried to kill you. I failed. I don’t harbor bad feelings just because you had the audacity to survive.” He touched the cut on his cheek where Phoebe had grazed him. “My wound doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. You are no longer a threat. You released the information and did your damage. What would killing you now achieve?”

  I blinked. “Nothing, I suppose.”

  “Precisely. Besides, your little spying may have helped. Your infiltration put pressure on MacCallard to do something. The news that I was experimenting on corpses incensed them.”

  “It should have!”

  “Bah. A typical Luddite reaction. What is a body but another machine? We strip parts from a broken furnace. Why not from a cadaver?”

  “But you aren’t just switching parts out. You’re enslaving people’s afterlife.”

  “Afterlife? What a curious notion.”

  “Have you seen your reanimants? They’re not happy.”

  “Who is, Mr. Schist? Are you? Am I? This society is, I am sad to say, founded on misery.”

  I wanted to tell him how sick he was, but I held back. His blood—loathsome though it was—poured into my veins, saving my life.

  I could contain my disgust, but not my curiosity. “This wasn’t just about the bodies, though, was it?”

  “No. I could’ve done my experiments anywhere.”

  “So you knew who MacCallard was—you knew this place was a powder keg.”

  He wore a coy smile beneath his finely-trimmed beard.

  “You wanted the union to revolt! Why, so you could get more bodies?”

  “Oh, what a droll thought. Ask yourself something, Mr. Schist—is there a shortage of bodies...in a mining town?”

  “Then what were you after?”

  “What’s my stock in trade?”

  I considered him for a moment. “Science.”

  “Wrong. Science is a means to an end, a tool just like any other.”

  I thought it over for a minute. “Data. Information. To quote Bacon, ‘Knowledge is power.’”

  His eyes gleamed.

  “So you’re here for some kind of information? What data could be so important that it justifies the pain you’ve caused?”

  “The most important data of all. Human behavior. How much stress can a group take? Where is the balance between worker contentment and productivity? What backgrounds create leaders under these circumstances? Which workers are more likely to remain loyal?”

  “This was an experiment?”

  “Why do you act surprised? Life itself is an experiment. We all make hypotheses. The only difference this time is we had greater control over the variables.”

  His use of the plural we was telling. Small wonder the bastard was so cavalier about the place. It wasn’t even his money at play. He had investors. Which of the Magnates would support this kind of thing? What if they all did? They all had something to gain here. Last time I found a conspiracy of this magnitude, I’d gone to one particularly powerful robber baron and turned him on the weaker one.

  Who could I go to now?

  Lichfield was oblivious to my suspicions. “You’re looking at this all wrong, Mr. Schist. You think I’ve been using these men like pawns on a chessboard, killing them for my amusement. As with a minie ball wound, sometimes a surgeon must cut a patient to heal him. The information I’m collecting here will make society run better, more efficiently, which is better for everyone.”

  “Government isn’t a machine. People don’t follow theoretical laws. Minds aren’t particles of matter.”

  “Let me ask you a question. You’ve read Mill, I assume?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He smiled triumphantly. “Splendid. It’s so nice to debate with a gentleman who reads philosophy. You know we can predict behavior. It’s an emerging field. One day, savants will study the human soul with the same precision as mathematics.”

  It was a tempting idea, but on the other hand, John Stuart Mill’s theories—like Tocqueville’s—could only give a rough idea of the future. They didn’t predict historical events with any certainty at all. Even when they did, as Tocqueville warned us about the Southern Secession, they offered no solution.

  “Hide behind consequentialism all you like. You set the Harrimen on those people like dogs. You let them bring in a Gatling and then took the leash off.”

  “It wasn’t I who cried havoc,” he demurred.

  “No, but you put men in a position to.”

  He shrugged. “So your counterargument is what? That I made them fight? Isn’t that rather fatalistic? Aren’t you attributing godlike powers to me? The union made a choice to buy those guns. The Hounds made a choice to shoot them in the square, provoking them.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling. The bastard was enjoying himself. “Let me posit a thought experiment. Suppose you invented a device that allows time travel and you journey to eleventh century Jerusalem. When the crusaders com
e, do you warn the defenders that the Europeans are going to mercilessly slaughter them all or do you quietly watch? What would happen if you did warn them?”

  “Now you’re the one arguing fatalism.”

  “On the contrary. I’m arguing that events be allowed to unfold according to the will of the participants. As that happens, you study the factors which cause a player to behave a certain way in hopes that you may encourage better results from future players.”

  The hubris made my jaw drop. “But you’re a player. You can’t divorce yourself from this. You are a participant, doctor, whether you admit it or not.”

  He was about to respond when the timer on the machine rang. “That should hold you, Mr. Schist.” He unhooked us.

  I wasn’t sure what to say so I grunted my thanks.

  He nodded graciously. The physician patched himself up and stood. “I must talk to you, for a moment, as doctor to patient.”

  I shifted uneasily. The statement made me feel oddly childlike.

  “I noticed that a supply of my exultatium has gone missing.”

  “The what?” I asked innocently.

  “Come now, Mr. Schist. I know your knowledge of Latin is sufficient to puzzle out the meaning. It refers, as you have undoubted surmised, to the blue liquid you’ve been injecting yourself with.”

  “Has it made me into some kind of fiend?”

  “You’ve had a busy time here. I think your use has been judicious, if a bit high. I can’t recommend more than one dose a day, though. Anything else and your heart may not take it.”

  I clutched my chest uncomfortably and thought of all the ampoules I’d dumped into my veins.

  “Barring an overdose, you should recover nicely. Your breathing and heartbeat are irregular, but if you get away from all this smoke you’ll be fine. I assume that was your plan anyway.”

  “It was.” I eyed him cautiously. “You’re just going to let me leave? Aren’t you worried I’ll tell the papers about you?”

  He smiled. “You aren’t suggesting blackmail, are you, Mr. Schist?”

  I lapsed into silence.

  “You won’t get a penny. Go and tell them. They might even listen. It was you, wasn’t it, who brought down James Cabot?”

  “Yeah.” I was hardly proud of it. I’d uncovered something ugly, all right, but the client died in the process, I had to kill a war buddy, and my hand got mangled. Worst of all, the stressful events somehow made me decide to stay with my wife instead of running to California.

  “So they might just believe you,” he allowed. “What then? You don’t think I’m ready for their ire?” He went to the window. “I may be a villain today, but one day I’ll be revered like a saint. There are those who appreciate what I do, those who will shield me from the myopic troglodytes out there.”

  I looked across at the rifle. It wasn’t far. Now that I wasn’t hooked up to the CCS, I could get it. But what would I do with it? Paint the walls with Lichfield’s oversized brain? I wasn’t a vigilante. I was a detective. Assassination wasn’t on my list of services. Even if it was, there wasn’t anyone lining up to pay me for this one.

  There was also the awkward matter of him saving Phoebe’s life.

  Lichfield suddenly went stiff.

  I stood up and felt a wave of nausea and exhaustion hit me, making me wonder if his blood was tainted after all.

  “I don’t feel so good, doc,” I said, holding my head.

  “It’ll pass,” he said absently. “Though I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He turned. “The reanimants. Someone let them loose.” For the first time since I’d met him, the cold-hearted physician looked uncertain.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  I ran to the window. The reanimants were coming out of the town and marching up the hill like a swarm of ants at a picnic. They were instantly recognizable by their slouching, inhuman gait. The unionists and hardheads were nowhere to be seen.

  “They remember the hospital,” I whispered. “They’re coming to make you pay, doctor!”

  Lichfield’s skin went pale, matching his immaculate vest. “Good bye, Mr. Schist. And good luck.” He inclined his head and started away.

  “Wait,” I said, forgetting my disgust and anger with him. “Let us come with you.”

  He went behind a screen and vanished. When I came around the corner, I found an empty bed and nothing else. A secret door. The facility was probably riddled with them, like wormy cheese. There was no time to search, though. I screamed for the nurses and ran back to Phoebe.

  When I reached her, she was sitting bolt upright. She could hear them now, even though they were hundreds of yards away. We all could. There were so many reanimants that the ground reverberated with their strange mechanical pulse.

  She jumped out of the bed and ran to the rifle, swooning a little. “How many shots we got?”

  I steadied her with one hand and pulled the box of cartridges out of my trousers with the other.

  “We’ll need every one of ‘em.”

  “We could go out the back way but they’d run us down. I don’t think they get fatigued like us. Not with their mechano-hearts.”

  “So we go upstairs,” she said. “We’ll barricade ourselves in and fight ’em off.”

  I shook my head. “That sounds a little too much like Thermopylae.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of the Alamo...”

  “Thermopylae, Alamo, or fucking Troy, I’ll pass. Not when we’ve got something that can outrun even a dynamo heart.”

  “Stanny’s carriage!” she squeaked happily.

  We jogged through the recovery ward and into the lobby. Several nurses and the orderly were standing by the window, staring into the dark night with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity.

  “Follow us,” I told them. “If you want to live.”

  The veteran-orderly didn’t have to be told twice. A pair of nurses fell in as well, but the others just stared.

  Phoebe paused to convince the others but I dragged her away mercilessly.

  “I won’t turn down someone who asks,” I told her. “But I’m not making anybody come. The less weight the better.”

  We left those nurses and more besides. We left behind a whole ward of injured people. The cold fact was we didn’t have room for everyone. This was the Magnocracy, though. No one could really expect benevolence anyway.

  The steam carriage was on the steps where I left it. The light from the hospital lamps flashed off the inhuman eyes of the reanimant horde stumbling and groaning in the darkness toward us. A few quick reanimants were at the edge of the lawn already.

  The gauges were cold. We weren’t going anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “We gotta get her steam up,” I said, running to the back.

  One nurse was dumbstruck by the reanimants. She froze on the steps and watched the horde of mismatched body parts shamble toward us. The orderly and the other nurse, however, appeared to be no strangers to battle. Their combat reflexes—or maybe good sense—took over. The sharp nurse led the dull one into the carriage while the orderly turned to help me. We stoked the coals and were rewarded with a red glow. Deep in the belly of the furnace, embers were still burning. Unfortunately, it wasn’t warm enough to get the tank boiling.

  Phoebe knew what she had to do without being asked. Despite the fact she was wearing little more than a ch
emise, she stood up straight, took a deep breath, and began aiming with the Krag-Petersson. Her rifle boomed as my fellow veteran and I pushed coal into the boiler by the handful.

  When the furnace was full to bursting, we stopped. The glow was spreading. I put the back of my hand on the fat brass belly of the boiler and snapped it away with a shout.

  “It’s hot,” I announced.

  The gauges didn’t move though.

  “Phoebe,” I called. “Up there.” I pointed topside.

  There were more reanimants in the lamplight now, too many to count. The crowd was thickening.

  The girl calmly walked back to me, firing round after round into the horde. She didn’t bother for vital organs. They could probably operate for minutes, perhaps even hours, without them. Instead she crippled them, like we’d learned in the factory. They didn’t seem to feel pain, but legs don’t operate without kneecaps, so it was the most effective tactic we had.

  The rifle was smoking and empty when she reached me. I gave her the .45, made a cradle with my hands, and hoisted her onto the carriage top. She kept plugging the reanimants in midair. I’d never seen anyone make a shot like that—man or woman.

  Once she was up top, I leaped beside her. The orderly jumped inside the coach with the nurses.

  Phoebe reloaded the rifle while I reloaded the revolver. They were getting closer, swarming our carriage like a school of hungry fish in a pond.

  “Not as nice as your twenty-two,” Phoebe said, nodding her head at the bogus Colt. “The action’s rough and she pulls a little to the left.”

  I recalled several missed shots—including Stanny—with a pang.

  “What do you expect? They’re using subpar ammunition.”

  She clucked her tongue reprovingly and started shooting. When the rifle was done, I handed her the revolver. I carefully reloaded the rifle while she emptied the sixer, then we switched again. I didn’t fire a single shot after that. I just sat there and reloaded her guns as fast as she could empty them. I was like a squire with a gun-toting knight. Only knights were never this petite.