By the Blood of Heroes

by Joseph Nassise

  It was only a few minutes’ walk from the entrance of the hospital to the bunker complex that Professor Graves had commandeered for use as his laboratory. The complex had started life as a deep dugout that served as protection for artillery and mortar attacks, and over the last several months had been expanded into a literal warren of passageways and rough-hewn chambers in which to test Graves’s various projects. Burke had never been beyond the main chamber; he had no desire to venture into the dark depths of that underground kingdom. Dealing with the professor himself was creepy enough sometimes; he didn’t want to see what peculiarities the man had generated down there in the dark.

  Apparently, the same held true for Charlie. As the two men approached the entrance to the “facility,” sandwiched as it was between piles of sandbags, the sergeant slowed, then said, “You all right from here?”

  Burke cast a glance in his direction. “Aren’t you going in with me?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Coward.”

  Charlie laughed. “I like to think of it as the better part of valor. I’ll be waiting right here for you when you come out,” he said, settling back against a pile of sandbags and reaching for his cigarettes.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime, Captain, anytime.”

  Entrance to the bunker was gained through a cast-iron door several inches thick. It was currently propped open with a packing crate to allow some fresh air to make its way inside. Two guards stood outside it and they nodded at Burke as he passed by. Just beyond the doors was a long flight of stairs, nineteen steps in all, which led down into the complex itself. Burke took his time on the stairs, not wanting to slip and fall with only one hand to brace himself.

  As far as Burke had been able to ascertain, the professor had only two interests in life: mechanical devices and shamblers. While one was certainly better than the other, as far as Burke was concerned neither of them was all that natural.

  Or healthy.

  Graves was one of Nikola Tesla’s prize students, so it made sense that he spent a good part of his time with his hands in the guts of a mechanical apparatus of one kind or another, be it the steam-driven lorries that they used around the base or the partially assembled automatons that the army was forever hoping might one day replace men on the battlefield. Success in the latter case would mean lessening the horrible cost of this war in terms of human lives and would have the added benefit of preventing the other side from resurrecting the Allied dead with their damned corpse gas.

  Graves was obsessed with the shamblers.

  It wasn’t that he was just doing his best for the war effort. It went beyond that, into what Burke suspected was downright admiration for the foul things. All you had to do was see how excited Graves got when he was able to obtain another specimen to recognize that it was more than just simple duty.

  He could often be found walking the trenches after an attack, studying the carcasses where they lay and collecting specimens to take back to his laboratory for later study.

  Sometimes, Burke found himself wondering what Graves would do if all the specimens he hoarded down here in the dark suddenly decided to get up again and start walking around . . .

  He shook his head vigorously, banishing the thought. He didn’t need to focus on that stuff; he was here for his new hand.

  The room at the bottom of the staircase was as long as it was wide, lit by several bare lightbulbs that hung down from the low ceiling above and cast shadows throughout the space.

  The bitter smell of formaldehyde drifted through the air, most likely the reason for the open door above, and Burke followed it to where he saw a man’s body stretched out on a table set all by itself in the center of the room.

  As he drew closer, he could see that the body was in fact the decaying remains of a shambler, and it looked like someone had been operating on it. The chest was cut open, and the sides were peeled back and now held in place by a set of brass clamps that were stained with the creature’s black blood. The rib cage had been removed and rested on one side of the table. An unintentional glimpse inside the body cavity showed that what was left of the creature’s internal organs gleamed wetly in the stark light of the overhead bulb. Even the head seemed oddly shaped to Burke, and it wasn’t until he’d walked partially around the table and gotten a good look that he realized the top of the skull had been cut off and the brain removed for God-knows-what purpose.

  Burke glanced at the shambler’s face and was surprised to discover that he recognized it. It was the creature that had attacked him in the trench the day before, the one that had seemed to think for itself and that Charlie had ultimately been forced to shoot with the suitcase gun.

  What was Graves doing with it?

  Burke wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  The hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood up as he realized that he was no longer alone.

  Burked whirled about.

  A tall thin man with a hawklike face stood almost directly behind him. He was dressed in a butcher’s apron, stained black with shambler blood, and wore a pair of thick rubber gloves on his hands. In his hands was a shallow metal dish full of some gray gooey mass that looked oddly familiar to Burke, though he couldn’t place exactly what it was until he glanced back at the creature’s empty brain pan and made the necessary connection.

  “Be with you in a moment, Captain,” the professor said as he stepped past the other man and set the bowl he was carrying down on the table in front of them. As Burke looked on, the professor picked up an empty jar from a stack nearby and then carefully poured the jellied mass of brain tissue from the bowl into the jar.

  Burke had to look away.

  When he heard Graves strip off his rubber gloves, he chanced a quick look. The table and the corpse it contained were now covered with a large black sheet. The professor untied and removed the butcher’s apron he was wearing, then wiped his hands on a rag he picked up from somewhere nearby.

  Then, and only then, did he turn back to address Burke.

  “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  Burke held up his left arm stump and wiggled it in the professor’s direction.

  “Ah, yes! Time to fit that new hand of yours. How could I have forgotten?”

  I refuse to answer that, Burke thought.

  “All right, follow me, please.”

  Graves stepped around the dissection table and led him across the room to where an open door awaited. Inside was a small operating theater, complete with banks of overhead lights, a rack full of surgical instruments, a good supply of bandages, and even a small sink. A reclining leather chair, like you might see in a barber’s shop or dentist’s office, sat in the middle.

  Graves stepped over to the sink and scrubbed the shambler blood off his hands. “Climb up in the chair, Captain,” he said, as he dried them on a towel, “while I retrieve your new prosthesis from storage.”

  Burke slid into the chair and settled back, letting his neck and head relax against the cushion. There was a quiet whirring sound followed by a rustle of movement, and something cinched itself around his stomach.

  Burke looked down and found a thick leather strap with a metal buckle had just fastened itself around his midsection.

  “Hey!” he said, surprised, and was answered when four more straps emerged from the sides of the chair and fastened themselves around his thighs and ankles respectively.

  This time Burke was much more emphatic in his response.

  “Professor Graves!” he shouted. “Professor!”

  Footsteps sounded and Graves emerged from around the corner carrying a long and narrow wooden crate.

  “Yes, yes, what is it, Captain?”

  “These straps . . .”

  Graves chuckled. “I’m sorry, I forgot to warn you about those. The arm we’re giving you this time around is a considerable improvement over the earlier model,” he said, as he unfolded a side table the same height as the chair and rested Burke’s arm on it so that the stump e
xtended off one end. Taking a couple of thin leather straps out of his pocket, Graves secured what remained of Blake’s arm to the table.

  “In order for it to work at the level for which we designed it for you, we’re going to have to implant a kind of platform at the end of your arm in order to power and maintain the prosthesis long term.”

  Burke only caught one word, really.

  “Implant?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes. No worries, Captain, I’ve done this procedure hundreds of times now.”

  Something about the way he said it made Burke pause. He hesitated and then asked, “How many of those were on a living person?”

  Graves laughed but didn’t answer.

  Burke began to have second thoughts.

  “Maybe we should wait until Doctor Tesla returns . . . ?”

  “Nonsense! You don’t want to go two months without a hand, do you?”

  Two months?

  Finally satisfied with the arrangements, Graves opened up the box that he’d carried in with him. Inside, on a bed of satin, was Burke’s new hand.

  It came in two pieces; a small baselike attachment that would be attached to his stump and the fully articulated wrist/hand piece that fitted into it. Both pieces had been fashioned out of highly polished wood, brass, and steel. The fingers had three knuckles and only bent in one direction, just like real ones did, and judging by the cables and clockwork components running throughout, it certainly looked much stronger than his previous model had been.

  Satisfied that Burke had seen enough, Graves put down the box and removed the base mount. “The first step is to mount this device onto your arm where it can intersect with the existing musculature.

  “When the rest of the hand is slotted into place,” he continued, picking up the hand and doing just that by pushing one into the other until Burke heard a sharp click, “the electrical impulses produced by your muscle will activate the miniature clockwork gears inside each finger, telling them what to do.”

  Graves smiled. “Nothing to it, really.”

  Before Burke could say anything more, Graves picked up a bottle of ether, poured some on a cloth, and held the cloth tightly over Burke’s nose and mouth.

  For a second his eyes grew wide as he saw Graves looming over him, and then he was out like a light.

  As Burke stumbled into wakefulness two hours later, he instinctively felt for his hand and encountered the smooth, metal surface of the new implant. It was heavier than he was used to, but he knew he’d adapt to that soon enough. Right now he just wanted to be sure it worked.

  He held it up in front of him and then tried to bend his fingers. To his amazement, all five of them slowly bent inward toward his palm and then opened back up again when he tried to move them the other way. He could feel the muscles in his upper forearm moving as they powered the motion of his mechanical fingers, and he knew he was going to have to do some work in the days ahead to build up some strength in that area.

  “How are you doing, Captain?”

  Burke jerked in surprise, which caused his hand to snap shut with an audible click, and it was only then that he realized how much power he could generate with his new prosthesis. Who knew? One day he might even need all that strength.

  Graves waited patiently for Burke to get his hand to unclench and then began to unstrap him from the chair. “Any dizziness? Nausea? Pain in the extremity?”

  There wasn’t. Nor were there any lingering effects from the ether. Graves gave him a quick check and then suggested he head back to his hospital room for some more rest, a suggestion Burke was more than happy to take him up on. He was anxious to show Charlie his new hand.

  Chapter Nine

  FIELD HOSPITAL

  When Burke returned from having his hand repaired in Graves’s chamber of horrors, he found he had a visitor. An officer was waiting for him by the side of his bed, cap and clipboard in hand. His uniform was crisp and clean, with creases ironed so sharp as to be dangerous. The shoes on his feet were buffed to a glistening shine, which let Burke know that time at the front was not part of the man’s regular duty. The silver eagle on either shoulder board told Burke he was outranked.

  Despite his weariness, Burke snapped up a salute. It wasn’t something they usually did on the front lines, for calling attention to an officer was as good as painting a sniper’s target across the man’s forehead, but they were a bit more “spit-and-polish” back in the rear; given the colonel’s personal appearance, Burke figured the man would be a stickler for protocol.

  “What can I do for you, Colonel?” he asked politely, after the other man had waved the salute away.

  His visitor stuck out his hand. “Colonel Nichols, MID.”

  Burke’s eyebrows went up in surprise. The Military Intelligence Division was a newly formed group within the aegis of the War Department in Washington. It was run by Brigadier General Morrissey, a man who was not afraid to get out and see what life in the trenches was actually like, as evidenced by the Distinguished Service Cross he’d won at Apremont for personally leading a charge against a German machine-gun nest while visiting there. MID’s job was to learn as much as they could about the enemy’s plans and then disrupt them as quickly and efficiently as possible. They’d been operating primarily on the Western and Italian Fronts to date, but even if only half of what Burke had heard about them was true, they were a formidable unit indeed.

  Suddenly he was having a hard time reconciling this perfectly uniformed officer with his previously conceived notions of what a visitor from MID should look like.

  Nichols didn’t seem to notice Burke’s confusion. “If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to speak to you about the action you were involved in the other morning.”

  Burke glanced longingly at his nearby bed, wondering what kind of hell he’d catch if he sat down in the colonel’s presence without permission, and then decided he really didn’t care and did it anyway. He was a patient, after all. What were they going to do? Send him back to the front? They’d already ordered him to return there as soon as he was fit to do so.

  “What do you want to know?” Burke asked.

  The colonel raised an eyebrow at his departure from protocol, but didn’t pursue the issue. “Your report mentioned an encounter with a shambler that was acting strangely . . .” he said, letting the question hang in the air.

  Burke nodded. “That’s right.”

  “How so? What made it different?”

  “It was aware, for one.”

  “Aware?”

  Burke laughed, but there wasn’t anything even remotely amused in his tone when he said, “The bloody thing changed direction when the block was deployed to protect the communications trench, Colonel. Instead of continuing forward, it made the decision to turn around.”

  Nichols frowned, which let Burke know the colonel understood the implications of his statement, but the conclusion was one the colonel apparently wasn’t yet ready to accept and he tried to explain it away. “Perhaps it was turned about accidentally when it came in contact with the trench block?” he suggested, an almost hopeful tone to his voice.

  Burke would have loved to believe that too, but he’d seen the thing with his own eyes. “It stopped and turned around long before that, Colonel. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I could practically see the wheels turning in its head as it worked to figure a way out of the mess it found itself in. It wasn’t just instinct; it knew it was trapped and it wanted out!”

  Nichols’s expression grew more alarmed as he considered what Burke was saying. Burke had stood his ground in the face of more shambler attacks than he could count, and not once had he seen them act with anything resembling intelligent action. Once pointed at the Allied lines, they would simply shuffle forward. There might be a clear path through the barbed wire five feet to a shambler’s left and the stupid thing would walk straight ahead, getting tangled in the wire.

  Not only had this rotting sonofabitch sprinted out of the tunneling machine and headed straigh
t for the rear, but it had recognized the trench block as a threat to its mission and had headed for the opposite side when the passage to the left was no longer an option.

  Shamblers just don’t do that, he thought, his own statement from moments before echoing in his head. But that wasn’t all.

  “It didn’t move like any shambler I’ve ever seen, either. Shamblers can’t move at anything faster than an unsteady shuffle. That’s how they got their name, right? This thing was different. It came out of that tunneling machine like an Olympic runner right out of the blocks.”

  Despite the fact that the creature had once been a living, breathing soldier, Burke couldn’t bring himself to call it “he.” As far as Burke was concerned, it had ceased being human, and therefore deserving of human appellations, the minute it had gotten up after dying the first time around.

  The colonel didn’t seem to notice the pronoun issue. He was still trying to find a reasonable solution to what Burke had witnessed, for anything else might change the face of the war as they knew it. “Perhaps it wasn’t moving as fast as you thought it was,” he suggested. “I understand it was pretty touch-and-go there for a while. Are you sure your senses weren’t simply confused by the strain of combat?”

  Burke stared at him. He’d been fighting in the frontline trenches for more than three years. He’d lived through gas attacks, mortar bombardments, and wave after wave of shambler attacks. Sometimes all three at once. The idea that he’d be “confused by the strain of combat” was ludicrous and, frankly, a bit insulting.

  He let the suggestion hang in the air unanswered.

  To his credit, Nichols didn’t turn away from Burke’s aggressive silence, but calmly gazed back at him. When he was certain Burke wasn’t going to reply, he said, “Right. I’ll note that it moved faster than normal.”

  He’s just not getting it, Burke thought.

  “Look,” he said. “This thing didn’t just move faster than normal. If that’s all it had done, I’d have written it off as an anomaly then and there and never mentioned it in my report. It was fast, yes, but it was also aware and that’s not something we’ve ever seen in a shambler before. It knew where it was going, waited for the best opportunity to get there, and then actively sought a different solution when prevented from carrying out its orders.”