Why he even bothered, Eva couldn’t say. As soon as he finished toweling himself off and dressing, Sawyer walked into a larger side room of the warehouse.
Rows of caskets were lined up inside. Several were open, others were closed. Dirt covered the floor where it had come loose from the caskets. A large skylight overhead let in the early morning light. Not that the light was needed. A number of heavy-duty floodlights were hanging from the second floor, all illuminating the room to the point of leaving almost no shadows.
Skeletons shambled about the area alongside a number of zombies. Some carried things, buckets for the most part. Others looked like guards, all equipped with various medieval weaponry. Except for a handful that appeared to have guns bolted onto their hands.
There was a small group of skeletons accompanied by a handful of enigmas and even a few zombies.
Sawyer paid them no mind, even despite the zombies’ proximity to him. They didn’t even notice him. He might as well have been invisible to everything in the room.
His focus was on a younger girl who stood over one of the open caskets. Des, the blended girl who looked like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster, held a long knife in her hand. She was shearing off the flesh of a corpse’s arm as if she were peeling a fruit.
The scraps of flesh were dropped into a bucket carried by one of the skeletons.
Sawyer walked up to the young girl, ruffling her hair. “And how are we this fine morning?”
Des looked up to him and just gave a slight, jerky nod of her head. Her lips were still sealed together with stitches.
When she was last able to spy on them, Nel had mentioned a heart transplant involving the girl and an enigma. Eva had to wonder if that actually got completed or not. Externally, there was no sign of it. Eva wasn’t sure what sign there would be, but she had expected bright purple veins at the very least.
Thinking about that got Eva considering another topic. Her tongue was dark in coloration after her latest treatment. Her skin was the same as it always had been despite her blood being pitch black. Eva had to wonder just what color her heart was. And the rest of her organs. Devon had never cut her open to check after any treatments and Eva couldn’t exactly say that she wanted him to do so, but it might be interesting to find out.
Something to discuss with Devon when she got back home.
“You’ve made it through less than half of them,” Sawyer said, glancing around the room. His eyes stopped for a moment on each open casket before moving on to the next. “Better than yesterday, I suppose.”
After giving Des two pats on the head, he moved over to the wall. A number of tools had been hung up on a rack. Some, shiny new metal. Others looked like rusted implements from a horror movie.
A few tools were set out that Eva recognized. Unfortunately. The small silver cigar cutter-like device hung from a thin metal rod. Not far from it was the flexible knife that he had used to remove her original eyes.
Lying in her bed, Eva clenched her fists and ground her teeth together. They were good reminders of just why she was out in the middle of relatively rural Idaho, stalking a necromancer.
He ignored all of them. Instead, he walked up to a large tool chest and opened a few of the drawers. It took him a moment of searching, but he finally found what he was looking for. Sawyer pulled out a large silvery knife. One almost identical to the one held by Des. He pulled a few other things from the rack, a saw, a hammer, and a large spoon.
With the tools in his hands, Sawyer walked over to one of the unopened caskets. He cracked it open, much to Eva’s despair, and proceeded to remove flesh from the bones.
From what Eva had seen of Des, the girl was an amateur. Her knife hacked where Sawyer’s glided. Her strips of flesh were jagged and chunky where Sawyer’s were smooth and long. Eva could feel the lack of resistance as his knife cleanly severed muscles, ligaments, flesh, and everything else.
The way he moved and cut was so elegant that Eva almost forgot that he was slicing up a corpse.
Once finished with the limbs, Sawyer moved on to the torso. He used his knife to remove any excess flesh on the outside of the ribcage. Using the large spoon-like tool, he scraped out the entirety of the insides in a single go. It was sharp at the edges to cut any meat from the bones that might be still attached, but small enough to fit into a wide variety of chest cavities.
All of the mostly decayed organs got dumped into a bucket carried by the skeletons. Eva couldn’t see where the skeletons were taking the flesh, but she couldn’t help but wonder just what the purpose of all this was.
If he wanted to remove everything from the bones, surely the older corpses that he had sent to the ritual field were better for the task. They had all been in a far more advanced state of decay. More decay meant less flesh to remove. Unless, of course, the ritual required corpses of a certain age.
It was hard to say without knowing much about necromancy. Part of her hoped that he would go and review his plan with Des, or read a tome that Eva could understand that detailed everything he was intending to do.
Eva doubted that it would be that easy.
Though Des had a head start on the corpse she had been working on, Sawyer finished well in advance.
Mostly.
He finished scalping the skull. From looking at the skeletal remains, Eva had assumed he was finished. That was until he had grabbed hold of the saw.
Sawyer took the tool to the base of the skull and started removing the back of the skull, right near where the spinal cord connected to the brain. When he finally got it open, he looked inside.
There wasn’t much of a brain left. A lot of black goop that Eva wouldn’t have wanted to touch. Not much else.
Sawyer stuck his bare hand inside without a care and proceeded to scrape out the insides into one of the bucket skeletons’ buckets. Once the inside was mostly clear, he carried it over towards the tool rack.
Just to the side of the tools was a large brick structure that came up to Sawyer’s waist. Eva could feel the heat coming off it through her link to Sawyer.
He put on a heavy glove, gripped a rod that was sticking out the top, and pulled it back.
The head of the rod was an intricate design of weaved iron. And it was glowing red hot. A branding iron.
What’s more, Eva recognized the design. As Sawyer shoved the hot end of the iron into the hole in the skull, Eva realized just what he was doing.
It was one of the things that she had come across while skimming through the necromancy tomes that she had stolen.
Sawyer was making skeletons. The animated kind of skeletons. Ones that would wander around, doing his bidding and being nuisances to everyone else.
More skeletons. Between the field, the graveyard, and his warehouse, he already had so many skeletons.
Then, Eva remembered the crypt. The one that she, Arachne, Devon, and Juliana had all entered. The one that had been packed full of the monsters. There had been so many in the cave that, weak though skeletons were, Eva’s group had nearly been overwhelmed anyway. And then there was that giant mass of skeletons that Arachne had fought.
Eva considered the idea that Sawyer had some sort of compulsion to make skeletons. Although, the skeletons at the crypt probably hadn’t required so much effort to make. He would have just had to run around branding skulls. They would have been far less fleshy than most of the corpses he had dug up for this batch.
As Sawyer withdrew the branding iron from the skull and replaced it into the kiln, Eva could feel magic being channeled. The still hot sigil glowed slightly before fading.
The bones in the jaw creaked. A faint glow in the back of the skull’s eyes lit up.
Sawyer turned the skull over, inspecting it. Looking towards the casket, he watched as the rest of the skeleton tried to sit up.