The dead were not there.
He looked for them, but the mist was empty. Just decaying houses, collapsing fences, leaning and splintered telephone poles whose lines hung limp as spaghetti. The truck would not be far. He would find it, get in it, get away. Yes. He would pull the lever that opened the doors to release his cargo. The Wormboys would take care of the rest. Then he would go back, make up a story. Maybe crash the truck and call for a pick-up on the radio, say the dead had attacked, he’d released the cargo to draw them away.
Yes, yes.
Through the mist, the latticing of shadows.
The truck would be just ahead.
He stopped, suddenly roped tight with fear. He could hear… yes, grunting sounds, sucking sounds, chewing sounds. The stink of blood in the air was violent and overwhelming. He crept through the fog, knowing he had to see and then, hidden behind a bush, he did.
The doors were torn off the truck.
Jesus… look at that.
The rear door was open, lift gate down. The Wormboys were everywhere. They had released the cargo and fell on them in a starving mass. It was a sea of blood and bodies and entrails out there now, the dead squirming in the waste like worms, feeding and fighting, blood-slicked faces snapping up meat. A feeding frenzy. They bit the bodies in the streets, one another, even themselves.
Now was the time to get out.
Cabot hobbled away into the mist until he found the sign marking the perimeter of the town. Only then did he dare rest. But not for long. He moved down the road, weaving through the auto graveyard out there. And then… lights.
Headlights.
They were coming for him.
Thank God.
He stepped out, waving his arms. A truck. It slowed. Cabot fell over, just worn out and used up. He lay there, half-conscious, just breathing, just alive. Not much more.
“Help me with him,” a voice said.
“Where… where you from?” he heard his voice ask.
“Moxton,” the man said. “Moxton.”
Hands on him. He was lifted gently into the truck. It was warm in there. He drifted off, feeling safe at last. It was good.
Later, Cabot opened his eyes.
There was darkness all around him. He heard people mumbling and sobbing, pushing against him, crawling over him. He tried to get up and he was knocked flat. He tried to talk to the people with him but he was not heard. With a slowly dawning horror, Cabot understood. Understood how that truck was from Moxton and not Hullville and in Moxton they did what they had to survive.
A great clicking. A groaning.
Moonlight pushing in as the rear doors of the truck opened.
People screaming.
Mist flooding into the bay like toxic steam. And in that mist, hulking shapes and morgue shadows with reaching arms and graying fingers. Graveyard faces specked with flies, faces gone to wormy white pulp, all grinning with long gnarled teeth and leering with glossy red eyes.
Cabot closed his eyes.
And waited his turn.
MORBID ANATOMY
“Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?”
1
An Introduction and a Horror
Of my experiences in the Great War with Dr. Herbert West, I speak of only with the greatest hesitation, loathing, and horror. For it was to the flooded, corpse-filled trenches that we came in 1915.
Perhaps I held some naïve patriotic and nationalistic motives of serving mankind and saving the lives of the war wounded—a state of mind induplicable once the truth of war is known—but with Herbert West it was never the case. Openly he disparaged the Hun, but secretly our commission in the 1st Canadian Light Infantry was merely a means to an end. You see, my colleague’s motives were hardly altruistic. Though a surgeon of exceptional, almost supernatural skill, a biomedical savant and scientific wunderkind, West’s lifelong obsession was not with the living but the dead: the reanimation of lifeless tissue and particularly the revivication of human remains. And in the war itself and the horrid by-products it produced like some great fuming factory of death, he saw the perfect environment for his arcane research… not to mention unlimited access to plentiful raw materials.
I came to the war as West’s colleague, yes, but I felt deep inside that I was answering the subtle call of a higher power, that I—and my surgical skill—were the instruments of good in a theater of evil. I arrived with high ideals and within a year, I departed Flanders, hollow-eyed, broken, my faith in mankind hanging by a tenuous thread. For many months, the memories struggled within me, stillborn shadows of pestilence—living, crawling, and filling my throat until, at times, I could not swallow nor draw a solitary gasping breath.
If that seems a trifle melodramatic, then let the uninitiated consider this:
Flanders, 1915.
A cramped, claustrophobic maze of waterlogged trenches cutting into the blasted earth like deep-hewn surgical scars. Throughout the long misty days and into the dark dead of night, machine-guns clattering and high-velocity shells bursting, the thumping of trench mortars and the choking cries of gassed soldiers tangled in the barbwire ramparts. The stink of burned powder, moist decomposition, and excrement. Rotting corpses sinking into seas of slopping brown mud. Rats swarming atop the sandbags. Flares going up and shells coming down. And death. Dear God, Death running wild, sowing and reaping, gathering His grim harvest in abundance as the bodies piled up and the rain fell.
It was just the sort of place where a man of Herbert West’s peculiar talents would thrive.
Unlike I who held faith in the existence of the human soul and its ascension, upon death, unto the throne of God, West held no such misconceptions (as he put it). He was a scientific materialist, a confirmed Darwinist, and to him the soul was a religious fantasy and the Church existed only as a political entity to oppress and control the masses for its own remunerative ends. Life was mechanistic by nature, he claimed, organic machinery that could be manipulated at will. And if I had doubted such a thing, he proved it repeatedly with a reagent he had developed that galvanized life into the dead… often with the most unspeakable results.
Even now, these many years later, I can see West—thin, pale, his blue eyes burning with a supernal intensity behind his spectacles—as he sorted through the piles of corpses, whispering off-color remarks to me and giggling with his low cold laughter as he scavenged about like a butcher selecting only the finest cuts… a clot of gut, a stray undamaged organ, a particularly well-proportioned limb or the rare intact cadaver. I can see corpses floating in flooded bomb craters and the black clouds of seeking corpseflies. And I can see the terrified eyes of young men about to go over the top in search of their graves.
I can see Flanders.
I can see West’s workshop—a converted barn—part surgical theater and part laboratory of diabolical creation. I can see things in jars and vessels of bubbling serum… remains that should have been dead but were horribly animate with a semblance of ghoulish life. I can see the headless body of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee that West had reanimated. And I can hear the Major’s head crying out from its vat of steaming reptile tissue right before German shell-fire brought the structure down in a blazing heap.