“What is all that?” one student asked, looking up from the study of a male subject’s internal organs. Curious, he set aside his instruments and wiped his hands as he approached Hicks.
“This is your doing,” another said, directing his scorn squarely at Hicks.
Below, a single man stepped forward, shovel in hand. “I want all you doctors out here, right fucking now!” His booming voice had a gravelly edge to it, powerful and smoky.
Hicks turned to the students beside him and flashed them both a toothsome, winning smile. “I do believe these gathered gentlemen are requesting your presence in the yard.” He laughed then put his back to the window and the boys. Ignoring the growing clamor, he took up his scalpel and carved fresh lines into the dead woman at his station. He cut simply to cut, with no rhyme or reason. He slashed at pearlescent skin for the sheer enjoyment of it, opening dry, parted lips in her belly, thighs, and forearms.
One student studied Hicks with unveiled disgust before his eyes turned back toward the window with worry. He ran his hands through his hair, plainly unsure whether he was better off inside with a crazed, young sadist or outside amid a throng bent on violence.
“We go out the back,” another student said.
“They could have the whole building surrounded,” one objected.
“Don’t know till we try, boys,” a third said.
“Yes, yes,” Hicks chimed in. “Out the back, it is, then. Best move fleet of foot!” Again, his maniacal laughter bubbled up as his blade cut a long, solitary line down the woman’s abdomen. “Out, out, out!”
The teenage anatomists shook their heads in disgust. Behind them, a rock crashed through the window, raining shards of glass upon the floor. The noise was enough to compel the students to flee, and they jostled one another as they vied to be the first out of the room.
Hicks trailed behind them, taking his time. He tapped a mindless rhythm against his pant leg with the flat edge of his scalpel, whistling softly to himself. Footfalls echoed through the stairwell as the boys thundered down the steps, encouraging one another to move faster. Shouting from the crowd outside seemed to dog their each and every step, and still, Hicks whistled, savoring the stink of adolescent fear leeching off the boys.
He hit the ground floor and turned toward the rear of the building. Panic and anger echoed along the hallway from opposite directions, but he followed the corridor to the operating theater, which was currently closed. The boys yanked at the doors on either side of the theater, their panic growing with the discovery that those doors were locked as well.
And then, with sudden swiftness, the theater doors were pulled open. Light from the hallway spilled into the darkened auditorium to reveal a gathering of black-clad, beak-faced bodies bearing scalpels. The boys startled. One let loose a scream. Then the plague doctors were upon them, seizing the moment of surprise. Blades sank into bellies and slashed at faces.
One boy turned, but Hicks was already standing there with a devilish grin spread upon his face. It was the last thing the boy would see, as Hicks raised his own scalpel and drew it across the younger child’s throat. A plume of air whistled softly from the boy’s severed windpipe, and a fountain of blood sprayed from either side of his neck. His hand rose but failed to stop the red gushing jet.
Hicks strode forward, slashing at the backs of the children before him, while his fellow cultists brutalized them from the front. Soon, the wooden floorboards were soaked with blood, and the plague doctors hauled the bodies inside the operating theater.
Not all of the boys were dead, however. Two still clung to life, if only by the edge of but one fingertip. Their breaths were shallow and clearly pained, and with each exhalation, they expelled pure, raw fear.
Hicks slammed shut the doors to the theater, muffling the madness outside. The crowd was growing violently loud, and it likely would not be long before they got their druthers up enough to force their way inside.
Bayley stood at the front of the theater, a large tome in hand, reading aloud. A pair of plague doctors pulled the boys into the center of the room and kicked at the backs of their knees, forcing them to the floor. They stood behind the boys, scalpels at the necks of both teens. Bayley’s gloved fingers moved over thin onionskin pages. Between the periodic pauses of Bayley’s chanting, the voltaic piles hummed, driving dead muscle given unsure life. The trio of hearts beat within their cages, and blue arcs of light flashed, delivering electric charge from the batteries to the briny solution that soaked the hearts. The chambers of each heart beat bloodlessly, out of rhythm with the electric crackle.
Hicks did not understand a single word Bayley spoke, but he could feel the power each syllable carried. The language, dark and ancient, drove into the air around them. The room, by turns, grew stifling hot and arctic cold, a wind fueled by the slurry of magic Bayley recited. Beneath the cloak he had donned, Hicks could feel the hairs all along his arms and the back of his neck stand on end. An invisible weight coiled around his middle. A tight, unseen muscle hugged him closely as hot breath pulsed against the side of his face. Something crawled across him, up his legs, and over his jaw. A breeze rustled his bare head as spiky-haired fingers pried open his mouth, then a hot, pulsating, multi-legged thing crawled past his lips and bit into his tongue.
He screamed, but his cries of pain were ignored. A thunderous crash assaulted his ears from both inside and outside the room. Hicks jerked and writhed in agony, seeking escape from whatever had grabbed hold of him. His fingers searched for the foreign body biting at the inside of his mouth but found nothing, nothing at all. He saw the air all around him ripple and spasm. The front doors had been breached, and the mob was coming for all of them.
Bayley read, his voice rising to an impossible tenor over the fury set upon the air, the skies, and the heavens. And then the air itself pulled apart, and the wind kicked up, nearly knocking Hicks off his feet. He saw stars—actual physical stars—set against a black void, hanging in the air before him. The air had peeled open to reveal a nightscape, but there were things between the stars, beasts his mind could not comprehend, creatures his eyes refused to see. They were there, nonetheless.
A flash of lightning lit up the room, then an eerie darkness crashed down upon them. Bayley turned another impossibly thin page, screaming now as he read. Long, muscular tendrils pierced the veil between worlds, hanging in the air before Hicks and the other doctors. Looking down, he saw, for the first time, the thick appendage gripping him, hoisting him off his feet. Tentacles seized both his arms, tearing his searching hands away from his face, just as fresh pain exploded in his mouth. He screamed, a well of blood rising from the cavity of his mouth, surging from between the gaps in his teeth, and he spat out his severed tongue. Rough, spidery limbs brushed against the inner walls of his cheeks, and still, he screamed as pointed mandibles stabbed into his upper palate, boring through the roof of his mouth. The tentacle squeezed, hard enough to pop something inside Hicks’s middle, breaking a trio of ribs. The sharp end of bone pierced a lung, and the air went out of him on a cry of torment.
As he recoiled in pain, dizzy with the fever of fear, he saw his final moments. Bayley turned another page, and the plague doctors violently slashed at the throats of the kneeling boys. Bright-red arcs ejected in the wake of their blades, then their young forms slumped and toppled. Strangely, their blood did not similarly fall but was held suspended between their prone forms and the thinnie growing above them. The crimson bubbles danced in the air, weightless. The blossoming darkness above them shimmered and resolved, and inky, ephemeral limbs snaked through the void, searching for handholds upon the dead children and finding succor.
The strain of Hicks’s agony grew so loud that tendons in his neck popped and his voice went hoarse. His torment teetered uncontrollably toward insanity. Driven to madness by the profound misery, his mind fractured into its final disassembled form as a jointed, fuzzy limb shot out through his nostril, scrabbling over his upper lip for purchase as it continued to eat
its way upward through his skull. The creature burrowed into some cavity within his face. Pressure built behind his eyes then exploded outward.
His last sight was of a massive, slumbering beast awakening. The last he heard was of a banging of metal against wood, the mob demanding entry into the auditorium. The last he felt was the air being pulled from his one good lung, and he exhaled in obligation.
Chapter Seven
An impossible wind staggered Hereford on his heels as his brain struggled to comprehend the images set before him. From the corner of his eyes, he saw shimmering thinnies dancing all through the auditorium, and through those thinnies came the searching tendrils of the inexplicable. Puckered tentacles lashed through the air, while a black mist lingered over the corpses of two boys, savoring their final moments.
Hicks was hanging in the air, held by a thick appendage wrapped tightly around his middle. Blood pouring down his body dripped off the toes of his leather shoes. His eyes were missing, and the skin of his face rippled like an ocean’s current stirred from below. A sharp crack of bone further screwed up his skull. Then the meat over his cheeks unzipped as his mouth was pried open to an impossible angle, the jaw unplugging and hanging limply from his maw. Long fingers reached out from within the young man’s mouth as the creature struggled to free itself from the orifice. The violent cracking sound of bones breaking snapped in the air. Hicks’s skull burst, his shattered cranium cleaving apart the covering flesh, then his nose split in half as his whole head came apart.
A large, spidery, albino creature emerged from the gore. It shimmied down Hicks’s chin to his shoulder. The thing was larger than any spider Hereford had ever seen, and its obscenely large abdomen sat upon more than a dozen appendages that resembled hands more than legs. Each long, multi-knuckled phalange ended in a sharp-looking point surrounded by bristling hairs. The sight reminded him instantly of a multi-pronged fishing spear. Its enormous mandibles were hooked, with jagged edges. Its eyes, like a collection of burning coal embers, were hot black fused with red lines. Behind it came its small children. Hundreds of them climbed from the pulpy soup of bone, tattered skin, and blood. The babies feasted, and they grew.
The air shrieked. A flurry of thin pages torn from the Al Azif whipped past his head. Bayley read still, his voice growing hoarse… and, Hereford noted, slightly panicked. The man’s black magic had summoned far more than any of the plague cultists had bargained for.
More tendrils shattered the space of reality, lunging forth through the thinnies abridging their separate dimensions. Hereford stepped back from what appeared to be an oversized, empurpled palpus covered in thick saw-toothed antennae as it pushed through the window of its reality and into his own. What emerged was an enormous conglomeration of insectile anatomy overlaid upon spiny crustacean features. It slinked forward on a hundred legs, thousands of spiky nails sticking upward from the ribs of its piebald back and skull, its carapace a ruddy brown and sickly, spotted yellow. A trio of antennules probed the air ahead of its massive, segmented body, brushing against Douglas Quick’s overcoat.
Hereford tripped over his feet as he maneuvered out of the way. His heels kicked at the slick floor, sliding uselessly as his shoes dug a trench through an odd mucus-like gruel.
The front-most segment of the crustacean rose, and long pointed limbs unfolded from beneath its wicked, clicking mandibles. It speared Quick through the shoulders, pinning the man’s howling, writhing body to the floor. Quick’s screams were mutilated into nightmarish noise then halted with a wet, gristly snap as the monster gorged.
Pounding and the noise of men clamoring came from the operating theater’s entrance. The doors shuddered beneath angry fists and axes, then they snapped away from their frame in an explosion of wood. A dozen men fell into the room, nearly trampled by a dozen more pouring inside. And then those angry, sweat-covered faces absorbed the scene before them, halting in their tracks. Surprise and fright replaced the looks of hatred in their eyes. The front line turned on their heels, plowing into the men behind them, who, ignorant of what lay ahead, foiled their attempts at escape. The mob surged into the room, blind and deaf, seized entirely by a crazed ambition for revenge.
The albino arachnid-like horrors, having reduced Hicks to little more than skeletal remains, scurried toward the mob, fueled solely by carnal appetites. Wave upon wave of monsters met men, washing over them, crawling atop one another in their pursuit of additional feasts.
Tentacles, lingering in the air from points unknown, lashed out, grabbing rioters off their feet and seizing them in powerful grips. Men were hoisted into the air, slammed into the ceiling, then pummeled upon the floor hard enough to split open skulls. Other tentacles competed to seize one body, pulling him in opposite directions. As if set upon a rack, the man’s spine stretched and popped, his knees yanked loose of their sockets. His screams were lost in the wind, but the sight of his belly tearing open to spill his innards in a wet slop against the ground was not. His spine was torn free as his hips broke loose of the flesh and sinew supporting them, and his hollowed-out trunk sank in upon itself.
Men, and even a few women, Hereford saw, battled with shovels, picks, and axes, but such heroics were lost in the maelstrom of fear and madness. Propped against the wall, he watched the violence unfold and spread before him through the darkened glass lens of the plague mask. His clothes were sopped in a warm, unnatural liquid, but he paid it no mind. He was lost and enraptured, giddy with the madness of it all, even as his body shook with terror.
Bayley had stopped reading and was, in fact, no longer in the room at all. Hereford didn’t care, though; he laughed, instead, at the absurdity of it all. He redirected his focus on the mayhem at the fore of the room, where pointed feelers impaled men and hell’s own gods feasted upon flesh. The caged hearts beat faster and faster, thick strings of crackling electricity snapping across them and rising up and around the voltaic piles, casting the room in an erratic blue glow.
The words of Abd al-Hazred were true, truer than he ever could have imagined. And it was beautiful.
Hawley shoved through the crowd lingering on the fringes of New York Hospital. Inside, the riot was in full bloom, and although he could not see the activity within, he could hear quite well the bloodcurdling screams and demands for escape.
The mob, he thought, lost in a fugue of anger were tearing the doctors apart, exacting their street justice. He could imagine what grisly actions the medical students had been in the act of executing when they were interrupted and laid siege upon. Thinking of Jeremiah and Scipio, and the total lack of care exhibited by the Common Council, Hawley found it difficult to feel any degree of sympathy for the anatomists and students of the physic inside the building. He, after all, had come with his own aim toward vengeance.
A cold rain pelted those gathered outside the hospital, and his wet hand moved inside his jacket as he pushed his way between the protestors mindlessly shouting in the yard. His shoulder hit a solid-looking White man as he maneuvered, and the man seized his arm in an instant. Taller than Hawley, the White man looked down into Salem’s eyes, a flash of anger boiling there.
“Pardon,” Hawley said, his own eyes steeled beneath the scrutiny.
The man’s eyes followed the line of Hawley’s arm to the butt of the Ketland brass-barrel pistol holstered beneath the free man’s overcoat. Their eyes met again, and the White man nodded. An air of understanding passed between them, and the man released Hawley.
“Let him through,” he urged his neighbors, and bodies shuffled aside to make Hawley’s passage easier.
Salem nodded at the man curtly and proceeded through the yard unmolested. Gun in hand, he strode up the hospital’s steps to the front entrance. A malingering force seemed to radiate from the building itself, and although the doors were open, he certainly did not feel invited.
Inside, the building was unnaturally dark, the candles situated along either side of the hallway extinguished in their sconces. A pall of black vapor, not exactly smoke
but something far more malodorous, coiled through the air. Hawley did not choke on the fetid musky stink so much as he gagged in revulsion.
A calamity of screams echoed down the corridor. Through the murky mist, he caught flashes of movement, but only just. He used his free hand to remove the tomahawk at his hip, feeling only slightly more secure with both his weapons at the ready.
Another scream, more a howling, then a piercing cry of torment reached his ears and was ended as quickly as it had begun. He hurried toward the far end of the corridor, heart hammering against his ribs as he recalled the screams on a hazy battlefield where a thick fog of gun smoke and black cannon powder had clouded the air.
Nearing the source of the agonized wailing, Salem Hawley saw a battlefield unlike any other. Pure white creatures with an unnatural assemblage of furred legs encircled a man in webbing. The webbing itself was caustic, and the smell of burning flesh assaulted Hawley’s senses.
The webbing melted through skin, right down to the bone as it cut thin grooves all along the victim’s body. One eye ruptured, and a thick goop popped from the eye socket to run down a ruined face. The insectile creature’s netting soon dissolved through the entrapped man’s neck, burning through vein and blood. His head canted at an impossible angle before he finally slumped and fell, dead and diced into an assortment of puzzle-like pieces.
Various horrifying scenes played out across a dozen other bodies, the hallway itself a mass grave. One figure clawed at his own face, digging fingers into his eyes, forcing them out of their sockets, and plunged his fingers into the bleeding craters, heedless of the pain. He ran straight into the wall, hands flat against the stained wallpaper, and beat his skull against it, over and over and over, screaming all the while.
The Resurrectionists Page 8
