Midnight Liberty League - Part I

by Brock Law

  *************

  A mechanical buzz emanated from behind, accompanied by steady electric zaps and whistling valves. Will stirred to a dull yellow light. On a cart beside him was a network of knotty circuitry. Tangled rubber hoses, braided wires, glass cylinders, rusty tanks and triangular nozzles stuck out from a central device. Its hand-drawn dials and tarnished brass nobs gave the antique scientific instrument an unhygienic look.

  Will twitched and looked down. He was belted to a gurney. Though the leather straps were just as ragged and aged as the odd device, he couldn’t free himself. He struggled for a moment, but stopped when he began to feel claustrophobic.

  His attention turned to the surroundings. The little room looked like a defunct surgery. More carts, on which similar medical implements lay, were positioned around him. The walls were tiled in blue with dingy grout. The ceiling and floor was smooth concrete, though there was some liquid discoloration near the drains in the corner.

  Just then a heavy door squealed open on steel hinges. Mengele emerged from the darkened portal, draped in a white lab coat. He looked at Will with his unmistakable gap-toothed grin and cupped his hands together with delight.

  “Excellent, you are awake,” said Mengele.

  The heels of his boots echoed unnaturally in the tiny room as he approached. He grabbed ahold of a stool and dragged it over to Will’s side. Then he flipped back the tails of his coat and sat with a satisfied exhalation.

  “Guten Tag, I am Uncle Mengele,” said the Doctor. “That’s what all the other children call me.”

  Will’s mouth was glued shut, incapable of speech. Mengele held the conversation with himself, continually arching his brows and smiling at Will. As his words lisped out, he hummed a polka beat between sentences.

  “How about something sweet to eat?”

  Out of the air Mengele produced a fluffy spiral pastry. The confection shifted back and forth as the Doctor tried to get the young man’s attention. He pushed it closer to Will’s mouth, and then retracted. He repeated the playful tease several times, but became dismayed when Will didn’t show any interest.

  “No?”

  Mengele shrugged and popped the dough in his mouth. His eyes squinted merrily as he mashed. After an exaggerated swallow to invoke jealousy, he licked each one of his fingers and wiped them on his coat.

  “Perhaps you prefer that little French girl. You like her, don’t you?”

  He winked at Will, puckered up and made a kissy face at him.

  “Would you like to see her again?”

  The vile scientist’s suggestive expressions curdled Will’s composure. Mengele kept inching forward as if he were about to strike, and would then back off again to resume his conversational tone. The obvious buttering was leading to something, which Will was unable to resist while snared. Intermittently, the polka tune reemerged as the Doctor idly inspected the surrounding equipment.

  “Then you will have to tell me where the Grail is kept.”

  A psychotic craze bled into Mengele’s eyes. His face flushed red as he hovered above the gurney. Will still couldn’t speak, but the Doctor pressed him relentlessly. He became visibly angry when his victim did not respond. Quakes rippled through his shoulders, arms and up into his neck. The veins around his temples pulsed, and his smile dissolved into the jagged sneer of the monster within. His hand shot up and clutched Will’s arm. Vibrations of rage transferred from one to the other, as Mengele strangled the muscle. He rocked the quarterback violently, trying to loosen the information from his brain by force.

  The Doctor fell back on to the stool, radiating hot frustration. He took a deep breath and slicked back his hair. A disapproving shake of his head brought his clasped hands to his nose in a brooding pose.

  “You are quite a strong specimen. What makes you so special, I wonder?”

  Mengele turned away and reached for the nearest cart. He wheeled it closer and flung off the top sheet. As the cloth drifted away an extensive set of gleaming knives appeared. There was a blade for every conceivable function. Some were straight, some curved and some serrated. One had a scoop, another had a hook and one was pronged like a trident. Others looked like they came from a tool box with screws, drills and mallets fastened to the handles. Mengele spun around and faced Will, glowing with a new countenance of diabolical pleasure. In his hand he held up a long scalpel.

  “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  Mengele leaned in, grinning from ear to ear. The knife rotated in his pinched fingers. As it descended, the blade sparkled under the glint of the overhead lights. The vigorous dance tune emanated from his throat again, just as the icy metal edge pressed into Will’s chest.

  Will’s lungs popped, and dragged in air. He shot up from bed and gripped his sweltering head. He was alone, hidden in the darkened sanctuary of his room. Molten blood coursed through his dizzy brain. The familiar surroundings registered with a semi-conscious flicker, as he wavered and plummeted back on to the pillow.

  Big Enough To Take Away Everything That You Have

  The mercurial viscosity of the night bled through the brambles and grasses, choking out the lamp lights as if it were a living opaqueness. Crawling and oozing, its inherent spite dripped out into the slimy residue of the immeasurable horrors whose malign energy it had leeched. Through the dirt, at its own liquid current, the roots sucked it up for the limbs to spew out in its sticky aerated state. Traveling swiftly on the breeze above the rolling hills, it swarmed in infectious mists of gloom.

  Yet creatures thrived here, awakened and were resuscitated by the deviant shade of the universe’s unknown hollows. Perhaps, even, they were born of this corruption. Heinous beasts pushed out dirt, broke headstones, cracked open mausoleum doors, tore out cemetery fences and descended upon Philadelphia. Innumerable in quantity, strength, and origin they came snarling with outstretched fangs. Like an army of marauding skeletal devils they marched, summoned with greater boldness by the hourly tolling of the valley’s choir of church bells. They scampered up the water’s embankments, ripped out clumps of soil, and mashed the earth between their claws. As they crested the peaks of the forested terrain, the amplification of their silent flight towards the living realms manifested in an accelerated bloodlust. The undying thirst intensified until they reached the edge of the light. Careful not to breach the threshold, they knelt in secrecy and salivated as the prey materialized.

  The night clouded Will’s eyes and mind. Over the last few days all of the legends he was taught, whether he was huddling around a campfire or stirring up dust during a tour of an ancient brick and mortar haunt, came skulking back. A host of nightmarish fiends spun glossy, reflective webs around his brain that scattered the electricity to whatever illusions would most terrify him.

  Concealing as it was, the evening was no favor to him. He was neither possessed of the anatomy nor the instinct to wield the benefit of the mask. If ever anyone had been possessed of one thing out in the wild, without knowledge and alone in the fight for survival, it was an iron will of self-control. His command of that, too, by the mystery’s innate thieving of his resolve, was forfeit to the enigma. The definition of what sense resided in its place was burgeoning primitive fury wrought by the gradual dissolving of reality, so far still caged. Right now, that was as sharp a weapon as he was capable of effectively brandishing.

  In the company of Washington and Franklin, again finding himself exposed by the lights of Isaac Potts’ house at Valley Forge, Will awaited the dreaded undead recurrence. The primary initiative was to verify that Vivienne was alive. They would then convince the Nazis that they would go retrieve the Grail and deal in three days. A caravan of Hamilton, Greene and Hancock would then follow the Nazis back to their hideout. Hopefully, the additional time would then allow them to find the means to rescue Vivie unnoticed. It seemed like a reasonable position to take, but Will still doubted that the minions of the SS would allow for such obvious stalling.

  Every night, lying awake, he pictured her anguishi
ng under the torture of her pitiless captors. He remembered her perfume, her probing eyes, dark silken hair, the softness of her hands and the little bolts of energy that emanated from her fingertips when she touched him. Without knowing her at all, it still felt like he was connected to her, as if her personality was a just summation of her past and all the events she endured. In a way, it was comforting for him to imagine her as a hardened immortal who could withstand time. It was just as nice to wonder how much of the teenager was still inside her. What kind of music would a two hundred year old woman like to listen to? What kind of movies would she like? Wine tasting? Assuredly. Football games? Possibly. Rock climbing? Unlikely. Would it all be a trivial waste of time for her? Not with that smile. What would she feel like in his arms? She would dangle a foot above the ground. What would it be like to kiss her? French, he supposed.

  A jostle in the woods choked out Will’s meandering thoughts. Adjoined by the snap of branches, the men perked up and scanned the darkness. There wasn’t anything for mortal eyes to see. The surroundings remained a sensory mire of anticipated doom. At least it wasn’t Halloween yet, or else Will’s brain would be really concocting some disturbed inventions.

  Washington’s verbal withholding was the most reassuring unknown in the