Iron and Blood (39 page)

“Sometimes, there are too many pieces, or not enough,” Sheffield went on. “That can happen, especially with airship crashes or industrial accidents. But the injuries I’m seeing don’t match the kind of accident reported, or the sort you’d expect in a mine.” He pushed his glasses up his nose with his wrist, before using his gloved hands to remove organs from the cadaver on the table.

“If miners die of blackdamp, it’s bad air in the lungs. I wouldn’t expect to see bodies that look like they’d been torn apart by wild animals. Maybe fingers torn up trying to dig out, that kind of thing. But if you could have seen them...”

“Which mines?” Drostan asked, trying not to sound too interested.

Sheffield worked a bit more on the body before he answered. “Mostly Vesta Nine—the big one, the one the bosses are so damn proud of.”

“You think the bosses are covering something up?”

Sheffield gave a bitter laugh. “The mining bosses are always covering something up. Question is, what is it this time?” He shook his head. “For the number of bodies that have come through here, it’s been quiet—too quiet. Like someone’s got a lid on the situation. And before you ask, there’s no one honest to report it to, even if I had proof.”

“I heard that the survivors—when there are any—had some wild tales to tell,” Drostan prompted.

Sheffield gave him a hard stare. “I should have known you never come in without a few cards up your sleeve, Drostan. But yeah. I heard a little of that myself, although the mine superintendents were quick to shut down the talk. Monsters. Huh.”

“Rumor has it, some of those survivors—the ones with the interesting stories—ran into bad luck,” Drostan replied. “Fell down the stairs, drowned in the river. Or just up and disappeared.”

“I heard that, too.” Sheffield sighed. “Don’t doubt it.” He paused, as if they both remembered that most of the police working across the street were on Richard Thwaites’s take. “I’m not sure I’d blame what I’ve seen on monsters. But I do know that if it goes on too long, the miners won’t stand for it. They won’t stay cowed by the Pinkertons if there’s something that scares them worse down below.”

Just then, Benny raised his head and sniffed the air. He gave a low growl.

“Hush,” Sheffield commanded. Benny gave him a mournful look and ducked his head.

“You think there’s union trouble coming?”

Sheffield shrugged. “I hope not. Depends on how far the owners push this. Folks’ll put up with a lot to earn a living, but when too many die, and the bosses don’t care, people get their backs up.”

Benny suddenly got to his feet, hackles raised. He gave a growl, then began to bark with more urgency than Drostan thought the old dog had left in him.

“You expecting company?” Drostan asked.

Sheffield tried to hush the dog, but this time, Benny refused to quiet down. “No, I’m not. Supposed to be a quiet night. And Benny knows the night guard and the regulars who have business here. He doesn’t act like this.”

Drostan had already drawn his gun. “Then maybe he knows something we don’t.”

The morgue had two entrances: the front door on Diamond Street across from the new, massive Pittsburgh Jail, and a back door for ‘deliveries’. Benny stood facing the back door, lips pulled back in a snarl, back hunched, barking for all he was worth.

“Yeah,” Sheffield said, glancing from Benny to Drostan’s gun. “Maybe he does.” He peeled off his heavy rubber gloves and grabbed a skull chisel and a nasty looking claw hammer. “Since when does anyone try to break into a morgue?”

When they want to hide the evidence,
Drostan thought.

Bang
. Something hard hit the wooden door hard. Not a knock; more like a battering ram.

Benny barked louder, transformed from a lazy family pet to a vicious guard dog.

Bang
. Whatever hit the door was heavy, tipped in metal from the sound of it. “What are the odds some lost bloke saw your lights and decided to ask for directions?” Drostan quipped nervously.

“In a morgue?” Sheffield eyed the narrow windows, set high on the walls. He pushed a chair over to one of them and climbed up.

“Well?”

“Looks like three men, can’t make out much more,” Sheffield said.

The pounding at the door came louder and harder. Any sane person would think twice before trying to force entry into a room with a frenzied dog on the other side. But the pounding continued, each blow harder than the last, heedless of the warning.

“Can we get out the front way?” Drostan asked. “Doesn’t matter what they want; at this hour of the night, it can’t be good.”

“The office staff usually lock that door when they close up around five,” Sheffield replied. “I have a key to the back, but I lost the front door key a while ago. Meant to get a replacement.” Sheffield went to the back door and tried the knob. “Locked.”

“How long do you think that door is going to last?” Drostan asked. “Do you have any alarms in here? Any way to summon help?”

Sheffield just stared at him. “It’s a morgue. My patients don’t usually give me a hard time.”

Crack.
The sound of splintering wood made both men turn back to the door.

“Someone’s awfully determined to get in here,” Drostan said. “And they’re going to succeed in a few minutes.”

“We can slow them down, give ourselves some cover,” Sheffield said. “Grab one end of the table.”

Together, Drostan and Sheffield pushed the heavy autopsy cart in front of the door with the corpse still in place, chest splayed wide open.

“Help me with this,” Sheffield said, gesturing toward two other carts. “If we turn them on their sides, we can get behind them. These are solid steel.”

Drostan and Sheffield managed to get the two carts overturned just as the door gave way. The click and hum of gears accompanied a stench like an abattoir in the summer heat.

Three hideous creatures barreled through the doorway. Once, they might have been men. Now they were nightmares, animated by clockwork. Their skin was mottled, the color of deep bruises and spoiled meat. Clockwork mechanisms stiffly animated their joints, visible on jaws, fingers, wrists, and glimpsed beneath their tattered clothing. Benny’s fierce barking trailed off into a frightened howl, and he bolted for the back room.

“What are those things?” Sheffield asked, eyes wide with fear.

“Nothing good,” Drostan replied.

As one of the creatures raised his hand to strike, Drostan could see where it had been impaled by a splinter from the shattered door.
The clockwork corpses care nothing for pain or damage to themselves,
Drostan reminded himself. Another of the mechanized cadavers shoved aside the autopsy table blocking the doorway as if it were nothing.

“These tables aren’t going to slow them down for long,” Drostan muttered. “We’re going to have to fight them.”

“I’m a coroner, not a cop,” Sheffield protested.

“You’re going to be a dead coroner if we don’t do something. Maybe if we raise enough of a racket, some of your jailer friends across the street will come to see what’s going on.”

Sheffield tightened his grip on his claw-hammer and bone saw. Drostan popped up from cover and squeezed off three shots in quick succession. The bullets struck their targets, driving the creatures back a pace. One of the clockwork cadavers was struck square in the chest, blowing a spray of dead flesh out the exit wound.

For a moment, the clockwork assassins halted. And then, with the relentless click and hum of the mechanisms that drove them, they renewed their advance, strange glass eyes oriented on Drostan and Sheffield.

Drostan got off three more shots. “I need to reload! Hold them off!” He ducked for the cover of a heavy autopsy table, and Sheffield stood, pale with terror, a white-knuckled grip on the tools in his hands.

“Get back!” Sheffield said, giving a warning swing with the hammer he used to open up the skulls of corpses. His bone saw rattled in the other hand. But the dead kept coming, the taut skin of their bloated faces registering neither anger nor fear.

Drostan stood and put a bullet through the forehead of the first clockwork monster. The creature’s head snapped back and he reeled. Drostan fired again, and his bullet entered the eye socket of the second monster, shattering the glass eye and blowing away the back of the thing’s skull, filling the morgue with the smell of gunpowder and formaldehyde. Drostan fired once more, and his bullet destroyed the third attacker’s face, smashing the nose, flattening the cheekbones as the sinus cavities collapsed, and sending a shower of rotted skin, matted hair and decomposing brain matter to foul the operatory.

“They’re not slowing down!” Sheffield shouted, his voice high with panic. The lead corpse was almost to the barricade. He swung with his hammer and winced when it hit with full force against the creature’s outstretched right arm, shattering bone. The monster never slowed its steps, although its damaged arm hung at an unnatural angle, bent between the wrist and elbow.

“Use the claw!” Drostan shouted, squeezing off three more shots, targeting the zombies’ eyes. He shot out the remaining glass eye of one of the creatures, and took the top off the head of the one whose nose his last shot had destroyed. For once, the monsters hesitated.

“I think you’ve stopped them!” Sheffield cried. Nearly in unison, the abominations slowly pivoted, seeming to focus on the sound of Sheffield’s voice.

“They can still hear us,” Drostan replied. “Separate. Take them on however you can. No one’s riding to the rescue. We’ve got to do this ourselves.”

One of the zombies remained oriented on Sheffield, but the other two had turned to focus on the sound of Drostan’s voice.

“Damn,” he muttered as the creatures walked mechanically into the table barrier. The table stopped their advance for only a moment; then the zombies clawed at it until they had dragged it out of the way.

Sheffield backed up against a table of morgue tools. Abandoning the bone saw as too cumbersome, the coroner grabbed a crowbar-like tool used for prying open rib cages. Armed with the hammer in one hand—claw-first—and the tine end of the crowbar in the other, he grimaced as he swung at his attacker with his full strength.

The crowbar dug into the dead flesh of the clockwork zombie’s shoulder, opening a gash bone-deep. The hammer smashed against fragile finger bones, crushing them. Still the creature came.

“Go back to the devil who spawned you!” Sheffield shouted as he put his full strength into a swing that caught the zombie in the neck with the crowbar, ripping the head from the body. As the twitching corpse sank to the ground, Sheffield kept on pounding, sending chunks of rotten flesh flying.

Drostan backed up as far as he could go until he found himself up against a set of metal shelves. Bottles and jars clanked a warning as he jostled them.

No time to reload. He jammed his gun in his belt and reached behind him, grabbing whatever came to hand. He threw the first bottle behind the zombies, buying himself time as they paused at the sound. Drostan pelted the two approaching zombies with heavy glass jars filled with formaldehyde and discolored, gelatinous organs preserved for study.

“That’s evidence!” Sheffield objected.

Drostan hurled jar after jar. Glass shattered, shards stuck out like porcupine quills, lodged in dead skin, and the stinking chemicals bathed the zombies, fouling the air so that Drostan thought he might reel from the smell. Still they came, undeterred.

Bits of clockwork zombies splattered the operatory’s tiled walls and cement floor, covering every surface with decomposed flesh and organs. Drostan and Sheffield had backed up as far as they could go. One of the monsters lay twitching on the ground, headless, its body still bucking and jerking, hands scrabbling against the tile.

“Stay back!” Drostan shouted as he grabbed for a box of safety matches. Sure that it was better to act than debate consequences, he struck a match and tossed it at the formaldehyde-soaked mechanized corpses.

“Are you
nuts?
” Sheffield shouted.

The roar of flames cut off Drostan’s response. The two creatures nearest them went up like torches, flailing and moaning, blundering around the room as the flames rose from their clothing and hair. One of them veered close enough for Sheffield to swing his crowbar again, knocking the flaming head from its shoulders. The severed head rolled, igniting the fluid on the floor, and the first downed clockwork burst into flames.

Drostan grabbed a set of rib cutters, long-handled jointed blades like pruning shears, and got them around the third zombie’s neck. He jerked the handles together, severing the head from the shoulders.

Three decapitated clockwork corpses lay on the floor, flames guttering in the pools of chemical solution as the zombies shuddered and went still.

“Stay clear of them,” Drostan said, choking on the noxious smoke. “We don’t know if the bodies can still move.”

He swung the rib cutters at two of the windows, shattering the glass to let in air and clear the heavy black smoke. He was heaving for breath between the smoke and the heavy smell of formaldehyde.

“Where the hell are the cops?” Sheffield demanded, looking around his ruined operatory. A fine layer of soot covered the formerly pristine white tiles. Puddles of foul liquid muddied the floor.

“Makes you wonder,” Drostan said, toeing one of the cindered corpses out of the way with distaste.

“My morgue,” Sheffield groaned, looking around at the wreckage. He shook his head. “It’s going to take forever to put things back.” He eyed the empty shelves, where Drostan had grabbed jars and bottles to hurl at the zombies. “And you’ve just compromised a dozen investigations.”

Sheffield came around from behind the battered table and poked one of the charred zombies with his crowbar. It lay still, but he glared at it mistrustfully.

“Cover me,” he said to Drostan. “I want to get a better look at those gears.”

The attacker was headless, with a gunshot wound through its chest, and dead to start with, so the absurdity of Sheffield’s request did not escape Drostan, but he bit back a remark and reloaded, leveling his gun at what remained of the clockwork corpse.