The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [2]
Reanimate first. Keep waiting.
Wyndham was still screaming; he’d gone off the deep end, talking about the dark mysteries behind the veil of life. It was a common delusion among the necrologists: the idea that death was more than the absence of life, but a vital force in itself. He’d talk about the Asphyx next, and the Hidden Heart, the Suspiria, the secret whisper behind the Word. The man’s voice grew more and more hysterically desperate as he screamed, as though the Coroner’s understanding was as important to him as the science. Despite his decades of pursuing deranged scientists, Beckett had never been able to determine whether necrology drove a man mad, or if insanity was a prerequisite for trying to reanimate the dead..
The massive Reanimate jerked its head suddenly towards Beckett and his hiding place in the dark. It shivered slightly, and a third leg unfolded from beneath its huge, tattered cloak. The creature lunged suddenly towards Beckett, in a ground-eating lope, startling fast for something that size. Its iron jaw worked open, and the creature made a kind of choking sound, as it coughed black ichor from the ruins of its lungs.
Old fears, Beckett knew, are always the strongest, and there’s an old, old human fear that reacts to large monsters that move quickly. Instinct called up adrenaline, and the adrenaline pounded at the Coroner’s mind, screaming at him to run, just run. Every sense, every primal emotion built into the human nervous system clawed at his nerves and muscles, demanding that they hurry, hurry, hurry. It was all to no avail; Beckett’s mind was drug-becalmed by the veneine, and he’d had years of practice standing still when his instincts told him to run.
Beckett snorted, raised his pistol and fired twice. The massive revolver jerked in his hand. Two bullets struck home, right between the Reanimate’s legs. The creature collapsed to the ground and began thrashing wildly.
If there was one thing Elijah Beckett could not tolerate, it was incompetence. Reanimation was essentially the easiest, if most time consuming, of the Forbidden Sciences. It involved stitching together body parts, either from fresh corpses or, in Albert Wyndham’s case, limbs hacked off from live humans, trolljrmen, indigae, or sharpsies. The necrologist would then saturate the putrefying body with ichor, which preserved it and provided it a kind of vigor. Finally, a complex network of thin silver wires were attached to the major muscle groups, and usually powered by a phlogiston battery. The most expensive Reanimates usually had difference engines either affixed to the torso, or placed inside a hollowed-out skull. The mechanical thinking-engines were simpler in function than a living mind, but could temporarily stave off the effects of the Putrescent Derangement that was caused by rotting brain-tissue.
The process, while expensive and tedious, was fairly straightforward, and it suggested a few things in terms of design, suggestions that necrologists always seemed to ignore. In their haste to build new, invincible super-men, they seemed to just haphazardly stick limbs together. Of course it was possible to add a third leg to a human torso, and even invigorate it with ichor and electricity, but the Reanimate couldn’t use it. It had a spine and a pelvis that was built for two legs. All it could do with a third was drag it uselessly about.
Beckett watched the Reanimate flop around on the ground. It couldn’t die, not without being dismembered and cremated—the ichor in its rotten flesh would see to that. But it couldn’t get up or chase after anyone with a shattered pelvis. There was simply no structural way for it to support its own weight. Bones, as it turns out, are very important. The thing tried to rise up on one of its burly, trolljrman arms, and, after a moment’s thought, Beckett put a bullet in its shoulder, shattering clavicle and scapula. Just in case.
“No! NO!” Screeched Albert Wyndham; Beckett whirled to see the necrologist framed by the eerie blue light of the phlogiston lamps. The lamps