Curran Array - Zombie Pulp

“Toothsome little thing, isn’t it?” West said.

There is madness in war, but the story West told me was beyond that. There was an officer, a Captain Davies, with the West Surrey Regiment, who routinely tiptoed over the top of the sandbagged parapet, whistling “Tipperary” with his pet monkey tucked safely under his arm. No one doubted that he was a lunatic for he often charged into battle stark naked. One evening, a German shell exploded as he walked the parapet, the shrapnel neatly decapitated his monkey and reducing him into an unrecognizable mess of red meat. Somehow, of course, West had gotten his hands on the monkey’s head.

And what he did with it you can well imagine.

I would be remiss at this point if I did not write of the massive bubbling vat that was secreted in the very center of the workshop. I likened it to some massive aluminum womb that was connected via an intricate spider-webbing of glass tubing and rubber hoses to various immense glass tanks and vessels that hung from the ceiling in swaying harnesses, all filled or half-filled with red and green and yellow solutions that bubbled almost continuously. Other snaking tubes led to upended vacuum jugs and what I was certain were athenors, sublimation vessels, and decomposition chambers straight out of the Middle Ages, all connected together and feeding into the vat with an intricate system of glass piping like organs connected by artery and vein. I saw what I thought was a primitive digester furnace alongside vacuum pumps and gas combinators.

A womb. No more, no less.

The centerpiece of that congested laboratory.

West had yet again cultivated a seething mass of reptilian embryonic tissue. It was steaming and fluid and pulsing. A terrible hissing came from it as it “cooked” in its own vile secretions. There was a steel lid keeping it in absolute darkness. West kept it at 100% humidity and at a stifling temperature of 102?. Mimicking some offensive tropical spawning ground, the vat was but a revolting noxious womb of wriggling fetal life. As I stood there, trembling, he dropped the corpses of six rats in there, a jar of carrion and something else he would not let me see.

“Soon enough,” he said, ducking under the tubing and piping and ductwork. “Soon enough.”

I did not inquire further though my scientific curiosity was nearly insuppressible with a desire to know. West showed me something that snarled in the corner, a thrashing nearly impossible thing that bayed like a hound in its reinforced cage. I dare not describe that fanged doglike horror, its jaws dripping foul-smelling saliva.

I was glad when we stepped away around tanks and heaped stacks of books.

What West wanted me to see was lying on a slab in the center of the room. He pulled the sheet back and I saw the body of youngish woman. She was pale, certainly, but in no way decomposed. She had the “freshness” that West always sought in his subjects and which we both knew from our experiments was the key to successful reanimation.

I found her disturbing.

Just another corpse one might say and I should have been quite used to such things by that point…but the sight of her unnerved me. She was like Death personified: emaciated to a frightening degree, her ribs protruding and her pelvic wings seeming to nearly thrust from the flesh, legs and arms like broomsticks. Her grinning skull was horribly pronounced, lips shriveled back from dirty teeth and discolored gums. She was a skeleton stretched with tight yellow-white flesh that was shiny and ill-fitting. I was reminded, and unpleasantly so, of the female from Grunewald’s The Dead Lovers.

“A prostitute,” West said, holding up one sutured wrist. “The poor thing tired of life. But, you and I, we’ll give her the chance that her maker never would.”

The idea that this wraith could stand and walk was unthinkable. The very notion made cold chills run up my spine like spiders, a feverish sweat break out on my face.

As I lifted her head up, West made a tiny incision at the base of her skull with a scalpel, then taking up his hypodermic of reagent, carefully slid the needle into the medulla oblongata at the sight of the inferior peduncle which was just below the cerebellum. There was no guesswork with West; when you had dissected as many bodies as he had and put them back together again, there was no such thing as chance. Once the needle was seated properly, he injected 8 cc’s into the selected site.

Then I lowered the woman back to the slab and the waiting began. Perspiring, trying to ignore certain nameless oddities squealing and slithering in that anatomical sideshow, I timed it with my stopwatch. West claimed that this latest reagent-which now contained a certain abominable glandular secretion from the reptilian tissue that hissed in the vat-would give us, he believed, a near-perfect reanimation. I was skeptical, of course, remembering quite well the absolute horrors we had resurrected in the past. The very idea of them made something inside me clench tight.

There was nothing to do but wait. Sometimes reanimation was achieved within minutes, sometimes not for hours.

I wrote my observations in West’s voluminous leather-bound notebook while he examined the body: “10:27 PM,” he said. “Six minutes, twenty-three seconds since injection. No discernable reaction as yet. No evidence of rigor. Limbs are supple, flexible. Pallor mortis unchanged. Algor mortis has flatlined…temperature rising steadily now.” He checked the stopwatch. “At seven minutes, forty seconds, body temperature shows a noticeable spike. Sixty-one degrees…now sixty-two.”

West continued his examination while I wrote feverishly by lamplight, the shadows sliding around me. Above the infernal noise of the creatures in that room, I could hear the wind whipping outside, hear the creaking of a tree, the scrape of branches at the roof.

“Temperature up two degrees,” West said.

It was happening and I could feel it as I had so many other times. How to explain it? It was as if something in the atmosphere of the room had subtly shifted, as if the very ether around us was being charged with some unseen malefic energy. I swear to you that I could feel it crawling over my arms and up the back of my neck like a rising static charge. The shadows thrown by the lamps seemed thicker…oily, serpentine shapes that cavorted about us. Those abominations in their cages seemed to sense it and they began what can only be deemed a whining/shrilling/baying/screeching chorus of bestial wrath and fury that was part fear and part near-human hysteria. The profane head of that primeval-looking ape began to move in its jar of serum, suckering flabby lips to the glass like a snail. And in those bubbling vessels of vital fluid, the various limbs began a mad, hellish dance, thumping and bumping, hands wiggling their fingers and swimming around like waterlogged spiders. And in that vat of pestilential tissue, that seething firmament of fungous, godless creation, there was movement and hissing, weird slopping sounds. The metal lid began to rattle as if what was inside desperately needed to get out.

And then Through that bacchanalian cacophony of fleshy monstrosities, I heard a tapping. A single finger on the woman’s left hand trembled. It was tapping against the slab as if impatient. Then her body jerked stiffly, her back arching, bones straining beneath that thin veneer of skin, and a low mournful moaning came from deep in her throat. “Aaaaaaa,” she said. “Gaaaaahhhh.” It was a dry and scratching sound like claws on concrete, like the rustling of ancient wrappings in a violated tomb.

“ Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds,” West said above the din. “Reanimation achieved…”

I was terrified to come into contact with her, for my fingers to brush against that shining, near-phosphorescently pallid flesh. And I say to you now, she sensed my unease, filled herself with my anxiety and tremor. For the eyes peeled open in that skullish face and they were glossy pink orbs, translucent like egg yolks, set with tiny pinprick pupils. She looked right at me, titling her head slightly and offering me a charnel grin of yellow, narrow teeth and blackened gums. It was a mirthless, sardonic grin of sheer malevolence that made me take a step back.