CHAPTER 32

“The War of the Undead”

As Related by Robert Peaslee September 15 1928

The juggernaut of undead tissue waded through the army of the reanimated like a scythe through a field of wheat, and with each step the homunculus grabbed up a handful of its fallen opponents and squeezed them dry. It was a horrible thing, a gestalt entity of my own creation, and built from the ashes of the undead. Ashes I had harvested myself from that long-forgotten cemetery that Megan had found on her travels, which the reanimated had once used for refuge but then abandoned.

I had spent days exhuming the bodies from that ramshackle graveyard and then converting them to the powder, the essential salts. It had taken me weeks to learn how to pronounce the words, and to then find the way to intertwine the bodies themselves. I had started with just two, and then three, and then it climbed exponentially, until I had scores of the dead entwined together as a massive creature. One that moved as a single entity, thought as a single entity, and fed as a single entity, and it fed constantly. It fed on blood, so much blood.

I don’t know why I did it. I had said I wouldn’t, but something had set me off. In retrospect, of course, it was a good idea; the colossus of flesh was exactly what I needed to help me wage a war against the reanimated, not to mention the thing that was climbing Sentinel Hill. Once it had been done, once it had been broken to my will, it was easy to keep it bottled up for just such an occasion. Like a loaded gun kept in the closet. Just in case. I suppose that makes me just a little mad, but after everything I had been through, wasn’t I entitled to be just a little mad?

While the reanimated fled from the cyclopean thing that was wading through them, I ran toward Megan and took a shot at the enigmatic thing that was the leader of the undead forces around us. Clapham-Lee dodged my bullet easily and retreated around the side of the cabin. I reached Megan a moment later and grabbed her by both shoulders.

“Are you all right?” I asked, noting the tatters of her coat and the blood that stained it.

She nodded. “The glass from the window cut me deep, but I’ll be all right in a minute or two.” She stared at the hulking thing smashing through the tiny creatures that were assaulting it. “What is that—abomination?”

“You and West and Clapham-Lee have your way of bringing back the dead, I have another.”

Megan’s mouth was agape. “West and Clapham-Lee were trying to find a way to cure death, to help people . . . it may have become twisted but that was the goal. I only studied reanimation so that I could bring an end to it. I never intended to become a reanimator . . . reanimatrix.”

“That’s the thing I’ve learned about life, Megan; no matter what we set out to do, whatever we think we know about ourselves, and what we believe about ourselves and those around us, we always end up doing things, becoming things that we never intended, and never imagined.”

“Is that how you justify creating that thing?”

“Justify it, no, but just as you had to study reanimation to learn how to better put the reanimated down, I had to learn about this, study this, create that thing out there.” I pointed at the juggernaut. The reanimated were screaming, being torn to bits, as something they didn’t understand fed upon them and their deaths.

“Can you control it?” There was a questioning fear in her eyes.

“Briefly,” I admitted. The juggernaut swung his club like a hockey stick and sent a pair of reanimated flying into a tree, where they exploded instantly.

“Briefly! What does briefly mean?”

“Six minutes.” Two reanimated had sneaked up behind the thing and jumped on to its back. They scrambled up and then plunged makeshift daggers into the space between its shoulders.

“Six minutes! What happens after six minutes? Please tell me it collapses back into dust!”

We caught the attention of something that had once been human, but now looked more like the results of an unholy union between a woman and a chimpanzee. I put it down with a shot from my pistol. “After six minutes it becomes unstable and breaks down into its component parts.”

“That’s dust, right?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not, it’s the dozens of individuals that make it up, individuals that I can’t control; individuals that will be very upset with me.” The juggernaut was thrashing about, trying to dislodge the things on its back. I fired at something that had crawled up its leg.

“Care to elaborate?”

“The resurrection process is painful, not just physically but spiritually. They were dead, from what I can tell they have no memory of being dead, but they know there is missing time. They know that for some period of time—months, days, years, sometimes even centuries, they didn’t exist, and that is an existential crisis that they simply can’t deal with. It makes them violent and I tend to be a reminder, a focus of all that confusion and pain.” Megan fired at a meatball of a man and dropped him to the ground just inches from us.

“Six minutes?”

“Well, no, actually.” I looked at my watch—it was almost eight in the morning. “We have less than four and a half minutes now.” The rain was coming down in buckets.

“This is your play now, Mr. Peaslee,” yelled Megan over the sound of rain and the cacophony of screams. “You lead, I’ll follow.”

I turned and looked into that beautiful face with the strange alluring eyes. “You should know that I love you.” And then I kissed her. It wasn’t a long kiss, it wasn’t a short kiss, but it was enough to make my point.

When I finally and reluctantly pulled away, there was an awkward look on her face and her hands darted to my chest and played nervously with my shirt. “Perhaps we should talk about this later? You know, when we’re not surrounded by the undead and on the verge of being killed.”

“Good point.”

I took the Tommy gun and turned, firing into the crowd with short controlled bursts aimed at the head. Megan followed behind me, laying down covering fire on my flanks. It took us a moment, but we soon got into a rhythm with me taking point and firing into large parties, and then Megan either cleaning up or picking off strays.

As for the juggernaut, that thing eventually cleared its back by rolling over and crushing its attackers beneath its immense bulk. They were still there, embedded like dead flies, but they weren’t causing any more damage. The juggernaut was back in the game, smashing its way through the attacking horde. The thing seemed unstoppable, but the reanimated minions of Clapham-Lee didn’t seem to understand that; they just kept throwing themselves at it, trying to tear it apart, but to little avail. True, they were able to wrench a limb free, or even decapitate a component or two, but these were quickly replaced and the beast marched on, leaving devastation in its path.

Then, without warning, the Tommy gun ran dry. I disengaged the drum and tossed it to the side. “You had another one of these?” I called out to Megan.

“In my knapsack.”

“Which is where now?”

“It tore loose when I was dragged through the window. It’s probably still in the cabin.”

I looked back, thinking the cabin would be quite some distance away, but in reality we hadn’t actually moved that far. Our steps had been slow and sure. We had been methodical, not manic, and consequently we hadn’t actually gained that much ground. In contrast, the juggernaut had been anything but controlled, and as a result he had actually circled around and wasn’t far from where he had exploded through the front of the cabin, leaving the door and windows as little more than wreckage. Wreckage that I could see someone was now picking through.

It was little more than a shadow, but that shadow was unmistakable, unlike all the others, essentially unique in all the world. It stood there in the darkness, holding in its hands its own head, a head that was even now speaking words I could barely hear, but recognized almost immediately. They were words that I had grown to know almost by heart, but had left a copy of behind on the table in case my memory failed, and now they were being spoken and the juggernaut that had turned the tides of battle in our favor was on the verge of being banished. Clapham-Lee was screaming in that throatless, airy voice of his.

OGTHROD
AI’F GEB’L-EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
‘NGAHING AI’Y
ZHRO

I fired my pistol, but missed. Megan followed suit, but her shots failed to connect as well. Suddenly I was sprinting across the devastated landscape, shooting as I went. This time my bullets found their mark, and Clapham-Lee’s body shuddered and recoiled as the slugs hit, but the head kept speaking.

OGTHROD
AI’F GEB’L-EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
‘NGAHING AI’Y
ZHRO

Then suddenly he was laughing, and I saw why. The juggernaut, my flesh golem, was falling apart, crumbling, dissolving. It was systematically turning back into ash, and in the wind and rain the ash was being washed away into the muddy field where dozens of the reanimated now lay dead, or dying. Their crushed forms were still struggling; still trying to come to terms with what had happened, but for most it was inevitable. There was little to save, which was actually the whole point.

The body of Clapham-Lee was still standing; it staggered a little, but that was all. “Now what shall you do, Mr. Peaslee? I warned you before not to interfere in my plans, but you’ve done just that. And now it’s time to pay the price for your insolence.”

I dropped the useless Tommy gun. I felt the weight of the pistol in my hand. There was still a shot left, maybe two. The last of the juggernaut collapsed onto the ground, spilling bodies and parts of bodies across the muddy lawn. They didn’t last. The rain pelted the squirming cadavers and bored into them like drills through soft wood. They weren’t even screaming anymore. They were just being washed away into nothingness, while all around us the surviving reanimated came shambling back to surround us. “Did you expect me to do nothing?” I shouted back.

“No, Mr. Peaslee, I expected you to . . .” But he never finished that sentence. I had flicked the gun up and taken aim and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot went right into his chest, and when it exited it took a significant amount of meat with it. There had been no second bullet. The gun had only had one shot left after all.

But there had been two shots. I had heard them.

I looked at Megan. She was running toward me, her mouth screaming my name. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the once-imposing form of Major Doctor Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, ODS, spin to the ground. I tried to stay focused on Megan. Everything had slowed down. There was something wrong with my shoulder—it hurt. It burned. There was pain. And then I saw her.

She was standing in the distance, just at the edge of the wood. She had a revolver pointed in my direction. There was a wisp of smoke at the tip of the barrel. I was breathing hard, my eyes wouldn’t focus. Megan became a blur. The woman standing there with the gun came into sharp resolution. I knew her. I had never met her, of course, but I knew her. I had seen her picture every day. I had lived in her house. There was no mistaking those features. Her pictures didn’t do her justice. She was as beautiful and radiant as her daughter, the only girl I had ever fallen in love with.

My hand went to my shoulder and I felt the blood pumping out of the hole I had found there. I had been shot. I fell to the ground. I had been shot. I had been with Megan for only about two hours, and both she and her mother had aimed guns at me.

The difference being, Elizabeth Halsey-Griffith, Megan’s mother, had actually shot me.

This was one hell of a way to start a relationship.