Authors: Alan Spencer
“He’s whimpering. I can hear him. He’s yards away.”
His eyelids froze shut. “I won’t die like this.”
“I see him. He’s on the ground. He won’t run anymore. Ah yes, another brain we can use.
Another mind
.”
Throwing his head back, using his brain, he pictured a better reality, and he shouted, “
I won’t die like this!
”
The darkness turned blacker, and the cold finally receded.
Dead Confederates
Displaced at a nanosecond’s speed, Craig was suddenly hunkered against a stone wall. The rustle of wind and dirt breached the silence—a silence that seemed wrong in his predicament. He hadn’t opened his eyes yet. Nothing about the dry and searing-hot weather and the smells in the air—raw black gunpowder, iron, blood, and the not-so-subtle hint of recent death—was reassuring. He was losing courage, battling fatigue and the knowing of something horrible would be coming his way soon. He was far removed from the happy memories of necking with Susan and loving Katie in bed.
The silence must’ve occurred recently, Craig thought, as mewling voices and weak conversation broke out throughout the area. He opened his eyes and studied the dead bodies along a stone wall, some of them unmoving, and bloody, and shot to pieces, and others on the verge of death. The ground was rock-hard dirt. Craig focused on the bodies strewn about the way. They wore strange uniforms. They weren’t navy, Marines, or army. Shell jackets, frock coats, forage caps, cravats, and suspenders were the components of the wardrobe, each a powder-gray color.
My God, these are confederate soldiers.
Dust blew in his face, attaching to the streaming sweat on his face and limbs. Many of the living wounded soldiers clutched their muskets to their bodies in fear of another attack. It was too quiet, he kept telling himself. A gunfire battle had recently ceased, and each side was waiting for either a retreat or a counterattack.
One of the soldiers seized his leg. “Who are you? You’re not one of Lee’s men. No, you can’t be. Whose side are you on?”
“I-I I don’t know,” he replied, overwhelmed looking at the soldier’s face caked in blood. He’d taken two shots to the stomach and one had blown off his ear. “Our pumpkin slingers couldn’t hold ’em off. Hooker doesn’t know how to fight. Bastard got us all killed.”
“What year is it?”
The soldier laughed, coughing up blood and clutching his chest in raging pain. “It’s 1863. Suppose you don’t know where we’re at either?”
Craig shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t.”
“Fredericksburg, Virginia, boy, and I’m a Confederate until my dying day!”
The man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, but they didn’t close, the marbles forever trained in a strange moment of glory.
He heard drumming and commands issued in the far distance. The rest of the Confederates had retreated, he guessed, and the dead and critically wounded had been left behind. Craig scavenged for a way out, though he still didn’t know why he was here during the Civil War. He crossed soldiers cut in half, missing arms and legs, and otherwise shot to pieces.
“
Hmmm
…the head’s already opened, but the brains are ruined.”
Who was that?
Craig lowered onto all fours. Farther down the stone wall built into a hill, he heard somebody stir.
“Oh no, it’s worthless. Ruined. I can’t use him. Pitiful and a bloody mess. Putrid magpie waste of human flesh. I’ll never get anything accomplished at this rate.”
The speaker wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t Dr. Krone or anybody he’d known from his past. The man kept marching forward, concerned and curious. Sifting. Searching. Desperate. Maybe he’d been sent to this memory on accident, he supposed. This had to be another person’s life, another person’s account of the past because it certainly wasn’t Dr. Krone’s or Craig’s to recount.
“No—
naaaawwwgghhhh!
”
Craig bolted ahead, and a quick sprint later, he caught a man hunched over a solider reaching out to fend the man over him off. The victim’s defense quickly faltered, dying and finally dead. The attacker wasn’t a solider on either side of the war, though he wore a pair of Confederate trousers and suspenders without a top. He clutched a sizeable blade and hammer.
The man caught Craig behind him. “Oh, someone’s watching me, I see. Well, you might as well enjoy the presentation. It’s about to get messy!”
Craig was flabbergasted, catching a mouthful of dust and choking on it.
“I’m saving this man’s life—no, not his life, he’s dead. In fact, he’s been shot four times. No, not saving him. His lungs have pooled up with blood.
A dead son of a bitch
.
Heart might’ve taken a hit. Ah, another casualty, but his soul can be saved. Maybe. I just need one thing.”
And what would that be?
The extraction was crude and performed with careless precision. The man propped the tip of a blade—what was actually a socket bayonet without the rifle—and hammered it through his skull. The man playfully struck and chiseled at the skull around the circumference of the man’s head. Blood burst with each strike, the skin in ribbons, the skull in brittle pieces.
“And here it is…
the soul
.”
Craig fixated on the man. He was rotund, fat beefy fingers, double chin, eyes slightly crossed, and his spectacles magnified his stare. He had to ask, “You wouldn’t happen to be a part of the Krone family?”
The man jerked from his work, disturbed, clutching an empty skull cap and admiring the glistening brain he excavated. “Who told you? How do you know me? You speak up.”
“I’m a friend,” he lied. “I’m not a threat.” He needed a better explanation to appease the man. “I’m interested in your work. Your work is important. Worthwhile. Genius.”
The man was breathing hard, his mouth slightly open in a soft pant. Then he loosened up and traced his dirty hands along each crevice and lobe of the brain. “Nobody appreciates my work. That’s why I was so happy the war began. I could take my subjects without scrutiny. I used to be a doctor. Dead cadavers were all I could use, but they caught me, banned me from practice, and the bastards, they tried to lynch me. They’ll see I can save the soul even after death. Nobody has to be a casualty of war.”
The knife carved around the circumference of the brain with wet sloshes and gushing blood, and then Krone clutched the brain in one hand. “It’s magnificent. So much potential and we still barely know the human brain.”
He stuffed the brain into a blood-sodden knapsack. “So you’re interested in my work? I can’t share it. You being here has put me at risk. They’d hang me, shove sawdust into my eyes, and execute me. Southern boys are as adamant about slavery as they are about their punishments for treason. You’re not going anywhere, friend. In fact, I can use you. You want life after death? I can grant it. You enjoy me and my work,” a sly grin, “why don’t you become a part of it?”
Craig snarled, with hands and arms poised to fight back. “You stay the hell away from me.”
“A willing test subject,” he laughed, albeit bitterly, “is too good to be true. You’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen, and they will listen to your tale and someone will believe you.”
He clutched the knife. “Now come here.
Give me that brain!
”
Craig raced back the way he came, stamping on dead bodies, and kicking at broken muskets, and trudging through puddles of blood spread out on the killing ground.
Did the Krones have a killing gene, he wondered, every generation as sick and twisted and deranged in the name of science as the next?
He ducked, the socket bayonet hurled at him and sticking into the ground. Craig picked up the weapon, claiming it as his own. “And how about your brain? How would you like it if I took it from you?”
Krone was taken aback. “What do you know of my work?”
“You want to steal memories, don’t you?”
“Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” Krone said, placing his finger on his lip introspectively. “No, no, I’m after the soul. I want to retrieve the person out of the organ. Maybe the memory would be a good avenue to study. Do you want to combine ideas? You sound as interested as I do. Let’s talk about our ideas over a bottle of whiskey.” He winked at Craig. “Interested?”
“Hardly,” he spat at him, wielding the knife. “I’m not a murderer, and I’m certainly not a madman like the rest of your fucked-up gene pool.”
“Gene pool?” The man was confused and rightfully so. “Just who are you? You’re not a solider from either side. I haven’t seen anybody in such strange clothing before. How did you arrive here?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “And it doesn’t matter. You stay where you are, and I’ll stay where I’m at.”
Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom!
Krone was shot three times, his chest blooming red. Landing on his back, the man pointed at Craig with his blood-caked hands, curled up in excruciating agony. “He’s a traitor! I caught him cutting up the dead. He’s stealing their brains! He’s got dozens of them. Check that knapsack. Execute him. Behead him. He did it. It was him!”
That son of a bitch.
Craig ducked, numerous muskets aimed in his general direction. The shots rattled and pinged at the stone wall, followed up by a gray fog that obscured the gap between him and the Union soldiers standing above the wall. He had a temporary shield to hide behind, but it wouldn’t be long before the smoke dissipated and a clear shot could be made.
“Shit!”
He launched in the opposite direction, praying he didn’t catch buckshot or whatever the hell they used to unload their muskets into his back.
I can’t stay here much longer. I’ll be a dead corpse baking in the sun in no time. Damn you, Krone, even your family is trying to murder me.
His options were low. The wall was near an ending point, the hill continuing on to an open field. Many more soldiers were strewn about in death poses by the hundreds along the green pastures. The Union soldiers would surround him soon if they didn’t already have him in their sights.
He decided on one last option. He lifted up a series of bodies and buried himself underneath them. Blood soaked into his clothes. Flies buzzed, landed, and tested his body and were displeased he wasn’t ripe and covered in open wounds.
The pounding of boots surrounded the wall, and he waited, listened, and prayed that he’d hidden successfully.
The Secret Basement
The wait ended soon enough. He was safe from the musket fire, but not from what was in the room. Studying the area, Craig wasn’t chained up like the rest of them in the concrete cinder-block room. He counted nine individuals in chains, wearing institutionalized garb. He shivered, perplexed and relieved all at once. The room was half dark, with lights on farther down in the corridor, but where he was now, he was shrouded in darkness. The room leaked from the foundation, the stink of stagnant and earthy-smelling water filling up the area. Then there were feces and urine hanging in the air.
“Where the hell am I
now
?” he whispered to himself. “This shit is unending.”
“Silence back there—I’ll rip your tongue out if you speak again! I thought I sedated all of you. It will be your turn soon enough. Your wait won’t be much longer.”
The speaker was a woman. He thought back to when he was walking the halls of a sanitarium. The walls here were also institutionalized and characterless.
You’d think when trying to cure the mentally ill, you’d give the place a bit of pep. I wonder if the paint color is named Clinical Depression?
The joke left his mind immediately once his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The mental patients were all in straightjackets. Leather belts were wrapped tightly around their eyes. Hands and feet were shackled to the walls. Water dripped from the ceiling and gargled and belched down the drain feet from where he stood, the trickle slow but steady. Farther down the room was the reason why their eyes were blocked by belts. His mouth unhinged at the sight. First, he took in the strange device—homemade in appearance and craftsmanship. The guillotine was crafted from two planks of wood with a hole cut out for the head, the blade a piece of sheet metal sharpened to slice. Chains were connected to the wood to keep the hands in place behind the back. The device stood on a metal pushcart for easy transportation.
A guillotine on wheels, how original?
Shuck!
Another’s head was removed, the hands waving, chains rattling as the hands flung about in peril. The woman collected the head from the bucket, the shaved head drenched in red from what spurted down from the neck. Then, she shoved the head onto a vice on a nearby table. She placed a metal crown onto the skull and spun a handle until the gradual cracking turned into one loud and sharp
crick
noise. The woman removed the head device—a crown with razors, he guessed—and the top section of the skull was detached. She plunged her fingers and retrieved the brain with practiced and monotonous skill.
The body finally went still, all nerve pulses killed. The woman dumped the brain into a plastic case brimming with a clear fluid. She sealed it, labeled it by name, and was working toward the room with the other patients in-waiting when she caught Craig hiding.
“Who are you and why aren’t you in restraints?”
Craig tightened his fists. “I’m not one of the patients you’re exploiting. You take another step, and I’ll hurt you.”