Grave Voices (Haunted)

Part Two: Missing Bodies

Mitch and Jacob opened fire. Jacob's shotgun caught the well-dressed corpse of an old man full in the chest, blowing a hole through his rib cage. The zombie fell back a step from the blast, then kept on coming.

Mitch's rifle shot took another zombie in the middle of its forehead, taking off half of its skull when the bullet exited. The zombie fell to the ground, quivering.

Jacob's next shot caught a zombie square in the pelvis, blowing the legs off the rotting body. Mitch shot again, going for the kneecaps of a fourth walking corpse. None of the downed creatures stopped moving, quivering where they lay or trying to claw their way forward on the lawn.

"This isn't working too well!" Jacob yelled above the gunfire.

"Beats hand-to-hand combat," Mitch snapped back, and his rifle shot dropped a fifth zombie as Jacob's shotgun blast felled the sixth.

"They might not be destroyed, but they're not going anywhere fast," Jacob said, watching the twitching zombies and keeping an eye on the tree line in case any more walking corpses emerged. He spared a glance toward Mitch.

"I hope you've got a theory about this."

For once, Mitch lacked a sarcastic reply. "I've got nothing," he admitted. "We're going to have to pull in Renate Thalberg as well as Adam Farber and do some research."

"Uh oh," Jacob said. "Trouble."

Mitch raised his rifle, only to see Mr. Henry striding across the lawn scowling. "Stay away from the forest!" Mr. Henry shouted. "You'll only make them angry."

Jacob stared at the gravedigger. "You mean the zombies? You know about them?"

Mr. Henry rolled his eyes and spat to one side. "Of course I know about them. Hard to miss, aren't they? We've got a truce, sort of. They keep the rats away and I don't go hunting them."

Jacob cleared his throat. "Are there always zombies in the forest? And you didn't think to mention this when we asked about the graves?"

Mr. Henry looked at him as if he had gone daft. "Lately, yes. They don't usually last long before they fall apart, but then something brings up a new batch and it starts all over again."

"Has this been going on long?" Mitch asked, frowning.

"It's always been an on-and-off thing," Mr. Henry replied. "Lately, last month or so, more than usual." He swore. "Gets so that I can hardly bury the new dead before they pop up again. Wastes my time burying them two or three times. I don't get paid for that."

Mitch and Jacob exchanged glances. "Grave robbers, zombies, and mechanical monsters," Mitch said. "There's got to be a connection. And we'd better find it soon, before things really get out of hand."

# # #

"It's a pretty interesting mechanism, once you clean away all the fur and whatnot." Adam Farber looked down at the clockwork remains of Lustig's monster, which lay partially disassembled on a worktable in his basement laboratory at Tesla-Westinghouse's headquarters. The skinny inventor wore a stained lab coat. His wire glasses were askew and slightly smudged, and his sandy brown hair was falling into his eyes.

"What's so interesting about it?" Jacob asked. He and Mitch had come straight to Tesla-Westinghouse's 'Castle' in Wilmerding after they left Allegheny Cemetery.

Adam pointed toward the monster's mechanical innards. "It's really a big wind-up doll, but more sophisticated than any toy I've seen. On the other hand, it's not nearly as complicated as the werkmen I've built." He gave a nod toward Lars, a brass and chrome metal man wearing the uniform of an elevator operator.