The Company of Shadows (Wellington Undead Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

circumscribe the navel. Caldwell had noticed that incredibly, the thing seemed completely immune to the pain that such a procedure should be expected to cause: its thrashings and gnawings upon the leather strap continued unabated. Black-tinged drool leaked around the yellowing teeth of what had once been Private Michael Tombs, late of the King’s 74th, as they tried in vain to chew through the coarse brown leather.
    “Stop bloody struggling,” Caldwell muttered irritably, more to relieve the built-up tension than from any genuine expectation of the reanimated corpse actually understanding him.
    Once the chest was opened up from clavicles to genitals, the doctor had grasped each flap of skin and peeled it back, exposing the ribs. With the help of an orderly and a little grunting and straining, Caldwell was able to crack the ribs on each side, getting the thoracic shield out of the way and granting him access to the heart, lungs, and the great vessels of the chest.
    “Just the same as all the others…”
    Taking a pair of iron forceps, Caldwell prodded and probed at the pericardial sac, the rubbery bag of tissue that enclosed the heart. Try as he might, he could not stimulate any sort of movement. The creature’s heart was simply not beating.
    How in the Good Lord’s name was it maintaining any sort of blood pressure?
    Caldwell set down the forceps and took up the scalpel. Selecting a portion of the aortic arch, he placed the tip of the blade against the rigid vessel and applied pressure, pushing gently at first, until he finally felt a distinct pop: the scalpel had broken through the thick vessel wall and punched into its inner lumen. He was rewarded with a small dribble of black viscous fluid, which elicited a frown. The aorta was the body’s largest, high-pressure artery. Caldwell had seen soldiers shot in the chest whose aorta had been merely nicked by the intruding ball — such men would hemorrhage to death before he could even get the chest open and attempt to staunch the wound.
    Then again, if the pump wasn’t beating, the blood wouldn’t move through the aorta at all, would it? It would simply sit there, pooling, rather than flowing throughout the vasculature as it ought in an ordinary, living human. Widening the incision, the doctor placed the tip of his finger and thumb inside and parted the aortic wall with a shlurp.
    “Bring the candle closer, if you please.” Caldwell beckoned with his free hand to the closest orderly, who was holding the flickering light up above the creature’s chest. The man duly obliged, lowering the candlestick until it was hovering just above the gaping chest cavity.
    Reflecting back the vessel walls, Reed found his suspicions instantly confirmed. The sticky black sludge that passed for blood in all of the creatures he had examined so far was present here, and had solidified to something that had the consistency of slightly runny treacle or blackcurrant jam. It coated the vessel walls, but wasn’t moving forward, no matter how much its owner thrashed and fought.
    If only it smelled like jam, he thought, wrinkling his nose in disgust. The foul substance smelled disgusting, almost fecal, and he resisted the urge to gag. Not in front of the men, Caldwell: you’re made of sterner stuff than that.
    Next, he turned his attention to the lungs. Neither of the two bellows was inflating or deflating significantly — and yet, the thing was obviously moving some air, else how would it continue to make that incessant growling noise that grated on the nerves so? No matter how many specimens he looked at (Caldwell couldn’t quite bring himself to think of them as cadavers, so long as they were still moving around) he could never get over the anatomic and physiologic lunacy displayed by each reanimated corpse. None of this made any damned sense; it flew in the face of every last scrap of his medical training, all of it. Devoid of both breath and heartbeat, these foul creatures should be