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<sup>[source](https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/1004.jpg)</sup>
*<sup>[Part 1](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novella-the-resurrection-men-part-1)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 2](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novella-the-resurrection-men-part-2)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 3](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novella-the-resurrection-men-part-3)</sup>*

Finally the train arrived at a second tunnel. Bracing myself as I knew not what to expect on the other side, we entered. This was a much longer trip. At first I thought my ears deceived me but as we approached the next stop, there was no mistaking it. The sound of rousing music. 

Expecting to find those two at the source of it, I stopped the train. The station appeared to be a refurbished tube stop with wooden trim added, ornate lanterns hanging here and there, and posters advertising all manner of brands I’d never heard of. I left Annika on one of the benches, vowing to return soon with help. She didn’t seem to care about that one way or the other, much less appear interested in where she was. 

The source of the music turned out to be a theater. Some sort of dance number by the sound of it. But when I poked my head through the curtains, I received an unbearable shock. Row after row of gaudily dressed theater goers looked on in delight as some sort of ribald comedy played out on the stage. 

The actors, insofar as I can call them that, were inanimate human remains. Dressed to the nines, but moved about by strong fishing line tied to circlets at their wrists, neck and ankles. Life sized marionettes.  

One slapped the other’s hat off, and the audience laughed uproariously. Scanning the audience, I noticed a number of them injecting themselves with the black fluid. That explained the sickly sweet stench. Not a warm body among them. 

“Take your seat or close the damned curtain” someone harshly whispered. So I closed the curtain and doubled back towards Annika. I found her still giggling, but laid out across the tracks. “What are you doing, you foolish girl?” I cried. How did she move from the bench? All I could figure was that she’d dragged herself with her one good arm. “No matter”, she tittered. “None of it matters. There is nothing!”

I scooped her up and continued to scold her as I set her securely in one of the train cars. We were unexpectedly joined by a strange gentleman before I could set the train in motion. “Dear me” he exclaimed. “She looks to be in poor repair. Are you on your way to the surgical center?” I asked where I might find it. “Is this your first visit, chap? It’s the very next stop.”

The next stop, indeed. It resembled nothing less than the main street of a prosperous town, but buried deep underground. All manner of colorful electric signs competed for my attention. I passed a boxing ring out in the open with spectators gathered to bet on the outcome. 

One pugilist soundly struck the other, I heard bone splinter, and the poor fellow’s head hung back over his shoulders like a dangling hood. Yet he seemed more disappointed than hurt. The crowd, mostly men in their thirties, ate it up. “Off to the clinic with him. He’ll be fighting fit within the hour”, barked the bookie. 

Appalling. To think, I’d gone the better part of my life with all of this beneath my feet, none the wiser. I knew of tall tales concerning shanghai tunnels, used to spirit away drunks who would then wake up aboard ships headed out to sea. Slave labor until arrival. If I’d been told such an operation were going on beneath the city, I’d have laughed it off. Yet something far stranger now surrounded me.  

I passed a series of brothels as I followed signs indicating the general direction of the clinic. Did my best to avert my eyes, and most of them took the hint, but one particularly bold madame obstructed my path. “What’s the hurry, love? Don’t you like me?”  

She was positively Amazonian, over six feet tall but with a wasp-like waist. Such a grossly exaggerated hourglass figure as to be more comical than lewd. I took note of four syringes loaded with the black stuff strapped to her muscular thigh. 

Striving to establish eye contact past her abruptly protruding bosoms, swaying about as if conspiring to prevent it, I answered as politely as I could that I was on urgent business. “If you don’t like these, I have some smaller ones back in my room.” She produced a needle and thread from her cleavage and winked at me. “I’ll even let you attach ‘em.” 

I recoiled in disgust, twirled around her as expertly as any rugby player you can name and ran the rest of the way to the medical pavilion. The lighting there proved mercifully less garish. Sterile white, save for the giant internally illuminated red cross above the entrance. As soon as I was satisfied I could find it a second time, I headed back and fetched Annika. 

Her broken limbs made the most distressing noises as they shook about, dangling as they did despite my efforts to hold her firmly. "You're wasting your time" she whispered. "All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put me together again."

"You're delirious" I muttered. "But you're in denial" she answered, eyes placidly shut as though asleep. "Can't you see I'm dead?" She burst into another fit of giggling. It was a trek this time on account of her weight burdening me. I attracted many concerned stares as well. But before long she was in the care of the local doctor and a trio of nurses. 

One of them looked ‘enhanced’ nearly to the same degree as the woman I’d escaped earlier. Feeling my eyes on her, she explained “I get all my work done here. Doctor McCullough is a genius.” By some strange definition, perhaps. He entered through a pair of windowed doors. Broad shouldered but a touch shorter than myself, wearing a surgeon’s frock and some manner of queer device on his back.

Once he began cutting into Annika despite my startled cries, it became clear what it was for. One of his forearms had, most likely by his own hand, been replaced by an electrical surgical saw. Once finished with it, he simply popped that forearm off as you might remove a glove, placed it on the rack slung from his shoulder with the others, and withdrew the arm he needed next. 

It struck me as similar to a quiver. But with a variety of motorized surgical prosthetics instead of arrows. A voltaic cell on his belt, perhaps the size of a soup can, recharged the arms docked to the rack while not in use via a thin black cable. Like nothing I’d ever seen, or had any desire to. “She’s done quite a number on her tibia. Fell, I take it?” I nodded, not taking my eyes off his crude mechanical limb as he worked. 

“You’re in luck, I just received a new shipment of those. May need some bolts here and there, particularly in the arm. One of my nurses will draw up the bill while I’m working. That’s everything I need from you, I don’t like an audience.” The shapely nurse from before shooed me out of the room and, following some preparation, presented me with paperwork to sign. 

It was difficult to leave Annika in such a place, but all things considered she was safer here than anywhere else. I paced outside for a few minutes before getting it in my head to explore this place a bit. Imagining, I suppose, that I’d seen the worst of it already. That it held no more surprises. 

A modern day necropolis. No exaggeration to say so, a real city of the dead if ever there was one. Bustling with shoppers, merrymakers, businessmen and all manner of compact electric carriages. I searched for petrol models but saw none, eventually reasoning that their fumes would only accumulate to intolerable thickness in this enclosed space. 

A wild young fellow zipped past me in a roadster built out of a coffin, a Jacob’s ladder mounted to the hood sparking as he accelerated. Two more on battery motorbikes followed in close pursuit, whooping raucously. Despite everything, I smiled. But once the commotion died down, my gaze fell on a pair of iron double doors in the far wall. 

No sign above them. No locks either, one hung ajar as if inviting me. Would I be held accountable for trespassing if they’d not even bothered to chain it up? Although it wasn’t even clear to me that I was welcome down here at all, so far coasting along under the pretense that I belonged. It was my father who taught me to carry myself that way, when first he began introducing me to his business partners. 

With some grunting and heaving, I moved the door on its rusty hinges enough to grant me passage. Then shut it behind me lest anyone unexpectedly follow. The corridor was hewn from solid rock, descending still further into the earth and dripping with moisture. In the distance I heard bats screech as they flapped about. 

Humming bulbs strung at intervals lit the way, almost more of a hinderance than a help as they prevented my eyes from adjusting to the dark. Soon I arrived at the far end of the tunnel. another pair of iron doors. Not wanting to have come this far only to turn around, I put my shoulder against one of the doors and with no small effort worked it far enough open that I could peer through.

I could not comprehend the sight before me. Row after row of nightmarish creatures resembling nothing more than immense insects lay restrained in rows, as their pulsating abdomens were milked for the familiar black fluid by motorized suction pumps. Long, clear rubber hose trailed from each stall up along the ceiling, then to a central reservoir. 

The one nearest me seemed to notice my gaze. It emitted a high pitched series of clicks and chirps, writhing about impotently under its leather straps. Then, Roderick Beady appeared. “Settle down, you.” he murmured, scowling at the earwig-like monstrosity. He produced an electric wand identical to the one he’d sent me home with and used it to jab the creature in the mouth parts. It shrieked. I heard prolonged sizzling and smelt some sickly burnt aroma. 

Beyond the stalls, I glimpsed something like a massive subterranean excavation site. Men in hard hats shouted and gestured at one another, a crane slowly pivoted bearing a palette of crates, and then there was the centerpiece of it all: A porous mound in the middle of the cavern, with a hole at the top leading down into the Earth. 

A buzzer sounded. Six men in the sort of protective armor you often see worn by dog trainers approach the mound, collectively holding a long pole with a loop of cord at the end. Then, one of the giant insects, perhaps the size of a bear, crawls out of the hole. Before it can react, the loop is slipped around its bulbous head and tightened. It chirps loudly and struggles to free itself.

It eventually takes another two men in addition to the first six to subdue it. The electric wands are employed, but only seem to enrage it, so it becomes a game of endurance. Finally exhausted, the six legged beast is herded off into an empty stall and strapped down. I now have a good idea of what fate awaits it, and briefly feel a strange sort of sympathy for the ugly thing. 

With some questions answered but many more raised, I backed away from the spectacle and turned to make my way to the tunnel entrance. Only to be confronted by Mr. Beady. “Wandered off from the tour, did you?” His voice dripping with acid. I told him of Annika’s leap from the roof and resulting injuries. It seemed to soften him up somewhat.

“You’ve seen it all now. I can’t say as I expected a principled man like you to violate my trust so casually.” I fell over myself apologizing for it and insisted I was no more inclined to breathe a word about any of this now than I was before. The promise of a generous additional sum finally put the matter to rest and, while walking back to the clinic, he addressed the matter of Annika’s erratic behaviors. 

“Aside from the standard preservatives, the injections also contain a substance developed for interrogation which suppresses short term memory. Besides the importance of reviving the body before it has significantly decomposed, there is also the problem of doing so within the window of time necessary for the memory serum to be of any benefit.”

I told him I was sure I didn’t understand the connection. “Without the serum, they are paralyzed by madness. They can only be restored to sanity by making them forget where they were before we brought them back.” I thought to inquire about the insects but elected not to press on a sore spot. 

He went on about how I may have received an irregular batch with insufficient memory serum, apologized and offered a replacement set of syringes. “If you went to McCullough, he’s likely to send you home with some nerve tonic. He’s a bit liberal with the stuff, but in your case I recommend it.”

Sure enough, upon releasing Annika to my care he produced a pair of green glass bottles shaped like flasks with some soupy translucent concoction inside. The label, covered in decorative flourishes, read “Doc McCullough’s restorative nerve tonic. Appropriate for the treatment of hysteria, insomnia, diminished vigor, possession and rickets.” Bit suspect that he brewed his own, but I thanked him all the same.

Annika curled up next to me as we rode the tram back to the warehouse. Fine little stitches marked where Doc McCullough had gone in to replace shattered bones. I wondered how she could heal so quickly before it occurred to me that she could not heal at all. Must greatly simplify a doctor’s work. As we passed by the tangle of transparent rubber tubing leading up to each of the grave hatches overhead, I inquired what they were for.

“Haven’t you pried enough?” he snapped. I reminded him of my generosity, and once again his lips loosened for it. “A preservative gas is piped up into the caskets. This slows the rate of decay, in advance of potential resurrection orders or in case we need to borrow bits and pieces for...maintenance.” I thought back to Doc McCullough’s windfall of fresh tibias. 

Annika resumed her soft, demented giggling. I pushed the tonic on her but could not make her drink. While I was in Beady’s lab writing him a check I meant to compensate for my indiscretions, she wandered aimlessly about the warehouse. 

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*<sup>Stay Tuned for Part 5!</sup>*