Stones River, Tennessee. The morning of December 31st, 1862.
Thirty-one, wielding a Springfield rifle like a club, swung the weapon at a Union soldier's head. The gunstock splintered and the man fell to the ground, his head a wet, lopsided mess. Thirty-one, feeling nothing for the man whose life he had just ended, dropped the now useless rifle and turned around to find someone else to kill.
Chaos raged around Thirty-one. His inhumanly sensitive ears were assaulted by a cacophony of sound: incoherent shouts, piercing screams, the harsh crack of gunfire, the whoom! of artillery, the strident blast of bugles. His nostrils were filled with the reek of gunpowder, the coppery tang of blood, the sour stink of urine and feces from humans that had voided themselves upon death. Everywhere he looked, men in gray fought men in blue, employing rifles, bayonets, knives, sometimes nothing more than bare knuckles. It didn't matter; just so long as they could kill each other.
There were other Plugs like himself on the battlefield--yellow skin that barely covered the muscles and veins beneath, watery eyes, discolored lips, stringy hair--wearing ragged, blood-splattered uniforms of their respective armies, the numbers that served as their only names marked in grease pencil upon their jackets. Though there were far fewer of the creatures than human soldiers, the Plugs tore through the men of both sides as if they were little more than oversized paper dolls.
"Hey, Plug-ugly! Over here!"
Thirty-one turned toward the taunting human. The Union soldier was barely out of boyhood. His whiskers were thin, his face still dotted with blemishes. He stood less then a dozen feet away, clutching his rifle in a white-knuckled grip, bayonet trained on Thirty-one's midsection. To the boy's credit, the knife-tip didn't waver.
"One'a you bastards killed my brother at Perryville." Voice tight, eyes threatening tears. "Now it's your turn. I'm gonna gut you--for James."
Thirty-one's voice, like that of most Plugs, was harsh and rasping. "Did it occur to you that your brother might have been made into a being such as myself?" Thirty-one smiled grimly. "Or perhaps he was merely disassembled and his parts used for repair."
Tears burst forth then, and the boy let out a cry of rage. He rushed toward Thirty-one, bayonet held forth, intending to eviscerate the Plug. Thirty-one merely stood and watched the soldier's clumsy charge. The Plug waited until the boy was almost upon him and then he reached out--
"Joshua, you'd best git on out t'the barn! The heifer's goin't'drop her calf any moment now!"
Thirty-one looked away from the fence he was repairing and saw the woman coming toward him. She was young and blonde, and if her face was a trifle careworn, it did nothing to diminish her beauty, at least in his eyes. He stood, took a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped his brow.
"Settle down, Annie. She can't be that close. I just checked on her an hour or so ago, and she didn't seem--"
The woman stopped and planted her hands on her hips. She wore a simple blue dress with a dingy apron that had been white some years back, though it was hard to imagine, looking at the gray cloth now.
"Joshua David Cook." Her tone was stern but her eyes twinkled with merriment. "When it comes t'birthing, one of us has had more experience than t'other."
Thirty-one smiled. "And who would that be?"
)
A reanimated soldier fights in a Civil War that never was, thanks to the Frankenstein Method.
