The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Man from Tomorrow, Part 6 of 12

The Man from Tomorrow might use gadgets that could have only come from the far future, but sometimes the strangest secrets lay hidden in the past. During WWI, the men who would come to form the Office for the Cataloguing of Unusual Occurrences face down their own incomprehensible technological horror.

This part features appearances by familiar characters such as the long-suffering Andrew Portnoy, as seen in The Suff and To All a Good Night, Elijah Kelly, expert tracker and tunnel rat, and more.

This is the fourth installment of The Case of the Man from Tomorrow. It is the sixth and final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 first.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, gore, body horror, death, mild swearing.

WEDNESDAY MORNING, JULY 11, 1916
SEVEN COUNTS MOBILE FACILITY HNÍZDO
RANCOURT, THE SOMME, FRANCE

The jerry soldier was sprinting at full speed, looking over his shoulder when he ran headlong into a waiting Canadian commando, concealed by the darkness of the deep trench. Andrew Portnoy ducked low and twisted, lifting the confused kraut and throwing him bodily into the earthen wall. Before he could scream, Portnoy drove the knife up under his jaw.

“Quiet now, hush,” he whispered, so close that his red mustache rasped against the dying man’s ear. The kraut tried to bite the hand Portnoy had clamped over his mouth, but a little twist and wiggle of the knife put an end to all that.

His knife slipped free as easily as he’d buried it and he let the limp body slide to the trench floor. He knew the red hell the dead man was destined for. The places he would see were barred to the living.

“Genießen Sie die Sehenswürdigkeiten,” Portnoy hissed. Only a few whose hearts beat were allowed a glimpse of what lurked beyond, and only if they truly understood the suff - !

“Stop talking to dead men, you nut,” Elijah Kelly grunted, interrupting his crimson thoughts.

The old tracker slipped out of the shadows lugging a sixty-kilo bag of gelignite. He was dressed in all black, with charcoal paint striping what little of his face wasn’t pelted with his thick beard. Even trudging through mud, burdened with a bag heavier than a corpse, packing full anti-chemical gear, and loaded for bear with a carbine, a shotgun, a pistol, and a half-dozen Mills bombs, he moved silent as a lynx.

Kelly hooked one hand under the corpse’s arm pit and they dragged the body into a dark alcove where it would not be spotted so easily. The third and last member of their band appeared seconds later, harrowed and furious.

“Let’s move, the both of you,” Lieutenant Alistair Halistone ordered. He was clutching an antique saber in one hand and an MP-18 machine pistol tucked under his armpit. The Brigadier’s son was eager to make his own name but was cautious to be off-leash.

The lieutenant was unlike his mother in that way. Hardly a week before, Héloïse Bellegarde-Halistone had not hesitated to lead Kelly and Portnoy into the depths below Bruges on the hunt for madmen and monsters. The way her son second-guessed himself at every turn was concerning. The young man had even tried to grow a beard to impress his father’s men, but it came in sandy, thin, and patchy, giving the opposite effect of what he was going for.

Still, the mission was his. The youngest Halistone had drawn up the plans, secured the intel, and killed the first enemy they had come across. He had pretended not to shake after he’d left the strangled kraut in the mud. Portnoy might have seen a tear, but then again, killing was sweaty work. Regardless, the Brigadier’s whelp could play the part of the soldier well at the very least.

He just had to keep the facade up through morning.

“This trench connects to the rear in two kilometers,” Halistone said as he studied a blurry aerial photo under a radium glow. He took his time like there was not a dead jerry oozing at his feet. “Per Monsieur Gagnon’s reconnaissance, the train parked at twenty-two-hundred hours. They will have had but three hours to set up.”

“We have to go,” Portnoy said. His voice croaked. Once, he had lived off that voice. He could speak and read eleven or twelve languages, he didn’t remember, but that didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered, so picking and choosing what others might want to hear was a pointless chore. Still, to maintain his fleshy facade, he had to act the part of the man he’d once been.

He had told the Brigadier during their sessions that he no longer spoke so much because the sodium sobrialux treatments burned his throat, which was true. The smoke was like a swarm of glass in his lungs. But pain did not matter.

Andrew Portnoy stayed quiet because he had seen the raw truth beneath the skin and it had turned him into something else. The treatments helped him hide it, but underneath he was more. There was no word for it. There was no point to explaining anything to his comrades. All he could make was noise, generated by the movement of stale air and wet meat, and he would only be talking to meat. They would all die, whether he made them understand or not.

Halistone and Kelly did not hear his pathetic chirp; they continued comparing their worn map to their blurry aerial photos in the meager light the Lieutenant’s radium watch face had to offer. He cleared his throat and tried again:

“He was running.”

That caught Halistone’s attention.

“Who was?” he asked.

“This kraut was running toward us,” Portnoy explained, poking the dead man with his boot. “Not at us. From something else.”

“I’ll check him,” Kelly said. He rolled the corpse like a log, looking for any insignia on his collar, shoulders, chest, or sleeves. Portnoy did not let his gaze linger on the dead man’s face. He was so young, and his journey was just beginning. The red hells welcomed all.

“Nothing, a simple private,” Halistone concluded. The lowest-ranked krauts wore neither pips nor epaulettes.

“The Seven Counts mark theirs with the barbed Z, or the black sun,” Kelly added. Those unfortunate enough to be brainwashed, converted, hired, or shanghaied by the Counts were always marked. If not by patches or pins then by brands, ear notches, medallions, implanted metal studs, or tattoos. “Though I haven’t encountered any Count men in some time.”

“I am aware. This poor sod must have been part of the unit stationed here before the Hnízdo train arrived,” Halistone concluded, and Portnoy concurred. That the dead man carried none of the Counts’ sigils indicated he was he was simply a frontlines conscript, interested only in mud and home. He had no idea what monsters had emerged from behind his lines.

“Why would he be running, and running west for that matter?” Kelly wondered. Most German soldiers would prefer to escape away from the Somme, not towards its churning heart.

Portnoy felt a distant scream liquefy his marrow before he heard it.

Halistone and Kelly froze as the echoes of a man lost to terror and pain faded away.

“That man is dead,” Portnoy said of the unseen victim. “And if my knife hadn’t killed this one, he would be, too.”

Even in the few seconds since they’d searched the body, gleaming red boils had sprouted all over its face and hands. Its sclera had gone black and the blood oozing out of its punctured neck had congealed into an oily jelly.

Kelly recognized the symptoms.

“Blood gas,” he observed.

Something inside Portnoy recoiled at the thought. He’d first endured the suffering and glimpsed the red hells after exposure to another of the Seven Vampire Counts’ foul chemical weapons. Or so the Brigadier claimed. However they had come about, those carnal sights had never left him.

“Sergeant Kelly, please,” Halistone snapped. “Not ‘blood gas.’ Its proper name is Mekhurnisol and you are to use it.”

“Whatever you call it, looks like the jerries deployed it on their own damn men,” Kelly snapped right back.

“The Counts aren’t jerries,” Portnoy whispered. “They are devils.”

“Stop all of that,” Halistone hissed. “They are power-hungry, sadistic men. That is all. Perverting science and weaponizing superstition. Your mythologizing of them only injures our resolve. We can stop men.”

Kelly and Portnoy had heard that particular speech dozens of times before, longer and better, from Halistone’s father. They didn’t have time for it again, not even the rushed, surface-level version.

“We’re in a trench, sir,” Kelly reminded him. Halistone seemed to lurch as if he tripped over something. He’d been raring to get into that old standard that their odd little band so constantly discussed. He cleared his throat and got back to the task at hand:

“With Mekhurnisol ahead,” he said. He unclasped the bag slung across his hip and strapped it across his chest, drawing forth his small box respirator. “Gas protocols.”

Portnoy hated gas gear, but he’d seen the alternative. He set up his own filter bag and hose then adjusted the straps of the rubberized mask. Blood gas attacked every bit of exposed tissue, and he knew that the mask’s seal wouldn’t hold over his beard. Fortunately, all three men shared the same issue.

Kelly scooped a handful of vaseline out of their shared tin then passed it to him. Portnoy followed suit and handed it over to Halistone. The three men massaged the thick jelly into their cheeks, jaws, and chins then plastered their whiskers flat. The sensation was unpleasant, but having one’s blood vessels burst and congeal within their body was more so.

The trio made sure their gloves were secure, that their sleeves were buttoned over their wrists and that their collars were up and their necks were covered. The entire practiced process took just forty seconds.

Kelly groaned in discomfort, but offered no other gripes. Portnoy concurred. The mask was stuffy, its nose clip was painful, and the lenses had already begun fogging.

Still, it was better than the red hell.

“We cannot tarry further,” Halistone said, muffled and nasally under his own gaspirator. He led the way, and the three took off westbound, down the empty trench. Portnoy could swear he spotted lingering tendrils of blood gas grasping at his ankles, though it might have been nothing more than the fog inside his mask or the spectral fingers of forsaken ghosts.

Even in the quiet times, when the red hells slept, he could see the ghosts. Everywhere he went was woven from the horrible legacy of endless generations of violence and suffering, and those places carried that weight. He could see it leaking through sometimes, even after he’d smoked himself numb with the Brigadier’s medicine.

Spirits crowded the frontlines.

He tried move forward them but it as if he was wandering against the flow of a crowd choked with the maimed and exploited. His time in the red hells precluded him from ignoring such things. The suffering was fresh in the trenches and anyone could see reach the veil there as easily as it reached into them.

Portnoy just ran, keeping Kelly’s heels in sight. Within minutes, the incorporeal ghosts clustered around them gave way to warm, bloated corpses.

Halistone signaled them to stop. Portnoy examined the closest curled body, one of dozens. Another German soldier, uniformed for the regular army, not one of the Counts’ creatures. His flesh was scarlet, lumpy, and gleaming like a bowl of cranberry jam. A single poke would pop him.

Portnoy felt his hand grasp at the knife in his belt and had to will it to let go.

“Blood gas,” Halistone hissed, forgetting himself at the sight. Whatever he called it, Portnoy concurred: the effects were obvious. The lieutenant froze:

“Listen.”

An inquisitive steam whistle sounded up ahead.

“We’re close,” Kelly said. Portnoy judged the rail yard as no more than a few hundred meters distant, beyond the blackness of night and the clinging, venomous fog.

“Remember, we find the boiler, rig the gelignite, and leave,” Halistone said. “There shan’t be any commotion until we are safely exfiltrated.”

“Yes, sir,” Kelly said. Portnoy nodded, silent. He had his own orders, direct from the Brigadier, and he would follow those. The man had given him his mind back, at least in pieces.

He was not behind enemy lines as some assistant saboteur. He was the Brigadier’s assassin. Were he to encounter any of the Seven Counts, he was to kill them, commotion be damned. He had memorized every line of Vaclav Břichomluvec’s sunken face. Were they to meet, the weaponsmith’s next sights would be the rolling hills of carnage that made up the length and breadth of the red hell.

“On me,” Halistone whispered. Portnoy could see sweat beading on the inside of his gas mask lenses. He and Kelly followed the young lieutenant close, stepping over swollen, crimson corpses and squelching through the jellied remains of those who’d burst. He could hear Kelly gagging inside his gas mask. Portnoy was used to such sights: the memory of them lived behind his eyelids.

The titanic silhouette of the Hnízdo train appeared before them, not so much an object but as the sudden darkening of the sky before them, a black void that swelled upward to swallow the stars above. Portnoy had known it was a mobile factory, but he hadn’t truly considered what that meant until it stood idling before him. He had imagined a string of little machine shops. Instead, he found a segmented skyscraper laid on its side, featureless and scaled with black steel.

“Jesus,” Kelly whispered. The thick sack of gelignite on his back, more than he’d ever seen in one place before, seemed like a joke.

A rumble emanated from the great thing, then a blast that made the three of them drop into the mud. A kilometer south, at the head of the massive train, three towering smokestacks belched flames up through the scant clouds. Arcane machinery churned within.

“It’s already starting,” Kelly noted. The train shook and roared, like a lion waking from a long slumber. It breathed as if alive.

And anything living could die.

“How do we get in?” Portnoy wondered. The others looked at him, then at the armored thing before them. It was fully sheathed in steel, without doors or windows.

“The undercarriage,” Kelly suggested. Although the factory was sealed like a casket, it was still a train. It had brakes and wheels like any other, and there was certainly a soft spot in its belly beneath.

“I concur,” Halistone said. He sheathed his sword and led the way. There was not another person in sight, only the rumbling train and piles of red-faced corpses collapsing into puddles.

He was careful, picking his way between whatever cover he could find, and the last hundred meters to the factory were excruciating. In a few moments, they were alongside it. From a distance its black metal skin looked painted. Next to it, Portnoy could see that it was charred and pitted, as if the train was some ancient artifact dragged from the depths of a sunless sea. He reached out and touched it. He pulled his hand away the instant he made contact.

“It is hot,” he said. Even through his gloves he could feel blisters bubbling on his fingertips. He pressed them together, feeling the fresh lymph desperate to escape his flesh.

“It is a refinery, forge, and assembly plant all in one,” Halistone said. “According to Mister van den Berghe, anyway. Raw materials are fed in one end and weapons of war emerge complete from the other.”

“It is amazing,” Portnoy whispered. An army could be crafted from scraps, anywhere, to fight any war. The mobile factory was not some armory, but a key to bring the red hell gurgling forth. It was the future, the way to change the very basis of war and suffering. With its existence, one need neither followers nor a just cause to sweep across nations and massacre their populations, only desire.

The war machine pulsed with heat in tempo to Portnoy’s heartbeat. One who had visited the places beyond could always find others who had, as well, and the Hnízdo knew what he had seen. It recognized him.

The great machine might have been crafted on the Earth, but its eldritch symmetries and ravenous desire was from somewhere deeper. It had clawed its way out of the red hell into the dreams of a Czech engineer. Portnoy knew the songs it sang and the sights it showed. He felt that tempo through the ground and through the heat. It wanted to change the living world and make the world bleed for that change.

The Hnízdo was a herald of an inevitable future. The gassed bodies piled high were just the beginning. Men would be the tinder upon which the fires of progress burned. With such a weapon in existence, the world would be rendered to ash, and all in the name of the Seven Vampire Counts of the Schwarzvald.

“You waxing poetic, Andy?” Kelly hissed.

Portnoy scowled at the man. Sometimes it was as if Kelly could read his mind, but that the words were written in another language. If he knew, if he had seen the sights…

“Dial in, it gets exciting now,” Kelly added, jarring him back into the moment.

“I do not see any means of egress, even underneath,” Halistone was saying. He had moved further up the train, searching for doors or hatches, checking between the wheelsets. The Hnízdo had no need for doors or windows: it was not made by or for men.

“It must invite us in,” Portnoy whispered. As with the curdling red hells, the Hnízdo was aware and malevolent, he could see a foul intelligence twisting through formless patterns on its stark surface. It would only open to them when it wanted to.

“‘Invite us in?’” Kelly snorted. He humored Portnoy’s quirks due to the man’s unparalleled abilities as a translator and his unwavering calm in the face of the truly unusual, but sometimes enough became enough. They were behind enemy lines attempting to infiltrate a thirty-foot-tall fortified train, with blood gas on the wind and bodies piled up around their ankles: he did not have time to hear about the ‘fate of man’ or the ‘rolling crimson hills.’

Andrew Portnoy was always spouting off about some odd shit, and by the time Kelly figured out that the nutty Canuck was not going to simply wait for his invite into the Hnízdo, it was too late to stop him.

Portnoy had his sharpened E-tool held high, silhouetted in moonlight tinged pink with blood gas, then clanged it against the train car’s metal shell as if calling the ranch hands in for dinner.

Halistone dropped, cursing, and Kelly tackled Portnoy, throwing him to the ground and knocking his shovel aside.

“You goddamn idiot,” he snarled, the lenses of their gas masks almost touching.

“Get off of me,” Portnoy told him. It wasn’t a demand or threat, Portnoy did not make those. He asked for what he wanted from whom he needed it, or he did it himself. Kelly rolled away, knowing that a knife was the madman’s next option.

“You blasted fool,” Halistone snarled. He might have had more to add, but a low steam whistle sounded from further up the train. They all froze when they heard the unmistakable rasp of metal on metal.

“We are welcome,” Portnoy said. He lurched to his feet and slipped past both of the other men, searching for a door. Instead, he found a small hatch had opened and a pipe had extended a few inches out, capped with a glass ball the size of his fist.

The ball rotated in place, seeming to fix on Portnoy’s face. He knew that the Hnízdo well and truly saw him in that moment.

“Back!” Kelly grunted, then brought the butt of his carbine down on the eye, shattering it like a skull.

A symphony of whistles sounded from a hundred sources, followed by the echoing snaps of innumerable hatches opening with another glass orb peering from each. The Hnízdo had a thousand eyes, spaced every ten feet down its serpentine length.

“It is awake,” Portnoy whispered.

A gush of pink fog whooshed out from beneath the train, washing over the three man. Were they unmasked, they would have been dead in minutes. Instead, they waited until the blood gas rolled past.

“We are running out of time,” Halistone said. He was desperately searching for a means to open the small hatch wider, or even to enter through the gas vents beneath. Portnoy knew that it was only a matter of patience. The Hnízdo would welcome him in, it had to.

One of the skyscraper-sized cars ahead groaned then split open like a blooming flower, its steel slabs calving and shifting and swinging back like they were lighter than folded paper. Its exposed guts glowed from within with infernal heat, packed with pipes and racks smoking blue as raw oil burned off their cyclopean angles.

Diesel exhaust belched forth in great gouts that rolled gray and thicker than the billowing blood gas. The flames shooting from the engine’s distant smokestacks howled and reached another hundred feet higher into the black sky.

“Slowly,” Halistone cautioned.

“Forget that,” Portnoy snarled. He was watching Hnízdo unfurl itself for him and the lieutenant wanted to linger.

“Something’s happening, we better go like sixty,” Kelly said. It was rare that he agreed with Portnoy off the rip, and when he did it was because his gut was telling him that something was about to kill him.

Steel screamed. Kelly and Halistone ducked and Portnoy nearly fired his carbine then and there. They watched a swarm of mechanical arms unfold from within the splintered car and begin picking at the glowing parts within like a wake of ravenous vultures tearing out their own guts.

The first arm drew forth a pair of segmented pistons and set them on a low platform. A second set a metal drum upon the first pieces. Even several cars back, Portnoy could see the bright red barbed Z emblazoned upon it. There was no question that the Counts had dedicated the Hnízdo to the goals of their deadly cult.

Even incomplete, Portnoy recognized the strange thing being assembled before him. It was a kriegerpuppe: the war puppet. The very weapon they had come to destroy.

A second set of arms plugged a bent periscope into the top of the kriegerpuppe’s drum-like body, capped with one of the same glass eyes that studded the length and breadth of the damned train. A set of avian, atrophied claws socketed into the drum itself.

“Not much time,” Kelly said.

“There never was,” Portnoy muttered, only to be ignored.

As they watched, the open car screeched and whistled and dozens of arms extended, stretched like waking cats before getting to work assembling their own kriegerpuppe. Within a few minutes, there would be dozens of the things.

The first of them shuddered as a large mechanical bundle was jammed into its back. The kriegerpuppe jolted and exhaust belched from its newly installed exhaust pipes. Its tiny hands spun and grasped, its legs shifted and balanced, its eye twisted and around, taking in the grim sights of the churned front lines and the piles of gassed dead around it. Finally its little periscope neck rotated around and settled on the three masked men watching it.

It studied them for just a moment, then let loose a piercing whistle. Portnoy could hear every eye up and down the train ratchet around to watch them, then a hundred whistles matched the kriegerpuppe’s cry.

Far ahead, the Hnízdo’s triple smokestacks belched flame even higher, scorching the clouds.

A final arm arced up and out of the train car and and placed a Mauser rifle in the kriegerpuppe’s grasping claws. Its little hands worked the rifle’s bolt, chambering a live round. It rotated its round body until its rifle was pointed at Portnoy.

It whistled once more, setting off another shrill cacophony. Its stubby finger tightened on the trigger, sending the first round high. The mechanical soldier worked the rifle bolt with mechanical precision, racking a fresh round in less than a second and firing again, still high but low enough that Portnoy felt the air snap above his head.

“Free fire!” Lieutenant Halistone shouted. He leveled his MP-18 and let off a rip. Bullets pinged up and down the kriegerpuppe’s metal shell. Kelly joined in, blasting the thing with his carbine. Lead skipped across its armored body.

The kriegerpuppe rocked on its heels but held fast, ignoring the barrage. It adjusted its aim and fired once more. If Portnoy hadn’t dropped to a knee at the last instant, he would have been back in those red hells.

“The eyes!” he hissed, then fired his own carbine, aiming to gouge out the whistling thing’s glass orb. Kelly and the lieutenant understood exactly what he meant, and within seconds the kriegerpuppe’s eye had burst into a starscape of crystal slivers. The thing whistled mournfully, then began walking, an unbalanced avian strut that saw it trip over its own feet. It fell slowly, almost tragically, into the mud like a tower collapsing on itself. It hit hard and went still.

“Do not rest on your laurels,” the lieutenant snapped. The entire firefight might have lasted just an instant, but the arms had not slowed assembling their scores of kriegerpuppen in that time. A half-dozen whistles sounded, and a half-dozen glass eyes twisted around on their metal necks.

“Run!” Kelly shouted. The kriegerpuppen took a few seconds to register what was happening around them. Movement was survival; to hunker down meant a tide of steel soldiers rolling over them.

The three men dashed ahead, ducking and weaving between the whistling things, faster than they could aim. The kriegerpuppen squealed with frustration, but turned and tracked them. Another fresh dozen whistled with them as their engines coughed to life and their glass eyes found focus.

“In here!” Halistone shouted. He leapt onto the open lip of the assembly car, dodging swinging arms and clambering across racks of steaming parts. There was an open corridor forward into the next car that would take them further up the train, toward the roaring engine. Orange light beamed out.

“Climb, damn you,” Kelly grunted, shoving Portnoy up and ahead after the scrambling lieutenant.

The whistles around them coordinated. The half-second’s pause to climb was enough for the two-score kriegerpuppen to catch up and set their sights. Their rifles roared as one. Portnoy lurched up onto the car and rolled behind one of the busy arms.

Kelly was nowhere to be seen. He tried to peek over the car’s edge, but another salvo forced him down.

“Go!” Kelly shouted, muffled. He must have been under the train. The bag of gelignite swung up and over from beneath and flopped in front of Portnoy’s position.

The coordinated whistles sounded again and another barrage forced Portnoy flat onto his belly. The kriegerpuppen on the other side of the train had joined the fight. Those pinning Kelly underneath the train lurched forward in lock-step.

“Go, help the lieutenant!” he shouted.

“Sergeant Kelly!” Halistone shouted from the open corridor. He’d appeared again, silhouetted in orange, dragging a handful of pipes and tubing. He twisted two wires and the steam whistle in his hands shrieked, scalding him. The kriegerpuppen on both sides of the train froze, their periscope heads nearly spinning.

Kelly didn’t hesitate. He hauled himself aboard and grabbed the bag of explosives. Halistone dropped the steam whistle, wincing at the pain of his fresh burns.

“Forward we go, gentlemen,” Halistone said, then disappeared into the infernal light emanating from within the Hnízdo, Kelly close behind. Portnoy lurched to his feet and stumbled after them. The kriegerpuppen behind him whistled in renewed synchronicity and took aim again, but he was gone before the bullets raked across the doorway.

Within, the Hnízdo was a snarl of pipes and conduits never meant to accommodate human beings. It had never been built for them. He ducked low and followed Kelly and the lieutenant close.

Portnoy felt liquid squelching in his boot. Under the orange light, the blood pouring from his thigh looked black. He maintained pace. He could feel the itching fingers of blood gas digging into the open wound. He ignored the curdling sensation. It didn’t matter what happened to him, he had been long lost.

Andrew Portnoy had dreamt of the red hells every night since that day in Yippers. Before he had met the Brigadier, he had wanted everyone to understand what he had seen, the truth behind it all.

But he had been given a second chance. He recognized that only those who deserve to see what lies underneath the skin need see it, those nihilists, sadists, and betrayers. The recognition of its existence mutes all other motivation.

He could not let the red hells spill over onto anyone else. Not even onto the Counts, for knew not what their success truly heralded. There must be something left, a second chance for everyone.

Portnoy felt himself weakening as blood pumped out of him, but he had strength enough to see it through. The Hnízdo, the Seven Vampire Counts, the mindless horde of trilling kriegerpuppen, could not be allowed to dictate the future.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.