The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Man from Tomorrow, Part 9

Mickey Malloy and Lucky Ford are in a desperate race to head off a time-traveling crook in Chicago, but their problems started nearly three decades earlier. On the battlefields of France, a harried commando team takes on an inhuman menace during the height of the Great War.

This is Part 9 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, 5, 6, and 7 and 8 first.

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

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

The Hnízdo had never been built for mortal men, that Andrew Portnoy had known the instant he had put his eyes on its lifeless black silhouette. It was not until he was crawling through its churning innards that he truly appreciated what that meant.

“Push!” Lieutenant Halistone roared from in front of him, as if belly-crawling through a conduit surrounded by rotating pistons activating randomly with the speed of a sewing machine could be overcome purely with confidence.

Still, Portnoy clenched his jaw and slithered forward. Every movement was agony. He could feel the fluids in his right leg congealing into toxic sludge. He had a matter of hours, perhaps less. Had the blood gas only settled on him, he could have fought through the rash and blisters. Instead, it had sought out the bullet hole in his thigh like a hound and dug its way into him.

He would see his red hells again, and soon.

“Good Lord,” Kelly grunted from behind. Portnoy could not even risk a look behind, though he knew the old tracker was fighting against the Hnízdo’s hazards at every turn, dragging sixty kilos of plastic explosive the entire way.

The thrumming conduit did not offer Portnoy room to twist or turn; he could not have offer help even were he able. He doubted his liquefying leg would let him walk upright should the train’s interior ever open up.

“It is getting warmer ahead!” the lieutenant shouted back. The young officer had lost his helmet a ways back and his curly hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat. Every meter deeper into the rolling factory’s fouled innards that they crawled seemed deeper into the maw of a bread oven.

Whatever designed the Hnízdo did not consider the needs of ventilation, light, or space necessary to its function.

When the commandos had escaped inside from the whistling mechanical soldiers that the Hnízdo had spawned, they had expected to enter a train, with rows and aisles. Instead, they found only jagged, greasy machinery. Everywhere they could have hoped to squeeze through was packed with pistons and flywheels, boilers and ratcheting conveyers, exhaust vents wheezing dizzying fumes, spitting scalding steam, and drooling caustic acid.

The Hnízdo knew they were within it and was fighting their advance every step of the way. They were maggots burrowing through the veins of a thrashing animal.

Kelly was gasping in the darkness. The only light in within the train radiated off of red hot exhaust pipes. Portnoy could feel the heat in his lungs, in his muscles, leeching into his marrow.

“Don’t slow down,” he grunted back to Kelly. Portnoy did not want to say, but he knew if they stayed in place, the Hnízdo would digest them where they lay. It would tear them into pieces and regurgitate their scraps to its countless mechanical babies.

“Are you bleeding?” Kelly wheezed. He lifted a hand and in the low red light his palm was glistening black.

“Not for long,” Portnoy answered. It was true: his leg was almost immobile. He had left a bloody snail trail behind him as he dragged his leaking wound. The blood gas was hard at work, and when it was done with his leg it would move into his hip then up to his heart.

He had to send the Hnízdo back from where it had come, and he did not have much time remaining to see that through.

The red hells wanted him back. He had seen too much.

They crawled for what felt like hours. The temperature rose with the din, an intensity that approached insanity. Portnoy’s vision was blurring with exhaustion, blood loss, and oozing sweat. He could barely see when he bumped into the soles of the Lieutenant’s boots.

“This is it,” Halistone wheezed. He was able to pull himself up into a crouch. He shuffled forward enough for Portnoy and Kelly to squeeze in behind him. The heat had diminished, and the noise had changed from industrial hammering to the sound a million decks of cards being shuffled at once.

“What the hell is that?” Kelly grunted. He flicked open his cigarette lighter and let its little flame illuminate the space.

Dozens of thin, segmented chrome arms whirled around them on narrow tracks, snatching up perforated cards from countless racks, rearranging them, bringing them forward into the train to push through a slot and retrieving old ones from a constantly filling hopper. The racks extended up and over them in a tunnel that ran forty meters ahead, endless cards with arms racing up and down them.

“What is this?” Portnoy asked.

“I have seen cards like these in automatic looms, but…” the lieutenant started, but trailed off. Both he and Portnoy knew that nothing found in a textile mill could compare to horrors conceived below.

A wisp of smoke carried up off Kelly’s burning wick. As soon as it brushed the card racks above, the arms around them froze. Far ahead, an unused set folded out and snatched a set of red cards out, feeding them into the slot.

“What’s it doing?” Kelly asked.

A vent snapped open behind them and his lighter snuffed out, leaving them in darkness. The living machine was fighting against the human bacteria and their flame so close to the cards.

“Carbon dioxide,” the lieutenant hissed. “Hurry, or we’ll be extinguished as well.”

The three of them crawled as fast as they could, bumping into one another, fighting their own burning lungs until they reached the far end of the card racks. A solid wall greeted them, adorned only with the slot to gobble up the cards and the hopper returning those that had been used.

Portnoy felt around for an opening to move forward but found none.

“What now?” he asked. His chest felt drum tight, his leg like aching pudding.

The frozen arms and packed card racks wrapped around them. The air was getting heavier. Even the darkness wavered in his vision.

“It is solid,” Halistone wheezed, “Or at least bolted from within. There is no lock to pick or hinges to break.”

Portnoy pressed his ear against the barricade. Something was alive beyond the slot, something moving and reading the cards. Even with the arms immobile, waiting for the commandos to suffocate, the brains behind the Hnízdo were still there, still filtering decisions down the massive train and into the chicken-legged steel soldiers.

“It is locked, but they left their keys out,” Kelly said. They heard him fumbling with the last card racks, the ones containing the red cards.

“There’s no way to know which…” the lieutenant objected, but his voice tapered off as he fought for air.

“One of these has got to be it,” Kelly wheezed. He jammed two fistfuls of the red cards into the slot, then went back for more. Portnoy heard the activity on the other side of the bulkhead immediately increase in intensity.

The Hnízdo lurched forward, throwing the three men backward before slamming on its air brakes, sliding them into a scrambling dog pile.

The red cards were doing something, at least. Portnoy wasn’t sure it was what they wanted, but it was something. He grabbed another handful of cards to feed the beast when a rattle of loud clanks sounded beneath them. The reverberations coursed up through the car so loud that the remaining cards erupted from the racks, fluttering down around them like confetti.

“What?” Kelly asked in the half-second before the entire car explosively ejected from the infernal train. It lifted two meters off its frame and rolled off the siding, tumbling until it was far enough from the rest of the train that it could do no harm.

The Hnízdo had chewed it off like a fox caught in a trap.

In the span of a heartbeat, Portnoy, Kelly, and the lieutenant were pressed against the floor, went weightless, and then thrown around the racks, snapping metal arms and drowning in cards. The car came to a rest on its side within an eternity of six seconds.

Smoke and whistles washed over the dazed men. They could see moonlight and pink tendrils of blood gas from the far end of the car. The urge to rip off their gas masks as suck down the fresh air like vagabonds at an oasis was strong, but their training overrode their instincts.

“Move, move,” the lieutenant grunted.

“Sir,” Kelly said. He flicked his lighter once more, showing his leg askew in a way that intact bones would not allow. There wasn’t time for orders, not that Portnoy needed them. He grabbed the American under his arms and dragged him and the gelignite bag to the far end of the car, over broken metal arms and drifts of holed cards. Kelly was heavy, and Portnoy’s gas-contaminated leg didn’t help, but they made it.

Lieutenant Halistone was firing as they emerged from the car. The first kriegerpuppe fell, its eye burst out in a crystal geyser. A stack of cards burst from its back as it died, whistling.

A dozen other steel soldiers took up its dying cry and began shambling over. The car had rolled thirty meters, nearly to the abandoned German trenches. The unmanned back lines were littered with kraut equipment, from silent howitzers to discarded long guns and rocket flare launchers. The kriegerpuppen had a long way to go and their first shots went far wide, but they adjusted and fired over and over, every time landing closer to their mark.

“We can’t hold out here,” the lieutenant said. He ducked behind the edge of the train car as the shots zeroed in. Lead hammered against the Hnízdo’s excised flesh. He never considered escaping into the nearby trenches; they’d gone behind the enemy lines for a reason.

Another score of whistles sounded from further down the train, and Portnoy watched as the blossomed cars continued their work, assembling more kriegerpuppen by the minute.

He studied the rest of the looming train. The space in the train they’d just occupied was little more than a steel frame skeleton on wheels and had been five back from the rumbling engine, a massive yoked beast that glowed from within with demonic heat. Behind it, he could see its fuel car, then a thickly armored cannon carrier. The big gun’s bore looked wide enough to pierce a dreadnaught through-and-through. The fourth car, the one that had been devouring the cards and churning out instructions, carried heavier plate than the engine and gun carrier combined.

It was the Hnízdo’s heart.

“Give me the explosives,” he told Kelly.

“You don’t know how to set them,” Kelly objected. His leg might have been ruined but his grip was iron.

“You’ve only got one leg,” Portnoy pointed out.

“Looks who’s talking,” Kelly replied. Portnoy’s entire pant leg was soaked through with black blood and the flesh visible through the tear in the fabric was swollen, crimson, and splitting.

“Fine,” Portnoy said. He dragged Kelly to his foot, threw the explosives over his shoulder, then the pair three-legged raced past Halistone.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the lieutenant shouted over the salvos of kriegerpuppe fire.

“That’s the brain,” Kelly said, gesturing at the fourth car and its angry glass eyes glaring at them. “That is how we kill it.”

The brain car belched waves of blood gas at them, piercing the broken air with frantic whistles. Hundreds of kriegerpuppen trilled back. Portnoy and Kelly lurched ahead and ducked below the incoming rifle fire. They scrambled through the pink fog banks and beneath the car’s armored skirt. The space between the splintering ties and the greasy axles was tight and they ditched their helmets to fit through.

The lieutenant kept up his fire, but the kriegerpuppen kept coming, uncaring of how many of them he felled. The Hnízdo called for them, they could hear nothing else. Hundreds of steel feet stomped in ratcheting unison.

The soulless children of the red hells were awake and they were hungry.

“How can I help?” Portnoy asked Kelly. The American was struggling to force the bag of explosives forward through the small space beneath the plate. Sweat was fogging the lenses of his gas mask and his every breath was a tortured wheeze.

“Push this,” he gasped. He scooted aside. The kriegerpuppen whistled and tried to fire under the train’s hanging skirt plates. Their bullets thudded and skipped across the ballast, peppering both men with pulverized stone and lead. Portnoy grunted and shoved the bag of explosives ahead toward the center of the churning brain car.

“A few more yards,” Kelly grunted. The lieutenant fired another salvo, bursting cards out of a handful of the trilling automatons.

They kept coming.

“We have got to be far enough!” Portnoy shouted over the din.

“Fine,” Kelly grunted. He fished a set of wires out of one of his pockets and shoved them into Portnoy’s outstretched hand. “Insert the bare leads, anywhere, anywhere will work.”

Each kriegerpuppe stomped onward, crunching across their fallen. Steel shells collapsed under steel feet. Uncountable rifles fired, over and over and over again, little hands racking them to fire some more. Somewhere behind them, the lieutenant was still shooting but the mindless things ignored him no matter how many of their number he felled.

Death meant nothing to them.

Portnoy pushed the exposed wires into the gelignite. It was soft as wet clay.

“Now what?” he asked. Kelly yelled something back to him that he couldn’t make out. The mechanical cacophony outside had risen to a fever pitch. One of the kriegerpuppen caught its foot on a dead one and tripped, clanging like a keg falling down the stairs. It landed alongside to two men, kicking and screaming through its whistle.

“Shut it!” Portnoy yelled. The thing’s periscope turned and focused on him. Its round body shuddering as it turned to line up its rifle with his chest.

Kelly’s shotgun roared, blowing the kriegerpuppe’s eye out of the back of its periscope. Its rifle jerked and fired, deafening under the train, then the thing went still.

“Thanks,” Portnoy shouted over the ringing in his ears. “Now what?”

He couldn’t hear Kelly saying anything over the battle mere feet away.

“Now what!” Portnoy shouted again.

Still nothing. He twisted around to find Elijah Kelly still, one hand clutching his smoking shotgun, the other a detonation timer. The bullet hole the kriegerpuppe had drilled through his gas mask left the lenses filled in with blood.

“Thanks, Eli,” Portnoy whispered. He reached down and grabbed the little clock out of Kelly’s hand. It had two screws on the back and he wrapped the wires around them. The timer’s face vexed him for a moment. Sixty kilos of gelignite meant he’d need quite a distance, but no matter how far out he set it for he had a wall of kriegerpuppen to get through.

“It does not really matter, does it?” he muttered, then set the timer for five minutes and that was that. He froze and watched the seconds start start trickling away.

No going back.

He tugged the shotgun out of Kelly’s grip and racked a fresh shell in. The kriegerpuppen were unliving creatures wrought from riveted steel plate. Nothing he’d brought had half-a-hope of piercing their shells. He’d have to rely on breaking their glass eyes, and buckshot by the bucketload would be his best bet with a ticking clock and a bum leg.

A crowd of steel puppets clanked into each other just a couple of meters away, still trying to get a bead on him but firing even without one. The mob was so large that half of them were shooting another kriegerpuppe in the back while the rest tilled dirt and splintered railroad ties with every salvo.

Portnoy timed the pattern between shots and shouted between them:

“Lieutenant! Five minutes! And counting! Kelly’s dead! Can you get! Their attention!”

He waited too many of his precious seconds for a response, but when Halistone replied, his answer was definitive.

A rocket slammed into the kriegerpuppe mob from behind, bowling over a dozen as it hammered its way into their midst. It detonated against the Hnízdo’s thick skin. Sputtering chemical light burst forth, bright as the summer sun, hot enough scorch unblinking glass eyes.

The clustered automatons whistled in a dissonant wail and began stumbling around and tripping over one another, clattering to the ground like a truckload of pots and pans. A few fired their rifles as they fell, but their mechanical barrage trickled off in an instant.

Andrew Portnoy dragged himself from beneath the train. His guns were suddenly heavy as bricks so he shrugged out of their slings, leaving them behind. He crawled on his hands and knees, over and around the shrieking machines. When he had room to run he pushed himself off the ground only to feel his leg collapse beneath him.

“Oh, right,” he muttered. The blood gas infection had spread through his hip. The swelling locked the joint, the muscles around it going limp. He felt the bones beneath flexing; the poison was starting to liquefy them.

It was a matter of hours. The infection had hit his organs, and the true suffering was set to begin. There was nothing else to be done. He could feel leaking blood shifting in his belly, in his lungs.

“Sergeant!” the lieutenant yelled. Portnoy groaned. The younger Halistone would be rushing over, ignoring the hundreds of momentarily dazed kriegerpuppen to drag one already dead man out of the mud. It was etched in the lieutenant’s being; he knew no other way.

Portnoy hauled himself over a disabled kriegerpuppe, shoving ejected cards out of the way. A blue one caught his eye among the white and red. It was flimsy, but it would be enough.

“Sergeant, we have to move,” the lieutenant gasped. His gas mask and uniform were coated black in rocket exhaust. He’d have dragged the flare launcher from the closest trench and fired it off himself. He was exactly like his father in that way.

And in that way, he would die.

Halistone tried to grab Portnoy’s arms to hauled him up but he swatted him away.

“We do not have time,” the lieutenant objected. Portnoy jammed the single blue card in Halistone’s face, shocking him to silence.

“This is how they work,” Portnoy wheezed. He could barely catch his breath, but he had to. He was already dead, the lieutenant didn’t have to join him. Portnoy was a confidence man by trade. He could sell mud to a trenchie. He’d could sell the lieutenant his own life. “This is what you need to carry out of here.”

“I cannot leave you,” Halistone said. The young man’s eyes burned blue behind the soot and glass.

“You can’t leave this,” Portnoy said. His next lie came with a sincerity that only a lifetime of scams and secrets could train and that only impending death could execute: “This card is worth all of us.”

The lieutenant stared through the holes in the little blue rectangle. A chorus of coordinated whistles broke his daze. He took the card gingerly, as if it were a songbird egg, and placed it ever so gently in his breast pocket.

“Go,” Portnoy said. He rolled onto his back and showed the lieutenant the bullet hole in his leg and the chunky tar oozing out of it. “I’ll cover you.”

“Godspeed, Sergeant Portnoy,” the lieutenant said. The recovered kriegerpuppen’s initial exploratory shots peppered the ground around him and he took off, breaking for the German trenches and disappearing into the depths.

Portnoy laid back and peeled the smothering gas mask off his face. Pink mists caressed his sweat-soaked skin. He breathed them in, let them dance in what was left of his lungs.

“Sweet,” he gasped. Blood gas smelled like spun sugar. The kreigerpuppen clanked past him in their hundreds, ignoring the dying man. They only had eyes for the lieutenant. He watched them trudge onward, mindless, inexhaustible, merciless.

The stars watched him from above, their diamond twinkles tinged rosy by the lingering gas.

The suffering.

“Oh, you again,” Portnoy groaned.

A familiar specter stood waiting just at the edge of his fading vision, a leering, hunched man made of rags and hair, wild eyes and twitching, many-jointed fingers. Portnoy sat up and stared at the apparition for nearly a full minute, their wild eyes locked on one another.

“You know, you are a right bastard,” he called to the phantom. It grinned back at him, its too-long teeth crooked like the stairs in a collapsing row house. Its thick mustache arched over its grin, its eyes wide and crazed, as if searching for even more horror than the unliving army and melting man before it.

Andrew Portnoy had lived in that thing’s shadow for almost two years. It had to be over soon.

“I have had - !” he started, only for for a chunky hash of lung meat and blats clots to catch in the back of his throat. He hacked the raw mass up and spat it into the mud. He tried once more: “I’ve had about enough you and your suff - !”

The gelignite interrupted his tirade with a monumental blast that broke the heart of the Hnízdo and killed Andrew Portnoy once and for all in an instant of white light and black thunder.

He had expected red.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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