"An Endless Array of Broken Men"

by Edison McDaniels

For these surgeons, hell is in session.
A steep descent into the horrors of a battlefield hospital in 1863.
# Horror
# Historical Fiction
# Psychological Thriller
# Drama
# Gritty

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This novella, the impetus for my larger work Not One Among Them Whole, received honorable mention in The Seventeenth Edition of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (2003). It is an intense story of the deep wounds inflicted on the surgeons at a battlefield hospital as they labor endlessly over the wounded in a time before germ theory or antisepsis. For Joshua Bay, hell is twenty-four sleepless hours, every one of them scalpel in hand, standing under a cross in a nameless church atop a dusty hill after a pointless battle. For too many good men, this is where the world ends. On this sleepless morning, Joshua Bay is the embodiment of exhaustion. The blood and sinew that soil his front apron are now a full day old, and he hasn't had so much as a latrine break in hours. The muck on the altar floor is two parts blood, one part shit from exploded bowels, and one part tobacco juice; Bay spits frequently. The mothy taste of the chewed tobacco obscures the overwhelming stench of broken bodies and rotted flesh, allowing him to keep working in this seething hell. Except for the ever present hum of flies (they are everywhere, a constant distress), it is mostly quiet; no sounds of battle breaking the dawn stillness, only an occasional random shot. Outside the church-turned-hospital, those who have survived the night await their turn at the surgeon’s table. They are a quieter lot now, having seen the two extremities of their fate in those that have gone before them. They will live or die—it is beyond their making now...