Re-Animator

by Jeff Rovin

  Megan snatched the keys from the ignition and hurried after him. “Daddy, wait! You don’t understand!”

  Halsey paid her no attention. His step quickening, face becoming redder, gait becoming angrier as he walked, he made for the head nurse’s station. Dr. Harrod was seated there, having a snack, and he closed on her like a shark.

  “Grace, what the hell are you doing here?”

  She looked at him indignantly and answered through a mouthful of donut. “I’m filling in while Jan’s in the lavatory.”

  “Not very well, I hear.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I just got a call from Carl Hill. Would you happen to know if Mr. Cain is on the loose in this hospital?”

  “He’s in the morgue, I think.”

  “You think? Isn’t the person at this desk supposed to know where hospital personnel are?”

  “Allan, I’m a doctor, not a receptionist! All I know is what Mace told me when I bumped into him in the cafeteria.”

  “Mace? And what was he doing away from his post?”

  “He said something about Cain having relieved him.”

  Halsey pounded the desk just as Megan ran up. Dr. Harrod noticed her bloodshot eyes, understood at once what had caused her father’s mood. Although Harrod was glad she hadn’t accepted Halsey’s marriage proposal years before, she felt badly for Megan. Her father was ill equipped to raise anything but funds.

  “I’ll have that bastard’s job!” Halsey vowed, turning his back on his daughter as she ran up. “I specifically told Dr. Riley to suspend Cain and have Mace take him off the floor if he reported for work.”

  “Allan, Dr. Riley has been in emergency surgery for four hours. I haven’t seen him, and I’m sure Jan hasn’t either.”

  “Then he should have left word!”

  “Why—is there a problem?”

  “Problem?” Halsey snickered. “There’s no problem, as long as the deceased of Arkham have some very understanding next-of-kin.” Halsey looked down the hall. “Hold that elevator!” He turned to Dr. Harrod. “Grace, would you please page Mr. Cain and have him report to the level L security desk. And whatever you do”—he regarded his daughter—“make sure that she stays right here.”

  “You can’t stop me,” Megan sobbed. “I followed you here, and I’m going to follow you until you listen to me.”

  He turned on her, the hurt that had been in his eyes replaced with fury. “You’re going to stay right here, young lady. You won’t see him or sleep with him again!”

  Several people in the waiting room turned to stare. Dr. Harrod looked down at her coffee.

  “You can’t do this, Daddy. I love him!”

  Noticing the many eyes upon them, Dean Halsey recomposed himself and bent closer to Megan. Under cover of Dr. Harrod’s announcement, he said in a rough whisper, “I don’t care! You’re my daughter, and you’ll do as you’re told—if not for your own sake, then for that of Mr. Cain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you do what I tell you, things will go much easier for Mr. Cain. If not—”

  He didn’t have to finish. Megan’s shoulders slumped, and Dr. Harrod came from behind the desk. She took Megan lightly by the arm.

  “Sit down, Miss Halsey.”

  Megan sat in a swivel chair and watched as her father hurried down the hall. Her lower lip quivered. “It’s blackmail,” she whimpered. “My own father—blackmailing me.”

  “University deans and professors are very good at that,” Harrod said, offering Megan her coffee. The young woman shook her head, and Harrod took a sip. “I know what you’re going through, but Mr. Cain will be up soon, and we can discuss it then.”

  “Why bother? Daddy doesn’t understand. He just won’t let go!”

  “Daddies are very good at that,” Harrod said sagely.

  Megan stared helplessly as her father scuttled down the corridor toward the elevator. Half rising, she yelled suddenly, “Don’t blame him, Daddy! It’s West! It’s all West!”

  CHAPTER

  8

  The two men stood in the dark of the room, staring down at the spotlighted corpse. The big John Doe lay still, his lantern jaw and powerful hands unmoving. The dragon tattoo on his right arm seemed more alive than his own stiff limbs.

  “We’ve failed!” he sighed.

  West slapped the corpse roughly. “He failed, not I!”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. Come on, let’s go. Someone will be coming any minute!”

  Even before he’d finished uttering the warning, Cain heard the announcement over the loudspeaker.

  “Mr. Daniel Cain, please report to the security desk, level L.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Cain looked at the inanimate body. He deserved what he got. Any number of things could have explained the cat, the brain. How could he have been so stupid? In his eagerness to want to believe, he had blundered into disaster.

  “Cover him up,” Cain said with disgust. “Let’s go.”

  West stood staring at the corpse, studying it. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. John Doe looked like a biker. Was there too much dust in his lungs? Drugs in his veins? Gas fumes—had they done him in?

  “I said let’s go!”

  “All right!” West snapped, grabbing the sheet and tossing it over the body. “I just don’t understand. It should have worked!”

  Cain helped him straighten the sheet, neither man noticing the fingers of the corpse’s right hand flick once, then again.

  “The girl’s brain had been dead longer, and that came back.”

  The entire arm twitched.

  Cain had no desire to discuss the matter. All he wanted was to get home and get stoned. And call Megan, if he could find the courage. He hadn’t seen her all day and wasn’t sure he wanted to hear how she couldn’t marry him now that he was on the verge of being kicked out of school.

  Cain heard the popping and felt the spray of blood on his neck at the same time.

  “What the hell?”

  Turning, he saw the corpse sitting up on the table, its joints snapping as they defied rigor mortis. Its arms were stretched rigidly before it, speckled with blood which was gushing in violent spurts from its mouth; the eyes, open wide, were glazed and dry.

  West’s eyes ignited with delight. “Do you see, Daniel? Do you see?”

  “I see—”

  West slapped Cain hard on the back. “Didn’t I tell you it would work? Quick, the recorder!”

  Cain pulled it from his pocket, fumbled to turn the device on. “Time?”

  “Ten thirty-four forty-eight.”

  Cain murmured the time, then described what was happening as, groaning, the corpse slid from the table and staggered several stiff-legged steps. It bent slightly, momentarily, to its right.

  “Astonishing!” West blurted. “It’s aware of the broken rib!”

  “Does it feel pain?” Cain asked.

  “Impossible to tell. We’ll have to do specific tests. Come on,”

  With Cain at his heels, West slowly approached the naked zombie. He was crouching slightly, his hands open in a calming gesture. The corpse regarded him for a moment, then snarled. Blood spattered over West’s glasses.

  “Easy . . .” West said. “We want to help you.”

  Turning slowly toward the table, the zombie suddenly grabbed it and, with superhuman strength, threw it across the room. Then it grabbed the nearest body and did likewise, the corpse bouncing off the wall like a rag doll. Another table followed, sending the young medics to the floor.

  “Shit!” Cain swore. “What’s wrong?”

  “Shock, confusion—I’m not sure! Just grab it.”

  Rising, the young men charged the zombie as it turned to grab another table; they both yelped as, with ease, the corpse grabbed their upper arms and twisted hard. It released Cain but not West; taking the young man by the shoulders, it heaved him backward across a row of tables and into the wall.

  Scrambling over a
pair of up-ended carts, Cain helped West to his feet.

  “What now?”

  West stood and adjusted his glasses. He regarded the corpse, which had just climbed atop a female cadaver.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “Just . . . stop!”

  The corpse froze, then climbed down slowly.

  “There,” West said giddily. “It listened to me! We must have startled it before, that’s all.”

  With a startling roar, the zombie ran at them, batting Cain aside with its shoulder and squeezing West around the waist. The bear hug brought a quick crimson flush to the young man’s face, and he slammed futilely on his captor’s head and neck.

  “Dan!” he wailed. “Daaaaaan!”

  The young man rose and picked up a pair of wheels which had snapped off one of the tables. Bracing himself against the door, he threw them at the brute’s back; the zombie turned and, with a roar, barreled toward Cain, who jumped out of its way.

  Out in the corridor, Halsey heard the commotion and ran forward. Swearing at Mace’s empty desk, he rushed in and tried the door to the morgue. It was locked, and he pounded heavily with the side of his fist.

  “Cain, what’s going on? What’s all that ruckus?”

  There was a clanging of metal, the moaning of one man, and the curses of another.

  “Cain? Cain! Open the door!” Halsey put his ear to the metal. He heard low, feral snarling. “Is West in there with you? You’re in a lot of trouble, both of you!”

  The door came down with a crash. Halsey shrieked as he fell beneath it. The zombie crawled across it and leaped up and down across the top. There was an audible cracking of bones in Dean Halsey’s chest.

  Hearing snapping and Halsey’s pitiful cries, the zombie scurried to one side. It flung the door from its victim and scooped the stunned Halsey up under its arms. Holding him high, it smashed the dean repeatedly against a chalkboard. When the dazed man tried to push the zombie away, the creature simply took his pinkie and ring finger between its teeth and snapped them off. Halsey wailed as his spurting blood mingled with the red on the corpse’s chin, though his cries were higher and more agonized than those of the zombie.

  Spitting the fingers out, the corpse heaved Dean Halsey across the room. The man tumbled from the wall to a countertop to the floor. He made a weak effort to crawl toward the door before the monster was once more upon him. The zombie picked him up again just as Cain and West came running from the morgue.

  “Oh, God,” Cain muttered. “It’s Dean Halsey!”

  Racing over, he locked his fists and began striking the monster on the back and head.

  “Stop! For God’s sake, stop!”

  “That’s it, Daniel, keep it busy!” West advised as he grabbed a table leg and hurried over to a medicine chest. Smashing the glass, he returned with a bone saw. “Okay, Dan,” he said, starting the instrument up. “Look out.”

  Cain backed away while West, a grim expression on his bruised face, stepped behind the zombie. Locking one arm around its neck, he pressed the spinning blade to its back. The zombie shot erect as the saw cut through its spine, but West held on. Like a rodeo bronco the zombie stomped, snarling, around the room, West’s feet rarely touching the floor. When the blade finally emerged from its chest, it stared down with a puzzled expression at the metal which was spinning blood and chunks of its heart around the room. Then it dropped, without a sound, and West slowly withdrew his forearm from the zombie’s chest cavity.

  “No,” he said dryly to Cain, “they feel no pain.”

  The thing was too surreal to be sickening; Cain just stared in amazement as, tossing the bone saw aside, West threw clinging viscera from his hand and hurried over to where Halsey lay crumpled in a corner.

  “He’s dead.”

  Cain turned away; all he could think about was Megan and what this would do to her. He sank slowly to the floor beside a stool, trying to imagine what he would tell her.

  West began dragging Halsey from the corner by his feet. “Come on, Daniel, find the recorder!”

  Cain looked up. He realized, in an instant, what West intended to do. Now he felt his stomach churning.

  “Herbert . . . no!”

  West gestured wildly at the John Doe. “Did you see him, Daniel? He listened to me! He made a conscious act!”

  “You’re wrong! He heard you as an animal would. He’d have murdered his own mother.”

  West used his tie to wipe smears of blood from his glasses. “Well . . . you may be right. It had probably been dead too long, it wasn’t fresh enough. We probably only revived the senses and the instincts. Come on”—he pointed toward Halsey’s head—“help me get him up.”

  Cain laughed miserably. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am, Daniel. Will you give me a hand here?”

  “No! I’m not going to let you experiment on him. Christ, this man was almost my father-in-law.”

  “He still can be! Look, this man was a short-sighted son of a bitch, one who interrupted an important experiment in progress! Granted, it was an accident, but he owes us. Besides”—West picked up Halsey’s wrist and rubbed the flesh between his fingers—“this is the freshest body we could come across short of killing one ourselves. Please, Daniel, every moment we spend talking about it costs us results! Will you give me a hand?”

  Cain lay his head against the stool, made no move toward the body. West tried and failed to lift Halsey himself. He came over again, on his knees.

  “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? We can bring him back to life!”

  Cain regarded West coldly. “Like Gruber?”

  “No, not like Gruber! Like Dean Allan Halsey, God help him! All right, Daniel—never mind me, never mind him. You’re an idealist, what about patients?”

  “Patients?”

  “Yes, the ones enduring twelve hundred heart transplants each year, eight thousand kidney transplants! We can stop that suffering, and also the pirates who are getting two hundred thousand dollars for complete cadavers for these operations. And what about you and Miss Halsey? Are you prepared to tell her that we were indirectly responsible for her father’s death?”

  Cain considered these points. He didn’t think for a moment that West cared about patients or about Megan—but he certainly did. And, he wondered, how much worse could they possibly make things by trying?

  He climbed to his feet. “All right, damn you. Let’s do it.”

  With a mad smile, West scooped up Halsey’s feet while Cain took his shoulders. Together they hoisted him onto the table.

  “Get the recorder and find my serum,” West ordered as he used the straps to lash Halsey to the tabletop.

  Cain headed for the morgue and returned with the recorder and the vial. He handed the latter to West.

  West fondled it with relief. “Ah . . . good. Thank God for unbreakable plastic, one of man’s few durable inventions!” He sneered at Halsey’s corpse as he readied the injection. “It’s certainly more durable than this. But we’ll soon take care of that, won’t we, Daniel?” He bent over the prone subject and lifted his head. “Won’t we, Dean Halsey?” He motioned for Cain to bring the recorder over. “Twelve cc’s being administered, the dosage lessened in accordance with the freshness of the subject.”

  Cain stood numbly across the table, gazing down at Halsey’s blood-streaked face, the clotted tangle of white hair, the ripped vest and rumpled jacket. The indignity of death once again angered and sickened him. Narrow-minded as Dean Halsey was, he’d been a poised, distinguished man; he deserved better than to end up a gored mass on a stainless-steel table.

  As though reading Cain’s mind, West observed, “Amazing, isn’t it, that such a fastidious man should make his greatest contribution to science in a state of utter disarray?” He cackled. “Can’t you just see the photos in the New England Journal of Medicine?”

  “Herbert, please . . .”

  Cain didn’t care whether it was nerves or vindictiveness that was causing West to gloat. For all his flaw
s, the dean deserved a modicum of respect, of dignity.

  Laying the empty hypodermic aside, West crouched so that he and Halsey were eye to eye. The levity was gone from his eyes and from his manner. His chin was outthrust, his brow brooding, his taut lips inches from Halsey’s ear.

  “Five seconds. Come on, you old bastard.”

  Cain knew, of course, that Halsey would be coming back. It might take another shot-in-the-dark overdose, but West would bring him around. For the dean’s sake—for Megan’s sake—he quietly prayed that Halsey would be more cooperative than their last subject.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Cain heard himself being paged again. The commander was dead, but the army fought on.

  “Fifteen seconds. Come on, I’ll show you!”

  West’s voice was sharp, impatient. Curious as he was, Cain laid the cassette recorder on the table, then swung away and sank to the floor. If Dean Halsey came back like John Doe, he didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want that image of horror seared into his brain.

  “Sixteen . . . seventeen. Come on!”

  West slammed his fist on the table, and Halsey’s eyes popped open. There were two loud intakes of air—that of Halsey and that of West—after which the young scientist began talking excitedly.

  “Seventeen seconds—reanimation at seventeen seconds! The eyes opened—breathing regular. Pulse”—he seized the man’s wrist, counting to himself—“pulse forty but strong. Slight expectoration of blood, possibly from a laceration of the tongue.”

  Cain hesitated. He was listening carefully to Halsey’s breathing, which was hollow, watery. There was blood in his mouth. Was there blood in the windpipe as well? In the lungs? His eyes sought out the bone saw as he waited.

  If West were aware of the dean’s strained breath, he made no mention of it.

  “Subject apparently confused and tugging at restraining straps—but not as violent as last subject. God, Daniel, I’ve done it! He’s alive! He’s alive! Dean . . . Dean Halsey!” West put his lips to the man’s ear. “I want you to hear this, Dean. You once did me a favor by admitting me into your medical school. Well, sir,” he clucked triumphantly, “consider the debt paid—with interest. Welcome back to life!”