Resurrection

by Curran, Tim

  “Did you…did you regenerate him from it?” Harry asked, because somebody had to.

  Osbourne ignored that. “We studied his cells and from them we were able to isolate FRX-3, the radical gene trigger mechanism of his regeneration. We found that if a bit of bone tissue were placed in a nutrient bath much similar to embryonic fluid, the cellular activity went from a near-dormant state to a frenzied binary division and FRX-3 was released and the tissue began to metabolize. That vat of living tissue you saw out there…that was grown from but a section of Weerden’s digit, a sliver really.”

  “Didn’t look like it was turning into a man,” Harry pointed out.

  “And it won’t,” Osbourne assured him. “That tissue has been selectively cultivated and destroyed and re-cultivated a hundred times. It is, essentially, a massive blastema that gives us a near endless supply of the FRX-3 gene. This gene, by the way, exists naturally at wound sites, but is not active. Anyway, we no longer need it in that we have successfully synthesized this amazing protein artificially. That flesh should die soon in that it is no longer being fed.”

  “It looked pretty lively,” Harry said with a disgusted look on his face.

  “Yes, and that is more than a little disturbing.” He waved that aside with his hand, as if he preferred not to discuss it. “At any rate, we had isolated FRX-3, and it worked. We tested it for nearly a year on lab animals and then on humans. Volunteers, all. Men that had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, were missing limbs. Anything from fingers to legs. It worked perfectly. It triggered regeneration at the stump sight and replicated an entire arm within ten days.”

  “Ten days?” Mitch said.

  “Yes, ten days. FRX-3 sent the cells at the stump site into a sort of regenerative hyperdrive. You could nearly see the growth before your eyes. It was science, yes, but to see the results…well, it was little less than magic.”

  In the case of a complete arm amputation wound, Osbourne said, the stump was treated with FRX-3 in the form of a topical ointment. The FRX-3 genes immediately began replicating themselves and activating their latent forms which exist naturally. The trigger had begun. Within an hour, an epidermal sheet migrated to cover the wound. Genes common to both wound healing and regeneration were expressed via FRX-3. Cells in the stump tissue immediately lost their specialization, becoming migratory. They developed a blastema and proliferated. At this point, the re-expressed genes showed spatial and temporal patterns that differed from ordinary development. A limb bud developed, then a chimeric limb itself. The genes showed similar expression and function as they did in embryonic tissue. Four days later, the limb was completely regenerated.

  Jesus, Mitch thought, it was amazing. This was the most important thing ever discovered…but he knew something was going to be wrong with it all. The fact that dead people were walking around in Witcham proved that.

  “So what’s this have to do with zombies?” Tommy asked.

  Osbourne flinched at that word again. “The limbs and tissues regenerated perfectly. At least at first…but within days, the tissue became morbid and spongy. You could cut sections away and they would immediately regrow. But the flesh was cold, unbearably cold to its owner. The regenerated tissues immediately began producing toxins which sickened its owner. But worse than that, the new mutated tissue began assimilating the rest of the body. Somewhere during the process, the patients died from infection. But they didn’t stay dead. The mutant tissue assimilated the entire body and the body woke up.

  “Sometimes they were simply insane,” Osbourne said. “Sometimes quite lucid. But one thing became quite clearwho they were when they died and who they became after death, were not the same thing. Maybe Weerden’s consciousness never faded. Maybe he controlled the regeneration mentally and that was how he regenerated perfectly and not as some white, rotting thing. And maybe, being conscious, his mind was not filled with something else that should never have lived.”

  Osbourne wouldn’t go into detail about that.

  Even though he was obviously a very unsuperstitious man, he believed that there were minds out there, evil and malignant minds that had never been born or never were meant to be born, entities occupying some unknown sphere between the physical and the purely spiritual maybe. That they were always looking for bodies, for vessels to inhabit, and they found them in these regenerated/resurrected corpses. He had trouble admitting all this and he never once mentioned that great scientific imponderable, the human soul, but he was essentially saying it without saying it.

  None of that surprised Mitch in the least. He had heard what Wanda told Tommy and he the day before when Tommy had asked if they were zombies. She thought the idea was ridiculous.

  “…them things may have died as Joe Blow or Mary Jane Pissy Pie, but what they returned as is something else indeed,” Wanda told them. “The souls of Joe and Mary have gone traveling, but there are others in the void looking for occupancy. And these were not born as such. No, they are scavengers that have come to roost in the shells of the newly risen…like crows and buzzards attracted to bad meat, those things have been waiting a long time to be born.”

  “We began to experiment,” Osbourne said, definitely wanting to change the subject. “We found that you could endlessly bisect one of these reanimated bodies and that, given time, it would regenerate into a whole. But often that whole took on monstrous characteristics not contained in the original. Hence, the things you saw in the cages, gentlemen. How Weerden successfully regenerated himself is unknown. He made himself whole again and again and we, yes, we created monsters. We found that if a bit of tissue or even a limb were treated with FRX-3, it began to regenerate. Sometimes, it became a duplicate of the original…with certain unpleasant divergences or mutations. And sometimes it grew into something inhuman and plastic, something degenerate.”

  “That explains that thing at the mannequin factory,” Tommy said.

  “These imperfect regenerations are horrible to see,” Osbourne admitted. “White and fungous and morbid. But what makes them even more horrible, is that they seemed to be controlled by diabolic minds, anti-human minds.”

  Osbourne said they experimented for months and months. Some of the staff collected up the paraphernalia of alchemy, trying to recreate some of Weerden’s original studies, but to no effect…no effect that was not ghastly and unspeakable to the extreme. Hence, the madhouse the molecular bio lab had become. The rest of the staff continued to cultivate Weerden’s tissue and apply FRX-3 to various animal and human tissues. Organs, limbs, anything to an entire individual could be redeveloped…but the end result was always an absorption of healthy tissues by the mutated variety. It was found that FRX-3 would also reactivate dead tissue and even entire cadavers.

  “Then we had our explosion,” he told them.

  In a high pressure vat, they were “cooking” certain proteins that FRX-3 created during the regeneration cycle, hoping for a modified, biochemical approach to their problem. Osbourne did not know what happened, but the vat exploded and shot these hybrid proteins straight up into the atmosphere where they rained down over half the countryside.

  “And the dead started rising,” Mitch said.

  “Yes, apparently. The dead regenerated and things were regenerated from scraps of tissue as well.”

  Osbourne finished by telling them that in addition to the protein stew shot into the air, there were also quantities of other hazardous, experimental chemicals sent airborne. One of them was a spray called VVK. VVK was a yellow mist that when sprayed on the regenerated tissues actually halted the process and destroyed the regenerative processes in the cells.

  “Yellow rain,” Tommy said.

  “Yes, it fell over the compound here first, killing nearly everyone. The others simply lost their minds. Some killed themselves when they realized what had been unleashed and I don’t know about the others. They probably ran off.”

  “So this VVK can kill those things?” Mitch asked.

  “Oh yes. Unfortunately, it kill
s any living thing it comes into contact with. It’s deadly.” Osbourne grimaced and slammed his fist on the desk. “We’ve let loose a Pandora’s Box of horrors here, I’m afraid. And I’m as guilty as the others. But today or tomorrow, a containment team will sterilize this place. And me with it. The yellow rain, as you call it, may come down once or twice more before it dissipates. So be careful. But as to the FRX-3 proteins and the genes themselves…I’m not sure how to stop that or if it can be stopped from turning this goddamn country into a graveyard.”

  Mitch hated the man.

  Despised him…yet he almost felt sorry for him. Felt sorry for him because Osbourne had watched a wonderful research project that could have benefited millions perverted and turned into something unholy, for lack of a better word. The regeneration program, the original ReGenesis Project, could have been the single most important medical breakthrough in history. And maybe it still would be in the hands of the right men and women. For as Osbourne himself had said, they were damn close to perfecting it. Then came that crazy bastard Brighten and his witchcraft and alchemy. Something wonderful and unique had become a nightmare of gargantuan proportions. Yes, he hated Osbourne for being part of it, just as he hated the rest of those scientists for letting loose something like this. Something that had killed God knew how many people and Mitch’s own wife in the process. But as much as he hated, he understood. Scientists were really kids at heart, curious kids with incredible minds that always asked, why, why, why. And if you gave these kids in question a toybox with the secrets of the universe in it, of course they were going to open that box and play with what they found inside.

  “Where is this fucking asshole Brighten?” Tommy wanted to know.

  “Dead,” Osbourne said. “He exposed himself to FRX-3 and it…digested him cell by cell. He went into the incinerator.”

  Harry seemed to still have more questions and he asked one of them right now. “That tissue out there you’re growing…Weerden’s tissue. You’re not feeding it, you said, yet it’s alive. What will happen to it?”

  “It’ll go into the incinerator,” Osbourbe told him.

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “It will…it might just keep growing. We don’t know.”

  “But it’ll never become Weerden?”

  Osbourne shook his head. “No. We don’t know what Weerden’s exact process was. But that tissue is basically a fibroblast, a blastema…unspecialized cells waiting for genetic information to tell them what to do and what they should be. Technically, in their DNA, they have that information but are unable to access it. If that mass of tissue could get nutrients, it would theoretically grow and grow.”

  “The chicken heart that ate the world,” Harry said.

  “Precisely…in theory.”

  “And if got some human tissue…it would become a person?”

  Osbourne said, “Yes, I suppose. I suppose…”

  The three of them just sat around looking at each other and at Osbourne. Well, it had been a really wild and heady trip coming out to the Ft. Providence base. But what were they coming away with? How did any of this help them or Witcham for that matter? They had not learned anything really hopeful.

  “That VVK kills ‘em,” Tommy said. “You know what else works? Salt.”

  “Salt?” Osbourne grunted at the idea. “I suppose it would. The resurrected have an extremely high fluid content. The salt would leech water from the cells and destroy their membranes.”

  “We figured that out,” Tommy said. “And none of us are smart like you.”

  “Smart? No, not smart. Intelligent, I always thought, and perceptive, but hardly smart. You men should leave now. The Army will be coming. If they find you here, they’ll kill you.”

  “Okay,” Mitch said. “One last thing, though. Weerden. You didn’t answer my question. Did you guys regenerate that fucking old warlock or not?”

  Osbourne looked pained. “I…I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know.”

  “Brighten and the others were involved in things I wasn’t given access to. After I made my feelings on the project known, I was kept out of certain experiments.”

  Osbourne told them that down below, there were additional high containment levels that had originally been designed for the manipulation of genetically-enhanced disease germs, part of the Cold War biological warfare effort. Brighten was running experiments down there. Those levels were sealed off. Even Osbourne himself could not access them.

  “So he could have regenerated this witch?” Tommy said.

  “I…I just don’t know. We created blastemas, but I don’t know if they could have regenerated an entire individual.”

  “But that’s what Weerden said, wasn’t it?” Harry put in. “That he could regenerate himself endlessly from just a scrap?”

  “Yes,” Osbourne said. “Yes. Regardless, you men must leave now. It’s dangerous here. More dangerous than you can know.”

  When they didn’t move, he smiled grimly. “You wondered what that blastema tissue would do if fed and left to its own means? Well, come on. I’ll show you. And after you see it, you’ll be glad to leave. Yes, you will.”

  Mitch just stared at him.

  Maybe this guy was intelligent and had all kinds of letters after his name, but he was about to crack up. You could see it around the edges, he was starting to lose it and he must have been pretty damn strong not to have gone over the edge already. Now he wanted to show them something, something perfectly awful, no doubt. Mitch wanted to tell Harry and Tommy no, but he could see that they wanted to look at whatever it was. Wanted to see the thing that would send them running. He didn’t figure there was any way to talk them out of it. And Osbourne? Sure, he wanted them to see it. Like some kid that knows where a dead cat full of worms is.

  Osbourne led them back through the maze of the laboratory and to a steel door at the rear. He opened it with his card. He had that fucked-up grin on his face that was about three feet from full-blown dementia. He brought them to an elevator and opened it, again, with his card. They rode down for a couple minutes and the doors opened on a huge room that was circular like the morgue above itself.

  “Come on,” he said to them. “You’ll want to see this.”

  It was dark, the electric lights not working down there apparently. They brought the lanterns and Osbourne led them off into the murk. There was a fusty, rank smell of things rotting in bogs. A very organic, profuse sort of smell.

  Mitch heard a slopping, almost liquid sound ahead that echoed and echoed around them. It was followed by a weird, shrill chittering and then a godawful roaring as of some beast rising from a primordial lake. Whatever was just ahead, it was the end result of them toying with Weerden’s biology. Something no mind could look upon and remain unchanged.

  Tommy stopped and looked at Mitch, his face bloodless, but then he started moving again.

  There was a large rectangular pit ahead and it was probably big enough to hold a pickup truck or maybe a couple of them.

  Osbourne got there first and Harry was right behind him. He looked in there and his face just went yellow, his eyes widening, his lips trembling. He stepped away, shaking, going down on one knee.

  Then it was Tommy’s turn. And Mitch’s.

  Mitch saw. Saw something so hideous and utterly grotesque he thought it might burn his thinking mind to cinders. His first reaction was shock, then nausea, and then a curious vertigo that threatened to tumble him into the pit. His heart hammered like it would explode and his mind became a wind tunnel of buzzing white noise.

  The thing in the pit roared when he put his light on it. Roared with a booming sound that sent a blast of hot, rancid air right into his face. It stank of vomit and bile and fungal decay. Down there in that pit, the thing was huge and quivering and creeping, a fleshy miasma of gray pustulating jelly set with twitching, fibrous growths. There were dozens of limbs growing from the thing…white tentacular whips and snapping cords, human arms and legs tha
t were white and gelid-skinned, perforated with running sores. And heads. Snaring what genetic material it could, this mutant blastema had replicated a dozen bulbous human heads that were screaming and thrashing and calling out to the men above. Caricatures of what must have been Weerden’s head, fleshed in running wax. It was completely noxious and revolting. And what was maybe worse were those dozens of pink, slimy eyes the size of softballs.

  Eyes that were staring right at him.

  Harry grabbed Osbourne by the collar of his coat and lifted him right off the ground. “I should throw you into that motherfucker!” he shouted. “I should feed you to it! How would you like that, you crazy sonofabitch?”

  Tommy and Mitch pulled him away.

  They made towards the elevator.

  “Here me good, you prick,” Mitch told him. “My wife is gone because of your fucking pets and my daughter is missing. If she doesn’t turn up, I’m coming back for you. I swear to God I’m coming back for you and I’m going to toss your ass down there. You hear me?”

  Osbourne heard him, all right.

  16

  Imagine: the city haunted.

  Haunted by vermin.

  For Witcham was nothing but a flooded graveyard, a slaughterhouse, an inundated mortuary. A slopping, stinking gray cesspool of filth and decay and boiling miasma where thousands of ripe corpses had been washed from graves and thousands more were exhumed by the rising polluted waters every morning, creating a virulent black sea of dank rot and sewage and pestilence.

  And this brought the vermin in hordes.

  Immense buzzing clouds of meatflies and corpseflies that took to the air in droning, verminous clouds, darkening the sky as they settled over the streets, drawn and made hungry by the carrion that bobbed and drifted through the gutted carcass of the city. The flies feasted on the cadavers that clogged the streets in a gruesome logjam of bloated white flesh. They fed and mated and laid their eggs in the bellies of corpses, in the soft and spongy tissues of eyes and mouths and genitalia, seeding a fertile and noxious garden of putrescence. And within what seemed hours, those eggs gave flower: millions of writhing maggots and corpse-larva that themselves began to spread their wings, feeding and mating and laying millions of more eggs. The flies became storms that whirred through the city, feeding and fucking and breeding, spreading disease and filth.