Resurrection (79 page)

Holding the lanterns, they moved down the corridor. There were no doors on either wall, just a set of heavy steel doors at the end. Again, the ID card opened them and out came a nauseating, hot wave of decomposition that made them turn away, swallow their guts back down.

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “That stink.”

They moved in there, each wondering what sort of awful vapors they might be breathing, but none of them wanted to turn back. There was discovery ahead, the sort of things no man…or precious few…had ever been allowed to see. The room they were in was large with white walls, three doors set into it. They used the card again and went off through the one on the right that said PATHOLOGY over the doorway. The room was circular and tiled in green, set out with trays of surgical instruments, stainless steel slabs with drains set into them, cabinets of chemicals. Scales and specimen jars.

“Looks like an autopsy room,” Tommy said.

There were no bodies or anything in there, but lots of tell-tale stains on the floor and on those slabs. The air smelled of alcohol and preservatives. You could just image the sort of nasty things that went on there, but there was nothing much to see. They went through a set of double doors at the back like the kind that lead into restaurant kitchens. This room was even bigger. Set along one wall were the mouths of brick ovens and along the other were huge circular iron doors set into steel faces that gleamed. The smell in there was old, but unsettling. The stink of burned things and ashes.

“This is a crematorium,” Tommy said. “I don’t know about those brick ovens, but those steel hatches are for sliding bodies into…to cremate them.”

Nobody doubted what he said.

They moved around with their lanterns held aloft, shadows jumping around them. There was a coating of fine gray ash on the floor. They didn’t open the circular iron doors, but inside those brick ovens there were great heaps of cinders and blackened remains. You got the feeling that somebody had been burning a lot of something and very quickly, hadn’t cared much about the mess they were making. Which made Mitch think of those concentration camps in Europe, how the Nazis has been incinerating bodies as fast as they could before the Allies moved in. The air was dusty and gritty, left a dry film on your tongue.

“Can we get out of here?” Tommy said.

Mitch led them through another door and this room was narrow with shelving running from floor to ceiling along both walls. There were leaden, rubberized coffins heaped all over the place. But the shelves themselves were crowded with zippered body bags. Harry went right over to a few of them, took hold of the straps.

“There’s remains in these,” he announced.

Many were full and many were not. But nobody had to tell them that these were the remains of soldiers shipped back from Iraq and other terrible places where American sons and daughters were dropping like flies. This is what the government was doing with them. Not all of them, of course. Many were shipped to their families, but many were not. They ended up here to be used as raw materials for whatever line of research the Army Medical Command was pursuing. The nature of which must have been shocking beyond belief.

“This is sick,” Tommy said. “I mean, this is really fucking sick. You die for your country and this is the respect they show you in the end.”

“Are you surprised?” Harry said. “Are you really surprised?”

But he wasn’t, none of them were. You tried to be a good American, you tried even to be patriotic at times. You hung your flag out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. You tried not to be too hard on your leaders even though you knew, down deep, that they were dirty and manipulative, spinmasters and bureaucrats and out-and-out liars. But you tried to trust them, you tried to believe in them, you tried to tell yourself that there were not dirty backroom politics going on. You did your best to support wars that were unnecessary and bloody and costly, had no true purpose that you could see. And this is what it got you. This is how the puppetmasters pulled your strings and wasted your sons and daughters, pissed on the flag and the constitution they were supposed to uphold. And when the mask was stripped away at midnight, regardless of party affiliations, what you saw was ugly and brutal and squirming. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they said.

Mitch led them out of there.

Yes, they were still frightened and disturbed, but it was more than that now. Those emotions had been displaced by anger and slow simmering rage. They went back out the pathology door and chose another. This led to another steel door which announced:

EXTREME DANGER

CONTAINMENT AREA.

“Well, let’s see what those sweethearts were up to in here,” Mitch said.

Harry used the card and the door popped open. They passed through a series of doors, each warning them off and they found themselves in a wide corridor. To one side there were glass doors running from floor to ceiling. A very dark, smoky glass you could not see through. They put the lanterns right up to them, but the light would not penetrate very far. But there were things in there, forms, figures, something that they just could not see and that was probably a good thing. They turned to the other wall which was set with black iron doors with observation windows set into them.

“Look like solitary confinement cells,” Harry said.

“They are,” Mitch said. “This is…this some kind of fucking zoo.”

Holding the lanterns up to one of the observation windows, they saw a naked man in there. A dead man with that same pulpy, corpse-white flesh that the dead of Witcham possessed. Like them, he was wormy and rotting, bloated-up. He seemed not to notice them, was too busy chewing the meat off his own forearm. In the next cell they weren’t sure what they were looking at…something like a mass of gray-white slime that was trying to pretend it was a man, ropes of it webbing it to the walls and ceiling. It was the same in nearly all the cells…inhuman things, unformed things, unfinished things, things that maybe had started as carrion and kept growing, maybe not entire bodies, but parts thereof that were growing and multiplying like tissue in Petri dishes, an organic miasma of limbs and heads and staring eyes. They saw something like a jellyfish with a hundred coiling limbs, except the upper half of it was clearly a woman with a face that was fetal and indistinct. In another cell, it looked like there were two women sitting side by side, only they were not separate, but grown together like Siamese twins, rows of pendulous teats growing from chest to crotch. They found a cell with three or four corpse-like things in there, white and blubbery and slimy, that seemed to be dividing from a single mass.

These were the things they saw.

Nameless experiments gone terribly wrong.

Most cells had nothing even recognizably human in them…just scraps and cast-offs that were assimilating one another, mutating into things you could not even guess at. Evolution had started in the grave in this place and where it would lead, you just didn’t want to know.

“Enough,” Mitch finally said.

They got out of there, found another door in that maze of rooms that said MOLECULAR GENETICS/BIOENGINEERING above it. They all tensed at what that might be about. But they knew it was going to be bad, that if there was a nursery where these horrors were born, it would be in here.

They stepped through the door and found that there were a few lights on. Even so, the place was huge and shadowy. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high and the room itself was as big as the display floor of a car dealership, hundreds of feet square. Everywhere, there was machinery and tables crowded with laboratory equipment and microscopes and glass jars of specimens. But not only that but urns of human remains, casks of dried insects, stuffed animals, mummified limbs. The dusty remains of what looked to be very ancient cadavers crumbling on slabs. Huge glass vessels held pale limbs and eyes and internal organs floating in cloudy baths of serum…and many of them were moving, alive even though they couldn’t possibly be. There were entire corpses in huge glass tubes filled with fluids that reacted when Mitch and the others got near them, scratching at their prisons, their mouths opening and closing like they were trying to speak. Harry found the living head of a woman in a cask of pink liquid and Tommy found a vat of gray tissue that was undulating.

“What the fuck is this place?” Mitch finally said, stumbling madly down aisles of living specimens and chemical glassware.

There was no way he could know, no way any of them could know. Not really. They could not know nor guess that what they were seeing was an unthinkable combination of a witch’s workshop and a molecular bio lab, an alchemist’s laboratory and cellular biology research station. It was all these things. The intersection of cutting edge medical science and Medieval sorcery. This was a dissection room and a tissue lab, a cell physiology laboratory and a cabbalist’s shed. The meeting of the very old and the very new.

Here were dried snakes hanging from overhead and sectioned rats, presses and Athenors, cauldrons of decomposing animal matter and alchemist’s Pelicans with spidery tubes used for spirit production. Chemical furnaces and ovens, flasks and crucibles, alembics and retorts. All the workings of a Medieval alchemy lab

three-legged cauldrons and distillation apparatuses, bowls and clay jars, Liebig Condensers and receiver flasks, exotic glassware such as ampullas, crane’s bills, cucurbitas. Cementation boxes and fermentation chambers, scorifiers and aludels, bone-ash cupels and digestion vessels. Just a crowded esoteric menagerie of long-stemmed flasks and coiling spouts, ceramic pots and copper bowls, dried animals and bones and crematory ash and great charts of indecipherable figures. All of this crowded amongst tables of modern laboratory equipment, electron microscopes and centrifuges, dissection tables and chromatographs. Jars of petrified spiders were sandwiched in-between laptops and protein purification work stations. Embalmed human hands were flanked by pH meters, thermo baths, PCR machines, incubators and digital microscopes. Medieval sublimation alembics were attached to retorts and specimen jars, while to all sides were bones and feathers and staring human skulls. In the same room you could call up the spirits of the dead, you could do tissue culturing, DNA extraction, gene transfers, and protein purification.

“This is a goddamn madhouse,” Tommy said, bumping into a set of capillary DNA sequencers as he tried to avoid tripping over the snaking maze of a 13
^th
century distillation apparatus with condensers and tubing, flasks and cast iron pots, digesters for putrefaction studies. “A fucking madhouse.”

“You’re right,” a voice said out of the shadows. “That’s exactly what this is.”

Guns went up and a tall, thin man with silvery hair stepped out. He wasn’t the mad scientist they were expecting with a dirty lab coat and frizzy gray hair, but a neat and trim man in an expensive suit who looked more like a stockbroker than anything else.

“Now,” he said. “Are you here to seek vengeance for what has happened or do you want answers?”

The way they were feeling, vengeance sounded pretty good. But they weren’t after that and this guy looked positively harmless, sad really. He looked just worn and empty like maybe you could beat him to death with a hammer and he wouldn’t have even attempted to defend himself. He was offering them a look in his dark chest of secrets and they could not refuse.

“It doesn’t matter to me who you are,” he said to them. “I’m going to tell you what happened here. How this came about. Because today or tomorrow the Army will come in here and sterilize this entire place. No one and nothing will be left. The wheels are already turning.”

“And who are you?” Tommy put to him.

“I was, until five years ago, a professor of cellular biology at Stanford. My name is Robert Osborne, if that interests you. I came here five years ago after being contacted by the Army Medical Research Command on authorization of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. They wanted to include me in an ongoing research program known as the ReGenesis Project.”

“And what was that about?” Tommy said. “Making zombies?”

If such a man as Osbourne could smile, could show some human warmth, he did it then. But it passed quickly enough. “Hardly. The aim of the project was an investigation into limb and tissue regeneration.”

Osbourne said that the U.S. military had been interested in this for years, the possible application of biological regeneration technology to battlefield injuries. Hence, soldiers with disfiguring injuries and the loss of limbs could be potentially made whole again.

“And how did you go about this…this project?” Mitch asked him.

“By studying Medieval alchemy and certain remains of a Seventeenth-century warlock named Alardus Weerden…”

15

The research, Osbourne explained, was initially begun back in the 1970’s from studies in the acceleration of the healing of battlefield wounds and burns. And from that, it was extrapolated that possibly entire limbs could be regrown. Flatworms, fish, and certain amphibians can regenerate internal organs, tissues, and limbs to a certain extent, but humans can only regrow selective tissues and organs…the liver, the blood, the outermost layer of skin.

“It’s really genetics,” Osbourne went on, “when you come down to it. All the information to regenerate any tissues or limbs is encoded in the genes if we could only activate it.”

He said the initial research was done on salamanders, which can regenerate limbs. The key was to unlock how they did it and apply this to higher vertebrates, namely, man. The theory was that these salamanders, when they experienced significant tissue loss or damage or the amputation of a limb, had a sort of signal response. In that, when the tissues were damaged, cells at the site released signals which activated regeneration on a cellular level. This response was much like that in a human embryo when genetic encoding allows it to grow an arm or a leg for the first time. The trick was to reestablish this marvelous mechanism.