Resurrection (80 page)

They were all sitting in Osbourne’s office by this time, out of that blasphemous workshop of creation that made everyone a little uneasy.

“Project ReGenesis was aimed at understanding the molecular basis for regeneration,” he told them. “The first breakthrough was learning that when an amphibian regenerates a limb, there was not only healing at the sight to prevent blood loss, but no scarring. Humans always develop scar tissue at the wound sight. Amphibians heal, but they do not scar. You see, at the site of the missing limb, various specialized cells like skin and bone and nerve tissue immediately lose their identity and become generalized. Like stem cells or T-cells, they no longer know what kind of cells they are. This is called de-differentiation. The result is a mass of unspecialized cells called a blastema which proliferates at an amazing rate to form a limb bud. These cells take on specialized roles as the limb develops.”

That was basically the first breakthrough they had.

The stumbling block was that vertebrates were unable to create a blastema. They simply repair a wound and stop. The process goes no farther. In blood and liver tissue, for example, small numbers of unspecialized cells set aside during embryogenesis are activated. These stem cells can proliferate indefinitely, endlessly, but only for general repairs, not out and out replacement. They lack the proper triggers to activate them, to create a blastema. In the marine worm planaria, for example, if you cut one of these creatures into, say, two-hundred pieces, in days you have two-hundred separate worms. How it does this is with regeneration genes. These genes only exist in blastemas. One of these genes encodes an enzyme that degrades the cellular matrix, a mesh of proteins and other molecules that surrounds cells. This enzyme then triggers regeneration by releasing growth factors to the surrounding cells.

Mitch and Tommy and Harry just sat there, smoking, not sure what any of it was really about. Mitch knew a little about stem cells. Only that they could possibly become any sort of tissue they were exposed to…nerve tissue, heart tissue, whatever. In stem cell research, he understood, there was maybe the cure for diabetes, heart problems, brain damage, spinal cord injuries. The blind might see and the lame might walk and vegetables might live productive lives once again. Just as God had intended. Of course, there were a bunch of religious whackos and right-to-life zealots that were against it because fetal tissue had to be harvested. But as far as Mitch was concerned, using aborted tissue was at least a way in making something bad into something good. It was life
giving
life.

Vertebrate regeneration, Osbourne said, is accomplished by the formation, growth, patterning, and differentiation of a blastema at the limb stump. Mature tissues adjacent to the wound site lose their extracellular matrix and cells reenter the cell cycle in preparation for stump repair and limb regeneration. At the cellular level, the blastema mimics the original embryonic limb bud that gives rise to the mature limb.

“And we were there, gentlemen!” he said, growing heated now. “We were there! Right at the threshold of a new technology that would have saved millions!”

Tommy, with his usual subtlety, said, “So what’s that got to do with zombies?”

“Don’t be such an idiot,” Osbourne told him. “Regeneration is the most complete repair mechanism there is. It could completely revolutionize medicine as we know it. Coupled with nanotechnology, things like invasive surgery, cutting and probing and agony, would be things of the past. Medieval bullshit.”

“Like what you boys were doing out there?”

“I wasn’t doing that. I was against it. I didn’t have any interest in that nonsense, but I was overridden by the powers that be,” Osbourne said. “All of what you saw out there and all of what you see in Witcham is because of a cellular physiologist from the University of Michigan named Brighten that the Army brought into the project. He caused all this…”

Brighten was a genius, Osbourne admitted, but a dark genius.

He was one of those guys that would have made a great Nazi scientist like Mengele. Ethics meant little to him. He was concerned with pure science and anything that stood between him and enlightenment, the ultimate fruition of his studies, was simply a means to end. Osbourne said he wasn’t exactly a people person and had no compunction about using human guinea pigs…had the law allowed such a thing. Now Brighten was not only brilliant, but damned unconventional. One of his hobbies when he wasn’t dissecting things was alchemy, that great forerunner to modern chemistry out of the Middle Ages. Which Osbourne called a “frightening marriage between physical science and sorcery.” One of alchemy’s chief aims, other than turning base metals to gold, was the artificial creation of life, particularly,
human
life. And this latter endeavor fascinated Brighten, him being a physiologist.

“Brighten was obsessed with not only true scientific advancement, but with these realms of pseudo-science…or what we thought were pseudo-science.” Osbourne rubbed his eyes. They were puffy and red and it had probably been days and days since he’d closed them for any length of time. “He was well-versed in the works of the great alchemists

Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus, Jacob Boehme, Nicholas Flammel, the Comte Saint-Germain

and had read dozens of Medieval alchemical texts in their original Latin. Things known to be coded and practically indecipherable like
The Secret Book of Artephius, A Chymicall Treatise of Arnoldus de Nova Villa,
the
Coelum Philosophorum of Paracelus, The Ripley Scroll,
Bacon’s
The Mirror of Alchemy.
Good God, he knew them all and could quote openly from them, claimed to have discovered the ancient key which unlocked their codes. He would lecture us on Paracelus and his
alkahest,
the prime element of organic creation. Talk us to death on Edward Kelly and John Dee, Borellus and his essential salts.

“But what brought him into Project ReGenesis was his discovery of the life and works of Alardus Weerden, a Seventeeth Century warlock or witch or what have you that was executed in 1627 in Wurzburg, Germany, during the notorious witch persecutions of Von Ehrenberg.”

“That’s the guy you mentioned,” Mitch said. “You said something about his remains…you telling me you guys stole his body?”

Osbourne shook his head. “No, just a fragment for study. The Army arranged for it to be snatched from a secret grave it had been interred into by some of Weerden’s disciples shortly after his beheading and burning…”

It was insane, but Brighten, by studying contemporary witchcraft texts of the 17
^th
century, was able to learn where Weerden’s body was buried and to convince the Army brass that the old wizard’s bones held the secrets of regeneration. For Weerden had claimed that he could regenerate himself endlessly if but a scrap of flesh or knob of bone from his corpse was extant. Brighten was in possession of evidence, Osbourne claimed, that proved conclusively, at least to his superiors, that Alardus Weerden had lived a dozen lives, dying violently or by accident each time, and then biologically regenerating himself.

“So you got his bones?” Tommy said.

“Just one. A single metacarpal from his right hand.”

“And what did you find?”

“We found that there was still cellular activity in it and this nearly four-hundred years after his death,” Osbourne explained. “According to Brighten, Weerden had learned the science of regeneration from ancient texts. Though one contemporary source claimed that he had commerce with demons or entities from other worlds or dimensions. Unfortunately, we were not able to discover the process itself. Weerden had been exposed to something or had exposed himself to something, we believed, although there was always the possibility that it was some freak genetic talent. There was no way to know. But the point here is that Weerden’s remains had
activity
in them. Molecular activity. At least, that finger bone did.”

“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.”