“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.”
“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
