ran off.”
“So this VVK can kill those things?” Mitch asked.
“Oh yes. Unfortunately, it kills 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 that 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
