Josh glanced up at Dave. "Here we go."
"I can't believe that you agreed to this," said Dave.
"It comes down to practicality. I'm used to work that involves a manual angle, and when it comes to making observations and writing that down then clearly you're the one for that job. It's the most sensible division of labour."
Dave adjusted the notepad on his lap. "I'd love to have a camera to record this, but after we do some basic tests we'll figure out what equipment we're short on. For now we just need to start doing something."
"And how do we start?" asked Josh looking at Charlie and hefting the axe.
"Let's not get too wild. Start with Charlie's toes. I'm curious what sort of bodily fluids will come out when we remove a limb. If we did the leg straight away you could get covered in blood and who knows if that's enough to cause an infection."
"Just one toe?"
"That should be a safe start."
Josh looked at Charlie as he walked to Charlie's left. Without wasting a motion, Josh basically dropped the axe on Charlie's outermost little toe. Josh didn't do a full swing of the axe from overhead. Instead he started with as little force as he could manage with the goal of reducing the potential mess. That is, he merely dropped the axe onto Charlie's toe while holding the end of the axe handle as a pivot point.
The toe cleanly came away and rolled about thirty centimetres from where it was originally attached. Charlie had been slightly agitated by Josh being so close, but overall Charlie didn't seem to make any sign that he had noticed what happened. The axe had barely passed through Charlie's toe when Josh leapt back.
Dave hadn't expected what he saw. There was Charlie without a toe and the severed toe a noticeable distance from him. There wasn't any blood or any other kind of fluid. It was completely clean. Josh's preparations were now looking like overkill. Even his jumping back had been for nothing.
"Where's all the blood?" asked Josh.
"I have absolutely no idea. I wasn't expecting actual, living blood. Yet I was thinking that there had to be something. Nothing at all is the opposite of what should have happened. Yesterday, when I was cutting off Charlie's clothes, should have hinted at this outcome."
"What's this bullshit?" said Josh excitedly.
A strange cloud of greyish-brown enveloped the severed toe. It now wasn't out of purely safety concerns that Josh took a further step back. Another cloud appeared at the stump from where the toe had been severed. In the course of a few seconds the severed toe turned into a dirty-looking gas, and the toe then grew back from the stump.
"Grew" is probably not the most precise description. It appeared that the toe was being rebuilt from the inside out. First the toe bone appeared, muscles and tendons formed, and then the skin and toe-nail appeared. To all purposes it appeared that the severed toe had vanished and reappeared back on the foot where it had started.
"Okay," said Dave. "I'm not a scientist but I'm sure that just violated all the physical laws of the universe."
"I was dreading the idea of cutting this guy's leg off but somehow this just took the damn cake. What the hell just happened?"
"I've got no idea. So let's do that again."
Josh looked up at Dave. Josh suddenly appreciated that Dave's course of action wasn't a trivial one. This was a path where the discovery of the pure and uncensored truth would lead to madness. This was no bland discovery in a safe laboratory somewhere in some whitewashed building. This was a raw truth that cared nothing for the minds of whoever encountered it.
Stepping forward, Josh approached Charlie's left and again dropped the axe on Charlie's little toe. The toe rolled a distance from Charlie's foot. There were no fluids. No mess. It was a throughly clean separation. And yet such a mess-less separation caused a growing sense of abhorrence to the point of causing both Josh and Dave to grimly grit their teeth.
In a few seconds the toe had vanished and was again attached back on Charlie's foot. It was incomprehensible. If these dead had some sort healing mechanism then Dave expected to see the mechanism itself. Maybe some tentacles reaching out from the surface of the cut, to reach out and seek the other surface on the severed limb, to connect then pull together. But this was too much.
"I didn't see this originally," said Dave almost thinking out loud. "Let's try adjusting the distance. Cut the toe off but keep it close to the foot. Maybe we'll see something different."
Josh nodded and severed the toe again. This time Josh used the blade of the axe to tap the toe back towards Charlie so that it was about a centimetre from where it came from. Dave had to squint but he could now see the severed toe sliding towards the toe stump as if pulled by some magnetic force. There was an abrupt motion and the toe snapped back in place. In a moment the cut mark itself was gone.
"Did you see anything?" asked Dave.
"What do you mean?"
"All I saw was a toe sliding back towards the foot. Did you see anything reaching out to the toe to actually pull it back into place?"
"I didn't see anything at all. There wasn't even that weird looking cloud."
"Try it again but with the toe about five centimetres from the stump."
Josh rapidly repeated the last steps and made care that the toe was the requested distance away away from the stump. The toe quivered a little and then repeated the last approach. In seconds it reattached itself by sliding along the ground towards the foot that it came from.
"Was it me," said Dave, "or did that take longer?"
"Want me to try ten centimetres?"
Dave nodded. "Yep."
Josh chopped off the
