‘What’s this about?’ Osgood said.
‘I think it’s best if Doctor Grant explains things.’
McCaffrey opened the door and gestured for Osgood to enter first.
‘Right,’ Osgood said. He resisted the temptation to look back down the corridor as he passed through the doorway, aware that he’d locked Raine inside the chamber with an incredibly sick man.
4
Fause had moved back to the corner of his cell, ashamed of his behaviour now he’d quenched his thirst for human blood. He crouched in the shadows, sucking every last drop he could from his fingers while Raine leaned against the wall next to the bars.
Once his feed was over, he discarded the empty blood bag and used the edge of his bed sheet to wipe the red mess from his mouth and chin.
‘Feel better?’ Raine said.
‘For now. It helps to ease the symptoms, but the whole process is time-sensitive.’
‘I know. I’ve seen it before.’
Fause moved into the light. Although he tried to clean himself up, the bottom-half of his face was still stained by his gruesome meal.
‘Someone you know?’ he said.
Raine looked away.
‘Someone close to you? It’s hard to deprive a loved one of relief from their suffering, regardless of how that relief is obtained. Ask any parent with a child who is a heroin addict.’
‘What did you mean when you said you were a new species?’ Raine said.
Fause shuffled right up to the bars in a sitting position, resting his head against the cold steel of his prison.
‘To explain properly, I need to go back to the beginning.’
‘The beginning?’
‘When I first met Isiah Grant. Just over two years ago, I was assigned to the Lazarus Project, mainly due to my work in the field of neuropharmacology. I’d already heard of Grant, of course. Everyone in the research sector had, especially if you specialised in the neurosciences. He made up one of three senior members of a one-hundred-and-thirty-strong task force consisting of some of the finest minds in the world. Trent Lake funded the project. They were a pretty sizable biotech company who supported cutting edge developmental science.’
‘What was the Lazarus Project developing?’ Raine said.
‘Twenty patients were chosen. All with injuries that had caused them to experience a complete and irreversible loss of brain stem function.’
‘Brain dead.’
‘That is the consensus of opinion on the meaning of the term, yes. The idea was to attempt to effectively “reboot” the brain using a series of injections. Firstly, we would harvest stem cells from the patient’s own blood and inject them back into their bodies.
‘The second stage was to inject the patient’s spinal cord with a dose of peptides.
‘And finally, they would undergo a fifteen-day course of nerve stimulation to try and bring about a change in their MRI readings.
‘When I came onboard, much of the ground work had already been set in place. I was able to work on pharmacological preparation right away. They insisted on it.’
‘You were actively trying to bring people back from the dead?’
Fause lifted his head and shrugged.
‘What is the fundamental reason we study the human body? The entirety of medical research has been focussed towards ensuring the human body does not shut down. We tried to use everything at our disposal to cheat death—from nanotubes to artificial intelligence. The Lazarus Project was always meant to be a breakthrough. It just turned out to be more of a breakthrough than any of us could have ever imagined.’
Raine staggered away from the jail cell and almost fell backwards. Her heart felt like it had been unceremoniously dumped into the wall of her stomach.
‘Fuck you!’ she responded, refusing to accept what Fause had implied.
‘That’s how Grant, myself and all the other scientists came to be down here. We were selected for our intimate knowledge of the necro-outbreak. They told us that we broke it, so we’d have to be the ones to fix it. Well, it was more of a military order if you wish to get technical.’
Her head began to spin, as if she were plummeting off the edge of the world and she held the vomit of anxiety in her throat.
‘You destroyed everything,’ she whispered.
‘We followed our instincts as pioneers of medical research. There’s no way we could have known what would happen,’ Fause said. ‘Any selection of people from a different era, past or present, would have done the same.’
Raine let out a sickened laugh.
‘All such celebrated visionaries, but you never see it coming, do you?’
‘This time it wasn’t an excuse. What happened was unprecedented—unbelievable. We still don’t fully understand the science behind it.’
Raine pushed her hand against the wall to help support her weight, trying to calm her shallow breathing.
‘Carry on. I want to know how,’ she said.
‘Initially, no matter how we adjusted the treatments, nothing worked. Then, one day, something changed in a patient called Peter Cole. We detected a reading in his hemodynamic response on the MRI. The low-level activity began in the neocortex and slowly spread to other areas of his brain.’
‘You got it to reboot?’
‘No. Not just reboot. After the first signs of activity, something else happened—something wonderful. In 1928 Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, proclaimed “Once development was ended, the founts of growth and regeneration dried up irrevocably. In adult centres, the nerve paths are something fixed, ended and immutable. Everything must die, nothing may be regenerated”. Since then, we had been able to at least suggest that the generation of new neurons in adult brains was possible, but Cole’s brain wasn’t just producing hundreds of new neurons. It was remapping his neural-pathways until it became a brain structure we didn’t recognise. He began to regain independent respiration and motor-function, and eventually, consciousness. He was even able to communicate with us verbally.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Just nonsense. You have to understand that Cole had been legally dead for months. His brain stem was—’
‘What did he say, doctor?’
‘“It’s cold inside”. He said “It’s cold inside”.’ Fause’s voice broke, as if once he’d spoken the words aloud, he was much less confident they were meaningless. ‘Shortly after that, Cole vomited blood on one of the research assistants and entered a seizure. Of course, we were still monitoring his brain at the time and it was… on fire.’ He took a large gulp, afraid to recall what he’d witnessed on the MRI readouts. ‘He died not twenty minutes later.’
Raine shook her head and bit down on her lip.
‘And the research assistant got sick, right?’
‘She started to exhibit all the symptoms that we know now to be part of the necro-virus. She reanimated exactly 85 minutes after she had died. Through further study, we concluded that the brain restructures itself to facilitate its life after death. We had witnessed the birth of a new species of humanoid.’
Fause paused when he saw the glare in Raine’s eyes.
‘Someone at our facility in Egypt leaked the information that we were harbouring a “demon” within our walls to the E.I.J. They launched an attack, fourteen people were killed, and the first victim of the necro-virus remained unaccounted for. I’m sure you can use your imagination to piece together what must have happened next.’
‘I don’t need to use my imagination. We are living the results of what happened next. You idiots caused all of this because you wanted to play Frankenstein, and as a reward for all your fuck-ups, you received governmental protection down here, safe from the death and destruction you created. That, to me, is a lot harder to understand than someone rising from the dead.’
‘We were doing it for the betterment of human understanding—to transform the lives of billions of people.’
‘I stand by what we did—what I did,’ Fause said, raising his twin voice and gripping tight to one of the cell bars. ‘And I have paid my penance.’
She looked him up and down. His flesh seemed as though it was about to fall off his bones, angry veins burned in his eyes, and the blood around his mouth had started to dry and crust up around his lips.
‘You haven’t paid the full price yet. When you die, when you turn, when you rot away to nothing as one of those things, that might be enough. When you realise that part of you is still trapped inside, screaming to get out. That’s your fucking penance. You see, I have a friend who sees a lot more than you do, and he says that’s going to be your fate. The lights will go out, and they’ll come back on again. You’ll wake up, but something else will be in there with you, controlling you.’
‘Ah, you are talking about the young man in your group. Isiah told me about him during his last visit. He believes he has certain abilities. I thought Grant was going mad, but he’s quite convinced of it.’
Raine’s eyes widened and she rushed up to the bars to face him.
‘Convinced about what?’
‘That he would make the perfect test subject for the Lazarus serum,’ Fause said.
She jumped to her feet and started towards the steps.
‘Wait!’ Fause managed to haul himself up and pressed his broken body against his cell. ‘I don’t regret the Lazarus Project, but I can’t justify what Grant is doing now. He has lost his mind. I suspected he had done so even before the outbreak. He has convinced himself that the only way to save the human race is to alter us irrevocably, so we can live alongside the dead, as part of them. I want to stop this going any further. I know the man. As unhinged as he is, he may still listen to reason. Please, take me with you and I will try to end this without any blood being spilled.’
Raine held her position at the foot of the stairs to consider his offer. She didn’t trust a single inch of him, but he already looked at death’s door, and she knew McCaffrey and Crawford were military trained and heavily armed and would surely be backing Grant’s plan.
‘Over on the wall.’ Fause gazed over to the hook with the set of keys hanging from it, opposite his cell.
Aware there was little time to lose, Raine ran to the hook, collected the keys, and unlocked the doctor’s cell.
Fause virtually fell into her arms and she realised there was no choice but to sling one of his arms across her shoulder to help support him.
No sooner had she done so, the suddenly not so frail doctor swung his other arm towards her. In his hand was a piece of rock he’d chipped away from his cell wall.
The rock made good contact with the side of Raine’s head and she dropped to the ground in a cloud of dust. She fell at the feet of the second cell, whipping the two specimens into a frenzy, but they could not reach her.
Straightening his back, a little more stable on his feet than he’d appeared, Fause allowed himself a moment standing over her unconscious body.
‘You must forgive my deception, my dear. You were right. This has gone too far. It all has to end now.’
He made his way to the top of the steps and keyed in the correct code to unlock the door, venturing out into the facility, leaving the door ajar.
5
Once Ethan’s vision gradually shifted back into focus, he realised he was surrounded by laboratory equipment in a room he didn’t recognise. His head was pounding, his throat dry and nausea rolled around in his stomach.
When he tried to move, he noticed his wrists and ankles were restrained by leather straps and he was standing against some kind of vertical apparatus.
‘Hey.’ He attempted to shout, but his throat was so sore, the sound that came out was nothing more than a strained hiss.
‘You’re awake!’ Grant appeared from behind him and gazed into his eyes.
‘What’s happening?’ Ethan said.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to call it an unpalatable necessity. Here, take some water,’ Grant said. He placed the bottle under his chin and tilted it slightly so a small amount of liquid could pass his lips, and Ethan gratefully accepted it.
He then saw Doctor Foster working on something on the bench behind Grant. She glanced in his direction, unable to look at him, the shame of the situation written over her face.
‘Where are the others?’ Ethan said.
‘They’re fine. We don’t intend to harm them as long as they comply with our wishes,’ Grant said.
‘What do you want with me?’
‘I’m sure you can guess if you put your mind to it. In fact, I’d imagine you can do more than guess. The aspect of you that sets you apart from everyone else. During my research into the neurogenesis of the dead, I initially thought the great alteration in brain chemistry was merely to facilitate reanimation, but I began to observe a particular pattern of behaviour when I was experimenting with multiple specimens. They were communicating on some form of rudimentary psychic level.
‘Telepathy. Quite extraordinary, and a notion I would have flatly rejected if I hadn’t witnessed it in controlled conditions. It was then that I realised it was the key. The key to our survival. And you, Mr. Vallaluna, are the final component.’
They were interrupted by the opening door. McCaffrey entered with Osgood in tow. The scientist stopped in his tracks when he saw Ethan strapped to the trolley.
‘What have you done?’ he said.
‘Taken control of our destiny, Kenneth. Something I knew you would lack the stomach for, which is why I’ve kept certain things from you,’ Grant replied. ‘This young man represents our future. A creature that will not only be neurologically attuned to the dead, but will also have the ability to communicate with them, free from the fear of attack. He will walk among them.’
‘Jesus Christ, Grant. You never had any intention of reversing the process, did you?’ Osgood said.
Grant shook his head.
‘My aim was merely to halt progression. The problem was stabilising it. The serum is stable enough for our test subject to live through it. He will be our bio-bridge, doctor. Nature has always adapted—become something else in order to survive. It’s the only way we can fight this now. McCaffrey, it’s time.’
McCaffrey nudged Osgood further into the room and obeyed Grant’s orders, making his way to the back of the lab where two creatures were chained to the wall.
The reality of what was about to happen sparked Ethan into life and he wriggled manically to try and escape his restraints.
‘Doctor Grant, please. Don’t do this,’ he said.
‘Isiah, you can’t. You can’t take his choice away like this,’ Osgood said.
‘It’s not about choice,’ Grant said, anger inflecting his tone. ‘It’s far more important than that. Everything about us—the entire history of our species is at stake. How many questionable decisions did we have to make to try and prevent society from falling during the outbreak?’
‘And it still fell all the same. That’s over now,’ Osgood said.
‘You didn’t do those things purely because of the pull of authority, Kenneth. You did them because of your principles and your oath as a scientist. This is the only way.’
Osgood’s protestations were curbed. He recognised Grant’s words carried some degree of truth.
In his desperation, Ethan turned his attention to Foster, who was still trying to pretend this wasn’t all taking place around her.
‘Foster, you’ve got to do something. Don’t let them do this to me.’
Foster remained in her seat, holding back her tears of frustration.
‘Listen, listen. I know something about them that you don’t. They’re not dead, not all the way. A part of what made them human is still trapped inside of them, but it’s buried under the monster. You can’t let me become that. You can’t.’
Grant calmly appr
oached the trolley with a finger pressed to his own lips.
‘Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to turn you. We’re just going to let the virus gestate long enough for the neurogenesis to take place. We’ll monitor your physical health very carefully, and as soon as it starts to deteriorate, we’ll administer the serum. We can’t afford to lose you, Ethan.’
A broad and satisfied smile came over him, punctuated by his facial twitch.
‘You’re going to act as their shepherd. You’re going to bring them back to the fold.’
McCaffrey returned controlling the ravenous specimen at the end of a pole. He’d already inserted something into its mouth—a pronged metal device wedged between its rotten teeth that had an adjustable screw-handle on its right side.
‘All we need it to do is break the skin. That is a bite controller. It will ensure that it will cause as little tissue damage as possible,’ Grant said.
Ethan began to thrash violently bashing the back of his head against the metal.
‘Please. I’m begging you, don’t do this to me.’
‘You are going to usher in a new era.’ Grant nodded to McCaffrey to bring the specimen closer and grabbed Ethan’s right arm, holding it out as much as the restraints would allow.
Osgood didn’t know what action he could take against a soldier trained in combat, but he had to do something. As soon as he stepped forward, Foster arrived by his side, holding him back.
‘McCaffrey won’t let you get in the way. We need to wait—try to reason with Grant once it’s done.’
Osgood snatched his arm from her grasp.
‘The time he was capable of listening to reason has passed.’
‘Wait… wait. Grant, I’ll help you if you stop this. I can learn a lot about them without this. I can read their memories—their experiences,’ Ethan said.
His final desperate plea fell on deaf ears. Grant was focussed on lining up his exposed forearm as McCaffrey guided the creature towards it.
Everything Dies [Season Two] Page 19