Re-Animator

DEATH IS JUST THE BEGINNING . . .

Medical student Herbert West is brilliant, obsessed, and working on a secret project: a serum that will bring the dead to life. First it was cats, then parts of human bodies—now he’s in the morgue, preparing his ultimate subjects to rise from the cool grey slabs. But West’s plan is flawed: the bodies are moving, but they haven’t come back to
life
! They’re re-animated corpses, quivering with mindless, uncontrollable fury . . . and they’re coming after the guy who made them this way . . .

Herbert Met His Roommate
at the Morgue . . .

“Dosage,” said Herbert, as he lifted the head and jabbed the needle into the base of the skull, “fifteen cc’s.” Daniel Cain repeated the information into the micro-recorder.

After fifteen seconds, Herbert snatched up the vial. “Increasing the dosage . . . twenty cc’s. of reagent.”

“Herbert you’re scatter-shooting,” Daniel said. “Let’s go!”

“No! We need the data!”

After a full minute, the big John Doe lay still, his lantern jaw and powerful hands unmoving. They pulled the sheet over the body, neither man noticing the fingers of the corpse’s right hand flick once, then again.

Daniel heard the popping and felt the spray of blood on his neck at the same time.

“What the hell—?”

Turning, he saw the corpse sitting up on the table, its joints snapping as they defied rigor mortis. Its arms were stretched rigidly before it, speckled with blood which was gushing in violent spurts from its mouth; the eyes, open wide, were glazed and dry.

Herbert’s eyes ignited with delight . . .

Books by Jeff Rovin

April Fool’s Day
Re-Animator
Stallone! A Hero’s Story

Published by POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Text copyright © 1987 by Empire Entertainment, Inc.

Cover photo copyright © 1985 Empire Entertainment, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

ISBN: 0-671-63723-1

First Pocket Books printing May 1987

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

CHAPTER

1

T
he sounds of Zurich bothered Herbert West as never before. It was only slightly worse than usual; he knew it was him—the experiment—and not the city itself. But it distracted him just the same.

He took the bottle from the refrigerator, held it to the bank of fluorescent lights.

“No separation,” he said. “It looks good.”

“Fine,” replied the only other person in the room, an elderly man in a lab jacket. He resumed his writing while West fetched a syringe from the cabinet.

Noise had always bothered him. Distracted him.

West remembered vividly when he was a child and there was a TV in his home in Canada. Westerns. Soap operas. Game shows. Bad enough to be distracted by noise, but to be distracted by idiocy . . .

He recalled how glad he had felt letting his parents’ executors sell it and give him the money. It was one of the few things that hadn’t been lost in the early-morning fire. The chemical fire. But his joy was short-lived. He quickly became distressed at the levels of noise generated by the kids at the foster home in Gananoque and, later, the hoots of derelicts and the melee of traffic in New York. It seemed that for all his life he’d been trying to measure out a powder or cut away some tissue only to have someone do something loud to distract him.

Then he’d come to Zurich. The city had been a refreshing change of pace, much quieter—or at least more consistent—than anywhere he’d ever lived; rarely in the last three years had he found himself wishing for a cave in the wilderness, a place away from civilization.

Until tonight.

The Montreaux Jazz Festival had brought crowds of people to the city, and they had all apparently chosen tonight to go shopping. Across the green, at Karmgasse 26, J. Otto Scherer’s antique clocks went off in unison every fifteen minutes, drawing ever more pedestrians to the shop; below, a small jazz band raised a din for people taking in the warm summer night.

Maybe it wasn’t
much
louder, he had to admit. Maybe the problem was with him.

Even as he pushed the hypodermic needle through the test tube’s rubber stopper and into the syrupy yellow liquid, Herbert West had mixed emotions about the experiment.

The dominant feeling, of course, was elation.

He hadn’t felt this good about a formula since the exquisite compound he’d developed for his meddling roommate, Joe, at the foster home. That one hadn’t been as spectacular, of course. It was only a variation of a mosquito-repellent suppository used by the military, a reformulation that turned Joe’s semen green and left him dateless for years.

This was more important, and not just to science. It was the culmination of seven years of dreaming, four of them fumbling blindly, on his own, at NYU, and three working with a master.

The four years at New York University still rankled him. He’d known in the first six months that the school was wrong for him, but he stayed because they’d given him a scholarship and he was able to use the labs. After having other kids at the foster home tamper with his chemicals and equipment for five years, the freedom of the university lab was intoxicating. That is, until he began discussing his work with his professors.

They’d encouraged him when he began experimenting with the magnetic field of the human brain, suggesting that it could be used to pinpoint epileptic seizures, monitor brain swelling.

Even keep it from dying.

That’s when the wolves descended.

West freely expressed his growing doubts about the inevitability of death, earning him the scorn of professors and fellow students alike. He insisted that, in theory, it should be possible to create a living fossil, an exact copy of a cell which replaced the original and continued its functions. On his own, he was able to create a very elastic copy of very simple cells—but the problem was, they weren’t alive. And no one would set aside the time or money to help him in his research.

West complained about the scientific community’s narrow-mindedness in a letter to
Science News,
which only made things worse; fortunately, Hans Gruber had seen the letter and sent for him.

Now, three years later, they were finally going to
do
it, and West found the prospects of triumph exhilarating. After the countless hours he’d spent huddled over beakers and microscopes, studying computer terminals and contemplating the wired limbs and chemically treated organs of shrews and dogs and, of late, more and more humanlike animals, he could taste success.

Even so, as the moment neared, there were doubts—nagging and profound doubts.

The doubts had nothing to do with the danger to Professor Gruber. Ever since West had joined the project three years before, they knew that one of them would have to do this, someone who could communicate exactly what was going on—how the dextroamphetamine sulfate was affecting the nervous system, whether the fluphenazine hydrochloride was doing the job for shock, if the next batch should have more or less prochlorperazine for nausea.

It had to be one of them, and—his sight already failing, his hands not quite as steady as when he’d won the Nobel Prize for chemistry twenty years before—Gruber had known that West was the man for the job. Now he was calm and ready. Seated on a stool by the lab bench, he was quietly savoring the moment in his own way, carefully spooning powders from a series of dark brown bottles and collecting them in a petri dish. West admired his professional detachment more than he could say and only hoped that his mentor would be present to collect his second Nobel Prize.

The young man’s eyes narrowed, his thick brows folding over the tops of his eyeglasses. He studied the hypodermic carefully as the fluid climbed slowly into the barrel. He was tempted for a moment to stop at 15 cc’s. They’d asked two different computer programs for suggested dosages based on the results of the gibbon test. Adjusted to Gruber’s own system, both programs came up with 15 cc’s. However, after doing an autopsy on the ape and finding that the drug hadn’t saturated the thyroid gland and the lungs, Gruber had overruled the machines and decided to go with 25 cc’s. West didn’t agree, but Gruber had overruled him as well.
“Better to overkill than to kill-over,”
he’d joked. In any case, the question of who was right would be answered soon enough.

West had his doubts about the undertaking, not because of anything they were about to do; the experiment was absolutely necessary. He worried because if anything were to happen to Gruber he’d be alone . . . utterly alone. True, he’d done much of the research by himself while Gruber lectured in Switzerland and abroad, collecting hefty speaker’s fees which helped to pay for expensive materials they couldn’t justify billing to the university—like the two-toed sloth and the lar gibbon to test versions of the formula. The blind eye Dr. Willett turned to their work precluded any direct support. But the professor was always available with a helpful insight, a learned supposition, an inspired reformulation.