Re-Animator (12 page)

“Shock, confusion—I’m not sure! Just
grab
it.”

Rising, the young men charged the zombie as it turned to grab another table; they both yelped as, with ease, the corpse grabbed their upper arms and twisted hard. It released Cain but not West; taking the young man by the shoulders, it heaved him backward across a row of tables and into the wall.

Scrambling over a pair of up-ended carts, Cain helped West to his feet.

“What now?”

West stood and adjusted his glasses. He regarded the corpse, which had just climbed atop a female cadaver.

“Stop!” he yelled. “Just . . .
stop!”

The corpse froze, then climbed down slowly.

“There,” West said giddily. “It listened to me! We must have startled it before, that’s all.”

With a startling roar, the zombie ran at them, batting Cain aside with its shoulder and squeezing West around the waist. The bear hug brought a quick crimson flush to the young man’s face, and he slammed futilely on his captor’s head and neck.

“Dan!” he wailed. “Daaaaaan!”

The young man rose and picked up a pair of wheels which had snapped off one of the tables. Bracing himself against the door, he threw them at the brute’s back; the zombie turned and, with a roar, barreled toward Cain, who jumped out of its way.

Out in the corridor, Halsey heard the commotion and ran forward. Swearing at Mace’s empty desk, he rushed in and tried the door to the morgue. It was locked, and he pounded heavily with the side of his fist.

“Cain, what’s going on? What’s all that ruckus?”

There was a clanging of metal, the moaning of one man, and the curses of another.

“Cain? Cain! Open the door!” Halsey put his ear to the metal. He heard low, feral snarling. “Is West in there with you? You’re in a lot of trouble, both of you!”

The door came down with a crash. Halsey shrieked as he fell beneath it. The zombie crawled across it and leaped up and down across the top. There was an audible cracking of bones in Dean Halsey’s chest.

Hearing snapping and Halsey’s pitiful cries, the zombie scurried to one side. It flung the door from its victim and scooped the stunned Halsey up under its arms. Holding him high, it smashed the dean repeatedly against a chalkboard. When the dazed man tried to push the zombie away, the creature simply took his pinkie and ring finger between its teeth and snapped them off. Halsey wailed as his spurting blood mingled with the red on the corpse’s chin, though his cries were higher and more agonized than those of the zombie.

Spitting the fingers out, the corpse heaved Dean Halsey across the room. The man tumbled from the wall to a countertop to the floor. He made a weak effort to crawl toward the door before the monster was once more upon him. The zombie picked him up again just as Cain and West came running from the morgue.

“Oh, God,” Cain muttered. “It’s Dean Halsey!”

Racing over, he locked his fists and began striking the monster on the back and head.

“Stop! For God’s sake,
stop!”

“That’s it, Daniel, keep it busy!” West advised as he grabbed a table leg and hurried over to a medicine chest. Smashing the glass, he returned with a bone saw. “Okay, Dan,” he said, starting the instrument up. “Look out.”

Cain backed away while West, a grim expression on his bruised face, stepped behind the zombie. Locking one arm around its neck, he pressed the spinning blade to its back. The zombie shot erect as the saw cut through its spine, but West held on. Like a rodeo bronco the zombie stomped, snarling, around the room, West’s feet rarely touching the floor. When the blade finally emerged from its chest, it stared down with a puzzled expression at the metal which was spinning blood and chunks of its heart around the room. Then it dropped, without a sound, and West slowly withdrew his forearm from the zombie’s chest cavity.

“No,” he said dryly to Cain, “they feel no pain.”

The thing was too surreal to be sickening; Cain just stared in amazement as, tossing the bone saw aside, West threw clinging viscera from his hand and hurried over to where Halsey lay crumpled in a corner.

“He’s dead.”

Cain turned away; all he could think about was Megan and what this would do to her. He sank slowly to the floor beside a stool, trying to imagine what he would tell her.

West began dragging Halsey from the corner by his feet. “Come on, Daniel, find the recorder!”

Cain looked up. He realized, in an instant, what West intended to do. Now he felt his stomach churning.

“Herbert . . . no!”

West gestured wildly at the John Doe. “Did you see him, Daniel? He listened to me! He made a conscious act!”

“You’re wrong! He heard you as an animal would. He’d have murdered his own mother.”

West used his tie to wipe smears of blood from his glasses. “Well . . . you may be right. It had probably been dead too long, it wasn’t fresh enough. We probably only revived the senses and the instincts. Come on”—he pointed toward Halsey’s head—“help me get him up.”

Cain laughed miserably. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am, Daniel. Will you give me a hand here?”

“No! I’m not going to let you experiment on him. Christ, this man was almost my father-in-law.”

“He still can be! Look, this man was a short-sighted son of a bitch, one who interrupted an important experiment in progress! Granted, it was an accident, but he
owes
us. Besides”—West picked up Halsey’s wrist and rubbed the flesh between his fingers—“this is the freshest body we could come across short of killing one ourselves. Please, Daniel, every moment we spend talking about it costs us results! Will you give me a hand?”

Cain lay his head against the stool, made no move toward the body. West tried and failed to lift Halsey himself. He came over again, on his knees.

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying?
We can bring him back to life!”

Cain regarded West coldly. “Like Gruber?”

“No, not like Gruber! Like Dean Allan Halsey, God help him! All right, Daniel—never mind me, never mind him. You’re an idealist, what about patients?”

“Patients?”

“Yes, the ones enduring twelve hundred heart transplants each year, eight thousand kidney transplants! We can stop that suffering, and also the pirates who are getting two hundred thousand dollars for complete cadavers for these operations. And what about you and Miss Halsey? Are you prepared to tell her that we were indirectly responsible for her father’s death?”

Cain considered these points. He didn’t think for a moment that West cared about patients or about Megan—but
he
certainly did. And, he wondered, how much worse could they possibly make things by trying?

He climbed to his feet. “All right, damn you. Let’s do it.”

With a mad smile, West scooped up Halsey’s feet while Cain took his shoulders. Together they hoisted him onto the table.

“Get the recorder and find my serum,” West ordered as he used the straps to lash Halsey to the tabletop.

Cain headed for the morgue and returned with the recorder and the vial. He handed the latter to West.

West fondled it with relief. “Ah . . . good. Thank God for unbreakable plastic, one of man’s few durable inventions!” He sneered at Halsey’s corpse as he readied the injection. “It’s certainly more durable than
this.
But we’ll soon take care of that, won’t we, Daniel?” He bent over the prone subject and lifted his head. “Won’t we, Dean Halsey?” He motioned for Cain to bring the recorder over. “Twelve cc’s being administered, the dosage lessened in accordance with the freshness of the subject.”

Cain stood numbly across the table, gazing down at Halsey’s blood-streaked face, the clotted tangle of white hair, the ripped vest and rumpled jacket. The indignity of death once again angered and sickened him. Narrow-minded as Dean Halsey was, he’d been a poised, distinguished man; he deserved better than to end up a gored mass on a stainless-steel table.

As though reading Cain’s mind, West observed, “Amazing, isn’t it, that such a fastidious man should make his greatest contribution to science in a state of utter disarray?” He cackled. “Can’t you just
see
the photos in the
New England Journal of Medicine?”

“Herbert, please . . .”

Cain didn’t care whether it was nerves or vindictiveness that was causing West to gloat. For all his flaws, the dean deserved a modicum of respect, of dignity.

Laying the empty hypodermic aside, West crouched so that he and Halsey were eye to eye. The levity was gone from his eyes and from his manner. His chin was outthrust, his brow brooding, his taut lips inches from Halsey’s ear.

“Five seconds. Come on, you old bastard.”

Cain knew, of course, that Halsey
would
be coming back. It might take another shot-in-the-dark overdose, but West would bring him around. For the dean’s sake—for Megan’s sake—he quietly prayed that Halsey would be more cooperative than their last subject.

“Ten seconds.”

Cain heard himself being paged again. The commander was dead, but the army fought on.

“Fifteen seconds. Come on, I’ll show
you!”

West’s voice was sharp, impatient. Curious as he was, Cain laid the cassette recorder on the table, then swung away and sank to the floor. If Dean Halsey came back like John Doe, he didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want that image of horror seared into his brain.

“Sixteen . . . seventeen. Come
on!”

West slammed his fist on the table, and Halsey’s eyes popped open. There were two loud intakes of air—that of Halsey and that of West—after which the young scientist began talking excitedly.

“Seventeen seconds—reanimation at seventeen seconds! The eyes opened—breathing regular. Pulse”—he seized the man’s wrist, counting to himself—“pulse forty but strong. Slight expectoration of blood, possibly from a laceration of the tongue.”

Cain hesitated. He was listening carefully to Halsey’s breathing, which was hollow, watery. There was blood in his mouth. Was there blood in the windpipe as well? In the lungs? His eyes sought out the bone saw as he waited.

If West were aware of the dean’s strained breath, he made no mention of it.

“Subject apparently confused and tugging at restraining straps—but not as violent as last subject. God, Daniel, I’ve done it! He’s alive! He’s
alive!
Dean . . . Dean Halsey!” West put his lips to the man’s ear. “I want you to hear this, Dean. You once did me a favor by admitting me into your medical school. Well, sir,” he clucked triumphantly, “consider the debt paid—with interest. Welcome back to life!”

Megan had moved to a waiting-room bench situated halfway between the nurse’s station and the elevators. Though she was flipping through the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
her eyes kept shifting between Dr. Harrod and the clock. It had been nearly a half-hour since her father had left, yet they were still paging Cain. She hoped her lover hadn’t done something rash.

The minutes dragged as Megan waited for her caretaker to become involved with someone or to leave the desk; for nearly a half-hour now she’d simply signed forms, talked on the phone—and looked frequently at Megan.

Suddenly, a nurse came jogging up to the desk. “Dr. Harrod, we need you in the crash room.”

The doctor looked from the nurse to Megan. “Coming,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, then disappeared down the hall.

Sighing, Megan flipped the magazine aside and scooted toward the bank of elevators. She took the first one going anywhere, just to get off the main floor; as it happened, the carriage was headed for the basement.

Her companion, old Vinnie Papa, the janitor, tipped his hat and headed to the left, toward the boiler room. The corridor before her was deserted, and Megan proceeded cautiously.

West was shining his penlight in Dean Halsey’s eyes when he heard the elevator door slide open.

Megan called out. “Dan? Are you down here?”

West swore. “Damn that bitch!”

Cain became alert. “Meg?”

Dean Halsey groaned. His voice was not articulate, but there was enough control and variation in the tones to bring a broad smile to West’s lips.

“Daniel, do you hear that? He’s actually trying to speak to his daughter!”

“Dan? Daddy?”

Cain filled with dread. “Herbert, what if he thinks we’re going to hurt her?”

“Pardon?”

While West looked on, puzzled, Halsey’s eyes rolled back into his head, and, with a roar, he popped his straps. West fell back from the table, but Cain was not so lucky. The reanimated corpse locked its powerful fingers around his throat and began lifting him from the floor. Cain gurgled helplessly as the man’s manicured nails dug into his flesh.

“Don’t worry,” West shouted hopefully. “He only has three fingers on that one!”

“Herbert!” Megan yelled. “Is that you? Is Dan all right?”

West’s face screwed unpleasantly as he finally grasped Cain’s warning. “Miss Halsey, just shut up and stay away!” he shouted as he jumped to his feet. Running to help his colleague, West was snared by Halsey’s free hand; the corpse literally dragged him across the table by his neck, bringing both men to their knees on either side of him. He sat up, oblivious to West flailing at his arm and Cain trying desperately to pry his remaining fingers loose.

“I’ve had enough orders for one day!” Megan protested as she stepped into the doorway. The young woman’s expression shaded from defiance to rage, and she ran in. “No, Daddy! What are you doing!?”

Dean Halsey looked over, his mouth falling open dumbly. Hastily releasing the students, he rolled from the table and loped awkwardly to a corner of the room, where he crawled beneath a large sink and crouched, trembling, his back to the room.

Megan walked slowly toward him while Cain, rubbing his throat, ran to intercept her. West quietly retrieved his tape recorder.

“Ten fifty-two,” he whispered into the machine. “Nearly five minutes after reanimation. Reflexes and mind have both returned, though to what degree is as yet unknown. However,” he added gleefully, “subject appears to be crying. I do
not
believe that this is simple disorientation but embarrassment at having been caught trying to strangle Daniel Cain and myself.”