“Just to be clear,” Louis said a little while later, apparently satisfied with whatever he found in his inspection of Kyson’s injuries and glancing over his shoulder at her. “Hugh had nothing to do with acquiring those dead bodies for me. He didn’t have anything to do with the living donors I’ve been forced to turn to lately, either.” Her boss shrugged. “That said, Hugh will ultimately take the fall for everything when the time comes. Once I’m done with my work, the task force will receive an anonymous call and the police will have their Butcher. All of the necessary evidence, some of which you found, has already been put into place.”
As stunned as she was to learn that Hugh was completely innocent in all of this, it was the part about living donors that caught and held Samantha’s attention. But before she could say anything, Louis kept going, as if talking to himself.
“And as far as my experiments go, I really don’t think you can call them immoral,” he continued. “Technically, my test subject was dead when I started. And in accordance with Dallas County policy, unclaimed bodies left at the institute will be turned over to the medical and scientific communities for the betterment of mankind. I think discovering a process to resurrect the dead would certainly be considered the betterment of mankind, don’t you?”
Samantha had already known where Louis was going with this. Everything Shaylee had told her earlier made his confession almost anticlimactic. Still, hearing Louis say the words and knowing that the man’s moral compass was obviously broken beyond all recognition was hard to wrap her head around.
“I’d call you insane, but you’re so far past that point that the word doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she said. “What gives you the right to play God like this?”
“God gave me the right!” Louis shouted as he spun around, his face twisted in a grimace that made him seem almost inhuman. Just like the things he’d been doing to Kyson. “When he stole my son from me, he gave me the right to do anything I deemed necessary.”
Samantha stared at him through the grating. Her boss was even further gone than she’d imagined. But before she could point that out, Louis moved over to the big rectangular shape to Kyson’s left, ripping off the fabric tarp that had been covering it with the flourish of a magician.
“Everything I’ve done is for my son,” he said in a low voice as he leaned over the glass tank he’d exposed, his hands resting on the top, eyes locking on the body inside.
Even through the thick reddish fluid that filled the tank, Samantha was able to recognize the young man floating there. She’d seen a painting of him only hours before posed with his father and mother. Of course, the eighteen-year-old in the tank looked far from the smiling boy now. The vicious unhealed scars covering almost every inch of his body implied impossible pain and suffering.
“Oh, Louis,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
Sagging against the grating of her cell, Samantha gazed at the hundreds of tubes and wires running into the boy’s body. She knew without having to ask that the tank and liquid in it were somehow meant to keep the body from decaying. It was like he was in some kind of bizarre, suspended animation.
“What have I done?” Louis repeated, momentarily lifting his eyes to gaze at her before turning his attention back to his son. “I have found a way to create life where there was only death. And now that I have the answer to the systemic rejection issue that has been holding me in check, there’s nothing to stop me from getting my son back.”
Samantha didn’t say anything. What the hell could she say? This was completely insane and yet it was happening all the same.
“I expected some problem with rejection of the donor parts, but I’ll admit, it’s been worse than I anticipated,” Louis said in a conversational tone as he moved back over to Kyson and began to check the scars around the man’s wrists. “I’ve had to replace the subject’s hands, hearts, and lungs multiple times since I started this experiment weeks ago. It shouldn’t be happening, considering the steps I took to completely remove and replace his existing immune system before I even resurrected him.”
Replaced his existing immune system?
Samantha guessed that explained how Kyson was able to survive having blood in his body that was literally a stew of every type and rhesus factor there was. She was wondering how something like that was possible when noise from Shaylee’s cell distracted her.
“I already told you why it’s happening,” Shaylee said, her voice soft. “The man I love doesn’t want to live like this. Ky is making his body reject the parts you keep forcing on him, and he’ll keep doing it until you stop and let him go.”
Shaylee’s words were so desolate that tears welled in Samantha’s eyes. Louis, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as moved by them.
“And as I’ve already told you many times, the man strapped to the table over there isn’t the Kyson you knew anymore. The voltage I dumped into him as part of the resurrection process wiped the majority of his mind. Even if he did know who he’d been before, he couldn’t will his body to reject the new parts. Science doesn’t work that way.”
“Then why is it happening?” Samantha questioned even though she was having a hard time thinking about anything other than what Louis had said about dumping voltage into Kyson and wiping the majority of his mind. It called to mind visions of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and the experiments he’d conducted on his monster. The similarities between that fiction story and this reality were impossible to ignore.
“Perhaps he is a poor choice of test subject,” Louis said as Shaylee made a sound of disgust and walked toward the back of her cage, dropping back down onto her ratty mattress. “I selected him based on his military background and the types of injuries he’d sustained,” he added, motioning at Kyson but refusing to address him by name—or as though he was anything remotely resembling a human being. “I had assumed that his trauma, which was so similar to my son’s, would make him a perfect test subject. That if I could resolve his extreme physical issues, then my son’s would be a cake walk. I even thought that having a subject who was already dealing with severe PTSD would help when it came time to deal with the same issues if they developed in my son. I never considered that he simply might be too broken to ever be a viable candidate.”
That earned Louis another snort of disgust and disdain from Shaylee, which he ignored.
“At one point, I even considered terminating the subject and simply starting fresh with another one,” Louis said, seeming to take great pleasure in the gasp that Shaylee let out at that. “The only thing that stopped me was my pride, I guess. I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake in the first place. But now that I’ve stumbled over the solution to the entire problem, none of that matters anymore.”