The next day.
The hours had stretched into dawn, completely dissolving the boundaries between day and night, between sanity and obsession.
The laboratory, usually a hub of controlled activity, was plunged into near total darkness, interrupted only by the bluish glow of the monitors and the focused beam of the lamp over the autopsy table, a solitary beacon in the vast, sterile immensity.
Lina had retired several hours earlier, exhausted by the intensity of the past few days, leaving Kane immersed in his own thoughts, a willing prisoner of his tireless quest.
A new body lay before him. This time, it was that of a woman approximately fifty years old, who had died from a heart attack just a few hours prior. LyraGen demonstrated an unsettling efficiency in supplying 'fresh samples,' almost as if they knew in advance that Kane would need them.
For Kane, this was another specimen, another set of tissues, an additional piece in the complex puzzle of TS-996 latency. His primary focus now was the brain, the epicenter of consciousness, or what remained of it.
With sterile gloves and surgical precision, Kane had exposed brain tissue.
He had implanted tiny microelectrodes carefully connected to a high-sensitivity electroencephalograph. His objective: to map any residual neurological activity, however insignificant, in a brain that, according to all medical indicators, should be completely inert.
The electroencephalograph monitor displayed a flat line, an electrical silence confirming the total absence of brain activity. Death. Logic. However, logic was becoming a dangerous abstraction within LyraGen.
"Come on, Kane," he murmured to himself, his voice barely a whisper in the immense silence of the laboratory. "There has to be something, there has to be."
He activated an impulse generator, sending a small electrical discharge through one of the primary motor regions. It was a standard test, designed to verify the integrity of nerve connections, even in post-mortem conditions.
An electrical impulse coursed through the complex neural network.
On the table, the index finger of the corpse's right hand twitched. An involuntary movement, a simple muscle spasm, totally expected under these circumstances. Kane noted the data, barely a faint twitch on his face. He had witnessed it thousands of times.
He repeated the test, this time with a slightly stronger discharge, in another area. The woman's arm lifted a couple of centimeters, then fell with a dull thud. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But the third time, something unexpected happened.
Kane sent another impulse, this time directed at the premotor cortex. The index finger twitched again, but on this occasion, instead of an isolated spasm, it flexed slowly, as if trying to grasp something. Then, the thumb moved to meet it. A deliberate movement. Conscious.
Kane froze. His eyes, fixed on the hand, widened slightly. The silence in the laboratory became overwhelming, almost deafening, broken only by the distant hum of the servers.
"No... it's not possible," he murmured, his voice hoarse.
On the electroencephalograph monitor, the line remained flat. No brain activity was detected. But the hand was moving.
He sent another impulse, this time with greater intensity, to a more extended region.
The woman on the table, supposedly lifeless, not only moved her arm, but her head slowly turned to one side. Her eyes, glassy and dull, snapped open, fixed on the ceiling, but with a gaze that was not that of a corpse.
Kane took a step back, stumbling over a stool. The stool fell with a clatter that seemed to echo throughout the complex.
The woman's body on the table, with open eyes, began to breathe. Not a rhythmic breath, but a series of irregular gasps, as if her lungs struggled to draw air for the first time, a harsh, dry sound that filled the laboratory.
Kane felt a shiver run down his spine. His scientific mind desperately struggled to find a logical explanation, to fit this into any known paradigm. A malfunction in the equipment? A hallucination due to extreme exhaustion? Doubts about his own sanity began to surface, a crack in his confidence.
He approached the table, his headlamp illuminating the woman's face. Her eyes were fixed, unblinking. There was no consciousness in them, only an unsettling void, but her jaw moved, a dry click, as if trying to utter something, a sound that chilled him to the bone.
"Lina..." Kane whispered, his voice barely audible, a desperate lament in the silence. He was alone. Completely isolated in the darkness of that laboratory, a witness to the impossible.
The woman on the table, who should have been dead, sat up completely. Her eyes, though empty, seemed to search for something. Her head slowly turned towards Kane, and a low, guttural moan escaped her throat, the same drawn-out, dehumanized sound he had heard in his nightmare.
"It can't be," Kane murmured, terror paralyzing him. Deep down, he yearned for this to be a dream, but at the same time, his mind worked at maximum capacity trying to find an explanation.
The guttural gasp of the woman on the autopsy table dissipated as abruptly as it had begun, and the body slumped back down, inert, like a sack of bones. Kane remained motionless, cold sweat clinging to his skin beneath the protective suit, his heart pounding in his ears.
The headlamp on his helmet illuminated the scene, but it could not dispel the shadow that had fallen over him, the image of those empty eyes and the guttural moan seared into his retina.
When Lina arrived at the laboratory the next morning, Kane had already cleaned the autopsy room, erasing any visible trace of the incident. However, the session recordings remained intact. With a mixture of urgency and unusual serenity, he showed Lina the images.
"Look at this, Lina," Kane indicated, pointing to the precise moment when the arm lifted and the head rotated. His tone was neutral, devoid of emotion, a deliberate attempt to maintain objectivity.
Lina contemplated the screen, her wide, expressive eyes seeking an explanation that wouldn't challenge reason. She furrowed her brow, as if grappling with a disturbing truth.
"It's... atypical, doctor. A very pronounced post-mortem reflex, perhaps a residual nerve discharge," she expressed, her voice slightly more strained than usual, as if trying to convince herself as much as him.
"A reflex that coordinates a grasping movement? … A head turns and an agonizing breath, all without discernible brain activity?" Kane experienced a sharp pang of frustration.
Lina magnified the image, her expert gaze tracing anomalies.
"It could be an artifact. An interference in the instrumentation, a muscle spasm triggered by the electrical impulse that propagated abnormally. The electroencephalograph is unequivocal: flat line."
The team categorized it as a reflex or an artifact. Other technicians who passed through the laboratory, alerted by Kane's unusual stillness, proposed analogous explanations, all coherent, all scientifically plausible.
However, Kane perceived a pattern.
He observed the same hollow gaze from his dream, the same disturbing movement. No one supported him. His colleagues, accustomed to the rationality of the laboratory environment, were incapable of conceiving what he had witnessed.
The truth constituted a heavy burden that only he bore, and his isolation became more intense, more palpable, an invisible prison within the walls of LyraGen.
The subsequent twenty-four hours proved to be true torment. Kane remained alone in the laboratory, the door sealed, the main lighting off, immersed in the gloom that only the screens dispelled.
He replayed the images repeatedly. He froze frames, examined the electroencephalograph data, and verified every detail of the autopsy. He searched for the anomaly, the error, the artifact his colleagues had insinuated. But he did not find it. Each examination only solidified his conviction: what he had witnessed was not an error.
It constituted a reanimation.
The gloom of the laboratory transformed into a mirror of his own psyche. The boundary between reality and nightmare blurred, each frame of the woman moving, each guttural gasp, felt more vivid than the air he breathed.
Was he losing his mind? Were the incessant pressure, the secrecy, the ubiquity of the virus, pushing him to the brink?
Uncertainty crept in, a cold serpent in his chest, but each time he observed the coordinated hand movement, the expressionless gaze, the doubt vanished, replaced by a terrifying certainty: he was not insane; the world was.
As Kane examined the images for the umpteenth time, the door to his laboratory opened with a delicate hiss, a sound that in that stillness seemed like an intrusion.
Dr. Mercer entered, his slender and distinguished figure casting a prolonged shadow on the polished floor, as if darkness itself accompanied him. His presence permeated the atmosphere with chilling, almost suffocating authority.
"Dr. Kane," Mercer's voice was calm, though with a hint of impatience. "Dr. Rivas has informed me of your recent... observations. I understand there have been some unusual results."
Kane turned, exhaustion and frustration etched on his face. "They are not atypical, Dr. Mercer. They are impossible. The subject exhibited coordinated motor activity after brain death. And TS-996 was present in all of her cells."
Mercer approached the table, his eyes meticulously analyzing the screen with the frozen images.
"I understand your fascination with these singularities, Dr. Kane. Science frequently reveals phenomena that challenge our preconceived notions. However, we must remain focused on the primary objective of your research: the molecular characterization of TS-996 and its latency mechanisms."
"But, Dr. Mercer, if the virus is causing this..." Kane tried to object.
"TS-996 is a latent virus, Dr. Kane. That is what we have determined," Mercer interrupted, his tone now more resolute, with a hint of warning that admitted no rebuttal. His gaze constituted a tacit warning, a demand for compliance. "Any other manifestation is, at this moment, an artifact or a divergence that does not align with our purposes. Your time is precious, and our resources are limited. We require answers about latency, not conjectures about post-mortem phenomena. We do not desire interruptions, Dr. Kane."
Mercer turned, his silhouette vanishing through the door with the same discretion with which he had appeared.
Kane remained alone once more, the blue light of the screens projecting his face into the gloom. The disbelief of others, the pressure exerted by Mercer, the suffocating silence of the laboratory. He was alone with his terrifying truth, a knowledge that set him apart.
Death did not represent the end.
And he, Dr. Kane, was the only one who knew it.
The obsession was no longer limited to the virus, but encompassed the truth that LyraGen wished to conceal, a truth that now felt like his sole reason for being, his final and risky purpose.
----
INTERLUDE 2: Log of a Body (Part I)
[AUDIO INITIATED – The crackle of an old recording is heard, followed by a faint background hum, like that of laboratory equipment. The voice is that of a man, young, with an initially professional tone that deteriorates as the recording progresses.]
Technician [Identification: 734-B, Pathology Section]:
—Incident log, date… uh… [pause, a shaky sigh] … November 9, 2026. Time: 02:47 AM.
Subject: Miller, J. Assigned to laboratory 4A.
Cause of death: septic shock, according to the initial report.
Transfer proceeded for… for standard autopsy.
We began with the general autopsy. Y-incision, opening of the thoracic and abdominal cavity. Organs appeared normal, with no macroscopic signs of viral damage or inflammation. The heart, lungs, liver… all within expected parameters for a death by septic shock.
Routine tissue samples were taken for histopathology and virology. Preliminary rapid PCR results confirmed the presence of the TS-996 agent in all samples, which… we already expected, given the current protocol.
Then, we proceeded with electrical stimulation tests on the nervous system. A new protocol, requested by Dr. Mercer to 'explore post-mortem neural integrity in subjects with TS-996'. We connected electrodes to the brainstem and the main motor pathways.
The first discharges resulted in isolated muscle reflexes and spasms. Typical. Nothing beyond what would be expected from a body without brain activity. The electroencephalograph monitor showed a flat line, confirming brain death.
But then…
.
----
.
[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
Here's another chapter from our Bayern Munich striker. Hahaha
Kane continues with his paranoia, and today he saw, we saw, something we never thought possible: The reanimation of a dead body.
It's alive! It's alive!
On the other hand, we see how the lab knows about these events and is also covering them up.
----
Read my other novels
#The Walking Dead: Vision of the Future. (Chapter 71)
#Vinland Kingdom: Race Against Time. (Chapter 70)
#The Walking Dead: Emily's Metamorphosis. (Chapter 18)
You can find them on my profile.]