New Discovery

The scientists prepare to reanimate mummies.

Hours later, Rafe was elbowing Ileana’s ribs to roust her. She bolted awake and took a moment to orientate herself, rubbing her eyes and face as she did with a yawn that made her jaw lock temporarily. She stood and followed Rafe off of the plane taking in the serene snow-frosted view St. Frances, Maine offered to them before climbing into the waiting Town Car that drove them to the well-aged stone mortuary that stood high at the outskirts of the town.

 

“You aren’t going to like this. Or you’ll find it hysterical in a very twisted way, I guess. You scientists are an odd bunch.” Rafe was idly playing with the seam of his backpack as he scrolled through the e-mail he had received from Kenneth. Ileana raised a brow and leaned over to read it along with him. “Is he crazy? These mad heights must have gotten to him. Too much fresh oxygen has seriously warped him. How can he expect us to bring an ice mummy back to life? I mean… they’ve been dead for a little more than five minutes.”

 

“I’ve been working on an agent that has the possibility of accomplishing the feat. I never expected him to take it this far though.” She shook her head and stepped out of the vehicle when it parked. Rafe followed her eagerly with a racing mind.

 

“Wait. There’s something out there that can bring the dead back to life? What, exactly, have you tested this on?”

 

“It brought Moose back. He was hit by a car and killed. He was dead for a day before I decided to try the agent and it worked.” She turned to watch the expressions on Rafe’s face as he stopped in his tracks.

 

“He’s a zombie dog.” Amazement filled his voice. “So that’s why he’s so messed up.”

Ileana huffed and breezed into the mortuary, finding her way quickly and easily into the positive temperature cold chamber located deep within the bowels of the building. She opened the doors and cracked her neck when she saw a row of tables, each with a large slab of ice upon it. Kenneth, a tall, slender and red-haired man, was standing by one of the smaller slabs with a man shorter than Ileana with silver hair, a slightly hunched back and grey eyes.

 

“You’ve arrived at last!” The man greeted and hobbled over to her, using his cane to support most of his weight.

 

“It’s good to see you again Doctor Hamilton.” She embraced the man and introduced him to Rafe. “John’s been a good friend of mine since I was a teenager. He’s the one who got me into this field.”

 

“Far out.” Rafe shook the man’s hand and looked back to the slabs. “So, are these the mummies?”

 

“Encased within there are remains.” Hamilton nodded as he went back to them. “There were some difficulties in removing them. The jackhammers utilized ended up piercing a few of the specimens. We are going to be moving them into the basement where I believe you will find everything that you need to carry out your work.”

 

“Thank you. Rafe, come with me.” Ileana tapped the young man’s arm and led him down the long hallway that lead to a set of double doors concealing a spiral staircase. He followed her down with his hands on the stone walls for lack of railing to guide him and froze when he saw the set up before them. “Well? Don’t be shy. We have a lot to do and we need to do it quickly before the ice protecting the mummies aerates too much. I wish this mortuary was equipped to handle a negative temperature cold chamber.”

 

“This looks like a scene straight from a sci-fi movie!” Rafe walked in with his eyes flicking to the oversized chair with leather straps intending to hold a human subject in place, cryogenic chambers, individual steel tables and a long table filled to the hilt with various tools that made him wonder if aliens were real. “What’s the plan of attack?”

 

“First, we need to ensure we have viable specimens. To get them out of the ice, we’re going to need to bring them up to room temperature and allow for the water to drain away. We have the chambers that will allow that to happen then we can fill the chambers with liquid lacrimofuser that will jump start the reactivation process. As this is being done, we can inject each specimen with a cybernetic cell resuscitator and allow for them to come back enough for us to shock the system and reanimate them. After that, we will need to run a battery of tests to ensure they’re as normal as can be. We will need to monitor brain activity and for any other health concerns before continuing.”

 

“This is some seriously freaky-deaky Frankenstein s**t, doc.” She only shrugged as she went about sanitizing the chambers, the scent of the alcohol giving him the beginning of a buzz. “Don’t you think we’re stepping over the boundary line? We’re playing God. Can’t we just let the dead stay dead?”

 

She bowed her head and turned back towards him, holding the sterilizer in both of her hands before her. “I have issues with it as well but without proceeding, I don’t have a job. This is all that I know, this is all that I am.”

 

“I, too, had taken issues with it.” Both Rafe and Ileana jumped when they saw Kenneth standing by the table of tools with a smirk. “Then I had a blasphemous thought. God is supposed to have infinite wisdom; he had to know at one point we would reach this point and could have prohibited the creativity and knowledge that allowed us to discover this possibility. If nothing else, the ingredients being used could have been omitted from creation. Get to work.”

 

With that, Kenneth left, leaving Ileana to shrug and shake her head before returning to sanitizing. "His wife's dying. He's desperate."

 

 

It had only taken five days for four of the bodies to come to room temperature. Proceeding to fill their chambers with liquid lacrimofuser had been halted the moment Ileana laid her eyes on them. She shook her head as she and Rafe placed the last body on the steel slab after finishing with the X-rays.

 

“Their bones have been crushed.” She rubbed finger along her bottom lip as she examined the pictures displayed on the ultra-thin computer screen before her. She pointed out the damage for Rafe’s inexperienced eyes. “Look how badly mutilated the organs are. I can’t even begin to make much other than the lungs and they’re barely recognizable as it is.”

 

“What do we do with them now?”

 

“First, we’ll open them up to find out what they died from, what they ate, what injuries they may have endured and what their possible role in the clan was. Then, they’ll be embalmed, cryogenically frozen and put on display in a museum somewhere with a slightly skewed history.” She sat back in her chair before looking back to the chambers that still held the remains of the defrosting mummies. “We have to hope at least one of them will be in good enough shape.”

 

“We only need just one?”

 

“Yes. Besides, I think one ice person is quite enough for the world to handle.” She smirked and tossed her pen to the counter before switching off the monitors and crossing her arms. “I hope it’s one of the females.”

 

“Really? Why?”

 

“If it’s one of the females, it would just give me peace of mind.” She sighed and nestled her shoulders into the chair that failed to meld to her spine. “If it’s one of the males, it wouldn’t really matter but to just be able to look at Ken and say if we brought back a five-thousand-year-old mummy, we can bring Trish back would be very rewarding.”

 

“What exactly is wrong with her?”

 

“Metastasized cancer. It’s spread throughout her body; her veins can’t handle the treatments and the blood transfusions anymore and are collapsing. They have to do everything through feet and that’s very painful for her. She doesn’t have much time left.” She looked at her thick-banded watch and ran a hand through her hair as though it told her exactly how much time Trish Bowen had left to survive. She slapped the back of her hand against Rafe’s arm as she stood. “There has to be a way to accelerate the defrosting rate of the remaining specimens.”

 

“Without furthering tissue damage?”

 

“Yes, without furthering the tissue damage. And yes, I know what to use now.” She headed to the rear of the room the bodies were kept to a small storage room just behind it with Rafe jogging to keep up with her. She pulled a tarp off of three large barrels and glanced around the room until she saw the black dolly in the corner. “Help me lift these.”

 

“What are these?”

 

“Barrels.”

He dropped his enthusiastic and intrigued face into irritated stare as she heaved a barrel up on to the dolly. “I got that, boss. I mean, what’s inside?”

 

“These contain a soniionization solution. It acts like a microwave does. We can monitor internal temperatures and drain this quickly to prevent it from overheating the specimens.” They loaded the three barrels and returned to the chambers where the liquid lacrimofuser was drained and the soniionization solution was pumped in. Rafe watched the rose-red mirror-like substance with white swirls fill the chambers. “I’m glad it didn’t get too cool otherwise it would have solidified and only have been somewhat malleable. It has such a high melting point it would have been impossible to work with at that point.”

 

Rafe frowned at the scent of dirt filled the air.

 

“It smells, I know. There are worse smells though. The original batch that I made smelled like body odor and stale beer. It was like my ex decided to drop in for an unscheduled visit. It was horrendous. Thankfully it didn’t work and I had to restructure a few things.” She watched the liquid cover the tops of the ice slabs and removed the tubes from the chambers. “We’ll check every so often and be on our way.”

 

“I’ll record the temperatures.” Rafe pulled the charts from the hanger, looking at the monitors above with the wires running through the chambers and into the exposed flesh of the mummies. “We have an average of twenty eight degrees.”

 

“Thanks.” She looked around the chambers with her hands on her slender hips. “Four down, five to go. Hopefully this works. You monitor them. I’m going to get Hamilton to assist me with the autopsies on the others. If there are any significant or even slightly alarming changes, you come and get me immediately.”

 

“Roger, wilco.”

 

She smiled and left the room as he plastered his eyes on the monitors. He wouldn’t need to wait long to see results.