From the Diary of Dr. Roy Curien
March 15th 1998
It is the ides of March, and on this day, we have brought a man back from beyond the grave.
The body we used was badly degraded from how long it had been in the graveyard, and we all knew that what we had strapped to that table would not be pretty to look at once it was reanimated. We did that on purpose—we wanted to see how completely the Chariot’s genes could resurrect its muscles, and the Hangedman its organs. We wanted to see how our sequences would function on even the most degraded of material. The subject had no family and had been dead long enough that no one would miss the body and headstone disappearing. It was missing an eye, and the lips were rotted away. The victim was balding, having left the world in his late forties, and had died of a stab wound, apparently from some long unsolved murder that nobody cared enough to try to solve.
I was unprepared. We all were unprepared. Seeing that… that thing that was once a man struggle against its bonds and gnash its rotted teeth like a hungry beast awoke a deep seated memory in my mind. The memory of when I had first read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein as a child, and how the doctor’s horror didn’t spring forth until his creation began to move.
The staff were even more appalled than I was. Some of the researchers demanded we destroy it. I refused—as hideous as this thing was, as partial and incomplete it’s resurrection was, we had done the impossible. We had brought a deceased human being back into the realm of the living. Without hyperbole or ego, I can humbly say this is the most astounding breakthrough in the known history of medical science. Beyond a game changer. Now we just need to perfect our technique so we actually get a regular human being back from the grave instead of this animalistic horror.
He have a holding cell already prepared to keep and observe our specimen. It is, thankfully, not very smart. Just like the Hollywood zombie monsters, it seems to have only a simple, brute intellect. Yet, it has also surprised us in some ways. One of the first tests we did was to put tools in front of it and see how it would react to them. This mostly a practical test on our part, to better make precautions to prevent a nightmare scenario of it ever breaking out of its containment. It ignored most of the tools, like a mindless zombie would, but then it fixed its eyes on a pair of hatchets. According to the headstone, the subject had been a woodsman when he was alive. It took the two axes and swung them around fairly expertly, as if it retained some long buried memory of the motion needed to feel a tree.
Given it still has some aspects of its humanity when it was alive, we decided to give our subject the same name it had when it was a man: Cyril. Monster, zombie—whatever the outside world will one day come to call our creation, it is the first axeblow against the barrier of mortality that threatens to take my son from me. I will create a horde of monsters like this if it means stopping that from happening.
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"He keeps mentioning a son," Joshua said suddenly, his icy blue eyes looking up from his reading. "And keeps bending all his actions to that one excuse of saving his boy. The man was clearly obsessed."
"Just keep reading," G said as he carefully lit cigar.
