The doc had told me a while back that he and his brother had been forced by the Nazis to try to create zombies. They’d been imprisoned with a team of other brilliant scientists and told to find a way for their captors to cheat death.
“I neglected to tell you that my brother, Albrecht, would later become Mr. Dowling,” Dr. Oystein says, “but most of the rest was true. The pair of us cracked the zombie gene and created the first reviveds. Then, when we learned that our families were no longer being safeguarded, we tried to escape. We were caught and, as punishment, infected with the deadly seed of our creation.”
What the doc didn’t tell me then, but admits now, was that he and his brother had also secretly come up with the formula for the revitalizing vaccine that could bring some brain-munchers back to their senses.
“We knew we could never give that to the Nazis,” he says hollowly. “With that power, the war and the world would have been theirs. The Nazis were creatures of pure malevolence, and we refused to subject humanity to their horrific rule. Even under torture we gave nothing away.”
The brothers had feared capture, and had guessed that they might be injected with the undead gene if caught. In a bid to counter that, each injected himself with a sample of the revitalizing vaccine before they made their break for freedom.
“So you were telling porkies about God restoring your mind,” Rage sniggers.
“No,” Dr. Oystein says stiffly. “God did intercede. The odds against anyone revitalizing are astronomical. For both of us to recover… it had to be a miracle.”
Miracle, my arse! The doc might still see the hand of God in all this, but I know better. It was just a fluke, one of those random twists of fate that the universe throws up every now and then. But I don’t bother arguing the point. It would be a waste of time. You can’t reason with a madman.
The doc tells me that Albrecht recovered first, but waited for Oystein, acting for several weeks as if he was still one of the mindless reviveds. When his brother revitalized, the pair freed the other zombies from their cages, unleashed them on the Nazis, then destroyed all the records that they could find, before terminating the undead and burning their corpses, leaving no trace of their operation behind.