The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (6 page)

I had to get a handle on my emotions. I
needed to determine what my next steps would be. I had to continue
my work. I had to identify this pathogen.

I took blood and saliva samples from each of
the four and placed them in a vacuum cooler for transport to my
lab, then exited through the airlock. After dropping the samples
off in my lab and checking on several viral growth assays I had
running, I left the BSL-4 lab complex and proceeded to my office to
call my wife.

When the line connected and we hurriedly
exchanged our opening pleasantries, she rushed to tell me that the
power had flickered a few times but was still on. Smoke was lying
more heavily in the air to her southwest, and she noticed people
out walking around now, although they weren’t acting right. They
still looked ill, but there was something animal-like in their
movements. She saw two who lashed out at each other when they
passed by and then continued on like nothing had happened. Every
once in a while one would pause to sniff the air or listen for some
unheard sound. She couldn’t get a close look at them, but she
thought that they had bloody drool dripping from their mouths.

I was horrified by her report. I had to
remind myself that this shit was happening everywhere, not just
here! I was so frightened for her and my son. I wanted so badly to
be there.

I told her to gather her short-barreled Colt,
a shotgun, and her 9mm handgun from the safe along with Jeremy’s
.223 caliber pistol and as many loaded mags for each as she and
Jeremy could carry down into the basement. I advised her to stay as
quiet as possible and keep armed at all times. I let her know that
those people were infected and highly contagious. The disease had
done something to their minds and that they would attack and kill
on sight.

There was only one way down into the basement
from the main floor and no windows from which anyone could gain
entry. The pantry was down there, along with a bathroom, bedroom
and family room. It could be easily defended from anyone trying to
open the basement door and rush down the stairs— the fatal-funnel
as police refer to it. All of our food storage was down there and
plenty of bottled water, along with all of our ammo.

In our camping gear was a Coleman stove that
they could use for cooking and a lantern for light in case power
was lost. She could hole up down there safely for however many days
it took me to get home. I thanked God she had just come off a three
day shift and was home today. My family was mostly together and as
safe as they could possibly be for now.

She asked me how much longer I would be. I
told her to give me three days, after that I would leave to come
home no matter what. She understood what I was doing, although she
was also understandably very frightened. She was holding together
well. I told her I would call three times a day as long as the
landlines held out and if we were to lose contact to stay put and I
would get home.

Jeremy wanted to hear my reassurances so she
put him on for a few minutes. Hearing his frightened voice sounding
so close while being so far away nearly broke my resolve. I told
him to be strong and take care of his mom until I got home.

I hung up after telling him and Holly that I
loved them. There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach
again.

When I entered my lab, I removed the samples
I had collected from the portable vacuum cooler and began the
continuing work of isolating the pathogens. Along with the samples
from this morning, it would paint a horrifying picture of what we
were up against.

I was shocked when I looked at the monitor
from the isolation ward and found Sung growling and spitting,
trying to get free from his bonds, his muscles straining mightily
at the wide straps. It had only been an hour and a half since he
was infected. The second generation of the disease seemed to
devastate its new hosts’ system incredibly quickly. Sung had
skipped the comatose phase.

Dr. Hanson still lay in a comatose state,
most likely due to the shock of blood loss. Pink drool spilled down
her cheek. I had no doubt she was now one of them.

At two hours forty minutes since Dr. Rafik
had woken to his murderous rampage, the other comatose girl awoke,
displaying the now familiar symptoms. I panned the camera over to
her when I heard the added chorus of her growls.

I watched in morbid fascination while she
struggled violently to get free from the bonds and then like a
trapped animal began gnawing at her bicep, as if releasing her arm
would free her entire body. My stomach turned queasy at the sight
of her tearing chunks of her own flesh free from her arm. She
screamed in agony then bent her head down and continued to tear
more bloody flesh loose in savage bites.

She was making a cooing noise from the pain,
pausing briefly like she wasn’t sure what was causing the intense
self-inflicted misery, then she would continue gnawing at
herself.

Blood pulsed in spurts from an artery when
her teeth tore through it, covering her face in a red, dripping
mask. Her teeth could reach no further and she pulled savagely at
the bound arm. I could actually see the flesh starting to tear.
After a while her struggles became less violent and soon ceased
altogether and the pulsing blood slowed to a trickle.

I had now witnessed two people dying
violently, and both would probably remain where they lay for
eternity, with no one to ever mourn them. I knew this was probably
just a drop in the bucket of what was happening across the
planet.

I talked to my wife and son one last time
before I called it a night. I prayed that this was a nightmare that
I would wake up from come morning, knowing that if it wasn’t, it
was going to be apocalyptic for our species. Even though I slept
fitfully that night in the lounge, I was thankful for the respite
from the horrors of the day.

CHAPTER 4

At first I could only make assumptions as to what
was happening. I was pretty sure it was viral, or maybe even a
prion which is basically a self-reproducing protein structure that
can be quite infectious.

Either one could have caused the symptoms I
was seeing. I immediately ruled out a bacterial source due to the
systemic nature of the disease. It was an equal opportunity
infector, it neither spared the young nor the old, the prince nor
the pauper, the politician nor the laborer.

My mind worked feverishly trying to deduce
the cause of this pandemic while the equipment worked its magic on
the specimens. Hypotheses that Jennifer, Sung and I had tossed
around earlier were being supported by the data I was
generating.

I had come to believe that the organic
molecules released from those small, burning particles of comet
were the harbingers of our doom. Then again, it wasn’t the true
start of the madness was it? No, this was only the next stage in
the long history of something that can truly be called the living
dead… a virus.

A virus is not a living organism, but
straddles the line between the definition of a viable living
creature and a complex molecule. Without a host’s cell, a virus is
just an inanimate package of nucleic acids that can never reproduce
or grow on its own. They are by far the most abundant type of
biological entity on Earth and can infect every type of living
organism from the simplest to the most complex. They are tiny
particles averaging one one-hundredth the size of a typical
bacterium and can replicate in their limited range of hosts’ cells
at a breathtaking rate. Some viruses are even able to mask their
presence from the host’s immune system so that the body can never
mount a defense against the invasion, resulting in a chronic
infection of that host. All of this taken together makes it very
difficult to isolate and identify a new invading virus, let alone
develop an antibody to combat it.

So when did it really start? I didn’t know,
probably no one ever would. I could guess that it was a long time
ago, millions of years most likely. Maybe at a time when our
distant ancestors were first crawling their way out of the thick
muck at the edge of some ancient primordial sea.

No one ever suspected that an attack would
come from within our own bodies, or that we would become factories
of our own destruction.

It was always assumed that any mass
epidemiological event would be from some external natural
reservoir, except it wasn’t. We ended up being the vault and fate
held the combination.

Many believed that some alien organism had
been released from the comet and was causing this disease. That was
not the case. No deadly virus or bacteria had rained down upon our
heads like the sprinklings of dust from some demented fairy. Oh,
the actual disease was viral, no doubt about that, as I had
isolated these tiny packages of nucleic acid that causes the
disease and was present in most of the bodily fluids of the
infected, from saliva to plasma. However, the virus didn’t come
from the comet. It came from our own genome.

Somewhere back in our ancient ancestry we
were infected by a virus. The RNA that this tiny molecule inserted
into our DNA must have evolved with us over millions of years. We
call these ancient strips of nucleic acid ‘fossil viruses’. All of
us have these remnants hidden within our DNA, probably left over
from long ago infections of our ancient primogenitors.

Who knows what this little monster did to our
ancestors? Maybe nothing, maybe something like the horror it is
causing to our species post-Hosteller’s. That was something we
would never know. It didn’t matter. Somewhere in our past the virus
inserted itself into a cell that was predestined to become an egg
or sperm without turning it into a virus factory. This DNA with the
new strand of viral RNA incorporated into it was passed down into
the creatures’ offspring on and on until it ended up in present day
humans, where it had sat unnoticed, quietly waiting.

Most fossil virus DNA that we carry will
never pose a problem. As generations pass it is corrupted by
mutations and will never again code for the original design.
Somehow this one remained in a large percentage of the population
unchanged, or what mutations occurred were not enough to destroy
its self-replicating ability. Something kept it in check in our
bodies, imprisoned by some organic Pandora’s Box whose key had been
lost in time.

That was until now.

The organic molecules that blanketed our
planet from Hosteller’s Comet had not graced our presence for at
least the past ninety thousand years. They must have held the key
to the box, an antigen that caused our cells to transcribe this
section of RNA and begin the replication process, which unleashed
on humanity this monster.

A plague I call the Zombie Virus.

The Zombie Virus didn’t create a human zombie
in the classical sense, even though the infected sure as hell acted
like those fokelorish creatures. More appropriately, it was the
virus that returned from the dead.

It seemed to have started almost immediately
following the passage of Earth through Hosteller’s tail after an
incubation period that appeared to be a few hours at best. The
replication rate for this virus was phenomenal, unprecedented in
viral research, but then again so were many of the attributes for
the infection. On the positive side, some of the world’s population
must have had a genetically mutated version of the Zombie Virus
RNA, and it never replicated in our bodies or we had some other
natural immunity to this infection. Otherwise I wouldn’t be telling
you this story now.

I was back in the labs very early the next
morning. I had to re-secure Sung’s bindings by wrapping surgical
tape around his wrists. His struggles had bent the metal hasps of
his straps and were working them loose. Sung was correct about one
thing, in their present state they were very strong. My guess was
that the adrenal gland was affected and pumping out bursts of
adrenaline at the slightest stimulus.

I had the room’s lights set to dim every
night to simulate normal day-night cycles. The infected individuals
would fall into a restless sleep every evening after the lights
dimmed and not wake up until the lights came back up to full
brightness the next day. I knew, outside of the Facility, that this
observation would be worth as much if not more than my viral
research to our survival.

By that evening I had isolated the small
bullet shaped particles of RNA, confirming the virus theory and the
family in which it belonged. It was surprisingly a lyssavirus,
closely related to that of the rabies lyssavirus which voraciously
attacks a victim’s central nervous system. These are one of the few
viruses that can cause illness in humans and are also good at
evading our immune system. Without a concerted immune response our
bodies have difficulty combating it. It would be another day before
I confirmed that its DNA sequence matched a section found in the
human genome.

I named the awakened infected, “Loonies”, my
dry attempt at humor in this humorless time. When those infected
with the zombie virus awakened, they were no longer what they were.
They had lost what made them human.

Later that evening I performed a crude
autopsy on the brain of the girl who bled to death.

There was massive inflammation and tissue
death throughout the brain. It appeared that the virus traveled
along the nerve pathways to the central nervous system, where it
quickly replicated and spread throughout the brain. The virus then
voraciously attacked most of the brain and when it was done, all
that was left functioning was parts of what some call the limbic
system, which controls our base instincts.

The Zombie virus destroyed our reasoning,
communication, and memory centers leaving us a literal eating,
sleeping, killing, virus production facility. This was the perfect
virus – it infected without killing its host, leaving them alive to
produce more virus and find new hosts.