“You into comic books. Y’know . . . Dr. Spectrum?” He had an expectant look on his face. “Dr. Spectrum, the superhero from Marvel Comics? His secret identity is ‘Joe Ledger.’ That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”
“All things considered,” I said, “no, not very much.”
“Doctor . . .” Church said with a note of soft warning in his voice.
“Okay, okay, whatever. We’re talking about the disease,” he said, and for a moment I saw the scientist behind the geek façade. “Look, science is only occasionally cool and a soul-crushing bore the other ninety-nine percent of the time. Aside from the fact that the empirical process requires endless repetition on each and every freaking step, there’s also the reality of state and federal regulations on what we can and cannot do. A lot of research opportunities are limited and some are blocked. Biological weapons, that sort of thing.”
“Even with the military?”
“Yes.”
“Even supersecret military?” I said, half smiling.
He hesitated. “Well, okay, that starts getting to be a bit more fun, but even then you can’t publish half the time, which means you don’t get prizes and you don’t write bestsellers.”
“No groupies?”
“You joke, but there are women attracted to brains. We don’t all die virgins.”
“Okay. And this relates to zombies how?”
“I think we have ourselves a genuine mad scientist. A supervillain.” He seemed really happy about the idea. I kind of wanted to punch him.
I glanced at Church, who raised his eyebrows in a “you’re the one who wanted to talk to him” kind of look.
Hu said, “I’m serious. We have someone with deep intellect and vast resources. I mean that: vast. Bear in mind that lots of terrorists come from oil-producing nations. It would take that kind of money for our Dr. Evil to do this sort of thing.”
“Got it. So has your supervillain actually managed to raise the dead?”
“No, look . . . these walkers are not actually dead . . . but they’re not alive, either.”
“I thought those were pretty much the only two choices.”
“Times change. You know that movie, Night of the Living Dead? Well, I think ‘living dead’ is a pretty good name for what we got here.” He took a Slinky off his desk and let it flow back and forth between his palms. “Here’s the thing, the body is designed by evolution to have natural redundancies, without which we’d never survive injury or illness. For example, you only really need about ten percent function of the liver, twenty percent function of one kidney, part of one lung. You can live with both arms and legs removed. There are millions of pages of research and case evaluation of patients who have continued to live well past the point where their bodies should have shut down. In some cases we can discover why, in some cases we’re still in the dark. With me so far?”
“Sure.”
“Now look at the walkers. If they were truly and completely dead then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d still be in Brooklyn and you’d be doing whatever you were doing before Mr. Church shanghaied you. Why? Because the dead are dead. They have zero brain function, they don’t get up and chase people.”
“Javad Mustapha was dead,” I pointed out. “I killed him. Twice.”
Hu shook his head. “No, you killed him once, and that was during your second encounter with him. Mind you, when you shot him during that raid you gave him what should have been mortal wounds, and he would have died had it not been for the presence of this pathogen; but this little bastard of a disease did not allow Javad to die. You see, this disease shuts down any part of the body that is not directly related to the purpose of its existence.”
“Which is?”
“To spread the disease. These things are designed to be vectors. Very aggressive vectors. The disease simply shut off the areas damaged by your bullets. Don’t look at me like that; I know how weird this sounds, but someone cooked up something that nearly kills its victims but at the same time prevents them from dying as we previously understood death. Plus, they added a little of this and a little of that so that the host body—the walker—aggressively spreads the pathogen. It’s marvelous but it’s bizarre, because the disease is constantly trying to kill the host while working like a bastard to keep parts of it alive.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does, but not in the way you think; and to a degree that does fit with nature . . . sort of. When you have an infection the fever you get is the immune system’s attempt to burn it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes the fever does more harm than the disease. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis . . . they’re a couple of examples of the immune system doing harm because it’s trying to fix the wrong problem, or trying too hard to fix a minor problem. In nature there are plenty of examples,” he said, “but what we have here is someone who has taken that concept into a totally new direction. We have a fatal disease, several parasites, gene therapy, plus some other shit we haven’t sorted out yet, all present in a molecular cluster unlike anything on record. If these guys weren’t trying to destroy America they could make billions off the patents alone.”
“Does this have anything to do with fatal familial insomnia?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Bonus points for even knowing that name. The answer to that is . . . yes and no. That’s the prion disease they used as a starter kit, but they’ve tricked it out with the other stuff. Even now it has some of the characteristics of a typical TSE.”
“ ‘TSE’?”
“Prions are neurodegenerative diseases called ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,’ or TSEs,” he explained. “We still know very little about prion transmission and their pathogenesis. We do know that prions are proteins that have become folded and in that form act differently from normal proteins. These are strange little bastards . . . they have no DNA and yet they’re capable of self-replication. Usually sporadic cases strike about one person per million, and at the moment these account for, say, about eighty-five percent of all TSE cases. Then you have familial cases, which account for ten percent of TSEs, and which are passed down through bloodlines in ways not yet understood, since inherited traits are genetic and, like I said, prions have no DNA. The remaining five percent are iatrogenic cases, which result from the accidental transmission of the causative agent via contaminated surgical equipment, or sometimes you see it occurring as a result of cornea or dura mater transplants, or in the administration of human-derived pituitary growth hormones. Still with me?”
“Clinging on by my fingernails. How come these prions are making monsters instead of just killing people?”
“It’s a design requirement of this new disease cluster. Prions produce a lethal decline of cognitive and motor function, and that allows the parasite-driven aggression to cruise past conscious control. Somebody took the prion and attached it to these parasites. Don’t even ask how because we don’t know yet. It’ll be a new process, something they invented. They essentially turned a TSE into a fast-acting serum transfer pathogen, but with all sorts of extras, most notably aggression. The victim’s aggression is amped up in such a way as to closely imitate the rage response some PCP and meth addicts have on the downside of a strong high. Ever see the movie 28 Days Later? No? You should. The sequel rocks, too. Anyway, that movie dealt with a virus that stimulated the rage centers in the brain to the point that it was so dominant that all other brain functions were blocked out. The victims existed in total, unending, and ultimately unthinking rage. Very close to what we have here.”
“What, you think a terrorist with a Ph.D. in chemistry watched a sci-fi flick and thought ‘Hey, that’s a good way to kill Americans’?”
Hu shrugged. “After all the stuff I’ve seen in the last week, I wouldn’t be surprised. Now, there may be some higher brain functions but if so it would be far lower than the most advanced Alzheimer’s patient.”
“An Alzheimer’s patient is still going to feel pain, and I b
eat the shit out of Javad and he didn’t so much as blink.”
“Yeah, well, we’re getting into one of our many gray areas. Remember that we’re not dealing with a natural mutation, so a lot of what we know will be based on field observation and clinical testing.”
“So . . . if we’re talking disease why are we also talking living dead? How does that work?”
“That’s something we’re working on with the walkers we harvested from St. Michael’s,” Hu said, and for the moment there was no fanboy smirk on his face. “This disease cluster reduces so much of the body’s functions that it goes into a kind of hibernative state. That’s what we’ve been calling ‘death’ for these cases, but we’re wrong. When you shot Javad his body was already ravaged by the disease and the injuries hastened the process. He slipped into a hibernative coma that was so deep that the EMTs who checked his vitals got nothing. Consider this,” he said, shifting in his chair, “animals can hibernate and to a very, very limited degree so can humans. Not easily, but it sometimes happens. You see it once in a while in hypothermia cases. But when a ground squirrel hibernates its metabolism drops down to like one percent of normal. Unless you had sophisticated equipment you’d think it was dead. Even its heart beats so infrequently that a cut wouldn’t bleed much because the blood pressure is too low.”
“Can’t some yogis do the same thing?”
“Not even close. Even in the deepest yogic trance their metabolism is maybe ninety-nine or at most ninety-eight percent of normal. These walkers, on the other hand, are going into hibernative states as deep as a ground squirrel’s. Much deeper than a hibernating bear. Almost anyone who checked their vitals would declare them dead. We had to use machines to establish this and even then we almost missed it. What we have here is someone who has managed to either splice ground squirrel DNA to that of humans—and before you ask, no, they are not compatible according to what we know of modern transgenics—or they’ve found a way to alter the chemistry of the body to cause artificial hibernation. Either way, we can see the effect but we’re nowhere close to understanding it.” He set down the Slinky and leaned forward. “Once the victim is in hibernation this disease cluster reorganizes the functioning matrix of the body. It somehow uses the fatal familial insomnia protein to wake the victim up again and keep them awake; but during the hibernation the parasite has closed off those areas of the body that have been severely injured—as with the gunshot wounds. Our walker gets up because the parasite has kept the motor cortex going as well as some of the cranial nerves—the ones governing balance, chewing, swallowing, and so on. However, most of the organs are in shutdown and the reduced blood and oxygen flow has caused irreparable brain damage to the higher functions such as cognition. The heart pumps only a little blood, and the lungs operate at an almost negligible level. Circulation is so significantly reduced that necrosis begins to occur in disused parts of the body. So, we have nearly a classic brain-dead, flesh-hungry, rotting zombie. It’s beautiful, man, absolutely freaking beautiful.”
The urge to hit him was getting tougher to control.
“Can they think at all? Are they problem-solving?”
He shrugged. “If the walker is capable of conscious thought, we haven’t seen evidence of it. But really, we don’t know what they can’t do, or what variations might emerge in a larger cross section of the population. Maybe that’s why they had the kids today—trying the pathogen on a new test group. Body chemistry is different in kids. But overall, these are brain-dead meat machines. They walk, growl, bite, and that’s it.”
I blew out my cheeks. “Can they feel pain?”
“Unknown. Certainly they don’t react to it. There’s not even a flinch mechanism that we’ve seen. Though at St. Michael’s we learned that they’ll recoil from fire. They appear to be oblivious to, or are capable of disregarding, other forms of pain and the threat of pain.”
“They die, though,” I said. “Brain and brain stem injuries seem to do the trick.”
“Right, and if I were you I’d stick with that. But whether they can be otherwise injured in the classic sense . . . that’s complicated. Our walkers have a hyperactive wound-healing capacity. Not on the scale of Wolverine from X-Men who regenerates back to complete health, but more on the lines of car tires when they’re filled with a can of that sealant stuff. Wounds do seal, as we know, otherwise we’d bleed out from a paper cut. Proteins called fibrins and high-molecular-weight glycoprotein-containing fibronectins bond together to form a plug that traps proteins and particles and prevents further blood loss; and this plug establishes a structural support to seal the wound until collagen is deposited. Then some ‘migratory cells’ use this plug to stretch across the wound, during which platelets stick to this seal until it’s replaced with granulation tissue and then later with collagen. In the walkers this whole process is running at superspeed. Shoot one and the wound closes right away. If this were a natural mutation we’d consider it an evolutionary response to a highly dangerous environment; fast healing in the presence of the potential for frequent cuts. But this is designer stuff; and again, our Dr. Evil has a gold mine of a patent in his hands because that process alone might be a potential cure or treatment for hemophilia and other bleeding disorders. And the battlefield uses would be worth billions.” He leaned close. “And if you and your Rambo squad can take out the geniuses behind this then I’m going to swipe this shit and file the patents, and then I’ll buy Tahiti and retire.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I sighed. “What about treatment, something to kill these prions? Can we give people something to amp up their immune systems?”
He shook his head. “The body’s immune system doesn’t react to prion diseases the way it does to other diseases; it doesn’t kick in and the disease spreads too rapidly with nothing to slow it down. Once it takes hold there is no treatment.”
“Terrific.”
“And killing a prion is incredibly difficult. In labs, where growth hormones are cultivated from extracted pituitary glands, solvents of various kinds have been used to purify the tissue; these solvents kill everything . . . except the damn prions. Even formaldehyde won’t kill them, which really boggles me. Radiation treatment and bombardment with ultraviolet light doesn’t kill them. We—and by that I mean my fellow wizards in the scientific community as a whole—have tried virtually everything to kill TSEs including treating diseased brain tissues with all manner of chemicals including industrial detergent—and the prions simply won’t die. They don’t even die with the host organism. Bury a corpse with a prion disease and dig up the bones a century later . . . and the prions are still there. They are, after all, simply proteins.”
“Is that all of it?” I asked.
“I could go on and on about the science—”
“I mean, are those all of the highlights? Is there anything else I have to know if I’m going to lead my team into that crab plant?”
Again Hu looked at Church and now the distant look was gone from Church’s eyes. He nodded to the doctor. “Well,” Hu said, “there’s the issue of infection.”
“Right, it’s transmitted through a bite. I saw enough of that firsthand about three hours ago. I saw those bastards biting kids.”
I looked to see how that hit Hu but there wasn’t a flicker of compassion on his face. He was too caught up in how cool he thought this all was. I wondered how he’d feel if he was in a locked room with a walker.
Hu gave me a devious grin. “It’s a bit worse than that. A whole lot worse, actually.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The DMS Warehouse, Baltimore / Tuesday, June 30; 9:39 P.M.
“WHAT’S WORSE?”
We turned to see Grace Courtland entering the lab with Rudy right behind her. Rudy looked terrible. His face was the color of old milk, except for dark smudges under his eyes; his lips were a little wet and rubbery, and his eyes had the glassy and violated look of a victim of some dreadful crime.
“Jeez, Rude, are you okay—?” I said quietly
as I moved to intercept him.
“Later, Joe. It’s been a hard day for everyone, but let’s talk later.”
Church got to his feet and joined the group. “Captain, your friend Dr. Sanchez has already been entertained by Dr. Hu. And I believe Major Courtland has shown him the St. Michael’s tapes.”
Rudy looked at the floor for a moment, then he took a deep breath and tried to master himself. I hadn’t yet seen those tapes, so having gotten my own tour of hell I could pretty well imagine what horrors were banging around in his head. It made me feel like a total shit for having gotten him dragged into this.
“You’re about to tell him about the rate of infection, Doctor?” Rudy asked in a voice that was steadier than I expected.
“Yep, but he’s your friend . . . why don’t you break the news to him.”
Rudy nodded. He cleared his throat. “Joe . . . I’m not sure which I think would be worse, a real case of supernatural zombies like out of the movies or what we have here.”
“Definitely what we have here,” Hu said. Courtland agreed, and even Church nodded.
“This is a lousy way to start a conversation,” I said. “I would have thought that zombies would pretty much be your worst-case scenario.”
Rudy grimaced and shook his head. “You understand what prions are, right? Okay, with any disease there is an incubation period, and for prion pathologies it’s typically very long, anywhere from several months to thirty years in humans.”
“I told him about the parasites,” Hu said.
Rudy nodded. “Prions, though extremely dangerous, are far from being short-term weapons and could at best represent a time-bomb effect. Whoever made this disease pioneered some new way to speed up the process of infection. Now it happens in minutes.”
“Seconds,” I corrected. “Like I said . . . I saw it.”
Hu said, “We’re seeing all kinds of variations in terms of infection, time of death, and speed of reanimation. We’re only just beginning to build models to study it but we’re nowhere near understanding it. The pattern’s funky, and I’ll bet you my whole set of Evil Dead action figures that we’ve either got mutations or more than one strain. In either case we are seriously screwed.”
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