That’s why the subjects in the holding area are still animate. That’s why they still want to feed.
We can use removed brain material from this one for nutrition for the others; they tend to prefer to eat central nervous system material. We may have to heat the tissue—that seems to increase the likelihood that they’ll bite—but we’ll do whatever it takes.
Most important, we need to keep the remaining ones “healthy.”
There is a symbiotic process here, a process that allows the contagion and the host to coexist and, at least for a while, to thrive. We haven’t thought about the infection like this. We’ve focused on how it kills us, not how it keeps us alive…
NOVEMBER 20, 2012
4:35 AM
Slept for twenty-six hours, off and on. Air-conditioning is intermittent. I am coughing, diaphoretic. My cot is soaked.
Gutierrez is in the infirmary—Pittman carried her there yesterday while I slept. She is better after IV fluids, but she is clearly dying.
Before I knew she was in the infirmary, I went to find her this morning in her room. Her quarters were empty and water had condensed onto the keyboard of her computer. The screen showed images of goats and horses and a molecular image. I’m going to ask Pittman to sketch the molecule—I think it’s a virus. I can’t trust her explanations—she just doesn’t look right. But I’d like to study it later, when I have some time to think.
I feel fuzzy, like there’s something slowing my thinking. It’s horrifying, this fuzziness, because right now is when I have to be sharp, to think more clearly than ever before. I’m scared. I think this is what it feels like to go mad: to not know whether you can trust your own thoughts.
Writing helps—it is organizing, helps me to remember myself. The journal feels like oxygen. Things seem more clear when I read what I’ve written.
Unknown molecular structure found on Gutierrez’s computer monitor.
So, here’s what we’ve learned:
Most important, someone made this thing. The more I see through the autopsies, the more I know that this virus was built, created, engineered. Whoever reads this journal needs to find this person, the creator, and hope to hell that he or she is still alive. This wasn’t made in somebody’s basement. There must be records, journals, failed experiments, and maybe even lab animals that we can find and study. This has got to be a priority for whoever reads what I’m writing.6
Because it now seems clear to me that the pathogen does something even more grotesque. It triggers some kind of novel immune responses and refuses to let us die mercifully once we’re infected and changed. It seems more and more likely that either the ANSD pathogen itself or, maybe even more likely, an additional infectious agent protects regions of the brain necessary for the behavioral changes induced by ANSD infection.
Currently, the immune response of the influenza and prion components of the ANSD contagion do not show any signs of recruiting the necessary immunological response to prevent what ought to be much more pervasive destruction. If an additional infectious organism creates this immunoprotection, then it most likely targets the very regions of the brain that are not affected or less affected by prion infiltration.
But there’s so little time. The remaining zombies could deanimate. Blanca could die. I could fail…
We need to hurry.
Unfortunately, when I went to the lab this morning, I found that the current subject is already badly decomposed. Apparently, the intermittent power outages affected air-conditioning there as well. Pittman and I turned the vacuum hoods to high pressure to clear the room of flies and other insects. There were crabs feeding on the deanimated body. We caught them with nets.
There are things alive that feed on the dead. They don’t seem rushed or eager—they’re just content to have found something to eat. The crabs walk sideways, their eyes waving around on twig-like stalks, their optic nerves clearly exposed. This is normal crab behavior, normal crab anatomy. Their eyes exist only to find prey. They’re not rushed. They seem to know that there will always be something to feed on.
Crabs, zombies, us. Is there a difference?
And the world seemed to be spinning then. The dissections, the flies, the feeding crabs—all of it was just too much, and I was sick, angry, rattled. I vomited, and when I wiped my mouth with my shirt I saw Pittman staring. His eyes were wide, like he was seeing it all for the first time. What to do? Do I smile to reassure him? Do I ask him to sit down? How can I protect him from all this? I can’t even protect myself. I can’t afford even to vomit.
5:50 AM
My pH is in the safe range and I am holding off on further diuretics. I’ve rested, feel better. Need to get back to work. Vomiting can disrupt the alkalosis, and I can’t afford to lose more water. I’m ready now to move forward. Too much time has already passed.
We need a new subject.
Three humanoids remain in the holding facility. Transport poles feel heavier than even a few days ago, but Pittman and I moved a zombie to the lab with little difficulty. Dog tags identified it as Gupta.
Christ, I know Gupta. Knew her. She is weaker than the last subject, barely recognizable from skin infections and ulcerations. I knew she was down here, knew she had turned, but this is different. I just shocked her with a transport pole.
I knew her family. We met when this all started, at the first international gathering.
6:30 AM
Humanoid broke free of the transport pole. The chains on its legs rusted and snapped. We subdued it with darts, but only after it bit Pittman’s chest, lunging at him with incredible speed—maybe even skill. The relationship to paradoxical Parkinsonian movement is remarkable. People whose movements seem rigid, slowed, even paralyzed by Parkinson’s disease can sometimes move with amazing fluidity when they’re frightened or excited. They can’t do it on command—it’s all instinct, all drive. Zombies do the same thing, and we should have been ready. Even something as weak as Gupta can strike quickly, without warning.
We stopped Pittman’s bleeding; it got him just under the ribs, but didn’t pierce the skin much beyond the dermis. Its teeth came out in his skin. I administered broad-spectrum antibiotics, but Pittman looks bad, shaky. I tranquilized him and left him in the infirmary resting next to Gutierrez.
Video surveillance of the lab in the infirmary shows subject still unconscious on the floor of the lab. More crabs.
I need to sit down, just for a minute, just to catch my breath.
6:40 AM
Arrived back at the lab and found the subject still unconscious but seizing. Crabs were scuttling over the body, trying to grab hold of her as she convulsed and writhed. Seizures will disrupt the integrity of the vital organs, might even obscure immune markers. Grand mal seizures are rare in ANSD until final stages; I needed therefore to stop this seizure in order to preserve the utility of the autopsy finding. I treated the humanoid intramuscularly with large-dose injections of lorazepam. This was the only anti-seizure medication I could find. The lab was a wreck from the fight earlier when the subject broke free. I know that lorazepam is a sedative, that it might slow some of the processes we need to study, but I don’t think it will affect the lungs or the surrounding anatomy. And I’m not ready to sacrifice another subject.
The seizure abated in about five minutes, and the humanoid was sleeping, sedated. I hoisted it onto my back and gently laid it down onto the dissection table. I was amazed at how light she is, it is. It’s barely even here. I ignored the crabs that had skittered into the corners of the lab and focused on what I had to do next.
I fastened the wrist, ankle, neck, and midline restraints. I checked to make sure they were solid. The capacity for even very impaired humanoids to attack is clear. Its breathing is steady now. Temperature is 104.3°F.
I am grateful it—she—is sedated.
Using a standard body block, I elevated the trunk and allowed the arms to fall to the side. I did not deanimate it—the head and brain are intact. We need the subject animate in
order to observe the organs in vivo, while they are still “alive.”
Using a long-handled autopsy scalpel, I made a Y-shaped incision, starting at each shoulder and moving down to the skin just above the sternum. Two humanoid ribs broke when I lost my balance and fell, blocking my fall with my elbows on its chest. Like the skull and scalp of the last subject, the bones are friable and fragile.
The layers of skin are decayed, the muscles rotting, the bones barely solid. But the heart is beating, its valves opening and closing just as mine are right now. As we hypothesized, ANSD leaves functional exactly what it needs.
I removed the dermal layers, placing them over the eyes of the unconscious humanoid. I don’t know why I did this. When I dissected the head two days ago, I couldn’t see it watching me, but if this one wakes up it’ll see what I’m doing. It will look into its own thorax, and it won’t recognize a thing. I think that’s what rattles me the most—not that it will see me, but that it won’t give a damn about what it’s seeing. It will stare at its own beating heart with dead eyes, and I don’t think I could watch that incongruity. I think seeing that might push me over the edge.
The fact that the heart is still beating and seems relatively healthy is important to note. This is especially interesting given the severely infected lung tissue. Healthy lungs bring in oxygen for transfer to blood that is then pumped throughout the body by the heart. Severe pneumonia ought to interfere with oxygen transfer. In fact, we have long wondered why ANSD victims do not succumb to pneumonia early in the process. Blum’s theory, that something protects the process of respiration, is a major theoretical development. We are pursuing this theory now on tissue specimens at the UN laboratories here.
What remains very clear is that Blum and his team need to move quickly exactly as their health is rapidly failing. To this end, we have read and urge all of you to scrutinize the following material for findings that Blum’s haste might have overlooked. Could there be observations in his notes—regarding the skin, the muscles, other features of the subjects’ anatomy, for example—containing important clues that he missed? Is there something relevant and new in his observations? Would immune responses that appear to protect brain structures also protect vital organs such as the heart and the lungs? Are there any infectious agents that might create immune barriers in both brain and thoracic regions? Blum has only recently been even thinking about these kinds of issues. Please keep in mind that he is not an accomplished scientist or researcher. These questions are in fact central to the focus of tomorrow’s meeting.
9:17 AM
Climate control is again intermittent—I’ll need to stop at midday to avoid the heat.
Before examining the lungs, I decided to culture some of the skin ulcerations. The wrists seemed most secure, so I scraped the skin off the side of the subject’s hand onto a tongue depressor, the dermal layers peeling away like onion skin, and pasted what I could onto the few petri dishes that aren’t already contaminated. If there is a novel pathogen, if something is protecting the lungs and the heart, then there has to be an entry point. Maybe some of the infection comes from direct contact… Maybe the skin lesions themselves provide the opening.
The subject woke suddenly during the skin cultures, snapping its jaws, again seemingly oblivious to pain. Breath is foul and rotten. I let the skin flaps fall off the face. Heart is visible beneath the ribs, and the pericardium is boggy… leaky. Blood everywhere. Whenever I move, the heart rate increases. It knows I’m here.
I suctioned off the excess fluid to better visualize the heart. Using bone clippers, I bisected the sternum and lifted the rib cage. Bones mostly crumbled. Heart muscles are hypertrophied, probably due to increased metabolic demand from fever and dehydration. Pulse is 145. Pericardial fluid was drained and collected.
Note the presence of external infection and friable tissue visible along the skin of the restrained hand.
Note the enlarged heart and decaying rib cage. Subject seems unaware of surgical status.
The heart is impressively preserved—it looks healthy, again as if something is protecting it from the invading pathogens. The contrasts… The rib cage is meant to protect the heart and the lungs, and yet the ribs crumble with almost no pressure. The heart, however, is tough, robust. Every time it beats, it literally moves the structures around it. And because of the fever, it is beating very fast, well over 140 times per minute. I don’t know if we appreciated this contrast in the initial studies. I certainly didn’t note it in my reading.
It is almost as if there is an evolutionary process here. The pathogen changes the host, taking it out of niches that it has inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. It turns us into insects, into bacteria, into primitive things. It broadens our biological niche at the expense of everything that makes us human. It confers to the host the ability to survive multiple attacks, multiple onslaughts. These things don’t die. It’s like trying to kill a cockroach. The heart is healthy, even robust. Cardiac muscle is enhanced by hypermetabolic states consistent with infection. Higher brain function is no longer necessary and is thus degraded, destroyed. Cortical material might even constitute nutritional value to the ANSD pathogen itself. Humanoids aren’t the hosts. They’re the disease itself. Stage IV ANSD victims become the disease.
We don’t hesitate to kill cockroaches. We step on them. For bacteria, we give antibiotics. We do not suffer a contagion to live.
Maybe we’ve got this all wrong. We treat strep throat with antibiotics. But “treatment” isn’t the same as “eradication.” If the host is the disease itself, then we have to eradicate the host.
And we are all, all of us, infected. We’re all hosts.
I can’t get my mind around this. These things, these cockroaches, have human hearts that beat. They’re alive. How can they not be alive? What the hell does NLH mean? What does “No Longer Human” mean?
It knows I’m here. It is sentient, aware.
But so is a cockroach.
And cockroaches can be killed. Cockroaches can be drugged and crippled and baited. Unfortunately, there is also a long history of quick and life-preserving adaptations among primitive organisms. Cockroaches have mutated, have become resistant to many of our earlier poisons.
Remember when we tried warfarin, rat poisoning, as a means of slowing or killing Stage IV subjects? They remained animated much longer than expected. They bled more but they kept moving. And the disease remained viable, still transmittable even after the heart stopped beating, even after all that bleeding.
I don’t think we’ll cure this without vaccination and treatment combined. We need to stop future generations from getting the bug in the first place, and since we are all already infected, we need whatever vaccine and treatments we develop to prevent disease progression. We need a regimen that both fights and eradicates the disease. We need to take back our immune system, get it to work for us and not against us. This is an interspecies battle.
10:15 AM
I had to leave. Had to see the sky, the ocean.
But the sky is green. The sky, the ocean, the air. All green. All wrong.
There were tentacles washed up on shore, disembodied from the thorax of whatever they once occupied. A squid? Octopus? Some cephalopod without the skull to stop its brain from exploding. SCE. We don’t see much of that anymore. Most are gone, already eaten by whatever is lucky enough to still be alive.
I kicked it back out to sea.
That thing in the lab is alive. More alive than any of the videos they showed us.
And it’s hungry.
Actually, it’s starving. It is tied to the operating table—I tied it there—and it is starving.
That thing is dying.
The wind shifted and the remaining humanoids picked up my scent. They started howling, moaning, and the one in the lab moaned, answered. Do they miss her—miss it? Does she miss them?
We nuked them and they survived. The humanoids died but they survived. The bug lived. Like a cockroach.
> We’ve tried anti-viral treatments but it survived. The host looked worse, but the virus survived.
Remember the initial treatment trials in Atlanta? Bethesda? Geneva? Humanoids looked worse with every anti-microbial measure. Humanoids need the pathogen. If we kill the pathogen, we kill the host.
But the host is already dead. That’s what they told us in Atlanta.
“They’re gone.”
The robust heart, the functional hypothalamus, the reticular activating system. All these structures keep working. Our organs keep working, because the virus makes them work. We get hijacked. We become the virus.
The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse Page 5