The green sky? Doesn’t matter. The dead fish? No impact. Viruses don’t care about beauty. They don’t care about art. They don’t fall in love.
Mitochondria—the oxidative factories for life. Don’t the evolutionary theories suggest that mitochondria once lived on their own? Things got too rough for them, and they used our cells for shelter. They used higher organismal cells to reproduce, and in exchange they created energy for those cells. That’s why oxidative metabolism is so robust. It’s an evolutionary exchange that fills a symbiotic niche.
Gupta’s heart… I’ve never seen a heart look so healthy in something so sick. The pathogen keeps it beating. It uses it. Uses us like mitochondria.
Jesus, I’m losing it. Feel dizzy.
If the host and the virus are the same, then something makes that possible. Some immunological response allows—no, requires—the change. Stage IV ANSD is characterized by the “loss of all that is human.”
Turn that on its head. Stage IV is characterized by the arrival of something new. A new species…
What gives it that power?
I need to hurry.
What else is preserved? What else keeps working?
11:12 AM
I woke Pittman. He looks shaken, won’t say much. We need to work. That’s all I said, and he followed. He sat on a chair and drew pictures, like he was in a trance, like he was just going through the motions. But when I checked, he was drawing what we needed. We need to document this, I said, and he nodded, not looking up. His sketches of humanoid lungs emerged on the paper, the pathology oddly sterile in the absence of color. But he can still draw.
Alveoli are almost completely obscured. How do they breathe? Looks like ARDS—Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome—a condition in which one or both lungs appear completely occluded by inflammatory response to disease and thus cannot engage in respiration, in the utilization of oxygen. However, unlike ARDS, these lungs have chronic rather than acute changes.
How do the lungs move oxygen? What carries the oxygen? Is something other than the lungs allowing more efficient oxygen exchange? There’s no way there’s any oxygen transfer in these lungs, in this rotten tissue. And the oxygen-carrying capacity of humanoid red blood cells is almost zero. Again, there’s got to be some compensating mechanism, some process that we haven’t considered.
Because the ANSD pathogen moves freely throughout the host, is it possible that the pathogen itself has evolved an independent oxygen-carrying capability? To my knowledge, no new oxygen-binding compounds have yet been discovered in any molecular analysis of the putative virus, but we haven’t really looked.
I removed the lungs, weighed them, sectioned the tissue for later analysis. Christ, the lungs are barely even there. They weigh almost nothing. How do these things take a deep enough breath to muster any sound at all, let alone those inhuman howls?
I should look at the peripheral vasculature. If something is carrying oxygen, then the place to find clues is in the extremities, the farthest distance that oxygen would need to travel. Remember, these things can still grab and hold tight. Somehow the arms are getting fed.
I had started this dissection, dissecting the muscle, the veins, and Pittman just fell, collapsed onto the ground. His drawing almost fell into the muck. I rescued the drawing first, felt bad about that, but it’s what I did. Then I woke Pittman. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. His eyes were pleading. “Have to get out of here.” That’s what he kept saying.
Muscles are atrophied, but…
… rudimentary motor control remains present.
I helped him up—he could walk, but not well. We went outside, into this mist, and then back to the infirmary. There was Gutierrez, still sleeping.
I let Pittman rest and studied his sketch of the dissected extremities. I had exposed the bones, muscles, and nerves, and it was impressive how much the muscles themselves were atrophied. Infection is everywhere. I wish I could talk to Gutierrez. Tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t rouse.
The muscles in the arms are shrunken. A robust heart, but emaciated muscle everywhere else. All the nutritional input must go to the heart, to whatever keeps them breathing, to whatever is left of the brain. All the other infections—the fungi, the bacteria, whatever other viruses are there—none of that matters. Something stops all the other stuff from spreading. That’s why the arms look so frail and the heart looks so good. That’s why the hypothalamus is solid and the cortex is gone.
The arms looked like twigs on a sick tree. Sticks that barely move. The integrity of the nerves, the vasculature, even the bones, all just enough to allow function. Nothing special. Humanoids can’t draw like I’m drawing. But they can grab, they can claw. They can move flesh to the mouth, and that’s all they need to do.
All of this suggests an almost conscious process. The disease has an economy to it. It preserves exactly what it needs to spread.
Because, all things considered, it is still a virus. It thinks like a virus. Efficient. Dispassionate.
Viruses co-opt their hosts—they even use our nucleic acid, the DNA and RNA of our own cells, to reproduce. A successful virus will cut its losses where it can if these losses favor viral propagation. Anything that isn’t needed in the host becomes food for the nutritional needs of the virus. Peripheral muscles break down to their barest essentials. Just enough tissue to allow the arms to feed, to bring food to the mouth, and nothing more. The arms waste, but the temporal muscles, the masseters, the muscles of biting and chewing—these are as healthy as the heart.
They exist only to exist, only to feed.
12:35 PM
I dreamed about funerals. So peaceful, the slow parade of cars down rainy streets. The ritual, the understanding that those who are with us will celebrate and remember those who aren’t. Comforting. Necessary. Need more sleep; more comfort.
Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists are confident that Blum’s wandering train of thought, his dreams that sound almost like visions, are potentially the first signs of mental deterioration. However, analysts are undecided as to whether this represents early neurologic involvement of ANSD or trauma from the gravity of his experiences. Both are possible. Although he does not demonstrate the classical signs of ANSD shock syndrome—he is very much aware of his surroundings and is not at all dissociated from his consciousness (see appendix I for a complete description of ANSD shock)—we are cognizant that the presentation of neuropsychiatric distress is heterogeneous and multifaceted. From this point forward, readers are advised to consider Blum’s thoughts as neither clearly nor consistently coherent or objective. Certainly his later entries suggest a rapid cognitive and emotional deterioration, though again this may not be related to ANSD as much as to his own particular temperament and the prevailing setting.
Finally, it is important that we note Blum’s observations about the environmental state of the world. He encounters the corpse of a cephalopod, presumably a victim itself of ANSD infection. (See appendix I for a description of Spontaneous Cephalopod Cranial Explosion [SCE].) Different nations have managed the shock associated with the realization of the destructive environmental changes on Earth in vastly different ways. Many in the current UN bunkers have opted not to view available surveillance of outside environmental conditions since the time that nuclear and non-nuclear eradication efforts started. Some nations with citizens sequestered in underground bunkers have in fact forbidden citizens from ever viewing this destruction. We respect these choices, but for those individuals for whom Blum’s descriptions are new, please understand that his descriptions are not signs of worsening delirium. The green-tinged sky to which Blum refers is the result of both nuclear ash as well as exfoliated flora caused by neutron radiation. Again, to honor the wishes of those countries that have forbidden access for their citizens to view these changes, we request that these descriptions be kept confidential.
NOVEMBER 21, 2012
5:17 AM
Pittman woke me. He had applied fresh bandages to his wound a
nd checked on Gutierrez. He looks better. Calmer.
I told him what I had been thinking about—that the virus itself confers protection to the host. That the host should be dead, but isn’t. It is dead, he told me. That’s why we call them zombies. He smiled nervously.
But that’s not the point, I told him. The point is that the human is dead, but the virus changes us, uses us. We keep moving even when we’re “technically” dead.
Pittman didn’t like this, and I stopped explaining. They’re dead, he kept saying, mumbling it over and over again under his breath. I dropped it. I need him to draw. Need him to hold it together.
We need to get back to the lab, I said. He agreed.
We need to look for molecular signatures of something that we may have missed—something that might be protecting the vital organs from infection.
We need genetic footprints, electron micrographs. We need to look much more closely, section the tissue we’ve preserved and examine it with immunofluorescence. I’m still thinking of a third pathogen. Nothing that I’ve read about would allow either influenza or prions to create these kinds of protections.
Maybe we should focus on organic structures that are preserved despite the infection. Why doesn’t the hypothalamus degrade? Why are the amygdalae intact?
And what about the GI tract? Humanoids eat. They change “food” into energy, and that means that whatever they ingest of nutritional value must be absorbed in the stomach and bowels. However, past dissections have shown that the bowels are virtually dysfunctional. What did we miss, then? It has to be at the microscopic level.
I need Gutierrez for this work. I can’t even begin to do these analyses, but she needs rest.
Pittman and I agreed to go to the lab, to prepare the tissue samples we’ve saved. We’ll start by sectioning the hypothalamus at the same time that we open the abdomen. We’ll get things ready and then one of us will awaken Gutierrez. Let her sleep until we need her. We’ll move on to whatever tissue she wants to see next.
6:35 AM
I had forgotten about last night, about what I had done. When Pittman and I got to the lab, he asked me where the subject was, and at first I didn’t remember.
Pittman looked around the room, frightened. Is it loose? he kept asking. Is it free?
He was holding a scalpel, shaking. I tried to recall what happened last night.
I burned it. It was still animate, but last night I bound its arms and stuffed gauze into its mouth and placed the humanoid onto a corpse-size slab of plastic that had washed up onto the rocks. I wrapped rope around the body, fastened it to the plastic, and set it ablaze. I used the flamethrower from the arsenal, and while she was still burning I pushed Gupta out to sea.
I believe Hindus cremate their dead.
For a while, the ocean lit up like a torch, but something was still alive in the ocean. It bumped the pyre from below, tipped the body into the water.
The fire went out.
I didn’t tell Pittman, though… couldn’t. Told him that the subject deanimated, died, that I threw it in the ocean to avoid more crabs.
They don’t die that easily, he mumbled.
He was angry. Wanted to know why I didn’t feed it to the two subjects in holding.
I didn’t answer.
Pittman stared. It bit me, he said. Goddamn thing bit me.
We left the lab to get Gutierrez, but she wasn’t where we’d left her.
She was in a wheelchair, in the kitchen. We ate beef jerky, drank warm, only partially desalinated water. No one spoke for a while.
I mentioned the plan to study the digestive tract, that we need to know what they do with what they eat. We need to understand why they don’t gain weight. What they’re running on. Gutierrez agreed, and she was particularly interested in the nerve cells of the large and small bowels. Again, she refused to say more, except that she needed genetic footprints of any virus in the colonic neurons. I tried to get her away from Pittman so that I could tell her what I was thinking about the virus, about its immune properties. Couldn’t, though. Pittman stuck to us like a frightened child. I can’t risk losing Pittman.
6:40 AM
The holding facility is foul, wretched. Threw a crab and a living fish into the pit, and the one that could walk got both, gumming the creatures with almost frantic intensity. The other had lost strength, coordination. It dragged itself toward the food but didn’t get any, rolled over onto its back, and moaned.
Pittman raised the platform and grabbed a transport pole. He reached over the fence and pinned the one that couldn’t walk onto the ground and shocked it. Shocked it over and over, its toes pointing down. Gutierrez shouted at him, told him to stop, that we couldn’t afford to lose a specimen. Pittman just stood there, holding it in place. It stared at him, its eyes glazed from the voltage, and I didn’t have the strength to intervene. Pittman finally let go. The subject was still breathing.
What’s happening to us?
We took the healthier humanoid to the lab, removing the old shackles and locking on fresh ones. The voltage from the transport pole held it still while I locked the chains. There were mites and snails feeding on its calves.
No difficulties moving it, prepping it. It woke entirely just as the head was secured to the table. It growled.
The abdomen is bloated, infected. The surface is hard, almost wooden. Peritonitis. There must be bacteria throughout the peritoneal space. The entire abdominal cavity must be colonized by bowel flora. Nothing survives this. Nothing human.
I made a vertical incision from the base of the sternum to the umbilicus, and then laterally, down either side of the subject’s lower abdomen. The dermal tissue and muscle peeled open, like an antique book. The smell was overwhelming. It’s been more than thirty years since I smelled dead bowel, but no medical student forgets this. It smells like death.
The spleen is huge, but I guess this makes sense. Makes it more human. It’s like the body is taking sides. The cortex surrendered but not the goddamn spleen. Fucking spleen. It’s pretty worn down by now. I tried to remove it but it popped, like a balloon.
Stored what I could of the spleen, liver, and gallbladder in some of the remaining preservatives.
I looked across the room and saw that Gutierrez was stooped over her workstation. She was sectioning the hypothalamus from a few days ago, preparing samples for microscopic analysis. We had sectioned the hypothalamus into distinct subanatomical structures. Different specimens were spread across a lab table, each sitting on top of a note card with writing. There were descriptions, shakily written by Blanca.
Spleen is enlarged and displaced.
The “anterior hypothalamus” sat on one card, the “posterior” region on another. And so on…
Gutierrez was smiling and called me to the computer. One of her samples was under the microscope, and its image was projected onto the monitor.
Look at this, she said.
I didn’t see anything. Almost no cells at all. Is the stain OK? What’s wrong with the sample? She didn’t say anything, but changed slides, told me to look again.
This time the histology, the cellular architecture, looked fine. Better than fine. It was intact. Microscopic boundaries were distinct. There was, however, a strange density of mononuclear immune cells. Immune cells devoted to fighting something, but mononuclear cells do not typically attack viruses. At least they aren’t the first-line immune response for most viruses. This was healthy, robust, hypothalamic tissue that was, nevertheless, compromised by something. Some outside pathogen called those mononuclear cells to attack, and the tissue looked different from what we had seen in ANSD infection.
She showed me the note card from the sample I was looking at, the one with the mononuclear cells. It was the “ventromedial hypothalamus.” She pointed to the note card for the previous slide. “Posterior hypothalamus.”
The ventromedial hypothalamus is relatively healthy, infected by one pathogen probably, given the mononuclear cells, but the rest of the hypoth
alamus is junk. ANSD won’t attack the ventromedial region, she said, or else something that already lives there, some other pathogen, is fighting it off.
Another pathogen? I asked.
She smiled.
11:34 AM
Autopsy going well. Body block in place, incisions made with little difficulty. Bones and fine tissue in worse condition than other subjects. Humanoid remains animate.
I saved its dog tag, hiding it in my notebook. Wonder who it was. Haven’t read the name yet.
We still need to understand how they digest food. Previous studies have shown that the gut is in ruins. Perforations, peritonitis, infection. How is nutritional material absorbed? Presumably everything humanoids eat feeds the virus. If we can find a way to interrupt this process, maybe we can starve them long enough for a vaccine to take hold.
The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse Page 6