The Blood of the Infected (Book 1): Once Bitten, Twice Die

by Antony Stanton

  Extensive clinical trials were required before a licence could be obtained to produce the drug commercially. In order to speed up the process GVF took an innovative approach and involved large pharmaceutical concerns from overseas. Human volunteers were found initially in twelve other European countries with more non-European nations added as the tests proceeded. This was an unusual arrangement and although nobody could have predicted, it contributed significantly to the events due to unfold. In days and weeks to come Jason would have time to rue some of the decisions made and how they foolishly thought they were infallible. Although like some of his colleagues he was uncomfortable with the speed with which the human tests were pushed through, he was not vocal enough in his protestations to make a difference. They were all swept along with the euphoria of the huge financial boost from Van Firstenburg and his unshakable desire to succeed, and Jason in particular with his own agenda to cure Nanny Boxall. They were so concerned with developing this neurological nuke that they forgot to treat Mother Nature with the respect that she deserves. Instead they showed her an arrogant level of disdain and sometimes Mother Nature bites back.

  More sessions of drugs followed. Always though at the back of Jason’s mind were the doubts. Were they going too fast? Were the normal safety procedures being ignored? His fears were mainly that the drugs would not work as they hoped and they would ruin this unique opportunity to achieve excellence and cure dementia. Nanny Boxall gradually became more responsive. She would often look up with a smile as Jason checked on her, or would speak of her own volition. To Jason these were priceless moments that helped to assuage his concerns. However, his worries were trivial in comparison with the horror that even now was building.

  Finally the drug was released onto the open market with huge acclaim and a celebratory party for ‘significant’ employees, of which Jason was one of the most important. He received a special mention at the party which he found highly embarrassing, and promise of a pay rise which he found highly agreeable. As Mnemoloss had been created in such unusually international circumstances the promotion of it was immediately opened up to medical practitioners all across the globe. The world press had incredible coverage of this new ‘wonder drug’ and the nickname ‘Dem-buster’ became better known than the actual brand name. After a couple of days the media, always notoriously fickle and with the attention span somewhat akin to the dementia sufferers that GVF was seeking to cure, turned its gaze elsewhere.

  Although Mnemoloss was now being prescribed freely they continued to examine its long-term effects in the laboratory. It was having excellent results with neurological recovery. What was not so good however was that in a small yet growing number of cases there were unpleasant examples of personality change. People with dementia are often fairly amiable and pliable having lost aggressive instincts along with most other basic drives, but increasingly those taking Mnemoloss were starting to become irascible. In a smaller number of instances that irascibility was becoming something decidedly more unwelcome…

  A short while after its release date Jason returned home from work to find Julia looking disturbed. When the children were out of ear-shot he asked what was bothering her.

  “It’s nothing really, I’m sure I’m being silly. It’s just that earlier when I was in your mother’s room I was chatting away to her and she told me to shut up.”

  “What?” Jason was stunned. It was very unlike his mother to be bad tempered, but also he wondered whether the drugs were reversing her decline to such an extent that some of her emotions and instincts were returning? He was not sure whether to be disturbed or delighted by this news.

  Julia looked distraught. “I mean for starters I didn’t know she was capable of having or even expressing feelings anymore. But also it was the aggression with which she said it.”

  “It may just be that as the drugs take effect emotions start to come back in a random order. The brain is trying to juggle with an awful lot of change and things get a bit confused in there. Or maybe she did not really know what she was saying. Let’s face it she has been talking garbage for quite a while now.”

  “Oh she knew what she was saying all right. She even turned and glared at me when she spoke. She’s said daft things to me before but this was different. This time it was as though there was real hatred.”

  There had been vague mention of such incidences with other volunteers from the Mnemoloss programme. However these were people he did not personally know so it was easier to write them off as over-reactions. To hear this report about his own mother was very disturbing. He went upstairs to check on her but she was asleep, breathing in a soft, rasping rhythm. She looked more at peace now than she ever did while awake and he could almost believe that she was her normal self again. He sat on the chair in the corner, watching her for a while and feeling decidedly troubled.

  A couple of days later and her headaches returned. She would lie in bed moaning and sweating at night and although she was indeed becoming more vocal and communicative, she was still not quite coherent enough to formulate complex sentences. It was like trying to deduce from an eighteen-month-old child what is bothering it. Jason wondered whether that frustration brought on by pain was the reason for the irritable behaviour.

  Despite the drug having attracted a huge amount of press coverage, the first attack ironically went by virtually unnoticed by the media. An elderly man called Howie who lived with his wife in Stuttgart, Germany, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years previously. He had been put forward by his family doctor, Doktor Rourke, for the initial trials, and although there had been some doubt over his suitability, Doktor Rourke was most insistent and they had pressed ahead anyway. Herr Howie had completed the first two courses of Mnemoloss but the side-effects had been so severe that he had been withdrawn.

  One Sunday afternoon after he had been removed from the trials Frau Howie was in her garden. She looked up to see her husband advancing towards her. He looked distracted and seemed irritated by something. She had risen to her feet and as he neared he had suddenly struck her, knocking her to the floor. The neighbours, a quintessentially English couple called the Clarksons, were in their garden at the time. They heard a commotion and peered over the fence, only to see Herr Howie crouching over his stricken wife and biting her. They rushed round and restrained him, Mr Clarkson receiving an injury on his wrist in the process. The four of them were taken to hospital. Herr Howie had calmed down already but was sedated. Mrs Clarkson was treated for shock and the other two were treated for bite wounds. Doktor Rourke visited them in hospital but there was nothing to initially lead him to believe it was linked to Mnemoloss. The incident made page seven of the local newspaper, the ‘Stuttgarter Zeitung’, but otherwise it went unnoticed.

  It was only a few days later when Doktor Rourke was in his surgery he came across some information pertaining to the drug trials. Out of professional courtesy he rang his local connection associated with GVF to mention the incident. His report eventually found its way to GVF Laboratories in Cambridge and finished its journey in the office of a man who worked near Dr Boxall, where such post-trial information was being collated.

  The second attack happened a week after the Howie occurrence in the town of Penn just outside Manchester. A teenager walking to school saw an old man he knew, called Mr Abra, tottering out of his front door wearing only his pyjama trousers. The boy stopped and laughed at Abra who seemed to take offence, turned and chased him. When he was later questioned the youth said that the old man had been shouting something at him but that it did not seem to make any sense, as though he was talking in tongues. After a short distance the teenager realized he had outpaced his attacker and turned to see him instead attacking another elderly gentleman. The gentleman, who was eighty-four years old, later had a heart attack and died. When the media got hold of this story it made larger headlines in the UK and the fact that Abra had been using Mnemoloss was mentioned this time. Now alarm bells started to ring at GVF, although at this stage they were
still reasonably muted.

  Dr Boxall was summoned for a meeting the next day and asked to relay his research to some of the more senior managers. First he returned to the animal section to check on progress and to speak to the head clinician, a small, twitchy man called Bennett who had an impressively bushy moustache that he waxed to a point. When he looked at the moustache Boxall could not help but think of the whiskers of the rats in the cages, especially since Bennett spent so much time amongst them. If any man was ever suited to their job it was he.

  Bennett led him down the lines of cages that housed the rats, row upon row of them stacked on work benches that ran the length of the room. The room was austere with white floors and scrubbed surfaces. The smell from the many rodents mingling with the scent of mass-produced cleaning products was quite nauseating at first until one got used to it. Boxall had worked there with Bennett for several long months, interspersing his theoretical computer modelling with live tests in the early stages of drug development, but he spent much less time there now and Bennett had more current information on the progress of the animals.

  Bennett briefed him as they strolled down the ranks of cages. “Of course a few of the specimens have died through natural causes. As you know we don’t include them as ‘Death From Drug’. Here are the statistics.” He handed some charts to Boxall. “They basically say that ninety-five percent of the test cases took to the drugs okay, the other five either DFD’d within the first couple of days or through other complications within the first week. Otherwise, as clinical trials go, it was remarkably smooth and straightforward, one of the better ones that I have ever seen.”

  Boxall felt a brief flush of satisfaction with this news as they both knew how important he had been in the design of Mnemoloss. He was about to thank the man and leave to study the charts further when Bennett added an afterthought that made Boxall stop short.

  “At least, the earlier rats we used all seemed to go through the tests without problem. It was only the latest batch that for some reason has started to skew the stats somewhat.”

  “How do you mean?” Boxall had a sudden feeling of alarm, those old, nagging doubts coming back to the surface chanting ‘I told you so.’

  “It’s not that there have been many more DFD’s. It’s just the latest group of rats have exhibited behavioural changes. At first we put it down to a coincidence. As you know that kind of thing happens sometimes, but there were so many of them that we thought there must be more to it than that. I assume the drugs have been tweaked in the latter stages of development and for some reason it has just not agreed with them.”

  “Behavioural changes? What kind of changes?”

  “Well recently the rats have been becoming quite aggressive. Often it is a struggle to get them out of their cage without claws and teeth flying everywhere. Three of my techies were bitten only last week. Most odd, I have never seen anything like it.”

  The hair on Boxall’s neck literally stood on end. For a second the world receded and he felt faint. He had heard about the attack in Manchester and whilst an isolated case is nothing to go by, the fact that the animal trials were reflecting the human reactions was worrying; very worrying. He thanked Bennett without enthusiasm and left the laboratory as quickly as he could without wanting to seem in a rush. A small prickle of sweat already ran down his throat like a talon gently tracing a path over his skin.

  At nine thirty-five he arrived back in his office. Immediately he checked the data from Bennett and then re-checked. The results were not conclusive, merely suggestive, but he was worried nonetheless. During the development phase of the programme Boxall had commanded a team of up to eight technicians working directly for him and he could still contact them and use them if he needed to. The next twenty-five minutes he spent doing just that.

  By half past ten they were all assembled in his office and he quietly closed the door. It would be very easy to panic them but at this stage there was not much to go on, nothing more than a disturbing hunch and the slightest spectre of a problem. He decided to keep it low key and for the moment just to gather more information, just to be sure.

  It was five past eleven when they left the conference room. Whilst apologizing for the short notice, he gave them all until three o’clock that afternoon to report back to him on their various assignments. “No lunch breaks today I’m afraid, no cigarette breaks, you’ve barely even got time to breathe. This takes precedence over everything else you were doing and over anything that anyone asks you to do. If someone has a problem with that then tell them to come and talk to me about it. Is that understood?”

  The last one out of the room closed the door leaving Boxall alone with his thoughts and the ticking of the clock. His doubts were speaking to him again in the silence and the one word he heard loudest was one of the most feared words in drug development – ‘mutation!’

  He sat there pondering. Drugs do cause mutation over time and viruses and diseases will evolve and adapt eventually. Such a fast alteration however was practically unheard of. Mnemoloss had been manufactured to target certain neurological functions and change the way the brain codes information. As such, it was in reality actually created to teach the brain to mutate, after a fashion. Not only that but it was designed to act quickly. Could it be that they had somehow got it wrong and it was indeed aggressively causing mutation, only not as they had planned?

  Until twelve o’clock he looked through some of his notes that he had stored on his laptop. Then he donned his white lab coat and went back to see Bennett. Regardless of what his team of technicians found out he decided to check over all of his work and retest the drugs. It was a little late to be doing this now, after Mnemoloss was already commercially available, but it would put his mind at rest. After all, had he not felt that the whole development programme had been forced through too quickly with insufficient animal trials? When he presented his findings to the medical board later that day he would insist on a lot more testing in the laboratory.

  He returned to his office at two fifteen. By three o’clock he had received most of the data from his team. He sat watching the clock and fiddling nervously with a sheaf of papers. By half past three they had all got back to him and he went to see his managers who were having coffee and biscuits in an office at the other end of the building.

  He entered the room, politely refusing the drinks he was offered. Boxall had regular dealings with the two men and knew them well. The woman he had met only a couple of times and knew mostly by reputation. His direct boss, Dr Michael Rhind, was wearing a light grey suit and yellow tie. He was a tall, slim man in his late fifties with thinning light brown hair in a side parting and always seemed to have a five o’clock shadow and a cup of black coffee. He was a neuroscientist like Boxall, and had been ultimately responsible for overseeing the neurological aspects of the drug and liaising with other departments. After Boxall, more than anybody else he understood the drug and its application, and the two of them had worked closely throughout its development. Next to him sat Dr Robert Cannon who had been responsible for integrating and coordinating the various aspects of medical science. He was a slim man who looked fit, was always extremely energetic and enthusiastic, and had very blond hair and eyebrows which in certain lights made him appear nearly albino. Dr Rhind reported directly to him and he, in turn, to Gautam van Firstenburg. He wore a standard, grey suit with light pin-stripes that seemed to lack imagination and was going threadbare at the elbows. Lastly, sat on the far right, was Ms Zoe Jenkins who had recently been promoted to the position of general manager responsible for sales of Mnemoloss. She was relatively young for such a senior position, being only in her early thirties. She had a fine head of glossy, red hair that clashed particularly badly with the red blouse that she wore. All three of them had clipboards resting purposefully on the table.

  “Gentlemen, Ms Jenkins, I am sorry for being slightly late...”

  Rhind waved his hand dismissing the need for apologies. “You know presumably why we asked for th
is ‘chat’; there has been a media report of a patient from the trials acting aggressively and clearly we need to cover ourselves. We would like a few facts so that we can exercise a little damage limitation with the press. We just need to know what caused the attack, if there have been any other incidents and whether you think there is a significant likelihood of this happening again.”

  Boxall placed his notes on the table in front of him and cleared his throat. “I have got my technicians to gather whatever data they could since this morning. I looked into three main areas; animal tests, results from the human trials and contacting as many of the volunteers’ families as possible, or failing that - their doctors.”

  He paused and looked up but none of them spoke, they were all scribbling furiously, so he continued. “Firstly, the animal tests.” He placed some graphs on the table in front of them. “Ninety-five percent of our test cases took to the final drug without problem. Of the five percent that died, one percent were from unrelated causes, two percent died within the first week of administering the drugs, likely due allergic reaction, and two percent lasted as long as two weeks before DFD’ing.”

  Jenkins looked up in confusion. “What was that, ‘DFD’ing’?”

  “Sorry, Dead From Drug. In the tests we found no signs of drug distortion and no side-effects at all with the final drug compound. The only comment I would add is that today the Chief Lab Techie reported some possible behavioural change in the rats.” The three of them paused and looked up intensely, waiting and not interrupting. Boxall continued uneasily. “The rats have been exhibiting increased episodes of violent behaviour although at this stage that could be for one of many reasons.”