The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (11 page)

“Since I abandoned the lab, I’ve been playing
with the parts of the puzzle in my mind, piecing them together and
trying to develop a clearer picture of what happened, and what is
happening. I don’t know how familiar you are with how our body’s
immune response works, but it’s something you need to understand
and is an important piece to this puzzle. When a foreign body, like
a virus, invades our bodies, they initiate a series of defensive
responses. Basically it is kind of like sic’ing the bloodhounds on
the virus, where the bloodhounds are our immune system’s response.
The viral antigen is the scent left on an object, in this case our
cell, after a crime, which would be the viral infection, has taken
place. The hounds track down any object with this scent and tree it
and begin braying— that is, to produce and bind an antibody to it
to alert the hunters, the T-cells, to where the prey is treed. The
hunters then come in and kill the trapped prey, by inducing cell
death. The hounds now remember this scent and can initiate a
proactive response the next time that specific scent is
detected.

“Viral titers showed the incredible number of
virions that were being produced, again unprecedented. The Zombie
Virus produced a virion load in numbers an order of magnitude above
the identified lyssaviruses. You figure we have roughly a hundred
trillion cells making up our body, maybe a billion of those cells
are targeted by this virus, producing thousands of progeny per
cell. It simply overwhelmed the innate response of our immune
system with sheer numbers, resulting in a chronic infection of the
host. Our bodies couldn’t produce enough RNA interface to degrade
the viral material or antibodies to bind and deactivate them, or
even T-cells to destroy them. There were no antibodies being
produced since there was no adaptive immune response; the virus was
free to continue its production unhindered within our cells. This
was probably because no surface antigens were being expressed on
the membrane of infected cells to flag their presence. The Zombie
Virus was hiding from some of our immune defenses in plain sight,
while it simply out produced our innate response. On top of all
that, no memory cells are produced to give us or our progeny any
inherent immunity. It literally cut the nose off of the
bloodhounds!

“It really is the perfect virus. It had the
shortest incubation period we’ve ever seen or even imagined and
becomes highly communicable through blood and saliva. It infected
in such numbers that our immune response was always a step behind.
It didn’t kill us as hosts; however, it caused a behavioral change
by degrading certain areas of our brain. The aggressive biting
behavior we see in the Loonies causes them to infect more hosts,
turning the human race into a perpetual factory for the Zombie
Virus.”

Everyone was quiet after he finished
speaking; the only noise was the crackling and popping of the
fire.

“What do we do? How do we cure it?” Katherine
asked.

Steven shrugged. “There is no cure for those
infected. Their damage is already done. The only way to treat the
symptoms of this disease is with a bullet.” He sighed deeply and
hugged Kera closer to him. “I think there are two ways we will be
able to defeat this if we can survive as a species. One is to
develop an immunization or anti-viral medication that targets the
Zombie Virus and inoculate every living uninfected human being on
the planet, or else we have to kill every damn one of the
infected!”

“Why wouldn’t we be able to survive as a
species?” Dontela asked in a subdued voice.

Steven shrugged again. “Because I’m not sure
it’s possible.” He stared at them both hard from across the fire.
“I don’t know how many uninfected are left. I don’t know what the
lowest threshold for our species is. That’s the point where our
numbers drop too far for us to ever viably recover to a growing, or
even stable, breeding population. For all I know we may well have
already fallen below that threshold.”

“Can you guess how many of us are left?”
Dontela asked.

“From the primary infection, sure, I could
guess. The problem is the secondary infection and those outright
killed by the Loonies. I just don’t know.”

“Try?” from Katherine.

Steven paused thoughtfully, staring at the
fire as if the bright plasma of flame was some mystical looking
glass that could supply the answers they all sought. “Let’s be
conservative and say that we had a 90% primary infection rate. So
for every 100 people, 90 can be presumed infected. We had roughly
314 million people in the good ‘ol U.S. of A., and slightly over 7
billion worldwide. Mortality rates from actual infection were
probably very low if there were any at all. This was not a lethal
virus in those terms. So after the primary spontaneous infection we
were perhaps left with roughly 700 million people uninfected
worldwide and about 31 million here in the States. The last time
the world population was at the number was around the mid-1700’s.
For the States, we saw a population of 31 million about the time
the Civil War ended, 1865 or so. So it’s a big hit, although
nothing that we couldn’t have recovered from, if those populations
were mostly centrally located.”

“The world would probably be better off with
that amount of people on it.” Katherine interjected, nodding her
head as she said it.

Steven gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re
probably correct, unless it’s your loved one that is crazy with the
infection. Then it becomes much harder to justify that
rationale.”

Both Katherine and Dontela nodded
knowingly.

“I didn’t realize there were that many people
left at first,” Kera said, speaking for the first time since she
had sat down at the fire.

“Many didn’t last long. However, it’s why
we’re all here together, and why we’ll hopefully find more as we
travel.” Steven took another long drink from the water bottle,
finishing it off. “This brings us to what will be total conjecture
on my part. Out of the eight people I knew who didn’t show signs of
primary infection, including myself, only three of us are still
healthy. That’s a 63% mortality rate. Most people were not as
prepared as we were, so I imagine we can add another 15% to that
for most of the population. It probably is a lot more for some
areas, especially cities and dense urban areas. So let’s say we be
conservative again and say 80% for the secondary infection and
mortalities.” He paused, doing the math in his head. “Worldwide,
that brings the population down to near 140 million souls who are
still uninfected with the Zombie Virus. I think the last time we
had a world population that low was somewhere between 200 and 500
B.C. Here in the U.S. of A., that leaves 6 million Americans still
thinking and breathing. I think that census wouldn’t have been seen
here since around 1800. Now it may be a lot better than that, or a
lot worse. One thing for certain is that with the collapse of our
society, and those across the globe, those numbers are going to get
a lot worse before they start climbing again, if ever. We are going
to be looking at starvation, murders, real plagues, and other
diseases long thought vanquished making horrible comebacks. Plus
there will always be the unrelenting threat from the huge numbers
of Loonies that are out there.”

“How many of them M-80s you think are out
there?

Steven looked at Dontela. “It’s simple math.
Six million Americans left from 314 million? That means that there
are roughly 300 million of those monsters still breathing our air.
Worldwide, there are close to 7 billion of them.”

“Six million doesn’t sound too bad for us
here in the States.” Kera said hopefully.

“If they were spread out evenly that would
average out to about three people for every two square miles.
Unfortunately, most of those people are, or were, in the large
cities and their surrounding suburbs. Out here in the rural areas
you would probably be lucky to find one person in ten square
miles.”

“Well shouldn’t we be headin’ to the cities
to find more survivors if that’s where most of them are going to
be?” Dontela asked.

Steven smiled, amused at the suggestion.
“Don’t forget that that is where you’ll find the Loonies in numbers
of about one thousand for every one survivor. Whoever stayed in the
cities and suburbs has a very low probability of survival by now, I
imagine.”

“So what do we do?” asked Katherine shrilly.
“Do we merely live out here in the woods like animals? What do we
eat? How do we stay warm?” She covered her face with her hands as
tears started to flow.

“No. We buck up and survive. Keep moving and
kill as many of those damn creatures as we can!” Kera hissed at the
weeping girl. She removed Steven’s arm from around her shoulder and
stood up, staring down at the two girls who stared back at her
wide-eyed. “We’ve all lost a fucking lot to this disease. You can
sit here and wring your hands and cry about everything you lost
while you wait for those things to find you and tear you apart or
turn you into one of them. I ain’t going to do that. My man and I
are going to be hitting that road as soon as we can. We’re going to
find someplace where we can be safe until we figure out what the
next step needs to be. You either step up and tell yourself that
you will do whatever it takes to survive, or we’ll kick you to the
curb because you’ll be nothing except a liability to us all!” Kera
spun away and stomped off out of the firelight.

Steven excused himself and went after
her.

Katherine watched them go with her mouth
hanging open, her white face even paler than normal.

Dontela laughed. “I really like that
girl.”

Katherine stared at her aghast. “She
threatened to leave us out here to die.”

“She already saved your sorry ass once. This
isn’t no sorority-party, girl. She saying you need to grow a pair
if you want to live to see your next birthday.” Dontela smiled
lopsidedly. “I agree with her. I plan on surviving.”

Steven caught up with Kera at the edge of the
camp.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded without looking up, trying to hide
tears that welled up in her eyes and threatened to overflow down
her cheek.

“She reminds me of Amanda,” she said, swiping
her eyes with the palms of her hands. “I miss her a lot.”

She looked up at Steven with her large blue
eyes shining wetly. “I don’t want to see the same thing happen to
them that happened to Amanda… or Holly.”

Steven winced, then nodded his head. “I know.
I don’t either. We can’t afford to lose anyone anymore, yet they’ve
managed to stay alive all this time somehow. That at least shows
they are survivors”

They kissed quietly, their lips lingering on
each other before drawing away. He took her hand and led her back
to the fire, and they resumed their seats on the log. Katherine was
no longer crying, just staring blankly into the crackling fire
while Dontela fed more logs onto it. The darkness in the woods
surrounding them was thick and impenetrable, the light from the
fire barely holding it back.

“Do you want to tell us your stories?” Steven
asked after a bit.

“How about you finish your story first? You
know, how you got from an Army lab in Maryland to saving our
asses,” Dontela replied, crossing her arms across her chest.
Katherine stirred the fire with a stick and nodded at the
suggestion.

So Steven related the horrors of his flight
from the facility and he and his family from the rural, yet densely
populated area of Southern Maryland. He told them of the important
contents of his pack that he had carried from the facility and how
hopefully one day it could be used to help develop a vaccine. He
told them about finding Frank, Amanda, and Kera, about them being
separated from his son and Frank, and the subsequent loss of his
wife Holly, the pain apparently still raw. How they had found Frank
infected and had to put him down and the news from an old couple
that his son was still alive and well and headed to the family farm
in Southwestern Virginia. He told of the narrow escapes and slow
progress that he and Kera had endured while trying to find his boy.
He explained how they had come across this camp and how he was
adamant that they bypass it and how Kera had charged ahead to
rescue the girls without him.

“One thing I learned through this whole
nightmare since it began in July,” Steven sighed, “is that you can
be the best prepared people in the world and circumstances still
can overcome all your preps and take from you everything if you let
down your guard for one moment.”

They sat around in silence absorbing
everything Steven had related to them, feeling very alone in the
world even as they looked to each other for companionship.

Katherine spoke first, her voice barely above
a whisper. “I was a sorority girl at UVA like Dontela said, the
Zeta Xi chapter of Alpha Delta Pi. It was summer, so there weren’t
a lot of students on campus. Our house is out with the Rugby Row
Fraternities, one of two sororities packed in with the fraternity
houses. It was a great location. I was there setting up for the
first year students’ orientation along with two of my sorority
sisters. A bunch of the students who were there for the summer
wanted to throw a big party that night. We decided to do it at our
sorority house.” She laughed. “We called it ‘Party with the Stars’
due to all the shooting stars that we were supposed to be able to
see later that night. Everybody came. It was packed with
undergrads, grad students, some of the locals, and a couple of
professors. It was a huge blowout.”

“I was there,” chimed in Dontela, her
inner-city dialogue disappearing as she got serious. “I hadn’t met
Katy yet. Don’t even know if I saw her that night since there were
so many people there. I was a biology major taking some summer
courses in math that I needed. Plus my boyfriend Shawn was there.
He was a grad student working as a summer intern for his professor.
Good excuse for me to be at UVA for the summer taking classes.” She
paused, her face sad with the memories. “We were supposed to get
married in a year when he was handed his degree. ‘Course, he’s gone
now.” She pressed the thought down somewhere deep inside her and
took a deep breath. “He talked me into going to the party since he
was a Frat guy in his undergraduate days. I wasn’t much of a
partier but he was all about going so I agreed. The party had about
the level of immaturity that I expected and Shawn did his thing
with his old frat buddies and was barely able to walk by the time
the light show started.” Her eyes grew distant. “When the shooting
stars started falling and dominated that sky, I had a foreboding
feeling that something bad was going to happen. It just seemed like
the whole night was bad mojo to me.