The Exodus Is Over
Chapter Seven - Skin Of The Teeth
Excerpt from Part 2 The Search For A Cure
Thank you to my B-Readers, Mom, Leslie, Jane, and many others who don’t necessarily seek out genre fiction for the beach. Having the opinions of people who aren’t beholden to the genre helps make the work that much stronger. Richard Pine at Inkwell, gets a shout out for timeless and thoughtful advice that has helped make me a better writer.
I am most especially grateful to my copy editors, Chance, Peter and Tony. Your insight is invaluable. You keep me from looking the fool.
OF SUDDEN ORIGIN - PART 1 THE EXODUS IS OVER
Copyright © 2014 Christopher Harwood / Fate & Fortune Press
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In 1999 professor of anthropology Jeffery A Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh postulated a solution to the so-called Missing Link. He proposed, that given the poor fossil record for evolutionary graduation, that there were no missing links. He then offered an alternative to the accepted Darwinian model: Rather than life evolving through a slow adaptation to ever changing environmental factors, he suggested that evolution was actually a history of rapid genesis and extinction, with long periods of stasis in between. Schwartz used a growing body of molecular scientific evidence to show that evolution is not a progression of perceptible mutations within species, but rather a series of sudden origins, where new species burst forth upon the scene.
In 2010 Chris Venditti and Andrew Meade at the University of Reading in the UK and Mark Pagel at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, followed up on Schwartz’s work, among others, with a paper published in Nature.
They concluded that the Darwinian theory of natural selection (whereby, over eons, transformations occur due to subtle changes in environment) made up for only 8% of evolutionary change. While studying rates of speciation in 101 groups of plants, animals, and fungi, they used four different evolutionary models to see which model best fit evolutionary history. They concluded that 78% of evolutionary family trees came into existence via singular, rare events, such as dramatic climate change, heaving mountains, shifting lands and
disease
- to name just a few.
In 2004 engineers and scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan successfully forced an evolutionary leap: In a process likened to natural selection, they made random alterations in the DNA of E Coli bacterium and then observed the bacterium come up with an entirely new way to make disulfide bonds – the stiffening struts that help give proteins their shape. A critical structural component of healthy proteins, disulfides keep molecules from forming into the broken building blocks of disease, such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and mad cow. These researchers offered a new alternative to the control of disease – bioengineered evolution.
Creationists have latched on to some of the above, to support their own theory - that an intelligent being, an omniscient engineer, controls all of this – completely new creatures simply don’t spring forth from the ether; a greater hand is involved. Scientists would of course disagree; pointing out that these new manifestations are but the final result of an immeasurable buildup of genetic mutations – mutations, that when given the right environment, the right set of circumstances, will spring forth as new species.
PART ONE
The Exodus is Over
GROWING THINGS
Like most prey animals, the white-tailed deer exits the womb and in moments, struggles to stand. To survive in a world where it is a delicacy on the large predator’s list, it must be able to run almost as soon as it hits the ground. In a dense forest in Northern New England, a very odd looking infant who was already on the edge of intellectualizing this, watched with glee as its mother butchered a fawn. In its own way, this baby was a creature born to survive the moment it entered the world. Within the labyrinth of connections in its fast growing brain, there was a new sense, a new skill if you will, that neither dear Mother Earth, nor God if you prefer, had ever experimented with. While its mother, and a few others around her, gorged themselves on the flesh of the still twitching animal, the infant directed Mom to concentrate on the choicest parts. Though its own sharp teeth were just breaking through its gums, and it still preferred her warm milk rather than blood marrow and muscle, it could nevertheless taste, smell and feel what its mother was eating. Everything that its mother sensed, the baby sensed as well. Its mind was connected through the ether to the others. As such, it directed its mother to eat only the choicest parts. As she gorged herself, it could feel and sense the mild frustration of the other’s around it, and it gleefully directed them to chew on the lesser bits.
As it sat on the forest floor, crushing leaves between its tiny fists, the infant got an idea: a part of it already understood humor, and it directed one skinny male to gnaw on a hoof. The child could sense the male’s irritation, and its sharp pointy ears folded back with amusement while a large smile spread across its healthy pudgy face. It watched its legs kicking with pleasure and it couldn't help but notice how different its legs were from the others around it. This thought, like all its thoughts, immediately transferred to the mother. What was left of its mother's mind thought,
Fucking odd shape. Like the thing I'm gorging on.
The child's legs were hinged like the rear hocks of any fourlegged animal, only with elongated human feet; like a cat's hindquarters; built for speed.
Driving through ancient New England farmland, Jon Washington listened to the engine of his Jeep sputter with its last sips of fuel. With exhausted eyes, he scanned the old stone walls that broke up the rural landscape and thought, I don’t have a clue about growing things. When his truck finally ran out of gas on a dirt road in the middle of a forest in New Hampshire, he looked around the thick wood and decided that he was far enough from civilization to warrant a piss… standing, instead of sitting, a bottle held to his crotch, the doors locked, engine running.
He’d been driving for five days straight; the last of the police and Army checkpoints the only things slowing him down. Atlanta had fallen in early April, and when Charlotte had been compromised, he, like all refugees, kept heading north. He had paused in Atlantic City where another wall had been hastily erected. He could still reach his editors who had bugged out to New York so he settled in to gather more information, report on what he thought could be helpful. A week later, commercial communication in North America fully broke down.
In some ways it had paid off to wait until the last moment to leave; the byways of the nation were now mostly open to him. At first, working north from Florida, he had struggled with the masses, witnessing the worst of the human animal when overcome by fear. It had been so tragically cliche, so Hollywood disaster, disappointing… but so very understandable. The bulk of the population who were still ambulatory, had run in shear panic; literally driving over each other trying to escape. On the highway to hell that was Interstate 95, the number of victims of mob rule was too many to count. He could only marvel at the way that people became lemmings, the flight instinct taking over any rational thought. If they hadn’t run each other over, they’d shot at each other in pointless me-first-isms. Law Enforcement, First Responders and the Military simply couldn’t handle the mindless wave - not for lack of a plan, not for lack of trying - many a selfless soldier, firefighter and cop died trying. It was sheer numbers multiplied by abject terror. Nothing frightens a human being more than the idea of being eaten alive. Nothing stirs pure unmitigated panic in a person than the notion of being ripped limb from limb while being eaten alive by other human beings.
Jon pulled the parking brake and climbed out of the 4X4 while grabbing his police baton and shotgun, pilfered from a dead cop’s car. The two tools had become extensions of his arms since Atlantic City. His truck was loaded to the gills with other less fortunate people’s survival gear; again, being one of the last ones out made for easy pickings.
The air smelled clean. It had rained earlier and the damp pine needles mixed with ozone made the surroundings fresh and sweet. During the entire drive north he kept telling himself he’d have to grow things. The canned and foil-wrapped food he’d scavenged wouldn’t last him long. Hunting was something else all together. Other than the three Fiends in Atlantic City, he’d never shot anything in his life, and that had made him vomit.
As a reporter for the
Atlanta Daily Mail
, Jon Washington had been at the front lines. His ability to get information to the rest of the country was, he thought, the most important thing he could do. Information was critical in keeping the American people safe. Information was the best weapon they had.
When the Everglades containment fencing (also known as the
Everglades Wall
) failed, Jon Washington was there to report that the Army was falling back to the
Lakeland
blockade, giving citizens the time to move north behind the next barrier, officially named
The Orlando Wall
.
Before the Orlando Wall collapsed, Jon was among the first to note, from personal experience, that the infected had somehow gained a foothold on the North side. It was then that the WHO had gotten somewhat of a lock on the disease. It was bacterial in nature, and like the bacteria that causes meningitis, it was capable of passing through the blood-brain barrier; the vicious creature piggybacking on the very white blood cells that the body was sending to destroy it. They determined that it wasn’t just spreading from a bite or a breath; it was showing up in municipal drinking water. The consensus was that someone was doing this. It was terrorism and it was national.
When people were suddenly becoming infected in Los Angeles in late March, then Seattle and other big cities, up to that point free of “infected” behavior, it was considered terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.
The disease was dubbed Frontal Negation Dementia by a USAMRIID scientist named Andre Zacharia and shortened to its acronym FND-z. The people gave it another name, one that they could get their heads around, one that made sense given the biblical proportions of its spread; they called it Cain’s Disease – Cain: He who slaughtered his brother.
It began with an insatiable thirst that water couldn’t quench. At first, many thought it was some kind of rodent poison, but that was quickly dispelled when the victim began to behave as if he’d been drugged with a huge hit of PCP: A person, once fully succumbed to Cain’s, has a tenfold threshold for pain; muscles that once seemed fit to only lift a can of food, could now, in a short burst of energy, heave a refrigerator aside, kick down a door or grab a wrist and never let go.
Fiends
(as the infected became known from the phonetic of FND-z) could be anyone, even your grandmother sitting right next to you. At first she’s thirsty and then she’s begging for water, which offers no remedy as her skin grows hotter and she sweats through her nightgown. Over a period of hours she rants and raves in feverish delusion, her guts twisting in pain, agony building with frightening speed, the helplessness of the observer compounding every moment. Then a sudden calm, usually sleep, even a coma-like state. The fever has broken. Thank God. She can rest. An extra blanket is found. Another cool washcloth applied. Her color returns and her eyes finally open, and… grandma isn’t grandma anymore. With eyes and mouth suddenly dripping with desire, she offers a look that can only be described as purest evil. She’s still human, but there is nothing human in that look; a smiling rabid wolf occupies the space that was her. Laughing with lust, she attacks. She’s as strong as an ape because she feels almost no pain. She’ll snap her own bones in the struggle to gorge herself on your blood, to take a bite right out of your face, your neck, your thigh, tearing into your muscles with talon like fingers and literally shredding them off your skeleton. And this won’t stop until she’s either been shot, stabbed or beaten to death. She’s the perfect killing machine, a shark that can’t be sated. If you initially survived her attack, it wouldn’t be more than twenty-four hours before you became a Fiend as well. A bite, or getting spittle or a splash of blood in the mouth, eye, open wound, even too close a breath and it’s all over. Do yourself before it does you.