The Latest Strain

[Iun]

Based on a dream I had, I'm hoping to expand this into a full short-story.

 

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The bastard virus had adapted again. Syme could barely believe his tired eyes, but what he had seen under the glare of the microscope had now confirmed what the troops had been saying for a few days now: the virus had adapted again. He thought they would have had longer from the last adaptation, and yet there it was under his nose.

 

The first one had been a sudden rapid increase in bone density around the crown of the skull, making kills more difficult. Then came the reinforcement of weak points – the eye sockets, sinus cavities and the back of the throat. Suddenly a stiletto in the eye no longer did the trick as you now had to aim for a very specific area that was almost impossible to reach in the panic of a close-quarters struggle.

 

A bullet still worked, of course. However, supply could not keep up with demand. And Parson’s group had concluded – spuriously, in the opinion of Symes and his colleagues- that the virus was in the process of making yet another bone density adaptation that would render anything less than an armour-piercing round a waste of ammunition within the next month or two. Again, in the opinion of Symes, the evidence was circumstantial at best.

 

Furthermore, there had been a more recent evolution in the defences that was easily documented: the redundant brain matter had begun to degrade at a phenomenally quicker rate. Which meant that survivors of the plague were not only having to aim for very definite points on the outside to actually penetrate the bone, but were also having to jerk their tools into the small areas of the skull where functioning brain matter still existed. It had turned what was already a difficult task for the average human into an impossible feat of overcoming fear, panic, adrenaline and a brutal physical onslaught all at the same time.

 

And now… now the bastard virus had adapted again.

 

They could speak.

 

Oh, the reason centres of the brain still decayed rapidly, so a lengthy debate on the similarities of the Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing was still off the cards…. But even so, walking corpses with the ability to beg for mercy, cry for help and to call out like a wounded comrade in the dark…

 

Hundreds of the precious few thousands of trained soldiers remaining had been lost within a few days. In a fight where the enemy outnumbered you already by a minimum of ten thousand to one, the loss of one gun was terrifying.

 

Syme rocked his chair backwards and grasped his jaw tightly in his hand. Psychological warfare.There was something almost artistic about a virus that turned your loved ones into ravening, violent dead husks that then begged you not to kill them as they tried to pass on the same disease through a bite. That is, if the shuffling revenant didn’t devour your entire body before levels of virus hit the trigger point – the point where chemical signals detectable to other infected told them that the meal was over. This was something of a logical niggle for Syme: the virus did not immediately communicate with the attacking infected that transmission had been successful, so there was a risk that the newly infected host would have the muscles it needed for locomotive power to infect others devoured by the attacker or attackers. There was even the possibility that in feeding, the infected would devour the brain of the victim, rendering the passing of the virus useless. Again, Parsons and his like had hypothesized that this was an evolutionary act – the strong devoured the weak.

 

Yet, seen in the light of this discovery… was the virus giving the victim hope? Was the fact that they were still pursued by the walking dead right up until and even beyond the point of death just a perverse way of suggesting that the infection was reversible? Or was it a means to get the newly-infected into a place where he would be surrounded by a crowd of potential new hosts at the point of reanimation?

 

Syme shuddered. Anthropomorphising an infectious agent was likely a sign of overwork.