Flesh Wounds, page 31
“And it’ll be the fucking end of the world.”
From an unpublished document maintained by the Special Pathogens Branch of the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA:
A DESCRIPTION OF THE EBOLA ZAIRE VIRUS
AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE HUMAN BODY
Biohazard Level 4 Hot Agent.
Filovirus: Ebola Zaire.
Ebola Zaire is named for the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo, or Zaire, River. The first known outbreak of E. Zaire occurred in 1976 when it erupted simultaneously in 55 villages near the headwaters of the Ebola River. Additional microbreaks have been documented since that time, but reports are sketchy. Known strains of Ebola include E. Zaire, E. Sudan, and E. Reston. Together with Marburg, these comprise the filovirus group. Ebola is distantly related to measles, mumps, rabies, certain pneumonia viruses, parainfluenza, and respiratory syncytial virus. A primitive “life form,” Ebola particles contain one strand of RNA and only seven proteins, three of which are vaguely understood and four of which are completely unknown. These proteins seem to target the immune system like HIV; however, Ebola does in ten days what HIV takes ten years to accomplish. Of the filoviruses, E. Zaire is inarguably the worst.
E. Zaire attacks every organ and tissue with the exception of skeletal muscle and bone. Early symptoms include headache, fever, back and muscle aches, and petechiae (red spots which are hemorrhages under the skin). Blood clots lodge in the capillaries where they shut off the supply of blood to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue, and all through the skin. Ebola attacks connective tissue with particular ferocity, multiplying in collagen (the protein which holds organs together). Collagen in the body softens and the underlayers of the skin die and liquefy. The skin actually separates from the underlying flesh and bone. Spontaneous rips appear in the skin, pouring hemorrhagic blood. The maculopapular rash merges to become huge bruises. The skin goes soft and pulpy and tears off under any pressure. The mouth, gums, and salivary glands bleed. This bleeding is a bright red arterial flow and it does not stop because the body’s clotting factors have all been exhausted. The host literally bleeds out beneath the surface of his skin. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, often during explosive vomiting of hemorrhagic blood resulting from internal bleeding.
The back of the throat and the lining of the windpipe may also slough off. The heart muscles soften and the heart bleeds into its chambers. As the heart beats, it also floods the chest cavity with blood. The brain becomes clogged with dead blood cells. The lining of the eyeball is attacked and the eyes fill with blood. Victims may weep blood. The lungs fill up with blood and the host has difficulty breathing. Hemispherical strokes are common. Blood examined under a microscope shows that the red blood cells have been destroyed. Cells still under attack are fat with clusters of replicating virus particles.
Ebola triggers a spotty necrosis that spreads throughout the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then cracks apart. The kidneys become clogged with dead cells and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen becomes a single blood clot the size of a baseball. The intestines typically fill with blood. The lining of the gut dies and is sloughed off into the bowels where it is defecated with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat and bruise. In women, the labia become blue and protrusive and there is massive vaginal bleeding. In both sexes, the nipples bleed. Pregnant women abort the fetus spontaneously. The fetus is infected with the virus.
Ebola destroys the brain. Depersonalization occurs as the virus destroys the higher brain functions, leaving only the deeper, most primitive brain stem functions intact. Eventually even these are destroyed as the brain is liquefied. Victims often go into epileptic convulsions, thrashing and spraying blood everywhere.
Ebola multiplies so rapidly that the body’s infected cells become crystal-like blocks of packed virus particles. The blocks appear near the center of the cell and then migrate toward the surface where it disintegrates in hundreds of individual virus particles which breach the cell wall and spread, continuing to multiply until all the body is filled with the virus. This amplification continues until a single droplet of the host’s blood may contain a hundred million virus particles.
In the final stage, the host goes into shock and loses consciousness from loss of blood. Transfusions are impossible because the veins have collapsed. After death, the cadaver deteriorates quickly. The internal organs, having been clinically dead for days, dissolve. A meltdown occurs as the connective tissue, skin, and organs liquefy. The fluids that leak from the cadaver are saturated with Ebola particles.
McLaughlin called again, first thing in the morning, just before the Indian made his appearance. Jesse hung up on his boss. He tore the phone cord from the wall. He was tempted to do as McLaughlin said and come into the office. There would be a certain justice in sitting down across the desk from him, in sharing the death that explodes now from his body with every exhalation.
But Jesse used the very last of his strength to make one trip out to the garage and back. By that time he had lost all sense of equilibrium. Something had torn in his gut, leaving him with a bulbous, tearing pregnancy in his lower abdomen like a malignant child wanting out. He wasn’t sure he could move anymore. A bare stretch of carpet in his living room looked comfortable enough, so he sat there. At least there was no pain. His nervous system was too far gone for that.
The Indian came back for the second otter, lifting it from the blood-soaked blanket and cradling it carefully in his arms. “Where do you take them?” Jesse asked.
“Home,” answered the Indian, “to that place where I first created them.”
“Will you also come for me?”
The Indian pondered the question for an eternity. Jesse thought he might have lost consciousness at least once in that time. He worried for a moment that he might have even missed the answer, but finally the Indian nodded soberly. “I will come back for you, Jesse Sanders, when your work is done.”
And then the Indian was gone, as if he’d never been there, leaving Jesse to think about their first meeting.
I offer you a cleansing and the chance to see the catalyst that you’ve become, the Indian had said.
Jesse understood the vision of the sweat lodge. From jungle to monkey to otter... to him. A series of mutations in which the virus gathered intelligence and strength. A new strain of filovirus in the birthing. An airborne assassin now. Incredibly contagious and incredibly fast. The next transmission would be the last. Jesse is catalyst and cataclysm in one. The beginning and the end. The sacrifice and the promise: today for tomorrow. Mother Nature had done him only one cathartic favor, she’d given him the chance to see what he was delivering. And now she promised him a place to rest afterward.
He laughed, a sick bubbling of arterial blood flaked with tarry clots. It would serve McLaughlin right if he were capable of delivering it in person. From McLaughlin it would spread, unstoppable. A global cleansing. An end. And a beginning. The earth would survive. Time would march on... without mankind.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even allow someone to find him like this. He refused to sell out his species.
Despite the dehydration, he was vomiting as much as ever. It poured from him, a concoction of blood and liquefied tissue and the microscopic death of virus particles. His clothing was soaked with it. It was in his mouth and his eyes and spreading out from where he sat, a black tide on the carpet when viewed through the red filter over his eyes. He seemed to be bleeding from everywhere. His home had taken on the odor of carnage and the color red.
All colors bleed to red.
The three gallon gas can he took from the garage was half full. He hoped there’d be enough. He couldn’t get on his feet to spread it around, so he merely sloshed it about, poured it into his lap, and splashed it over his head. No pain, even when it ran through the bleeding crenelations in his flesh. The vapors rose like red heat waves.
For awhile, he sat there, forgetting what he’d set out to do, forgetting why it was important that he do anything. Then it took him several more minutes to remember where he had put the matches. His mind was going. Some distant, coherent remnant of who he had been before the intruder had converted so much of him to virus and liquid waste spurred him on.
He opened the matchbook.
Took one out.
Laid it carefully against the sand paper striking surface.
Just a spark. That was all he needed.
The wet slap of the carpet across his eyes told him that he had fallen over. He had, in the terms of those who deal with such events, crashed and bled out.
Just a spark.
Please.
* * *
The author wishes to acknowledge the work of Richard Preston. Those readers doubting the plausibility of this story should read Preston’s enlightening and terrifying account of emerging filoviruses, The Hot Zone. As Preston points out, “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a 24 hour plane flight from every city on Earth.”
* * *
Flotsam
She washed up in their surf, this whale of a woman, bobbing and rolling all bloated and white... like a dead beluga, or an oversized, discarded milk carton. But she wasn’t a beluga, was in fact nothing that had come from their ocean—leastwise not in the last several millennia. She wasn’t garbage either. As the surf ground her against the sand and the shell-wash, flesh and blood permeated the saltwater. They could taste her. It was the taste of castoff, of rejection, of loneliness and despair and misuse, but mostly it just tasted of death.
“Have we seen this one before?” asked Swift, hoping for past history from which to derive some preliminary hypothesis. Where had she originated? What land-locked currents had brought her to their sea?
Dancer ran a quick search of the Collective, checking for any past sighting, the woman as a child perhaps, standing cautiously with the waves breaking around her waist and her tiny hand clenched in an adult’s, or as a teenager, frolicking with giggling girlfriends and vociferous boys. The Collective was a compendium of these sightings, passed from generation to generation, from one cetacean species to another, constantly updated as pods encountered each other on the migratory routes. Dancer’s search came up with nothing. Either the dead woman had never set foot in the ocean, or on a beach or pier—or no cetacean had ever seen her do so. “I think,” she told Swift, gently nudging aside his attempts to mate with her, “that we’ll have to make a new entry for her.”
“Maybe we should try pushing her back?” But Swift knew it was too late for that. From the look of it, she’d quit breathing some time ago. Her lungs were full of seawater, and he had but the most rudimentary grasp of how that fluid might be removed and replaced with air. He leaped out into the cool morning air to get a look at the beach. Even if they were successful at moving her back into her own environment, there were none of her kind around to help.
They probed her with sonar clicks, high-frequency whistles and directed pulses mapping her body as surely as any CAT scan. She was fat, but she had been fatter. In the gas-bloated tautness of her skin, they found the scar-like trails of stretch marks concentrated around hips and thighs, breasts and stomach, lighter bands against the already pale hue of her flesh. There were small scars which seemed to indicate that some of her bulk had at one time been taken by predators or parasites. Such was their logic that they couldn’t formulate such a concept as willingly sacrificing a part of one’s self. Human vanity was a mystery to them, one far more complicated than the task of mapping the currents and tides which tossed up these corpses more and more frequently.
Their probing revealed no anomalous growths, no deformities or past traumas of any significance. There were minor, negligible scars of the type acquired through everyday living. There were the usual accumulations of heavy metals and toxins, things the humans might know as mercury, lead, organa halogens, and PCBs, but the dolphins only recognized as unnatural intruders to the body. These were elements the dolphins had become accustomed to finding within themselves, as well as every other dweller of the sea.
She’d never borne children, perhaps never even mated (but that was a difficult call to make), and had never marked her body with any of the colorful designs so common among the younger members of her species. Her hair was long and blond (Swift loved the feel of it against his belly), softer than any kelp or sea grass. She was naked. She was cold. She was dead.
Swift mourned her loss, same as he did that of any intelligent species, and wished for the thousandth time that he could either understand why these things happened or be given a different assignment by the Council of Elders. Still, the sight of her did not hit him as hard as the infant they’d found the week before. He had pushed that one back on the land, struggling forward until his own body lay half exposed on the beach, bottle-shaped nose repeatedly pushing at the tiny body as if all he had to do was awaken the child. But the child had been, like this woman, dead. And when Swift had finally managed to struggled back into the sea, it was with the knowledge that man killed not only cetaceans, but his own kind as well.
“There’s no sign of injury,” Dancer said when she’d finished entering the sonar data into the Collective.
“She drowned herself,” Swift acknowledged, thinking it obvious.
“Perhaps she was shunned by the others,” Dancer suggested.
“Why would they do something like that?” He rolled through her hair again, its silken length whispering down his side, across his claspers, and over his flukes.
“Why do they do any of the things that they do?” she countered.
He agreed that it was incomprehensible. The mystery of this woman’s death, the loss of the sheer potential that she embodied as a sentient being, was beyond him. And if she had intentionally stranded herself here, how could the others have allowed it—or, worse, driven her to it?
They made their entries, logged their observations in the hopes that another survey team might later be able to draw some conclusions, and then they made their way up the beach, frolicking in the surf, making love in the whitecaps. Dancer put the dead woman out of her mind. But Swift could not. He remembered her hair, so long and lustrous as it billowed in the waves. He tried to imagine the warmth and softness of her. Wondered what it would be like to feel her next to him, to be stroked by those cleverly constructed hands. He would never know.
No one ever would.
Out the Back Door
Long after his heroes were ghosts, the very old man decided to take his leave. Because his jailers were watching the front, he decided to risk the tangled weeds and crumbling concrete in the back. Better a broken ankle or cracked skull than the tearful embraces and pleas that would hold him back. He had made up his mind. Screwed on his most courageous face. Put the minute affairs of what had once been his life in order. And made his decision.
He was determined that he would not be swayed. Not this time.
The house, his prison, reflected all that was left of his life. The barren rooms and peeling walls. The musty drapes and cobwebbed corners. The threadbare carpet, empty picture frames, and sagging kitchen cabinets. The echoes. The shadows. The emptiness.
He would not be swayed. Not this time.
They’d stopped him before. Love, in her gossamer gown and opal shoes. Youth, with his wild hair and ragged jeans. The twins, Passion and Lust, with their touch and their kisses and their sweet scented breath. Friendship, Courage, and Joy. Glory and Promise and Hope. They were Memories—the good ones, at least, those which he hadn’t long since locked away in the room upstairs. They were his memories. And they were his jailers.
The door opened easily enough, creaking on its rust-crusted hinges. He winced at the sound, glancing back toward the front room where the Memories held congress.
“Remember when...” they would say in turn, those two words the preface for every recollection; more, for their very existence. The ballfield where he and his friends played as children. That one glorious touchdown in high school. The first time he laid eyes on Betty. The births of his children. The birthdays, holidays, sunsets, and wines. All the memorable moments comprising the sum total of who and what he’d been.
Except the bad Memories. Those he’d trapped in the room upstairs, forgotten now, quiet. Too quiet, for at times he found he missed even them. Pain and Suffering. Sorrow and Grief. Loss and Boredom, Melancholy, Despair, and even Hate. These Memories, too, were a part of his life.
The outside of the house was no better than the inside. The paint was peeling away from the weathered siding. The weeds choked at the crumbling foundation, cutting away at the very roots of his life so that those early Memories, many now lost, were the dimmest and most feeble.
He stepped across the threshold to the small concrete step, a springboard from here to there—wherever there might be. The door closed easily enough behind him, but the snap of the latch seemed incredibly loud. He imagined the conversation in the front room coming to an abrupt end as they realized he had snuck away. He imagined their frantic flight through the kitchen to the back door. He knew he didn’t have long, but the figure on the back lawn had frozen him in place.
Death.
He wore the appropriate black, but there was no scythe and his face was soft and kind. The frame concealed by his robes was thin, but by no stretch of the imagination skeletal. His feet were firmly planted in the weeds. His eyes were a quiet turquoise.
