time, which means you don’t get prizes and you don’t write bestsellers.”
“No groupies?”
“You joke, but there are women attracted to brains. We don’t all die virgins.”
“Okay. And this relates to zombies how?”
“I think we have ourselves a genuine mad scientist. A supervillain.” He seemed really happy about the idea. I kind of wanted to punch him.
I glanced at Church, who raised his eyebrows in a “you’re the one who wanted to talk to him” kind of look.
Hu said, “I’m serious. We have someone with deep intellect and vast resources. I mean that: vast. Bear in mind that lots of terrorists come from oil-producing nations. It would take that kind of money for our Dr. Evil to do this sort of thing.”
“Got it. So has your supervillain actually managed to raise the dead?”
“No, look these walkers are not actually dead but they’re not alive, either.”
“I thought those were pretty much the only two choices.”
“Times change. You know that movie, Night of the Living Dead? Well, I think ‘living dead’ is a pretty good name for what we got here.” He took a Slinky off his desk and let it flow back and forth between his palms. “Here’s the thing, the body is designed by evolution to have natural redundancies, without which we’d never survive injury or illness. For example, you only really need about ten percent function of the liver, twenty percent function of one kidney, part of one lung. You can live with both arms and legs removed. There are millions of pages of research and case evaluation of patients who have continued to live well past the point where their bodies should have shut down. In some cases we can discover why, in some cases we’re still in the dark. With me so far?”
“Sure.”
“Now look at the walkers. If they were truly and completely dead then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d still be in Brooklyn and you’d be doing whatever you were doing before Mr. Church shanghaied you. Why? Because the dead are dead. They have zero brain function, they don’t get up and chase people.”
“Javad Mustapha was dead,” I pointed out. “I killed him. Twice.”
Hu shook his head. “No, you killed him once, and that was during your second encounter with him. Mind you, when you shot him during that raid you gave him what should have been mortal wounds, and he would have died had it not been for the presence of this pathogen; but this little bastard of a disease did not allow Javad to die. You see, this disease shuts down any part of the body that is not directly related to the purpose of its existence.”
“Which is?”
“To spread the disease. These things are designed to be vectors. Very aggressive vectors. The disease simply shut off the areas damaged by your bullets. Don’t look at me like that; I know how weird this sounds, but someone cooked up something that nearly kills its victims but at the same time prevents them from dying as we previously understood death. Plus, they added a little of this and a little of that so that the host body-the walker- aggressively spreads the pathogen. It’s marvelous but it’s bizarre, because the disease is constantly trying to kill the host while working like a bastard to keep parts of it alive.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does, but not in the way you think; and to a degree that does fit with nature sort of. When you have an infection the fever you get is the immune system’s attempt to burn it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes the fever does more harm than the disease. Psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis they’re a couple of examples of the immune system doing harm because it’s trying to fix the wrong problem, or trying too hard to fix a minor problem. In nature there are plenty of examples,” he said, “but what we have here is someone who has taken that concept into a totally new direction. We have a fatal disease, several parasites, gene therapy, plus some other shit we haven’t sorted out yet, all present in a molecular cluster unlike anything on record. If these guys weren’t trying to destroy America they could make billions off the patents alone.”
“Does this have anything to do with fatal familial insomnia?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Bonus points for even knowing that name. The answer to that is yes and no. That’s the prion disease they used as a starter kit, but they’ve tricked it out with the other stuff. Even now it has some of the characteristics of a typical TSE.”
“ ‘TSE’?”
“Prions are neurodegenerative diseases called ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,’ or TSEs,” he explained. “We still know very little about prion transmission and their pathogenesis. We do know that prions are proteins that have become folded and in that form act differently from normal proteins. These are strange little bastards they have no DNA and yet they’re capable of self-replication. Usually sporadic cases strike about one person per million, and at the moment these account for, say, about eighty-five percent of all TSE cases. Then you have familial cases, which account for ten percent of TSEs, and which are passed down through bloodlines in ways not yet understood, since inherited traits are genetic and, like I said, prions have no DNA. The remaining five percent are iatrogenic cases, which result from the accidental transmission of the causative agent via contaminated surgical equipment, or sometimes you see it occurring as a result of cornea or dura mater transplants, or in the administration of human-derived pituitary growth hormones. Still with me?”
“Clinging on by my fingernails. How come these prions are making monsters instead of just killing people?”
“It’s a design requirement of this new disease cluster. Prions produce a lethal decline of cognitive and motor function, and that allows the parasite-driven aggression to cruise past conscious control. Somebody took the prion and attached it to these parasites. Don’t even ask how because we don’t know yet. It’ll be a new process, something they invented. They essentially turned a TSE into a fast-acting serum transfer pathogen, but with all sorts of extras, most notably aggression. The victim’s aggression is amped up in such a way as to closely imitate the rage response some PCP and meth addicts have on the downside of a strong high. Ever see the movie 28 Days Later? No? You should. The sequel rocks, too. Anyway, that movie dealt with a virus that stimulated the rage centers in the brain to the point that it was so dominant that all other brain functions were blocked out. The victims existed in total, unending, and ultimately unthinking rage. Very close to what we have here.”
“What, you think a terrorist with a Ph.D. in chemistry watched a sci-fi flick and thought ‘Hey, that’s a good way to kill Americans’?”
Hu shrugged. “After all the stuff I’ve seen in the last week, I wouldn’t be surprised. Now, there may be some higher brain functions but if so it would be far lower than the most advanced Alzheimer’s patient.”
“An Alzheimer’s patient is still going to feel pain, and I beat the shit out of Javad and he didn’t so much as blink.”
“Yeah, well, we’re getting into one of our many gray areas. Remember that we’re not dealing with a natural mutation, so a lot of what we know will be based on field observation and clinical testing.”
“So if we’re talking disease why are we also talking living dead? How does that work?”
“That’s something we’re working on with the walkers we harvested from St. Michael’s,” Hu said, and for the moment there was no fanboy smirk on his face. “This disease cluster reduces so much of the body’s functions that it goes into a kind of hibernative state. That’s what we’ve been calling ‘death’ for these cases, but we’re wrong. When you shot Javad his body was already ravaged by the disease and the injuries hastened the process. He slipped into a hibernative coma that was so deep that the EMTs who checked his vitals got nothing. Consider this,” he said, shifting in his chair, “animals can hibernate and to a very, very limited degree so can humans. Not easily, but it sometimes happens. You see it once in a while in hypothermia cases. But when a ground squirrel hibernates its metabolism drops down to like one percent of normal. Unless you had sophisticated equipment you’d think it was dead. Even its heart beats so infrequently that a cut wouldn’t bleed much because the blood pressure is too low.”
“Can’t some yogis do the same thing?”
“Not even close. Even in the deepest yogic trance their metabolism is maybe ninety-nine or at most ninety- eight percent of normal. These walkers, on the other hand, are going into hibernative states as deep as a ground squirrel’s. Much deeper than a hibernating bear. Almost anyone who checked their vitals would declare them dead. We had to use machines to establish this and even then we almost missed it. What we have here is someone who has managed to either splice ground squirrel DNA to that of humans-and before you ask, no, they are not compatible according to what we know of modern transgenics-or they’ve found a way to alter the chemistry of the body to cause artificial hibernation. Either way, we can see the effect but we’re nowhere close to understanding it.”
