Journals of the Damned (Book 1) Page 5

  On the television there is a new video of a vicious wolverine attack. In a small town up in Canada, north of Ontario (I forget the name of the little town), school had started up again, as it has here. The town hadn't, miraculously, suffered from the wave of insane creatures much at all. They were lax in their wariness and they paid for it. A group of parents were escorting and waiting with their children, (elementary school kids the same age as my sister Lucy), for the bus to pick them up and take them to school. It looked to me as if the parents thought that any animals wouldn't attack them solely based on the fact that there were adults present. Everything was going as it should have yesterday morning and the bus arrived on time. The children boarded, the parents stood back and waved. As the bus driver was talking to one of the mothers, he was holding the folding bus door open about half way. before continuing upon his route a nasty, huge wolverine bounded out of a cement drainage pipe from the ditch next to the bus stop. It was obvious nobody was expecting anything like this at all, and none of them even knew what was happening until the parasite maddened animal ran up the bus steps and immediately went for the drivers throat.

  The video is from the camera inside the bus and panic and pandemonium ensued. The drivers throat had been quickly ripped out and arterial blood was spurting in great gushes onto the mass of screaming children behind him. There was a mad rush for the emergency door at the back of the bus as the crazed thing finished off the driver who was dying fast. Both the kids inside and the parents outside went to the back of the bus and started hurriedly getting the children off the bus as quickly as possible.

  One girl had somehow gotten her backpack tangled on one of the seats and fell down hard in the aisle. The little girl was screaming and crying as she yanked as hard as she could on the strap from her backpack that had gotten wedged between the upper and lower seat cushions. Just as she freed her backpack from the seat and it looked like she would be able to run to safety, the blood-lust driven beast went after her. The driver could do nothing but clasp his hands over his ripped opened jugular in a futile effort to save his own life.

  It was that same backpack that probably saved the girls life, when the wolverine jumped heavily on her and knocked her back to the floor. The parasite infected wolverine slashed its wickedly sharp claws and bit the backpack furiously, scattering pieces of it all around.

  One of the braver parents, rushed up to the animal, past the weakly struggling driver, and actually pulled the beast from the little girls back. Snapping and wriggling forcefully, the hairy fiend turned, in a flash, to attack the poor, brave woman.

  The young girl managed to escape but the brave woman, in her mid-thirties, quickly fell in the drivers blood. The animal showed no mercy. The maddened animal went for her face and throat and quickly delivered fatal wounds.

  The remaining parents and children abandoned the helpless victims, fleeing the area as the wolverine sliced the woman's flesh to ribbons.

  A neighbor heard the commotion and using a revolver, shot the wolverine repeatedly. The driver died, there on the bus while the woman died in the hospital shortly thereafter. At least the girl survived, without a scratch but minus a backpack.

  So yeah, we still face the threat of attacks, even though most of the infected animals have finally died of thirst, starvation or bullets.

  The first day back to my school was an odd and extremely uncomfortable experience. A mixture of fear and uncertainty hung in the air. Almost twenty percent of the students were absent and all of the normal joking and teenage energy was gone. The normal endless talking and bravado had been drained out of the students, replaced by a depressed silence. The sound of itching and scratching and relentless fidgeting was at times greater than the muted voices of the teachers' instructions. Every student, every teacher, except for a small handful of us, had signs of a rash. Most of the students and staff had headaches and some were showing signs of psychological trauma such as facial tics.

  I, and everybody else, knew in our hearts upon seeing this that it had to be because of the parasite. It was easy enough to think it was the normal onset of a cold or allergies when you're at home with your family, but when you went into a public place like a school and saw that it wasn't just you and your family that had the signs, that it was literally everyone, then we knew. Although everyone was aware of the enormity of what this meant, it went unsaid. Nobody wants to speak of this, out of fear of what might happen, as if talking of it will make it real. Everyone is afraid that the parasite will do to us what it did to the animals.

  My little sister is scratching her legs raw, only by covering her legs with calamine lotion does she cease the infernal scratching. My mother complains of having a headache and I catch her sneaking a quick itch when she thinks I'm not looking. They both have it. I don't feel any different, besides being scared and depressed, and I don't know what I'll do if I lose them.

  I watched the news tonight, before I wrote this. There was a brief acknowledgement of the new symptoms showing itself world-wide, it was downplayed and kept low key. When even the sensationalist media refuses to speak of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room I know it's bad. Everyone is secretly hoping, praying, that this is a temporary last gasp of the contagion before it dies off. After all, most of the larger mammals have proven immune. There is a good chance that this will pass and we can struggle with what is left of the world.

  I finally got some of my questions answered about the parasite from my mother. Getting that information from her was like pulling out her teeth with a pair of rusty pliers.

  The closest anyone has found to a cure is not only temporary, it carries with it a forty percent lethality rate. The host has to be basically poisoned to such an extent that even with close supervision there is still the chance that the cure will be too much for the patient's system to handle. Even when the cure is successful the patient is reinfected that same day, as the airborne eggs are literally everywhere. The patient would have to be kept inside a tightly sealed and filtered environment until the eggs are biologically rendered inert. Only once the last of the eggs are no longer viable, that is once all of the contaminated animal corpses, droppings and etc. are disposed of will there be no more of the minute eggs in the air. It's not only that though. This may prove to be an impossible task. Humans are now carriers of the parasite and they are growing colonies inside us and reproducing. The infinitesimal eggs are being spread by us, through our feces, mucus and other bodily fluids. The whole population of the planet would have to be cured at the same time, and only once the other sources of the plague have been eliminated.

  The headaches and itching are symptoms of the infection, just as I figured they were. Even though my mom tried her best to reassure me that there will be a cure soon, I am afraid. Even if they find the cure tomorrow how long will it take to mass produce enough drugs for the entire world?

  If the disease stabilizes we will survive this. If the disease follows the path in us, as it has in the maddened animals, then we only have about two weeks until we face our own "extinction event".

  Friday, September 21, 2012

  Nobody knows what's happening. The stress and sheer horror of the "Rat Death" and the "Rat Flu", followed quickly by the "Madness" had people near the breaking point to begin with. Now with the animal insanity over, humanity is facing a severe food shortage. Add to this the collapse of the fragile economy that had just started to grow again after the years long, world-wide recession. Top all of this off with a virulent unknown disease infecting everyone and shake well. It's a recipe for disaster.

  Unemployment has just jumped to a staggering forty percent. This is going to be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930's. Stock markets around the world went into a downward spiral once the reality of the global extinction event started to hit home. Every fast food chain has closed its doors. Every restaurant has shut down. There's no butter or milk to even make bread. There's no eggs. Whatever is left, rice, flour, beans and fish are in extremely short supply. Gro
cery stores are practically empty, many are only open once or twice a week, what they do have stocked is being sold at hugely inflated prices. People are hoarding whatever they can get their hands on causing even further shortages and even higher prices.

  A lot of the dogs, although they are immune to the parasitic infection, were decimated by the fear that they would go insane like the rest of the animals. Now, those people that managed to hang onto their pets are reporting that their dogs are being stolen. Undoubtedly they are being eaten.

  So many people thought they were so much better than the animals. They treated the animals with absolutely no respect. Now the animals are gone and we can't survive without them.

  Exasperating this is the new trend of illegally hunting any of the animals that survived for their meat. The deer and bears cannot simply swim out into the waters to escape men with rifles. The parasite dealt a crushing blow to the animal kingdom, and we are knowingly, going to give it the final death blow. It's sad to say that people are also trapping and eating blackbirds and robins and any other thing they can catch. How did that song go, "Three and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie."? We are going back to the dark ages.

  It is a simple fact of nature that when the preys numbers drop, so do the predators. The world has seen the rise of seven billion humans on the planet and decided it didn't like it. If the numbers of the animals we fed on dropped by ninety percent so will ours, by starvation.

  Murder, suicide and the crime rate as a whole is on the rise.

  People are rioting over food and just like every riot, the looting quickly spreads.

  On the news today there was a video of a homeless man with a placard stating that the world was coming to an end. This isn't new or surprising in itself, in every city there is always that one guy, standing on his soapbox trying to warn the rest of humanity to change its evil ways. What is surprising, even for New Yorkers, was the reaction. A small crowd quickly gathered around him, heckling and then spitting on the poor, unwashed, unshaven old man in dirty clothes. Then the crowd set upon the obviously mentally unstable man. First one of the crowd delivered a sucker punch, then another person attacked him. When the confused old man tried to fight back the whole crowd literally set about beating him to death. Even after he had been knocked down and was bleeding and unconscious, the men and women of the crowd kicked and stomped him over and over.

  The thin veneer of civilization is wearing away. I don't know how much of this is due to the natural stress and limits of the human mind and how much is due to the insidious influence of the parasite.

  Speaking of (writing of?) the influence of the parasite, there are new symptoms to report.

  Both my mother and my sisters' rash and itching have changed into small red spots all over their bodies. Thankfully, for Lucy, the intense scratching has died down but the red spots are a cause for alarm. The spots showed up yesterday and they seem to have doubled in size overnight. The spots show up black on the gums, the tongue, the whites of the eye and even under the finger nails. Many of the girls at school have resorted to wearing heavy make-up in an attempt to cover the spots.

  My mother told me the reason for the spots is the result of the growing infection of the parasites within the hosts body. The parasite is establishing itself along the central nervous system right down to the nerve endings in the skin and muscles, which explains the uncontrollable itching. The red spots are inflamed cells and burst capillaries caused from the single celled organism displacing the bodies normal cells.

  Lucy has fallen into a dark, depressed and frustrated mood that is hard to handle or cope with. My mom also tells me she feels aggravated and frustrated to no end too, but this may just be due to what is happening and not because of the parasite. I told her I don't feel anything but scared and depressed, almost the opposite of what she's feeling and my mom just stared at me like I called her the "c" word.

  School is becoming a dangerous place. People are short tempered and openly hostile towards each other. At every break between classes there was a fight. The fights weren't really any more violent or brutal than any other fight, but the fact that there were so many is disturbing. Everyone seemed to look at me with open disdain simply because I wasn't suffering as they were. The three other kids I know that are also immune told me they weren't going to come to school anymore until this epidemic was over. I don't blame them. I wish I could stay home too, but my mother forbids it. If things get any worse though I'll just skip school and hang out somewhere.

  My mother, Gods bless her, tried to reassure me as best as she could telling me no matter what happens, we will get through this. If we have to eat those little lizards that scamper around the yard (like the ones old Mrs. Hoffner's cats used to love to chase, catch and sometimes snack on, bless all their souls), then she would find a recipe to make the most delicious lizards I ever ate. I smiled when she said that and it felt like I hadn't smiled for a long time.

  Gods let me smile again.

  Monday, September 24, 2012

  Over the weekend those small blotches and spots that appeared all over my mother and little sister have blossomed into large scarlet colored patches. It's not just my family, it's everybody around the world. In some people the scarlet bruises grow faster, in some slower. Only the people like me, the naturally immune, show no sign of this progression of the parasitic infection. One Saturday morning the redness covered about ten percent of their bodies. On Sunday morning, twenty percent. This morning almost half of my sisters and mothers skin were bright scarlet. In the next twenty four hours their skin will be almost completely red, then they will die.

  Last night my mother came clean with everything she knew about the deadly parasite known as Toxoplasmosa Mondus Omni. Being infected herself, she also told me first-hand of the symptoms and their affects.

  The CDC has had an abundance of corpses to autopsy, both animal and human. They have been able to isolate the parasite, extract its DNA and examine it in great detail. This new and lethal parasite didn't evolve from Toxoplasmosa Gondii, it was bio-engineered from it. It is the general consensus that this was the result of a government run program, initially interested in creating a more lethal version of the parasite to eliminate the local rat population. This is where the single celled parasite's new and improved egg casing came from. There are markers that show the genetic material that made up its DNA was compressed to an extent, having some seemingly unneeded "junk" sequences removed to make the eggs light enough to allow for the eggs to become airborne. This turned out to be a huge mistake. A lot of even our own DNA appears to be compromised of this "junk", but it serves as both a "filler material" and a stabilizing agent. While cells with much of the place holder material removed can still be capable of reproducing, this presents problems of its own after even a few generations. Apparently without any further clinical study this modified parasite was released into the wild.

  The main culprit seems to be North Korea, but there is no solid evidence besides it being ground zero for the infection and a vague statement of an intent to attempt to stop vermin from eating their dwindling food stores. At this, the point of pointing fingers at the supposed culprit is mute, there is nothing that can be done about it now.

  The organism did its intended job very well, literally wiping out over ninety percent of the rodent population around the world during the "Rat Death". Soon after the new version of the parasite was released into the local rat population it mutated. The previously removed filler DNA was picked up from a new source and replaced the missing material. This made it contagious to many other animal species.

  When it made the transition to mammals it mutated again and became the behavior and mind altering pandemic that brought about the "Madness".

  With such a huge new food source, and the ability for this unstable parasite to breed unchecked, when it hit the human hosts, it mutated into what we now recognize as Toxoplasmosa Mondus Omni. Ninety percent of the human population had no natural defenses or immunities to this new p
lague. The ten percent or so of the population that is resistant to this deadly threat are only immune due to some, as of yet, unknown genetic quirk.

  It was the parasite that caused the "Rat Flu". That was when everyone became infected. It was then that our fate was sealed.

  "Why hasn't the government told us this?", I asked my mother.

  "To what end would it serve to tell people that they were going to die raving lunatics in two weeks? You see how bad its getting now, as people are filled with this growing fucking rage. Add on top of it the certain knowledge that they will most certainly die and they will figure it doesn't god damn matter any fucking more what the hell they do.", My mother's face was twisting hard to control anger that was caused by the parasite slowly eating her brain. She never swore like that before, at least not in any normal conversation.

  As the parasite grows exponentially in its human hosts it sets itself all along the central nervous system, attaching itself to the nerves throughout the body.

  In the brain it finds a home in the most basic parts of our minds and secrets a chemical that mimics the agent responsible for what we refer to as anger. As the parasite grows the mind becomes flooded with this chemical in an overwhelming tide of hate. All the while it destroys the rest of the mind causing eventual insanity, homicidal behavior, then death.