They dubbed it ‘Virus Deloris’, named after the first reported case of it. She had been a housewife who had an aneurysm when she slipped and fell in her kitchen. Pretty typical scenario, nothing anyone had worried about, nor knew about. But then something weird happened. She had been on the dissection table when she ripped the hair out of the mortuary assistant and then bit two of his fingers off. Left to his own devices after the morgue was evacuated, he died of suffocation within a few hours.
The virus just continued to spread after that. Through bites, scratches, blood to blood transfers. Anything that would cause you have your bodily fluid come into contact with one of the infected.
It was just a few days after the outbreak that they saw it begin to spread like wildfire, and the CDC started to do experiments. They released a statement explaining how people died exactly. The infected would start to feel nauseous after coming into contact with the virus, and would soon begin to vomit, then they’d get so light headed from lack of energy and pass out. They’d essentially drown in their own vomit, no matter the position they passed out in. Once dead the virus finished the person off by attacking the brain, right before it itself died, and taking it over.
The person would be alive, but in name only. They’d lose unnecessary functions like speaking and conscious thinking. Instead they’d only live to do the basic things like eat and drink. Their bodies however, already having gone through the process of death would cease to work. The cells wouldn’t reproduce causing the flesh to go a grayish color and the E. coli in their stomach would soon die off, stopping the digestive system’s process. Their bones become brittle, and their muscles tense, but not to the point of rigor mortis, just enough to cause them to be much stronger than they originally would have been when they were alive.
Their primal instincts would take over and all that was once them died. They became meat eaters, worse than any predator man had ever encountered before. The outbreak sent people into a crazed era where everyone had a gun or a weapon of some sort. Where people would kill other healthy living people for food or other supplies. The world had become barbaric.
Five years since the first reported case of Deloris and the outbreak had done a pretty good job of taking out majority of the population. Anyone who gets infected is put down in attempt to slow the spread or maybe even stop it. Killing the too-far-gone infected proved difficult in the first couple months of the outbreak, which was the big reason why it boomed so effortlessly. People didn’t know about destroying the brain, they didn’t think about destroying the brain. They just thought about killing what was attacking them in the easiest way, through the torso.
Five years since, and people knew better.
A week after the disease’s first victim the military began to panic, figuring they only had one choice left, to hide. They built ten Safe Zones around the United States, taking in each and every person they came across. Their attempt to salvage what was left of society backfired and most of the zones were overrun with biters in less than a month. Some cleaned the zones out, claimed them for themselves, but most were left to the monsters to control.
No cure had been thought of, nor attempted. The CDC gave up not long after the power grid went out and the rest of the government fell soon after. Connections between countries were severed and people started to realize that everything was going to change, there was no going back. And they, like their government, gave up.
The idea that a cure existed or that it could be made disappeared and people faced their truths. They fought and fought, some wondering if death was better than a life of running and fighting something you can’t just beat. If there were still ways to tell one might say that the suicide rate rose exponentially.
Those left with the will to live were more than certain that they’d live and die in a world where you feared your fellow man more than the natural elements. People would shoot innocents just so they could secure their fate, using the excuse that if ‘they’re dead then they won’t kill me’. The world itself wasn’t ending. The people upon it were.
They were all giving up.
Except Sydney.
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