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[His room is a ruin. Ash in heaps and brittle twigs, all char, ready to collapse at a breath. Scorched flagstones, exposed circuitry glinting like bone, lazy fish wriggling in ignorant unconcern in the silty pond. His lab, wreck though it was, is gone. His equipment is gone. His samples are gone. He shuts the door and walks away.]
[Public, Video, backdated to near the beginning of the flood.]
[Doctor K - he won't give any other name, not even Gravesend, not even Queens - doesn't look much like a zombie apocalypse survivor. He's grateful for the showers, dresses neatly and always wears a clean white lab coat and surgical gloves whether he's on duty in the infirmary or not. He's thin but not gaunt. His warden hasn't given him any of his guns and he hasn't asked for them. He doesn't gulp down his food or horde it. And yet. He never quite lost the haunted look, never stopped glancing sharp-quick at anyone passing by in the halls, applying more scrutiny to a humanoid shape in his space than most people would find necessary, gaze dropping away with the confirmation of life.]
The word zombie, originally, comes from Vodoun legends. A bokor, a sorcerer, revives a corpse with no will of its own, to use as a servant. Very few legends come from nowhere.
An ethnobotanist traveled to Haiti in 1982 to investigate. Not magic, of course, but something. He claimed a living person could be transformed into a zombie via a combination of drugs delivered directly into the bloodstream, usually through a wound. A near-lethal dose of tetrodotoxin - the poison found in pufferfish - to induce a deathlike state that leaves the victim conscious, and one of the datura species to induce profound dissociation, depersonalization, the lack of will and self so associated with zombies, the heart of the horror.
His story was difficult to corroborate. I suppose we'll never know. It didn't come from Haiti when it came. It came from the damn cows.
[He smiles, crooked and toothy and a little hollow.]
Prion diseases are like the nukes of the epidemiological world. There's no defending against them, because they aren't foreign agents, they aren't even autoimmune, with the body's systems triggered on the wrong targets. They're not alive, they're not even faking it like viruses, they're just proteins. The fundamental building blocks of every biological process. And something about them is invasively, evangelically wrong. They spread like fallout, and they never go away.
[He's not smiling any more. He's grim, cold, terse. He looks away, looks back up, sorrowful but subdued, resigned and a little bit mean with resentment.]
I wonder how many of you could do it. If the person you loved most in the world was a ravenous shell. Could you put them down?
[The thing is. The quiet unspoken lie. The guilt isn't for shooting his sister. It's because he didn't.]
[spam, throughout the flood]
[He spends a lot of time in the infirmary. He sleeps on a spare cot, startles awake at sudden noises, holes up in corners sometimes, scribbling furious in a very battered notebook. Sometimes he slips out to grab fruit, bread, cheese, anything simple and fresh and portable. No meat. Sometimes he picks a common room and sits, silently, just watching people, watching the living rhythms of them.]
[Spam for Riddick, near the end of the flood]
[A needle in an artery, quick and sure. If the tranquilizer doesn't suit his physiology, if K's miscalculated the dose, he'll probably have his neck snapped in a minute. He does really care.]
[Public, Video, backdated to near the beginning of the flood.]
[Doctor K - he won't give any other name, not even Gravesend, not even Queens - doesn't look much like a zombie apocalypse survivor. He's grateful for the showers, dresses neatly and always wears a clean white lab coat and surgical gloves whether he's on duty in the infirmary or not. He's thin but not gaunt. His warden hasn't given him any of his guns and he hasn't asked for them. He doesn't gulp down his food or horde it. And yet. He never quite lost the haunted look, never stopped glancing sharp-quick at anyone passing by in the halls, applying more scrutiny to a humanoid shape in his space than most people would find necessary, gaze dropping away with the confirmation of life.]
The word zombie, originally, comes from Vodoun legends. A bokor, a sorcerer, revives a corpse with no will of its own, to use as a servant. Very few legends come from nowhere.
An ethnobotanist traveled to Haiti in 1982 to investigate. Not magic, of course, but something. He claimed a living person could be transformed into a zombie via a combination of drugs delivered directly into the bloodstream, usually through a wound. A near-lethal dose of tetrodotoxin - the poison found in pufferfish - to induce a deathlike state that leaves the victim conscious, and one of the datura species to induce profound dissociation, depersonalization, the lack of will and self so associated with zombies, the heart of the horror.
His story was difficult to corroborate. I suppose we'll never know. It didn't come from Haiti when it came. It came from the damn cows.
[He smiles, crooked and toothy and a little hollow.]
Prion diseases are like the nukes of the epidemiological world. There's no defending against them, because they aren't foreign agents, they aren't even autoimmune, with the body's systems triggered on the wrong targets. They're not alive, they're not even faking it like viruses, they're just proteins. The fundamental building blocks of every biological process. And something about them is invasively, evangelically wrong. They spread like fallout, and they never go away.
[He's not smiling any more. He's grim, cold, terse. He looks away, looks back up, sorrowful but subdued, resigned and a little bit mean with resentment.]
I wonder how many of you could do it. If the person you loved most in the world was a ravenous shell. Could you put them down?
[The thing is. The quiet unspoken lie. The guilt isn't for shooting his sister. It's because he didn't.]
[spam, throughout the flood]
[He spends a lot of time in the infirmary. He sleeps on a spare cot, startles awake at sudden noises, holes up in corners sometimes, scribbling furious in a very battered notebook. Sometimes he slips out to grab fruit, bread, cheese, anything simple and fresh and portable. No meat. Sometimes he picks a common room and sits, silently, just watching people, watching the living rhythms of them.]
[Spam for Riddick, near the end of the flood]
[A needle in an artery, quick and sure. If the tranquilizer doesn't suit his physiology, if K's miscalculated the dose, he'll probably have his neck snapped in a minute. He does really care.]
