(Fiction) Report All Cases
Next to the door was a decade-old public service poster urging everyone to get their annual vaccine. It dated from the early days of the contagion crisis and was full of implicit threats. Unlike the comparable posters from WWII, which reminded everyone that loose lips sank ships, this announcement warned that:
SILENCE SPREADS DISEASE!
REPORT ALL CASES TO YOUR
MINNESOTA CMC OFFICE
But the zombie apocalypse had never come. Out of a global population of nearly nine billion at the time, it was estimated that no more than twenty thousand had died from the “zombie” virus. And yet, it was a real catastrophe. Five times as many were victims of panic: riots, looting, and mob lynchings of those suspected of being infected—or even of hiding those that were. In a handful of now-famous court cases in Spain and the US, individuals filmed leading such mobs or breaking into homes were either acquitted or left with light sentences, particularly if they were women, on grounds that they were acting “in defense” of their families.
The ranciform encephalopathy virus didn’t give its victims a taste for brains, but it did attack the brain, causing swelling and depositing Alzheimer’s-like plaques that swiftly inhibited cognition. Over the course of a week, sometimes longer, the infected began to act increasingly irrational before eventually succumbing to an irresistible urge to wander away, presumably so the virus could infect others. Once consumed with wanderlust, their eyes frosted over, limiting their vision, and they quickly became oblivious to their surroundings, including heat, cold, and pain. Cause of death in many cases was not the virus itself but violent trauma. Many were struck by high-speed vehicles while wandering across a highway or intersection. Others fell into machinery or drowned.
The episode gripped the world. Although the pandemic was over in months, the economy fell into steep recession. Nio had been a teenager at the time, and she had lined up with everyone else to get the vaccine. There were still hundreds of cases per year—an endemic disease, like measles or chicken pox—but the common wisdom was that the remaining afflicted were anti-vaxxer holdouts or crazies who ranted online about it all being a massive conspiracy to inject everyone with mind control serum. What few “zombies” appeared, more than a decade after the initial crisis, were greeted with annoyance rather than fear, especially by the thousands of stranded commuters who waited helplessly in traffic for a city sanitation crew to come clean up the shattered body still dragging itself, legless, down the highway.
snippet from the new book-in-progress
