Chapter Text
Coughing--the first sign.
They say it started on a plane--a standard flight from New York to Paris that left JFK International Airport at 8:00 a.m. sharp. If the stories are to be believed, at some point during those eight hours and thirty-seven minutes a passenger came down with a cough that then spread throughout the entire aircraft. Due to recent international health scares, the flight was quarantined upon arrival and the one hundred and fifty-seven passengers and crew members were kept under careful medical observation for what was meant to be a ninety-six hour period.
Subconjunctival hemorrhaging--bleeding underneath the lining of the eye.
Fifteen hours before the quarantined passengers were set to be discharged, a new symptom appeared. As startling as bright red blood covering every part of the eye except the iris may appear, subconjunctival hemorrhaging on its own is harmless and clears up on its own. Normally, the condition would be written off as a result of the intense coughing fits that the passengers had suffered from since the flight; however, the sudden onset of the bleeding in every single patient worried the medical staff. The quarantine was extended by one week.
Aphagia--the inability or refusal to swallow.
Less than twenty-four hours after the last of the patients showed signs of hemorrhaging in their eyes, many of them also began to display a disinterest in eating their rationed meals. Thought to be a result of the sudden stress and isolation, the affected patients were kept under closer observation, but otherwise nothing more was done. Throughout that same day, the remainder of the plane’s occupants started to refuse their meals as well. By the time the extended quarantine period was meant to end, every last affected patient was receiving an intravenous rehydration treatment and being tube fed. The quarantine duration was extended indefinitely. An unknown disease outbreak was confirmed.
Death--the permanent cessation of vital bodily functions.
From there, the progression of the disease was rapid. The inability to eat left the patients weak and listless, blood began to leak from their tear ducts, they started to cough blood, they wheezed with every breath, and their skin broke out in patches of bruises that ranged in color from dusty gray to deep violet. Not long after the bruising reached its peak, the patients showed drastic, aggressive personality changes: they snapped at their nurses, threw anything they could get their hands on, and yelled nonsense for hours at a time. Some patients grew violent with the staff and were placed in bed restraints.
In addition to these external symptoms, the patients were also a mess internally: organs were failing, fevers raged, and their blood pressures sank to dangerous levels. Despite doing their best to treat each symptom as it appeared, the doctors were unable to find an effective treatment for this disease without a name.
On the thirtieth day of the quarantine, the first of the patients died. Over the course of the next thirty-six hours, the rest of the infected passed. News outlets went wild, headlines shouted questions like "157 Die in Quarantine, Beginning of an Epidemic?" and public fear spread like wildfire. The United States and French governments were quick to soothe the public with pretty words and smudged statistics that appeared tremendously comforting to the untrained eye; for the next few weeks this method was effective as no other cases of the mysterious disease had been reported. People moved on to more pressing matters, as people do. The governments covered up the news that was even more startling than the deaths of one hundred and fifty-seven people, as governments do.
Reanimation--a restoration to life or consciousness.
When humans die of unknown causes, it is natural for some questions to be raised. Most people don't like not knowing. So when one hundred and fifty-seven people died of a disease no one had ever seen before, doctors and scientists from around the world wanted to take a crack at solving the mystery.
A small number of families agreed to donate the bodies of their loved ones to science. Those donated bodies were transported to top medical research labs across the world to be used in diagnostic and cure research.
It was during this research that the final symptom of the disease made itself known.
The first documented case was in a lab in Australia. The researcher in charge of collecting tissue samples for further analysis left the subject's body unattended for approximately twenty minutes while running files to a different research team one floor up. Upon returning to the autopsy room, the researcher discovered that the subject's body was no longer lying on the examination table. At the time, it was believed that another researcher had taken the body for a CT scan without proper notice; however, it was later discovered that neither research team knew the location of the subject's body. Facility security conducted a sweep of the building, but there was no sign of the subject.
Until they reached the basement.
The figure that huddled in a dimly lit corner of the facility's basement was dressed in a standard medical gown and was thought to be an escaped patient from the hospital next door. The security team approached the figure--meaning to detain the patient and return them to the hospital--but as the team came closer the patient stood and began to back into a different hallway. It was then, when the patient stepped into full lighting, that a member of the security team claimed to recognize the patient.
The supposedly dead research subject.
Ignoring the ridiculous claims of their teammate, the remainder of the security team moved to detain the patient. This movement was met with hostility from the patient, who attacked one of the security guards so viciously that the team resorted to lethal force.
Later, blood testing confirmed suspicions. The patient in the basement was indeed the research subject come back to temporary life.
Over the span of a week, every single lab studying one of the bodies reported situations eerily similar to the Australian lab's. Some were more prepared than others. Not every location was lucky enough to escape fatalities.
It is unknown what happened to the bodies not sent to research locations, but by then the world was more preoccupied with the increasingly common outbreaks of the still unnamed disease. The public panicked as the news of a 'real life zombie virus' spread with every new case of the sickness and with every new example of the dead coming back to...not quite life.
Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Z. In the eight months it took scientists to decide on a name for the deadly virus, over a million people had been killed by the disease and the number continued to grow with every passing day. The staggering infection rate and 100% chance of mortality of the airborne virus created immense paranoia all over the world: governments shut down borders, mandatory curfews took effect in nearly every city across the world, and scientists jumped immediately into intensifying the research for a cure.
The violent tendencies of patients in the late stages of "Z Fever" led to any confirmed cases of infection being detained and held in specially designated compounds where they were to either become experimental subjects for cure research or be terminated. After their initial deaths, patients were considered to be beyond saving and it became standard practice to burn their bodies before they were able to reach the 'reawakening stage' of the disease.
One year and ten months passed with nearly sixteen million deaths before a vaccine was created.
A cure was still considered to be years away, but that same research led to the invention of a vaccine that reduced the infectiousness of the disease. No longer airborne--spread only through contact with an infected person's blood or saliva--the rate of infection was cut in half.
Eight years later, the world's population has fallen to a mere 2.1 billion. While a cure is thought to only be a few months away by even the most conservative estimates, the surviving human population is struggling to hold out for salvation when the world's remaining cities are overrun with the infected and resources have hit critical lows.