Chapter Text
Marlene Mckinnon was desperate to find a cure. In the past ten months, she had lost everything. The only reason she hadn’t allowed herself to be ripped to pieces by now was the vague hope that maybe, just maybe there were other survivors. If she could find a cure, then she could present it to them and maybe they would know what to do. Maybe they could make everything right again. She had been living off of maybes. The muggle news called them zombies, but Marlene knew that they were something else, something more sinister. When the apocalypse had first started, there had been mass panic. Witches and wizards had flocked to St. Mungo’s to begin searching for a cure. Eventually, they were so overrun that the Hogwarts students that took special healing lessons with Madam Pompfrey or potions lessons with the Slug Club were called in to help. They had brought in a muggle television to keep up with progress on a potential cure in the muggle labs. Day in and day out, the low-quality TV screen had filled their makeshift laboratory with bright colours. The tinny voice that had echoed off of the cold walls would share stories of massacres and zombie armies, until eventually the voice had stopped broadcasting altogether. The TV had done nothing but dull their spirits. For two months, they had worked, but they discovered next to nothing. What they had managed to find out was that:
1. The infection spread through bites, but it was not a bacteria, fungus, or virus. It was magic. Everyone had expected as much. The plague had come from the Black family’s house, after all. They assumed that it was the Dark Lord’s doing, that he had attempted a new spell to make his most loyal soldiers more powerful, but that it had backfired, turning them into heartless, bloodthirsty monsters. More heartless and bloodthirsty than usual, at least. Regulus and Sirius had been at school when it happened, but the rest of the family had not been so lucky.
2. Since the infection was magical, it could not be contracted through any water or food source. It was passed from one organism to another when the infected organism bit the uninfected, and latched on for long enough for the curse to seep into the blood of the uninfected.
3. It was not a slow process. On average, it took around two weeks for the transformation to be complete. First, the skin around the wound would rot. Then, black veins would appear as the curse made its way into the victim’s bloodstream. The heart was always the first to go. The curse would rot away the heart, leaving only a black, festering, still beating mass. It would turn the person cruel. After that, the disease would reach the brain, and the transformation would be complete. Once it got to the brain, the cruelty created by the heart would turn into blistering rage. It made the victim want to scratch, bite, kill, and tear apart those that were uninfected.
Spreading the disease was not the zombie’s first priority. The zombies wanted to cause pain, and if the victims were unlucky enough to survive that, then that is when the transformation would begin.
4. They were smart. The infection only rotted the parts of their brain that kept them human. They retained information on spells, weapons, and hunting. This was a problem.
5. The zombies did not discriminate. Muggles had, unfortunately, been caught in the crossfire.
6. Once the infection had begun, there was no known way to stop or slow it down. They had tried amputations, potions, and every spell in the books, but nothing had been effective.
At first, Marlene had hoped that she could use the knowledge she had on werewolves to find a cure. After all, she was going to be a healer one day, and she aspired to study lycanthropy, so she had easily spotted the similarities between the two cases. She had told Madam Pompfrey about this, and they had formed a task force consisting of Lily (for her knowledge of potions), Remus, and her brother Danny to help them. However, it soon became clear to them that a bite and a transformation were the only things that werewolves had in common with zombies. Their task force had not survived long enough to let anybody know.