Immunity: Apocalypse Weird
Page 17
David squeezed her hand and kept a steady pace.
We’ve got to keep moving to stay alive.
“What did she mean?”
“The flu virus.” She swallowed but her throat was dry. “One segment of its genome is a handful of mutations away from HERV-W. That’s what my mother scribbled at the back of a picture I have.”
“What’s HERV-W? Another virus?”
They breathed heavily under the sun yet they kept talking, taking comfort in one another’s voice, no matter how cracked and broken. Talking kept them alive.
“No,” Anu replied. “It’s a gene, a very special one because it’s very similar to a retrovirus. It’s expressed in the brain and…” She tried to stop and catch her breath, but David kept pulling her forward.
“Keep moving, Anu. Tell me the story and keep moving.”
She nodded. “This particular gene—HERV-W—has been associated with schizophrenia and other mental diseases. I think what my mom meant to say in her note is that the mutated version of H7N7 that causes AVP—acquired violent psychosis, the violent symptoms that have been killing people ever since the pandemic started—is very similar to this gene. If this is true, there’s a perfectly sensible explanation as to why H7N7 causes AVP.”
They kept following the paved road, the landscape before them a yellow straight line that extended all the way to a flat horizon, nothing else in view for miles and miles, not even the whiff of a cloud.
“This is how it works,” Anu explained. “You get the virus and it’s nothing else but a stupid flu virus. It gives you a runny nose, a fever, the usual stuff. Then the body starts making antibodies against the virus. The virus is cleared and you start feeling better.”
“AVP takes two to three weeks to appear. Why?”
“Because by then you have antibodies against the virus circulating in your blood. Given that the virus is so similar to a human gene that’s expressed in the brain, once the virus is cleared the antibodies find a new target.”
David froze in the middle of the road. “The HERV-W gene?”
“Exactly. The antibodies elicited by H7N7 will now attack the HERV-W gene expressed in the brain, triggering all sorts of delusions. Similar to schizophrenia, except much more violent.”
“Homicidal delusions.”
Anu nodded. “Many AVP subjects have been reported to hear voices in their heads. Christine called me a ‘lurid monster’ when she attacked me.”
“Can you prove any of this?”
Anu sighed. “Where? The Lab will take months to be restored to full function. If it ever will again.”
“We’ll go to Albuquerque. You said you have colleagues there.”
Anu shuffled her feet and didn’t reply.
“Anu, you’ll make it. You’ll prove what your mother discovered and bring justice to her name.”
Again, she said nothing, her eyes blinking tiredly in the piercing sun.
David kept prodding her. “Does this help us in any way with a vaccine?”
Anu shuddered. “Don’t you understand? A vaccine is a catastrophe with a virus like this. A vaccine is designed to make antibodies against H7N7, but those antibodies are responsible for the homicidal delusions. They attack the brain and trigger AVP. Once the body starts producing them, there’s no going back.”
“Oh God,” David mumbled. “Didn’t the General say—?”
“He did,” Anu interjected, remembering Naga’s exact words.
Let me share some great news with you, Dr. Sharma. A vaccine against H7N7 is in the making. Just about ready to be released, the General had said.
Just about ready to be released.
Uranium or not, the man was dead set to end the world.
“We’ll stop him,” David said. “The man just got lucky. His evil plan worked because the virus knocked the Army Guard out of the game and the blindness cut all communications across the country. You wait until things get back to normal. The White House will soon find out what happened at the Lab. Joyce didn’t sacrifice her life in vain. I bet the Infantry’s already out there looking for her daughter.”
Anu exhaled, her hand limp inside David’s fist. “Things will never return to normal.”
“Yes, they—” He froze. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
A distant thud-thud-thud, like a hiccupping rumble, approaching from far away.
David let go of Anu’s hand, dropped on all fours—the pavement scalding his hands—and pressed one ear against the ground. “I hear it!”
“Hear what?” Anu insisted.
David beamed. “An engine. A car engine!”
She could hear it too, now, the soft popping and clanging of an old engine whining closer and closer. A cloud of red dust appeared at the horizon, chugging its way toward them.
David got back to his feet and cupped his hands around his eyes. “I just hope it’s not an armored vehicle.”
Anu stumbled to the side of the road and sat on the ground, her last bit of energy completely drained. “Whatever it is, I just hope it’s loaded with water.”
David slid the rifle off his shoulders and set it on the ground next to Anu. “Don’t move,” he said, as though she still had any energy to move, and strode toward the approaching vehicle, waving his hands in the air. The cloud of dust at the horizon grew bigger, blurred by the swirls of heat rising from the asphalt.
A white car, Anu noticed, with thick high tires. A jeep.
David kept waving his hands then slowly stopped and held still, both his arms still up in the air. The jeep came chuffing along at a steady speed, thirty miles per hour, max, even after the driver was close enough to spot David waiting in the middle of the road. It wobbled over potholes and rocks and took its merry time until it braked just a few feet away from David.
David’s arms dropped. He gaped, brows shot up in the middle of his forehead. He tilted his head and walked around the old vehicle, so dusty you could’ve drawn the whole country with your finger on the windshield and windows. David walked came back on the other side of the jeep, knocked on the driver’s door and yelled, “Nawat! You son of a bitch, this is my jeep!”
The door clicked and opened and an old Native American man stepped out of the car, his face parched and red like his own land, and his eyes sparkling with mischief.
“I heard an explosion,” the man said. “Saw a lot of smoke. I figured it had to be you. Either you or some friend of yours from the labs.”
The man grinned. David grinned back, swung his arms open and literally lifted the small man off his feet. “Man, Nawat, am I happy to see you!!” And then, finally releasing him, he added, “And I’m happy to see my jeep instead of those rowdy horses of yours. Where d’you find the gas?”
Nawat’s grin extended even more, yellow teeth flashing through dark lips. “A truck stopped by a couple of days ago. I traded gas for two pails of water from my well.”
David patted him heavily on the back. “You old fox.” He turned to Anu. “Come over here, Anu. Nawat’s my friend! He escorted me to the Lab the day I arrived.”
Anu smiled, her head giddy with exhaustion. The day David arrived, she thought. Only a few days ago and yet a lifetime away. So much had changed since then. She remembered how she’d despised poor David that day. How she still thought she was going to defeat the virus and save the world. Now she only wanted water. Just a few drops of water…
She nodded, tried to get up, but everything went black.
* * *
She felt water on her lips and it was good and refreshing. David held her up and helped her drink. It had an aftertaste of earth and metal and she couldn’t care less. She drained a full bottle and asked for more.
“In a bit,” David said. “Let’s get you out of the sun, first.” He picked her up and she let him even though she’d always hated to be picked up, even as a child. And yet in this moment it felt so nice to be snuggled against his chest that smelled earthly and metallic and so darn soothing.
Even through the layer of red sand caking his cheeks, she saw David blush to the root of his hairs. “Er—she’s not my… Nawat, this is Anu. She’s a scientist and she’s going to find a cure for the horrible virus that’s been plaguing humanity.”
It wasn’t true but she didn’t have the strength to argue. She leaned against the headrest, closed her eyes and fell into a blissful state of half-sleep in which she heard noises and voices and yet the rest of her body was sleeping and refusing to move.
Nawat and David laughed and talked like good old friends. David told him about the fire at the Lab, probably caused by an accident during the blindness. Nawat had not heard about the blindness, not even noticed it. He said his wife had died. He said the horses were fine instead. He said many things, and so did David, but then the jeep’s engine came back to life, its rumble and wobble cradling her to a deep sleep.
The last thing she remembered was David turning the radio on, searching for some Metallica radio station and instead finding a strange broadcast from a man rambling about the current state of world, and preaching about impending doom and more catastrophes yet to come …
“Not that nutcase again,” was the last thing she heard David say.
“Friends and kitties, friends and kitties, this is the Prophet of Pahrump speaking to you from my fortified bunker. I and seven others, including Mama Midnite, managed to find shelter thanks to my own wisdom, intelligence, foresight, and vision to ride out this great blood bath that’s making us, the living, miserable and making us envy the dead and really, really hate the undead. Oh and thanks to the boys on the other side of the border for boosting the signal. If we see each other and you like Italian food by the bucket and gin by the gallon, we’ll have a grand old party like John Wayne used to have before he was poisoned by Ronald Reagan for knowing the secret of the dolphin murders with a cancer arrow shot by O.J. Simpson. Didn't hear that story in the history book, did you all? Do you know how that worked? O.J. Simpson wasn’t human then and he was programmed like a machine to have the most yards rushed in the NFL and to kill those who oppose our great nation-state in ways minor or major with arrows filled with X-123 viruses. Cancer-causing viruses, that’s right you all. Think about that next time you are out grocery shopping and—oh. You’re probably not grocery shopping. I mean, maybe you are, maybe if there’s some way of using the term grocery shopping for breaking into abandoned and half-looted supermarkets and exchanging gunfire and retrieving whatever you can along with the bleeding body of what was once your next door neighbor’s daughter who was about to be chopped up in the Meat Department by glue sniffing cannibals with the rape giggles.
“I hate living in this world. I got the same supply of gin that’s beginning to taste funny, we’ve played the Simpsons’ version of Clue five nights in a row, and I always bet it’s Marge, that blue haired fussy britches, and I’m never right and I have to be restrained in the supply closet before I bite the others. And now they don’t want to play because I keep screaming out, “Marge Simpson” at the start of every turn. Crissman insists on using a knife and fork to eat pizza, which is just so wacko weird that I did bite him as a show of territorial dominance and not to use that damn fork and knife for pizza. And I think I failed in radioing the members of The Cult to come play at the bunker, which is just sort of annoying at this point, but I guess it would’ve been super awkward to let them stay, and…
“Well, there’s so much humanity can take, right? Right? I mean every day is a groin shot, every day is bumping your little toe into the edge of the coffee table, every day is finding enough ammo to shoot those who oppose you, I mean, every day is just one sort of annoyance after another…
“Right? I mean, look at what I got from the field mice out there. That lab I talked about in New Mexico? Ppffft, kerplop. Done. Burnt. Burned. Cooked. Over. Flames of hell all around. God’s barbecue. Bam. That’s-
“That’s one thing. New Orleans got effed first and that’s all over with. The Big Easy is the Big Body Bag, and Texas? Texas. Let’s just say Santa Ana’s ghost has had a massive quivering orgasm over the number of dead Texans.
“Everything sucks. It’s pitch black outside. Always darkest before the dawn, right? Yeah its gonna get darker, I suppose…
“The only happy little note, the one star left in the sky—got this from one of the field mice outside, people and kitties. And that one little star in the sky, I’m sure, is gonna become a real sun driving out a lot of the darkness all around. I heard that somebody finally made a vaccine for the horrible flu that's been making people go berserk and kill one another.
“Keep your fingers and toes crossed, say a few “Hail Marys” and keep the faith, brother. And sister. And cats.”
END OF BOOK 1
* AFTERWORD *
I was thrilled when, a few months ago, Michael Bunker contacted me to ask if I wanted to be part of Apocalypse Weird. Of course I said yes, I didn’t even think twice about it! At the time, Michael tossed a few ideas at me on how to end the world: nuclear weapons, tornados, zombies—they all went past me until he said two words: autoimmune flu.
I puzzled over that. You see, I’ve been working on viruses, retroviruses to be precise, for over 8 years now, and my first reaction was, “There’s no such thing as the autoimmune flu.” The word ‘autoimmune’ is used to describe the body attacking its own self. Autoimmune disorders arise when the immune system reacts against cells and tissues in the body and tries to kill them as if they were pathogens. But the influenza virus is something we acquire from the environment, not part of our own body, which is why there can’t be an autoimmune flu.
Or can there?
The concept was so intriguing that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remembered something fascinating I had discovered a few years ago: there are, in fact, bits of viruses embedded in our own genome. Yes, genes that once belonged inside a virus are now part of our own DNA. How did that happen?
There’s class of viruses—called retroviruses—that in order to replicate inject their genetic material inside the cell’s own DNA. When the cell replicates, the virus replicates its own genes too, making thousands of copies of its genome.
Retroviruses have been around much longer than us. For millions of years they’ve infected cells from all species. And every now and then, just by chance, a retrovirus infected a spermatozoa or an oocyte and inserted its genome inside the cell’s genome. Now imagine that infected spermatozoa or oocyte, with the extra bit of viral DNA, becoming a fertilized egg. The egg now carries the viral genome and, as it develops into a fetus, and the fetus grows into a new individual, the new individual will have the bit of viral DNA inserted in his/her own DNA (for a more detailed discussion, see my post http://chimerasthebooks.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-did-that-pesky-virus-end-up-in-our.html).
About 10% of our genome is made of viral genes that we acquired through an infected spermatozoa or oocyte. These genes became a part of our own DNA. They are called endogeneous retroviruses, where endogenous means that instead of being a virus we “catch” like we catch the cold or the flu, these “viruses” are inside our cells from conception. We are born with them. The question is: what do they do? Once embedded in our genome, do they behave like all other genes or do they behave like viruses?
They do both. Some of these viral genes, for example, are expressed in the mammalian uterus and they encode proteins that are useful in making the placenta. It makes sense if you think that viruses are good at hiding from our immune system, and a fetus, as it grows, needs to be ‘hidden’ from the mother’s immune system or else it could be attacked by her antibodies.
The bit that got me thinking more and more about Michael’s autoimmune flu, though, is this: many of these viral genes embedded in our DNA are found to be abnormally expressed in mental disorders. I looked up
one disease in particular, schizophrenia, and found that not only some viral genes are particularly activated in people who had been recently diagnosed with the disease, but a study also found significantly high levels of antibody directed at these retroviral elements.
Basically, the immune system is attacking the viral genes in the brain as though they were real viruses.
A light bulb went off in my head. You know, that nagging ‘What if?’ question that tugs at the back of your mind and doesn’t let go until you sit down and start writing. And writing I did. I invented a flu virus—well, not totally invented, as H7N7 does exist and is indeed one of the most zoonotic of the flu viruses, which means it has a high potential to jump from one species to another.
But what I did make up is that a mutated version of H7N7 could have enough similarities to the viral genes embedded in our genome to elicit antibodies that would then attack the brain. There are viruses that are actually very similar to some of our endogenous retroviruses, but thank goodness they are rare and it’s uncommon to become infected with them. But for my plot I needed a common virus, one that’s easily spreadable with a sneeze, and of course influenza fit the bill.
The rest you’ve read in the book: due to its resemblance to the retroviruses embedded in our own DNA, antibodies that recognize my fictional version of H7N7 end up mounting an attack against the brain. I borrowed the symptoms from schizophrenia and pushed the envelope with the suicidal and homicidal delusions to create my own version of “flu zombies,” if you will. For more information on the real science and references I’ve used for the premise, see my blog post http://chimerasthebooks.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-viruses-inside-us-can-endogenous.html
And for more science-based thrillers visit my website http://chimerasthebooks.blogspot.com/p/books.html
BIO: E.E. Giorgi grew up in Tuscany, in a house on a hill that she shared with two dogs, two cats, 5 chickens, and the occasional batches of stick insects, newts and toads her dad would bring home from the lab. Today, E.E. Giorgi is a scientist and an award winning author and photographer. She spends her days analyzing genetic data, her evenings chasing sunsets, and her nights pretending she's somebody else. On her blog, E.E. discusses science for the inquiring mind, especially the kind that sparks fantastic premises and engaging stories. Her debut novel CHIMERAS, a medical mystery, is a 2014 Readers' Favorite International Book Award winner.