The Romero Strain (Book 1): The Romero Strain

by Alan, TS

  “Cities of the Underworld… Secrets of New York,” I replied. Everyone but David gave me a dumbfounded look. I guess the two women weren’t fans of documentaries. “It’s not a real secret—obviously—just its location is a secret.” I addressed the doctor once again. “So, doc. You played God and it bit you in your ass? Went all Resident Evil on you?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “C’mon, Mister Umbrella Corporation, let’s hear it.”

  “Yeah, let’s hear it,” David demanded, the others in agreement.

  The doctor took a breath and sighed unenthusiastically. “The pathogen attacks and kills the immune system, thus killing the host. Once you are deceased, the virus which has bound itself to the AMPA receptors in the brain and nervous system will initiate fast synaptic transmission in the central nervous system, which reanimates you.”

  “Doc,” I interjected. “I’m not stupid. I know some biology and chemistry, and I know neurons would be damaged and killed by the over activation of receptors from the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in the AMPA receptor and the NMDA receptor. I additionally know that over pathologically high levels of glutamate can produce excitotoxicity by allowing high levels of calcium ions to enter a cell. A calcium ion influx into cells activates a number of enzymes that go on to damage cell structures such as components of the cytoskeleton, membrane, and DNA. Therefore, your virus would cause apoptosis induced by excitotoxicity leading to neurodegeneration throughout the nervous and synaptic systems. Your virus couldn’t sustain itself for very long, even if it could do what you claim.”

  “But it has, has it not? That is how the Trixoxen works!” he said, with pride in his voice.

  “What?!” I asked, not believing his statement.

  “Part of the pathogen replaces the GluR2 subunit in the AMPaR that renders the channel impermeable to calcium, thus allowing it to consume the high levels of calcium ions that enter the cell. The pathogen excretes glycine, glutamate, and oxygen as a bi-product, which in turn feeds the glial cells of the cerebral cortex and the brain.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense! There are so many things wrong with that. Without glucose production, astrocytic glial cells would die and there would be no support and protection for neurons. No nutrients, no cells, no matter how much oxygen your virus produces.”

  He smiled slyly. “That is one of the beauties of Trixoxen, it’s a complex exogenous carbohydrate-based pathogenic microbe coupled to a protein carrier and GDNF!”

  “What the hell are you two talking about?” David asked.

  “Glial cell lined-derived neurotrophic factor,” I answered.

  “What is it?” Julie wanted to know.

  I was about to explain when Max growled in the direction Joe had gone. Everyone stood still and silent. David raised the pistol. Joe walked into sight. We all looked at him.

  “What?!” he said, as if he did nothing wrong. “The lights are out ahead. My flashlight doesn’t work.”

  We didn’t acknowledge his comments.

  It wasn’t always easy for me to communicate medical explanations in laypersons terms; especially when the subject matter was complex and required avoiding technical or academic language without sounding condescending. Though virology was not a branch of science I was adept in, I did have a fair amount of knowledge in biology. I just hoped I could translate the scope of the doctor’s virus into something everyone could understand without sounding as pompous as France.

  “A glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, GDNF,” I began, “is a small protein that potently promotes the survival of many types of neurons. The virus is stimulating the neurological pathways and receptors of the nervous system and brain at a rapid rate. Re-animation of sorts. When this happens within the body, glutamates, a natural chemical in the body, can build up allowing calcium ions to destroy cells that make up the neuroreceptors. Except he says the virus is keeping this from happening by eating the calcium ions and promoting the survival of neurons.”

  “How do you know all of this stuff? Aren’t you just a paramedic?” Joe said, being condescending.

  I snidely retorted, “Wikipedia.” Without missing a beat, I returned to probing the doctor. “And how long does the virus sustain these functions?” I asked.

  “I do not know.”

  “What’d ya mean, you don’t know?” David asked, with obvious irritation at the doctor’s answer.

  “I do not know. The pathogen was… not intended to be used on the living. We were re-animating dead soldiers.”

  “What?” Joe said, startled with disbelief in his voice.

  “It is called the Resurrection Project. We have been trying since the Iraq War to develop a virus that would temporarily reanimate a dead soldier on the battlefield. Can you imagine the fear this would instill into our enemy?”

  “You come up with that idea all by yourself, doc?” I said sarcastically. “A man-made combat virus. What was that called, Trixie?”

  He knew what I was talking about but ignored my comment and tried to continue on.

  “You fucking bastard,” Joe yelled out.

  The doctor looked at him as if he was a complete dimwit. “Your ignorance is exceeded only by your charm. Are you so lacking in intelligence that you believe our government does not conduct secret experiments of biological and toxilogical nature?”

  “Hey, hey! Are you calling me stupid?”

  “Ignorance is often misinterpreted as a synonym of stupidity, and is as thus often taken as an insult, when really it is, in its correct form, not an insult at all but a criticism.”

  “Hey, don’t pull any of that fancy, superior intellect on me. I may not know much about things with proteins and compositions and things with… molecular stuff. But you said on our own troops!” Joe exclaimed this with anger and astonishment, as though it was a personal offense against him.

  “Doc, get to the point,” I said with impatience. “I don’t need a history lesson in U.S. bacterial warfare. Anyone with half a brain knows you’ve been doing this since Captain Ecuyer gave infected small pox blankets to Native Americans in 1763. What did you do?”

  I listened to the doctor’s vocalization and watched his body language as he spoke. He was lying. I was adept in body language; knowing and understanding a person’s body language was essential for any paramedic, and martial artist.

  The doctor was not at ease looking at us and turned his face away, looking at his leg where I was wrapping the gauze. He spoke mainly in a monotonous inflection, adding unnecessary details to the story, trying to convince us of its authenticity. He was uncomfortable with silences or pauses in his conversation, prattling on as he spoke; all sure signs of lying. He was also irritating me with his non-use of grammatical contractions.

  With his wound completely dressed, I let him continue his story, not letting him know that I knew the truth. I wanted to hear his fabrication, mainly for my amusement and to see how much of a horror film buff he truly was.

  “There was a problem, just a small one.”

  “Of course, there always is,” I interjected.

  The doctor did not stop at my interruption.

  “The virus did not do what it was supposed to.”

  “What was it supposed to do?” Joe asked. Again, the doctor ignored the interruption.

  “The virus was engineered to re-animate a soldier with the purpose of completing their mission. Except over and over again, all we could get was primal, absolute, pure base rage. At first, we thought it was because our post-mortem subjects had too many depleted neurons, having been deceased for several weeks. We tried with more recently deceased subjects, but still the same result. We then began to experiments on post-mortem subjects directly from the battlefield. I—”

  “All right, stop! Stop right there.” I had heard enough. “You really are a pretentious lying little bastard. I know most of what you’ve been shoveling has been bullshit! I see it in your body language; I hear it in your voice.” I put my foot down on his wou
nd and pressed hard. He let out a piercing scream of agony. “If you’re going to bullshit someone you should do it to someone who hasn’t seen every damn living dead movie ever made. I want the truth this time, or I swear to your God I’ll kill you where you lie!”

  “God, it hurts! It hurts!” he cried.

  “Does it?”

  “Yes, it does! It hurts!”

  “I’m very good with pain. Now talk!”

  “All right, all right,” he gasped. “I thought you wanted to hear the whole movie scenario. Is that not what you want to believe? That the dead have come back to life because of some evil government plot?”

  “I want to know what the hell is going to happen to me and what the hell you did. Tell me the truth!”

  I pressed my foot again against his wound. He pleaded for me to stop. Tears of pain began to well up and roll down his face.

  “Okay! Okay! It does not matter anymore. Some of what I said is not entirely inaccurate. The virus I described is exactly what I developed. The experiments during the Iraq War are also true. There truly was a Resurrection Project. Nonetheless, I have embellished… Having failed to create a reanimation virus, the project was decommissioned and my predecessor reassigned. I was brought in shortly after 9/11 for a new project. It was to develop a biological weapon of mass destruction, one with a short, but destructive lifecycle.”

  I gave him an evil look. He was still being evasive.

  “All right. My research was to develop a respiratory tract pathogen that would destabilize the enemy and have them destroy themselves. However, we were unable to attain a satisfactory exponential decay rate, which meant the probability of widespread contamination beyond the target area. Negatively impacting a non-combatant populous is bad for business. I abandoned that concept and went to a gastrointestinal tract viral agent, which would allow for a more controlled and direct system of delivery. Except again, the strains failed to go inert at the target time; instead would mutate. Using my background in genetics I decided to look at the problem from a different perspective. Thus, I came up with the concept to use the CCR5 receptor with avian DNA. The results were unbelievable. Instead of the virus taking control of the test subject and causing psychotic, homicidal rage, it killed the test subject and took control. I had discovered, by accident, a way to reanimate the dead… It was Trixoxen! However there was also a peculiarity with the most recent strains. It had an unexplainable side effect. The infected would come back to life, kill, and eat their victims. I named this anomaly the Romero Syndrome.”

  “You weren’t experimenting on dead soldiers, were you?!” Joe said, already knowing the answer to his question.

  “You are quite the master of the obvious,” France sarcastically replied.

  Joe was outraged. “You fucking bastard! How could you?!”

  “They were soldiers who had been court marshaled and found guilty.”

  Joe kicked him. David pushed him away.

  “God damn it! The program was voluntary—for bad conduct or court-martial offenses. In exchange, their criminal records would be expunged and they would be granted an honorable discharge.”

  “Bet you didn’t tell them what they were in for, did you, doc?” I declared.

  “That was not my job. My job was just to conduct the clinical trials and oversee the project.”

  “So much for your Hippocratic Oath,” I criticized. “Explain to me how the virus got out.”

  The doctor paused for a moment. “It does not make sense.”

  We all looked at him suspiciously.

  “Do not blame me. I did not cause this. It was the oversight committee. They wanted to close down the project, discontinue my research, when I was this close––” He held up his hand, separating the tips of his thumb and index finger by less than an inch. “––to solving the decay problem.”

  I asked, “Who?”

  “That psychotic Captain Robbins! The administration said the project was no longer viable and enough money was wasted on a venture that did not help the war effort. They sent Robbins in to oversee the facility’s closure. He caused the accident. We went into lockdown. It contaminated everyone in the complex. It must have gotten out through the exhaust system into the general populace.”

  “That’s very reverse Night of the Comet, d—”

  Marisol cursed, “¡Hijo de puta!” and then kicked the doctor in the bad leg. “You’ve ruined my M.I.T. scholarship!”

  The doctor clutched his leg. The blood seeped through the bandage. “Bitch,” he cursed at Marisol.

  “Puta,” she replied, and kicked him again, striking his knuckles.

  “God damn bitch,” the doctor yelled.

  I grabbed Marisol before she could inflict any more damage. “Hold on, Marisol. I need him to finish before you kick the shit out of him.”

  She continued to curse him in Spanish.

  I turned to the doctor. “But you got out.”

  “Yes. Through a top-level administrators’ exit. It connects to a stairway that leads to an unused exit of the Waldorf Astoria. But it would not open. So I—”

  “The brass door marked 101-121 49th Street, below a sign that reads Metro-North Fire Exit?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  They all looked at me. “What?” I asked. “Don’t any of you know anything about this city?” I turned my attentions back to France. “You tried to take your contaminated ass out into the city. That’s very ethical of you.”

  “I could not get out, so I backtracked, and traveled up a long set of stairs which led me into the tunnels, but some of them were not marked or were dark. I got lost and wandered around, and I heard you.”

  “You’re infected.” I placed my hand over his bandage.

  He flinched, expecting me to cause him pain. When he realized I was waiting for him to speak before I aggravated his wound further, he quickly reacted. “No, no. As soon as I realized what happened, I got out during the confusion. I was never exposed.”

  He was lying again, so I challenged him on his statement.

  “You weren’t exposed? But you said it contaminated everyone in the complex. How can you be sure you’re not infected?”

  “The Trixoxen has a pathogen route of entry through ingestion with a secondary parenteral portal, and…”

  “And? And what?!”

  “And… And because I have not exhibited any phase one symptoms.”

  “Phase one symptoms?” I asked. I squeezed his leg, and he howled. “I’ll let Marisol kick the shit out of you in another second. What have you done to me?”

  “All right, all right.” Tears of agony rolled down his face. “Phase one occurs within six hours.” His eyes met my face. He studied the perspiration on my forehead. “You first get a mild fever accompanied by the chills, followed by the onset of a severe headache,” he said as he stared at me, knowing I was infected. “In the eight to nine hour range, phase two will commence. You become disoriented, have an inability to concentrate, elevated fever and chills, highly irritable, then delusional. Phase three: blurred vision, lethargy, raging thirst, fever blisters, rigidity of the extremities, renal and kidney failure, blindness, excruciating pain, then death. Moments later, phase four: reanimation.”

  “Night of the living, fucking, dead. Great! And the destroyer of the world thinks he’s infection free.” The doctor inadvertently glanced at his case. “Maybe you are! You’ve been lying—again. You have a tell!”

  “What?” he asked.

  “A tell,” I said. “Like in poker. You looked at the case. DD. Open it back up and show me the serum vials. After all, doc, what’s a virus without an antigen, right?”

  David held open the case to reveal the four vials. I illuminated them one at a time with my flashlight. One showed an indication it had been used.

  “You fucking bastard. You used this,” I said as I held the small bottle up. “You used this on yourself. That’s why you’re not infected!”

  “No. I told you the truth. I did not get
exposed!”

  “Really? And what, you just took the antigen for shits and giggles?”

  “I took it as a precautionary measure.”

  “Lying bastard. There is an antidote.”

  “I do not know if it will work.”

  “It worked on you!” I declared.

  “I was not infected. The inhibitor was not developed specifically for the current strain, we never got that far.”

  “Then what is this, Dick? Cough syrup?”

  “No,” he plainly said. “It is an experimental broad-spectrum counteragent to the pathogen.”

  “What does that mean?” a concerned Marisol asked me.

  “It means it may not work,” I reluctantly told her.

  “No, but he’s alive. He’s lying to you.”

  “No, it is the truth,” France said.

  Marisol pointed an accusing finger at him. “But you took it!”

  “I was not infected. It has no negative effects on the uninfected.”

  I asked, “A precautionary injection, why?”

  “We only introduced the inhibitor into those subjects at phase four. No recombinant vector, attenuated or subunit antigen we developed could combat and reverse the pathogen at the final stage. All subjects had to be terminated.”

  “You developed a virus without a proper antiretroviral? That’s beyond reckless abandon, that’s terminal stupidity.”

  “We only started inhibitor pre-trials a week ago. Preliminary results showed the antiretroviral was negative on the uninfected, but also promising on those we infected after they received the inhibitor. It was never tested on subjects who were already infected. It was not a priority. We were only in the ninth week of testing that viral strain.”

  I ignored him, took a syringe out of the case, popped off the protective cover of the needle, and inserted it into the vial in my hand.

  “Do not inject yourself. I implore you,” he told me, but his plea wasn’t convincing.

  “Implore away.” I drew back the liquid into the syringe. “How much, doc?”

  “I do not know.”

  “How’s that leg?” I asked, my voice acerbic.