Hunger Pains
“We're looking at a transfer rate of up to seventy-five percent.” Doctor Allain Treme tried to keep his tone clinical, but his hands tightened on the thick stack of pages he was holding.
There was a silence from the crowd as his words sunk in. Three weeks ago, they'd been willing to argue with him, willing to tell him that his ideas were madness and that there was no way his predictions could be correct. Now, he'd been proven more than right as the illness spread from continent to continent, the world's greatest medical minds having no idea how it was carried or what made a good host.
Exoplasmis Gastrotal was the name he'd given the thing, since it defied all standard medical classifications. His colleagues had been willing to let him have his fun, but chalked it up to another one of his strange projects; something that wouldn't have an impact beyond the lab. For once, they'd made the wrong call, but he wished he hadn't been right, wished he hadn't seen this one coming. It was hard to watch the world crumble and die.
“Are you...” A voice began from the back, and then trailed off. Franz Zaber was a hell of a neurosurgeon, but had little care for diseases that affected the rest of the body. Allain had hoped that the pathogen was brain-responsive, but in the bodies he'd dissected, he could find no evidence of it there.
“Yes, I'm sure,” he said firmly, pulling up a map on the overhead projector. “This is the current spread of the disease. Red areas represent populations beyond control, where the number of uninfected left is not worth counting. Orange are areas where the disease is spreading rapidly, and the yellow sections are those where only a few cases have been reported. The few blue areas you see have no evidence of the disease.”
There was another long moment of silence as the white-coats in front of him took it all in. He'd stopped putting on his coat a few days ago; he didn't feel like he had much chance to heal anyone, anymore. Allain didn't bother looking at the map. He'd checked his figures time and again in the hopes that he'd been wrong, but his only mistakes were to under-represent the number of new cases that were developing. He knew that fully half of North American was in an orange zone, with both seaboards showing significant trends toward red. A large portion of Europe was already red; it was only third-world countries, and those with a far northern or southern latitude that had any blue on them at all.
It was a strange and terrible thing he'd discovered, thanks to a clever doctor down at the morgue. Hans Feldman knew that he loved odd diseases of the stomach and intestine – something few others in his profession took on as a specialization – and when he'd gotten a call two months ago about a strange case downtown, he'd been more than willing to lose a night of sleep checking out the dead man. It had been four in the morning by the time he arrived at Feldman's morgue door, and he'd like to think the hour played a part in the fact that he was horrified by what he saw.
The man couldn't have been older than thirty, with smooth skin on his face and taut muscles on his arms and legs. It was his stomach that was his most notable characteristic, however, as it was at least twice the size of that found on his most obese patients. Feldman had waited to do the cut until he arrived, and he had found himself edging to the back of the room, concerned that the man on the table might conceal something dangerous, something alien.
At first, the lack of anything jumping from the man's chest filled him with a sense of sleep-addled relief, but Feldman's gasp told him something was wrong. Moving in to stand beside the other doctor, he'd seen what was so odd – the man on the table hadn't just eaten himself to death, he'd done so eating everything.
Bits of wood, metal and plastic filed the corpse's stomach, and Allain was sure he could see remnants of nails, fence posts and soft drink bottles. Grabbing the dead man's jaw, he forced it open and found most of the teeth broken, along with cuts and sores along the gums and cheeks. The fool on the table had literally eaten himself to death.
He'd taken a few quick samples and been on his way, thanking Feldman for his time. More than likely it was just a one-off case, an oddity of genetics or environment.
Then the reports had started to come in.
Across the country, men and women were seen shambling through the streets, eyes and mouths wide open. Speaking to them did no good, and only forcibly restraining them from eating would get them to stop. Deprived, they would begin to gnaw on their own flesh. A cry of “zombie” was raised by local news stations, but Allain found something much more sinister.
Disease.
Those infected had no interest in the flesh or brains of anyone else, but only concerned themselves with filling their own stomachs until they burst, until they could no longer move or even breathe. Some communities took precipitous actions and killed anyone who they found feeding, but the truth was the infected weren't a threat to those around them, only to themselves. At first.
Allain still wasn't certain if the disease had gone airborne, infected the water supply or was spread by touch; cultures from the labs were inconclusive. No matter how it was spread, however, the facts were clear. The world had an epidemic on its hands, a frightening manifestation of the need to consume. Desperate hunger had replaced rational thought, and men and women all over the globe would die for it.
Hunger pains were merely the beginning.
- D
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