......Katrina and Chris looked at each other with raised eyebrows. They both laughed.
“It was just a migraine Mrs. Langley, you didn’t have a stroke.”
The woman dropped her head and looked at Chris and Katrina through the corner of her eye as she left the office.
Chris looked back at Doctor Stevensen just as Lucy was pointing at Chris with her pencil. The Doctor was just as tall as Chris, if not taller. He had thin dirty blond hair that hadn’t been done in any certain manner but somewhat disheveled. He looked like a Doctor with his grey slacks, white short-sleeved button-up and red skinny tie. He looked over his glasses at Chris and then at Katrina.
“So you brought this young man to me Katrina?”
“Yes sir.” She wasn’t sure if Dr. Stevensen was in a playful mood or serious. It was hard to tell with him.
He smiled and started walking towards them. Chris and Katrina stood up to shake his hand. He gave Katrina an awkward side-hug like you do with someone you barely know, he grabbed Chris’ hand firmly. “So Lucy says that you want to ask some questions about the infection? No one really asks questions about that.”
“So I hear. I’m trying to write a story on it since no one else has.”
“I see. Where are you from son?”
“New York, but originally from Virginia.”
“Ok, well come on back and lets see if I can’t answer any of your questions.”
They followed the Doctor through the secret door. Lucy watched them all the way.
Once behind the door, there was a short hallway with two doors on each side for the patient rooms. Straight ahead, Chris could see sterile white cupboards that held supplies (a door was open showing boxes of gloves and cotton buds). Beside the storage cupboards was a light green door. it was dingy and old and looked like it could be a janitor's closet. They turned into the first door on the left. It was painted white but had a green tinge from the horrible lighting. The only furniture in the room was a cluttered wood desk pushed into the corner and metal filing cabinet beside it.
Dr. Stevensen motioned for them to take a seat in the chairs available.
Katrina felt a little uneasy being back in that room, remembering what she went through with the medications and shots she got on a regular basis-- before being taken to Colorado. She took a seat in the chair, reminding herself that she was here for Chris, this had nothing to do with her-- really.
“Okay Chris, you have my utmost attention.” He demonstrated this by clasping his long fingers together and leaning on the desk to stare intently into Chris’ face.
“Great.” Chris opened his notebook. He was feeling slightly nervous with sweaty palms; this was going to be his first official interview. “I guess my first question is to determine what happens in the body once it’s contracted the full infection?”
“Of course. The infection—if intrusive enough—attaches to the cells in the body, it starts destroying them and begins to affect the nervous system; the body become tolerant to extreme pain and eventually, when the nerves start dying they can’t feel anything at all. Once it spreads even farther—which it will—it can reach the brain in less than an hour-- or sooner. The brain will start to swell and pockets of fluid will form. This slowly creates madness and the inability to function normally. The heart rate will rise, pumping extra adrenaline through the body.
“Once the infection progresses in killing the cells, it will cause discoloration of the skin until it starts to die, then that’s when flaking and peeling begin. It’s kind of like an extreme case of mercury poisoning with extra side-effects.”
Chris quickly jotted points down as fast as he could, along with a note to stop eating sushi and sashimi. He was receiving the information so fast he wasn’t taking in any of the information; it was like reading a book while listening to the conversation beside you. This helped his nerves.
Katrina knew most of this all ready but it was still morbidly fascinating to her.
“They lose most of their sight becoming legally and color blind but their smell increases and they develop some kind of mental radar for the difference between humans and their kind. For some reason, their craving for meat—raw in particular and human— increases and their taste is pretty much demolished. I’m not sure why this craving has become part of their new lifestyle. They also don’t have a sensor to tell them when their full, so this along with the normal human sensibility to not eat raw meat or human flesh is overwhelming to their stomachs, which is what causes them to vomit up blood. But that also has to do with their organs falling apart inside them.”
Chris stared at the doctor and then glanced at Katrina until returning his pen to his journal.
“Is this too overwhelming for you Mr...”
“oh, um, Phyles—that’s my last name but call me Chris, and no, this is just fine. My mouth is just a little dry. Is it possible to get a glass of water?”
“Of course.” Doctor Stevensen picked up the telephone and called Lucy at the front desk. Chris and Katrina could hear the phone ringing on the other side of the wall until Lucy picked up. “Lucy, can you get Christopher a glass of water please. Thank you.”
“Thanks. Please continue.”
Katrina was still patiently listening to the Doctor. Like a puzzle in her mind, she was fitting each of the symptoms with the few infected she had seen and even some of the symptoms with herself.
“They don’t normally go after their own kind, even though it has happened, it’s rare. They can tell if they are near one of their own and they are not attracted to them. They also become affected by the sun; Their eyes become ultra sensitive and a tan to them would be like getting a third degree sun burn. They will go out in the sun, but not if they don't have to.”
“How do you think it started?”
Katrina cleared her throat and shifted in her chair to put her sweater over her shoulders.
“I think it started with an animal. Possibly someone was scratched or bitten and then infected others and from there it would have spread.”
“What’s the first case you saw?”
Doctor Stevensen glanced at Katrina and looked back at Chris. “It was a child at my daughter’s school. The Dawes’ youngest girl.”
Chris remembered that The Dawes were the family that now owned the lumber company Katrina’s family built.
Lucy brought in three waters and set them on the desk. Everyone simultaneously thanked her and she left.
“Her parents brought her to me when she had gotten into a fight with her older sister,Mary-Anne. Without thinking like a normal nineteen year old, Mary-Anne bit her very hard and punctured the skin with three of her teeth while bruising with the rest.”
Katrina shook her head in disbelief and Chris raised his eyebrows. “Bit her? Like…” Chris bit his finger to demonstrate that he understood correctly. The Doctor nodded.
Chris looked at Katrina in disbelief at the actions of a nineteen year old. She just shrugged her shoulders and nodded.
“At this time we didn’t know that Mary-Anne was infected—she didn’t even know. “The child was brought in after the bite mark started to fester and swell up until it split open, forcing puss, blood and plasma out of the wound and through the skin around it. I think I…have…a…” The Doctor got up to dig through the filing cabinet to his left. He returned to the desk with a green folder labeled “Dawes, Jennifer-Dawn”. He flipped it open and wet his thumb with his tongue for traction. After finding the page he exclaimed: “Ah, here.” He spun the picture around so it was right side up to Chris.
Chris almost gagged when he took in the details of the picture—he never did have a strong stomach, which he seemed to only remember now. When he brought himself to look at the picture again, he could see the bite mark perfectly on the arm of the girl; there were only three punctures, which were just as wide as they were long due to the swelling splitting of the wound. The entire site of the bite was bruised and the skin around that was red and shiny. There was indeed greenish pus being excreted from the openings and beads of a clear liquid being pushed out of the skin around the wound through the pores.
“The mother tried to do everything she could to help her heal, but when the child’s pain became unbearable she was brought to me.”
“Do you think I can get a copy of this?” Chris didn’t know exactly what he’d do with it; if he’d put it in his article or not, but he wanted it. Bad.
“Sure. I’ll go make one.” Dr. Stevensen got up and left the room with the picture.
Chris looked at Katrina and she was looking back with her head in one hand as if she was bored.
“Are you serious with all this?” He asked
“What do you mean?”
“That was disgusting.”
“That was nothing!”
“Good lord.” Chris looked towards the ceiling as if delivering the message to God.
The Doctor walked back in and set the copy on the desk in front of Chris. It was in color, which Chris didn’t know if he was appreciative about. Dr. Stevensen sat back down at the desk, slipping the picture back into the folder and closing it.
“Where were we? Oh yes, so we tried to treat her with medications for an extreme case of a staph infection, but as it got worse, That’s when I took the picture and I became unsure of what to do. Around the same time more cases started popping up, and the first person in Forest Hills was murdered.”
“When you say first person?“
“I mean first person ever-- to be murdered.”
Chris nodded and wrote that down.
“Then another was murdered and another. When they were brought to the morgue, assumed to be dead, they transformed and escaped. More infected people came to me scared out of their wits and I wanted to help. We put together a special building for the infected and Jennifer-Dawn was the first one to turn within the building, everyone was doomed after she attacked them. Long story short, that’s when we realized it was contagious and the police stopped hunting for the ‘serial killer’.”
“What did you do?”
“We started quarantining each one that came in for treatment. If or when they turned, they were alone and we—as a town—decided that the best way to treat them was not to feed them.
“That’s starvation Doctor.”
“You’re a smart fellow Christopher. However, when given normal foods, they wouldn’t eat it anyways, so they were essentially killing themselves. When we found that there was no cure, that’s when we decided to let them perish.” The look on the Doctor’s face said that he didn’t like the way he explained that, or the reality of it; his brow was furrowed as he examined his clasped hands.
“Right. Katrina did tell me that they could be killed like normal humans; drowned or whatever—not like actual Zombies that just keep coming back from the dead.”
“I don’t really like that term: ‘Zombie’ I see the resemblance, but I like to call it The Ante Mortem infection or disease.”
Chris could tell that the Doctor made that up himself; not because of Katrina rolling her eyes and yawning, but he knew it was something Latin about ‘before death’ and he didn’t think it was clever. He wrote it down anyways.
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