“Viruses mutate. They branch off through natural selection and evolve continuously. Microscopically, each new strand might look almost identical to the original, but the effects on the host can be radically different. Look at the Human Herpes Virus: HH1 is genital herpes, HH3 is chickenpox.”

I remember the lessons of my senior year biology seminar often nowadays. I wonder where Professor Schneiderman is now, if he’s still alive, still explaining virus behavior to a bunch of starving survivors. Probably not; most likely he’s dead and feeding on those starving survivors. I load my make-shift crossbow, take aim, and shoot–another undead falls and three push to take its place. (more…)

“We’ve never seen a case of transmissible autism,” the nurse whispered, as she escorted me to the “containment area”.

State Schools for the Disabled had long been abolished. Yet there were still children born slow, or with odd twitches, or personalities that didn’t fit the norm. And as medical science came closer to making us all perfect, society’s definition of perfection grew ever higher. And those who couldn’t be clipped or trimmed or smashed into the mold, fell to the wayside. And fell through the cracks to this place. (more…)

When it all started Vincent was hunched over a keyboard writing a report on his first true clinical psychopath. There seemed to be double the clamour one could expect during an early afternoon in the psychiatric wing of the Ted Fisher Correctional Facility. His mind screened out this background noise–although at one point he glanced out the window and saw a woman in a tight skirt and high heels running across the hospital wing’s manicured lawn. His subconscious mind noted the oddity, but up top he was still evaluating when, if ever, his ‘client’ ought to be released back into the regular prison system. When the woman disappeared behind a hedge, he turned back to his computer screen and resumed typing. (more…)

I was just beginning to like my job as a resident at the hospital when the stool sample hit the fan. Talk of the Bird Flu stopped just as soon as the first city went up in flames. The news people at Fox tried to blame Al Qeida by throwing turbans on some of the un-dead and filming them as they attacked a military installation. Britt Hume defended the stunt by saying there was no proof the plague of zombies hadn’t been started by insurgents. As far as I was concerned, all the politics were outside my field, I was going to provide quality medical care, even if the patients were dead. (more…)