CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Second Day

THE first came and passed and so did the second-or at least it was almost over. But it didn't matter as the variant's full mutation climax was getting closer and closer and would soon fully activate on the third day, just as the people communicating through the encrypted channel had predicted.

Only a few deaths had been reported on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control across the States but things started to get worse towards the end of Friday.

At first, the deaths had been ruled out as the ongoing toll of COVID-19, how the non-vaccinated and unprotected people were succumbing to the virus. This new case, however, had the medical scientists in America baffled.

Dr. Anne Hollis, a silvery-haired senior chief medical examiner at the CDC Building 17 in Atlanta, had been analyzing another dead body that had just been brought in from New York.

"Victim shares the same autopsy as the rest," said, Dr. Hollis, going through all the recent records put down from Saturday morning.

She was currently studying a victim contained in the BioSafety Level 4 (BSL-4) lab, protecting herself with a positive-pressure suit that was designed to be leak proof. The victim had quite a number of defects on them: his eyes had turned ink black; his face was paler than any normal dead body and his features were hardened, which Dr. Hollis had initially diagnosed as rigor mortis but a deeper analysis proved that the victim's epidermal tissue had become extensively rigid prior to his death.

There was still more as the senior medical examiner carried out her fifteenth analysis for that day. She had extracted what appeared to be talons or claws from the victim's fingers. This had been one of the new defects she had come across from the recent bodies.

"Subject appears to have developed a mutational anomaly that might have been the cause of their death," she was saying as she recorded her work while carefully scrutinizing the victim's fingers between her own gloved ones.

Her final analysis; the sixteenth body that day; was now the one that completely shook her to the core.

The victim was an old woman whose body had been recovered from Illinois. She had been presumed to have died of a heart attack due to her age but the autopsy revealed something totally different.

For one, like all of the victims before her, she had been recently vaccinated and a vaccination bracelet had also been found in her home. Secondly, her eyes had lost their color to black, with none of the white being visible. Thirdly, she had clawed fingers just like the previous victim and then there was something new.

Dr. Hollis used a pair of clippers to pry the victim's mouth open and gasped when she saw the tiny pointed teeth aligned in both her upper and lower jaw, resembling the dental formula of a reptilian carnivore.

That was still not the strangest part of this new variant. No. That was established when all the garnered reports from all the cases across the countries with established CDC bases discovered something unnervingly unique about this new variant.

All previous variants of the coronavirus; Delta, Omicron and the like, had attacked the human respiratory tract but this new one had a different angle. It went for the central nervous system, attacking the human brain.

Dr. Hollis then motioned for one of her assistants. "Contact the Director immediately. . .we're under a state of medical emergency."

"We're clearly dealing with a new variant," she added, upon coming out of the BSL-4 Lab, addressing the rest of the medical and research scientists, "The WHO also needs to hear about this. By now they should also have gotten the news. It's time we informed the world of a new variant and a very dangerous one at that."

This then plunged the entire office into a frenzy, with everyone rushing behind their computers or disappearing into labs.

"Goddard, get the body to EDS," Dr. Hollis said to one of the doctors, gesturing towards the BSL-4 Lab.

"And the Zombie Apocalypse Campaign begins. . ." the young African-American scientist said comically, before he disappeared into the lab and had the victim's body moved into one of the many large cylindrical metal containment chambers--the effluent decontamination system (EDS)--that had metal pipes coming in and out of them, conveying steam and other chemicals that would soon have the body sterilized and broken down for further analysis.

The World Health Organization would soon have done its own analysis despite all the drama it was currently caught up in and the world would soon be introduced to a new variant.

At the moment, however, that Friday night, the WHO had something else to deal with before announcing the new variant. This was when a certain criminal scientific consultant was ushered into the BSL-4 equivalent of the WHO, where he was received by the lead research scientist.

"Dr. Lincoln," the scientist said, "welcome."