Chapter 13
Disease Burden
Jace had half buried himself in the deep snow, on a section of the park he was almost certain used to be a road. He had pulled Lizzie closely towards him and they both scanned the area in silence. The blood he had spotted in the deep snow was slowly being covered by the thick blanket of snowflakes that steadily fell from the loose canopy of trees. Soon enough a dark figure emerged slowly from the thick mist. It must have been one of the Robots but neither could tell for certain. There was a sound, but not groaning, not quite. It sounded like slurred speech. It made her blood run cold.
'What... eat?' It seemed to say. 'Hungry...' It continued. It sounded like a man so full of beer that he could barely stand.
'Oh shit...' Jace slowly sighed. The wind slowly disturbed enough of the snow and mist to reveal to them what had caused there to be so much blood spilled upon the snow. A severed head lay upon the bank of snow, eyes open. And terrified too. Female. Thin face. Jace started calculating. Like he was writing the most grim report of most grisly murder yet encountered. Red hair. Mid twenties. Death by Robot. Maybe.
'Do not move!' Lizzie had lost her nerve and stood from their crouched space on the cold ground. Her gun was drawn and she was calmly focused on her target. Hips fixed forward, legs far apart and ready to fire close range if she needed to. Jace slowly joined her, but could hardly stop coughing. It twitched upon hearing her and turned.
'What... kind... of dead?' It threw up blood. And staggered further towards the two lone and very frightened police detectives. 'What kind?' It roared in rage and frustration. It stumbled in a way totally different from any of the other Robots they had so far seen. Its arms flayed in ways so odd it was hard to predict what direction they would jut forth into. Like a sufferer of muscle spasms fighting the seizures of their limbs.
The bone clashed and sinew turned as it staggered forth one slow and violent step at a time. He wore hospital gowns. Open at the back and stained with blood at the front. His flesh was milky white. As dead as any death they had ever seen. Seemingly not caring for the cold.
'What... have... I done?' It cried. The most deathly cry of the dead. It curdled her blood to the point her jaw became locked and clamped together with fear.
'Did you kill this woman?' Jace fired up in her place, drew his own gun and squared to the monster beside his partner.
'Tasty.' Is all it cried back, fought through tears and anguish as it spewed more blood from its stomach. Lumps of flesh spilled out against the snow, steaming in the cold and melting into it. 'So hungry...'
'Oh my...' Lizzie could barely talk through her frozen jaw and locked lips. 'No further!' She screamed but could manage nothing more as her weapon began to quiver beneath her shock and its own weight.
'Help... me?' It wailed so hard it outmatched the howling wind and thrashing branches of the observant trees all around. Jace sprung to life and raced over to the Robot come human. He grabbed immediately for the throat and pulled it to the ground. But it was so strong. So much stronger than it should have been. "Help" Jace screamed and Lizzie, with a quiver in her stomach through fear of what might happen to him, darted over and pulled at the creature's arms and legs. It was no good. The jaw kept clashing closed, drawing ever closer to Jace's own neck. It was pulling him closer with each spasm of its arm muscles.
Lizzie drew her side arm, a cheap pistol, and fired a single shot into each arm. It did nothing at all. The monster remained strong.
'Put him down!' Jace screamed. With one tap to the head it dropped lifeless. Lizzie's chest heaved in guilt. But she kept it together and pulled Jace to his feet. They both embraced and slowly started to breathe normally.
Jace was first to break and immediately turned into a serious cop. He knelt down and pulled the gown away from the arms of the Robot. He started examining the tags fastened around the wrist. One was a time of death. A brown tag, no better than a postage or Christmas note tied to a gift. The other was a medical record. He pulled it from the arm in frustration so he could read it against the dying ambient light. He read it aloud to her.
'Suffers from sleep problems. Becomes agitated and endures spasms in the night. Permanent vegetative state with no clarity or apparent brain function. Administer two doses of Zolpidem, full strength, to aid patient's sleep pattern.' He read it aloud but didn't understand much of it. Lizzie was physically, and totally uncontrollably, shaking to her core.
'Was he even dead?' She half cried. Near overcome with guilt.
'I... I don't know.' Jace admitted and returned to their embrace. 'Let's keep moving.' He suggested to her. They made sure to keep their shotguns close.
They were both racked with guilt. No point denying it. Full of frustration and boiling over with confusion. Jace took his phone from his pocket and started to load up on online connection. The network signal was very poor. Much more so than usual. Even when the city was battered with storms as bad as the one they were currently in the middle of, he usually managed to get a better signal than that.
He loaded up the video of that General, and the first of the walking dead. He watched it again as they walked down a cut in the trees. It must have been where a road used to run when the city was functional. He could tell as the odd lamp post poked up above the thick snow. They were hard to spot in the dark but he just about managed to figure out they were heading in the right direction.
The video had been uploaded onto every popular video sharing site on the web. It really wasn't hard to find. He started to cycle through the comments, knowing full well that it would drain the last of the battery on the phone. His fingers were like icicles out in the cold too.
There was a lot of hate for the General on some of the earlier comments. Even some death threats from people who claimed to have known him and maybe even worked with him in the past. But those quickly turned to desperation. "My kid just bit me and it won't stop bleeding, what do I do" pleaded one of them. There was no response to it. Probably because there wasn't one to give. "Are we all going to die" cried another.
Pictures followed. Of the walking menaces. The things Jace just wanted to call Robots for the sake of dealing with this kind of trauma. "Is this one of them?" was the caption. The world was falling apart. But no mention of any of them talking... any of them having retained anything of the people they used to be. He shook his head and let out a long nasal sigh.
'What is it?' Lizzie tried to comfort him as he tossed his phone into the darkness in defeat. They stopped even though Jace just wanted to keep going.
'There's nothing about one like that... one talking?' She asked him. This wasn't the time for them to become too frustrated. There had to be something different about that one. There had to be an outside factor, something they had missed, that made it unique where all of the others appeared to be the same.
'The drug?' Lizzie suggested a solution but never trusted it herself. How could it be? It was ludicrous at best. 'Or maybe the disease he had before having been infected by the virus?' She posed it as a question but never expected any answer. They really just had to stick to the plan.
It made no difference at all if they were closer to figuring it out or not because they were both soon to be knocking on death's door, only to have him turn them away to walk the earth instead of hell, if they stayed out in this cold for much longer.
The droning moans of the Robots built up so slowly that it was barely noticeable at first. It was disguised as a part of the wind at first, but soon took on a sinister character of its own. Lizzie darted this way and that trying to find the source. Or sources, of the sickening howls. It was too thick, and carried too well on the wind, to make any kind of judgment about which side of the park the threat was coming from.
'Come on!' Jace half shouted at her and clasped his cold hand around hers. He started to jog but it was very noticeable how quickly he became breathless. The figures came out of the mist as it moved on the wind.
The mist seemed to have a character of its o
wn, even thoughts of its own. One moment it would be thick, even choking, and the next almost clear. The wind was its master and the snow its friend. The two of them combined made progress slow and it was almost impossible to see which way they needed to go.
Jace instinctively stuck to the road, knowing that was what would lead them to the reservoir. That was the way they needed to go. They had broken out into a sprint as more and more of the Robots seemed to have joined the hunt. They were faceless in the storm, just dark masses wrapped in a blanket of fog. None of them could keep up with the two highly trained and physically fit police officers, even with Jace having been knocked for six.
'There!' He screamed and raised an arm with great effort to point to a boat alone on what must have been a sheet of ice. The reservoir must have part frozen over. It was just a lone row boat, the kind used as a tourist trap or a romantic row out for two, when the city was still alive and teeming with holiday makers. The ores were propped up inside the thin wooden hull. A simple but brave plan was forming in his mind.
Pausing for fear never entered their heads as they both darted onto the ice shelf of what used to be the reservoir of the great Central Park. Lizzie immediately lost footing but refused to fall with some quick slides and brave corrections. Jace was not so lucky. He hit the ice hard and rolled like a rag-doll, winded but alive, he pulled himself back to his feet.
The Robots were not at all far behind. They lurched out onto the ice. There was something different about them when they had spotted prey. When they were alone and dormant they stumbled around, awkward and uncoordinated, and in all honesty, not that hard to fight. But when they were in a large group and a little worked up with hunger or the thrill of the chase, they were nigh unstoppable. They were fast, even running in cases, in spite of disfiguring injuries.
'Get to the boat.' Jace shouted, a few paces behind Lizzie, fighting through his hard breathing. The ice was making some disturbing crushing noises beneath her boots, but adrenaline stopped her caring. She made a final brave lunge for the boat, only to notice it was fully encased in ice. It didn't even move as she threw her body into the thin craft. The ice was so thick that it couldn't move.
Jace hit the ice again, tripped by some jagged frozen ridges. This time he was not so lucky as to keep rolling. The ice, with an almightily crack, opened up and swallowed him whole. The Robots, without a thought to drowning, poured through the gap after him. Her heart stopped as the whole Park seemingly fell silent around her. Most of the Robots followed Jace, perhaps for an easy lunch, but a few of them had spied Lizzie a little further along the ice shelf and remained focused on her.
She had almost forgotten the shotgun strapped to her back. She first drew her sidearm, and focused by the adrenaline and desire to save Jace, shot each of the remaining Robots through the eyes. They hit the ice, cracked it, and fell into the murky, sultry water below. The shotgun was big enough and strong enough to punch holes in the water. Jace wasn't going to last long in the ice, he was probably already close to hypothermia, if not dead.
But she couldn't risk the shotgun pellets hitting him either. She thought fast, and blew a series of holes in the ice at ten meter intervals, far enough away so as to not hit her partner. The sound of the powerful gun rocketed through the empty, or probably empty, Park. Then it fell utterly silent. All she could do was hope after that.
The sound of him exhaling and breathing deeply was enough to make her heart skip a beat and her lungs forget what they were supposed to do. He didn't seem too upset by Robots grabbing at his feet so he must have managed to finish them off or swim away from them at least. Lizzie scurried for the ore of the boat. She, with every bit of strength she had, started smashing it into the ice around the boat. He was going to be dead if she didn't hurry!
She used her pistol, even though it was almost empty, where she wasn't strong enough to break it on her own. Finally the boat started to rock, free from the ice and freely floating on the water beneath it. Jace had managed to pull himself onto an icy slab too, obviously with great effort. He panted deeply for breath but had started stripping his shirt from his back. He knew enough about basic first aid to not keep it on. He needed to get dry as soon as possible or he was going to die. Lizzie pushed hard to get the boat to him. She moved and heaved the ice away with the ore to finally reach him.
Jace was down to his boxer shorts by the time she reached him and physically pulled him inside, knocking both of them over with the effort. His skin was icy cold to the touch and he was shaking to his core. Lizzie didn't smoke. But she always carried a lighter, just in case. She fished around in her back pocket to find it. It was a zip lighter, the kind you constantly needed to buy fuel for. It was easy to light and she just made sure Jace was close to the flame. He was trying to say something. Always trying to be in control, but she just didn't listen to him.
'Sit here!' She barked so he did. The boat itself was freezing but he hardly noticed. Two wooden slats joined the frame of the boat together to form two seats for people to sit on. Lizzie made sure to save one of the ores but started smashing the other against the side of the iced up boat. It eventually started to splinter away. She took the shotgun from across her back and removed two of the shells from the barrel by quickly disconnecting the two halves of the gun. Quickly using the edge of a combat knife, she split them open and poured the gunpowder delicately onto the dismantled wood.
'Give me that lighter!' Jace had been holding it as close as he could to his heart. He had read somewhere that if cold blood rushed back to your heart too fast then you die pretty much right away from heart failure. He was half reluctant to let it go but could see what she was planning so trusted her completely.
She held it to the powder, which immediately caused a spark. One that was warm enough to eventually dry out and set the wood alight. The fire was small, and she had made it on the other seat, away from the hull of the delicate and wooden boat, but it might just be enough. She used the other ore to quickly retrieve his clothes. Drying them might take a while, but they had to try. She spread them out under the flames and preyed it would be enough.
Jace stumbled through his words but eventually said; 'Talk about taking a saw to the branch you're sat on.' He was being sarcastic. Setting a fire in a wooden boat hardly seemed like a good idea. But it was the best one they had. At least there was plenty of water around them to put it out if they needed to. Lizzie sat beside him, as close as she could get, and tried to keep him warm.
Jace just dazed into the water below. He had swam hard and fast, while fighting off Robots, in the icy but at least fresh water. Whenever the fire looked to be struggling, Lizzie dismantled another shell and added the gun powder to it. It was unpredictable, with bursts of intense heat then becoming quite cold, but it was doing the job of warming him up.
The Robots were still trying to swim. He watched them almost hypnotized by their milky eyes beneath the water's layers. But they quickly became bogged down with the water they had been taking into their lings, yet somehow not dying, and slowly sunk into the abyss below. Jace took it upon himself to paddle. Gently at first, just hoping the exercise would warm up his blood in places the fire could not reach.
His radio was beat. Water logged and probably on its long journey to the bottom of the lake. But Lizzie's started to crackle again. It was the same voice from before. 'I want to talk to you next, free New York, about disease burden.'
Jace sat shivering in the boat while Lizzie tried her very best to both keep him from dying of the cold, and help him to paddle. It took both of them to move the heavier pieces of ice. She reached down to turn her radio off, even contemplated throwing it into the water so she they didn't have to listen to the ranting clown on the other side.
'No... leave it on.' Jace's lip quivered through each word but he was getting a little better with each passing moment or stroke of the ore. He just wanted something to listen to. Something to take his mind from the numbing pain that the intense cold was causing.
'Dis
ease burden is the leveler throughout history. It's something that nature seems to throw at us, as a species, every time we try to find new pastures to hunt and graze from. Disease is the greatest threat that our societies throughout time have ever faced. And all this is, is the next step of it. This is really just a guessing game. But here's my latest idea.' Lizzie was starting to lose patience with him. They had bigger issues to deal with.
'Anyway.' He continued. 'Imagine the first single cell organism. That multiplies at virtually imperceptible rates. Imagine as that organism, and all of its offspring, slowly evolves over time. Imagine all of it happening in the primordial soup of our young planet, when life wasn't carbon based but sulphur based. Imagine the formation of water, the most basic life forms in all of existence. Imagine the millions of years that must have passed, while rogue bacteria produce in the millions, in the tens and thousands of millions. Mistakes. In the sequence of life. That is the basis of all disease.'
Jace was only half listening but trying his hardest to focus on each word. Only then could he take his mind from the driving and splintering cold around him. He watched slowly as his clothes started to dry around the makeshift fire. He was a little worried that the boat was going to catch fire, but he was far too cold to give it too much thought at all.
'So imagine... you all know the theory. Whether you feel it evolution or intelligent design. But imagine as that first water based creature falls from the ocean and takes to the land. Even if it be amphibious at first. The disease that creature was exposed to in the waters of the young planet, is its disease burden. By landing on the ground, whatever the ground was at that time so very long ago, virtually doubles the amount t of microbes, viruses and harmful bacteria that it has never had the chance to gain any kind of immunity to. So the disease burden of the species doubles overnight, or so to speak.'
Either the man didn't know what he was talking about, or he was treating it with some pretty broad brushstrokes. He didn't sound like he had any conviction in what he was saying, but nevertheless, his ability to haunt and chill remained. His voice was almost penetrative. It struck all kinds of chords, just by the way he phrased things and carried each word after the next.
'Skip forward a few million years. You all know the majority of our gene pool is similar to our ape cousins. And the best and most generally accepted theory is that those apes descended from the tress, for whatever reasons that we must leave only down to our own imagined thoughts, and began, so very slowly over time, to walk on two legs. As the muscles developed to allow them to do so. We see the same happen again. The creatures that adorned the tree top canopy would have had no protection from the bacteria on the ground, so again doubled their disease burden over night.'
They were making some pretty good progress across the frozen landscape of the reservoir. The ice was thinner in some parts than others, and it didn't take a lot to get some kind of momentum flowing to crack it and keep the boat from becoming bogged down. Lizzie heaved and panted with effort as sweat began pouring down from her eyes and brow.
She wiped it away at times. As soon as it set into her uniform it started to freeze, which meant that as soon as she stopped it would start to get very cold. Hopefully they could find land soon and just set the rest of the boat alight for the sake of some warmth. That might attract more of the Robots, but neither of them would care by that point.
'So lets take that theory and copy it, then paste it into hunter gatherer society. Humans started their journey in Africa and moved around for two reasons. One of them you already know, for food and to chase game or animals. But also to escape some disease that they didn't understand. Humans were probably never originally carnivorous. You don't expect that a deer in the forest would eat meat, but they will, if the opportunity arises. They might normally be herbaceous, but should free food come its way, it will just take it. That's probably how humans were. The increase of meat in the diet had the same effect, or vastly increasing the disease burden of the species. So by following game and trying to escape disease, humans find themselves eating different kinds of meats and the same happens again. Bigger disease burden. Without immunity, these diseases killed massive amounts of humans until some kind of collective immunity was formed. No one knows how really.'
Lizzie could just about see a new line of trees in the distance. The dark was truly unsettling by this point. It was all covering and encapsulating. There was no real natural light, just ambient light reflected like a dull and dying candle from the snow both above and below. The trees stood as a haunting testament to the fragility of man. Towering proud over mankind's destruction. But at least it meant that they were getting closer to land. And then they could get warm.
'So copy and paste the theory into medieval society. If you cast your minds back to history class, to the Spanish and the era of the conquistadors. Everyone, and especially the younger of the listeners with a mind for such things, will know the name Francisco Pizzarro. Sent by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, on a mission to spread Christianity to the new world, and to conquer even further lands for his empire, seizing as much gold as he could along the way. Those troops brought with them an as yet only European disease called smallpox. Killed thousands of natives. As the capitalist system grew, trade increased across Europe. The bubonic plague spread from place to place on the cotton and textile trade, carried by fleas and attracted by rats, of which the people had no perception of at the time. The increase in trade therefore increased the disease burden yet again. Areas unexposed to the disease suddenly become infected in a series of mass outbreaks, claiming one hundred percent of the population of some smaller towns.'
'Come on... I think we can walk from here.' Lizzie panted through he exhaustion but bravely took the first step from the boat. Jace was not one for giving up. Despite his often goofy exterior, he was as hard as nails.
He knew he had to get dry through, and make sure his clothes were bone dry too, before they could move any further. So he stood to the other side of the boat and helped Lizzie, with everything the two of them had together, to heave it over the last of the more solid ice and onto the snowy bank that lined the reservoir.
A sudden change in texture and feedback from the snow beneath their feet suggested the land below was solid. The ice must have remained just that little bit fluid, that their deeper senses could grasp but not their eyes, so they could tell they were off it when the ground stopped moving just that little bit.
Lizzie sacrificed the last of her shells and threw the shotgun back over her shoulder in case she might find more ammo later on. She added the last of the powder to the empty boat and watched the orange flames lick away at the wet and icy craft until it finally caught fire. Jace propped the rest of his clothes against a nearby fallen tree branch, which he dug by one end into the snow by the side of the highest flames.
'So copy and paste that into the modern world.' The voice continued. 'And what do you get?' The voice was more patchy, more confused and less self assured by this point in the rant. He was out of ideas. 'And that's where I'm stuck. Patterns of globalization have been in flux for the last sixty years. Tourism increased dramatically by the end of World War Two... The Wall fell in 1989 opening the gates to the East. So why now? What's increased our disease burden this time? Patters of climate change? But that's more progressive too? What was the tipping point?' He paused after each question, which had a dramatic effect upon the two of them. They couldn't help but entertain the questions, to reflect upon them and to try and come up with their own answers.
Everyone knew the disease, whatever it was, started with the most dramatic flu epidemic since the Spanish Flu of 1919-1920. Slowly it took on a rabies like character, at least in some parts of the world, whereas New York seemed to progress rather quickly into death and seeming resurrection. Maybe it was immunity to forms of vaccinations that encouraged it? Built up over time or something, like to the point that it couldn't be detected by modern medicine. That was the best Lizzie could do as she slowly
watched steam rise from Jace's drying clothes and enjoyed the burning embers of the boat.
The voice didn't start again. They would have to wait for the next episode. Lizzie was about to say that she hoped to never hear that voice again. But that would be a lie, and a bad one at that. There was some sick part of her that was hanging on every word. There was some part of her, another lie, that told herself that eventually he would come up with the answer and set this all straight. Not that the voice commanded much trust. Maybe she was just falling for his bull, or being sucked into some kind of propagandistic rubbish.
'Put your clothes back on! Quick.' She had only seen one, but one always attracted more, and it was time to start moving. Jace had warmed to the point he could just about function, so pulled his still damp clothes back on as fast as he could but in total silence. The boat burned slowly but sank into the snow. The melting ice was stronger than the heat of the flame and eventually the last ember died.
The boat sank completely into the snow and ice below, and the dampened flames returned the park immediately back into darkness. The Robot she had seen just a few seconds before, not more than ten feet from them, covered by the snow and rolling mist, disappeared from view as the last of the embers died.