Authors: Nick Mariano
Dawn of a New Day (8 page)
The CDC Global Rapid Response Team arrived in Germany and met with the Director of the German Federal Intelligence Service, Bundesnachrichtendienst, located in Pullach and explained what files they were interested in locating. They believed that Mengele and his group of scientists and doctors might have left some of their research papers at Auschwitz when they fled the facility at the end of the war. Teams scoured some of these records after the outbreak of the super virus in New York; however, the files regarding how the researchers actually formulated and constructed the virus were never discovered. Consensus was that some of these files might have either been destroyed before the group abandoned Auschwitz or Mengele may have taken some of the research information with him. They hoped however that some of the original research files were still hidden away with the files that were recovered at the war’s end. The Director said that he would provide the CDC Team with whatever resources they needed and two large rooms were dedicated to the files from the camp.
Robert Maxwell, the Team Leader for the CDC, was surprised at the volume of files that were brought to them to search. Both rooms had boxes of materials stacked almost to the ceilings and Maxwell knew that finding what they were looking for would be a timely process. The fact that much of the research was chronicled in German made the task even harder. One hundred people were dedicated to the project but Maxwell knew if they were to find something in a timely manner they would need three to four times that number of people. Maxwell spoke fluent German, however, most of the Team did not. He requested that CDC Atlanta find as many employees as they could who spoke German and dispatch them to Pullah to help in their search.
None of the boxes had any labeling on them and so it was like finding a needle in the haystack since Auschwitz opened on May 20, 1940, and continued its operations until January 27, 1945, when Soviet troops liberated the camp from the Germans and freed over 7,000 prisoners. The first gassing there took place in 1941 and Mengele came to the camp in early 1943 and promptly began his experiments on human genetics. Maxwell wasn’t sure that they would ever be able to discover what they were looking for, however, this was the only possibility they had for finding out how Mengele had manufactured the super virus. Research at the CDC and Fort Detrick had uncovered some clues about the virus’s construction; however, some key elements were still missing. Only if they fully understood the virus could the American scientists hope to ever find a cure for it. They did know that the X554 vaccine protected people to a certain degree from the deadly disease, however, unless they could cure the virus, it would continue to spread throughout the world.
Meanwhile back at Fort Detrick, fresh samples of the Asian strain of the virus were being worked on and scientists continued to be baffled by the mutation of the virus and the new characteristics that the zombies were displaying. It was almost like some were learning from trial and error and were able to do things previous infectees couldn’t. The fact that they were grouping into hordes and had developed some motor skills enabling them to attack people with greater success was intriguing the doctors. Many of the people attacked would eventually become infected themselves and so the number of infectees in many cities was growing at an alarming rate. Scientists were starting to look at how the pneumonia virus interacted with the three viruses already composing the super virus. Lab tests on the Asian samples revealed a virus unlike anything ever seen by mankind. Trying to separate the various strains and then work on a vaccine was going to be a challenge.
Meanwhile back in Germany the CDC Team was busily sifting through thousands of files from the days of Auschwitz. Many of the files had to do with various experiments that Mengele and his group had conducted before they developed the super virus. One large box of old records talked about experiments that he had conducted at Auschwitz that ran a wide gamut and one folder talked about freezing experiments where victims were submerged in ice water for long periods of time to see what the effects would be. Mengele also had a special interest in twins and conducted numerous experiments to see how twins were formed in the human body as opposed to a single birth. He worked on various types of transplants to determine what organs and body parts could be transplanted from one person to another. Mengele studied the effects of tuberculosis bacteria on the human body, experimented with various types of gases that could cause illness in patients and even death and several new types of poisons that could be used to torture or kill inmates at the camp. He started studies into types of virus that had the potential to cause mass deaths. When he met with Reichsfuhrer Himmler in 1943 he told him about the flu virus that killed close to 700,000 people in America in 1918 and over 21,000,000 people worldwide. He explained how the virus caused a person’s lungs to fill up with fluids and that the person actually ended up drowning himself. The Doctor also said that the virus had the characteristic of mutating over time and that even though some antidotes had been developed to counter the virus, they quickly became ineffective because of the mutation. Mengele told Himmler about how the plague had killed over 75,000,000 people in the 1300s and quickly spread throughout the world, even managing to somehow cross oceans and infect people in cities far away from the initial outbreaks. He explained that remedies for this infection were non-existent and that once it got started the fatality rate was almost 100%. He also mentioned that the rabies virus, which dates back to ancient times, was quite lethal, and that if left untreated was almost always fatal. Smallpox was another highly contagious disease caused by a virus and was highly contagious for humans that his team was studying. Mengele envisioned creating new and more deadly viruses that the Germans could unleash on the world and turn the course of the war. The Himmler-Mengele meeting that was chronicled in the files talked about creating the super virus per Hitler’s wishes, however, the files the team was currently scanning didn’t get into the particulars on how he hoped to do this. Maxwell thought they were getting closer to finding some of the doctor’s secret files but knew that they still had thousands of files to still go through.
The zombie outbreak in Asia continued to get worse and new cities were affected almost daily. Many of those infected merely died and did not return as a zombie. Doctors and scientists weren’t sure why this occurred. Did the smog outbreak and respiratory infections from the Indonesia fires play a role in this? Did a person’s DNA or family background have something to do with it? Was it the luck of the draw? No one was sure why one person got infected and died while others roamed the streets in a zombie like state. As time went by the numbers of persons turning seemed to outnumber those who were dying, at least in Asia. The ratios in the United States were about even and so the authorities were having better luck in containing the situation. Some thought the X554 vaccine was helping to slow things down.
As the days and weeks progressed the number of walking infectees grew at an alarming rate and they also seemed to becoming more organized and aggressive. Many cities were on lock down or had curfews requiring people to be off the streets by dusk. In the U.S. the infection had spread beyond North Carolina and the recent events in Washington, DC, had the government scrambling to come up with a solution. DC remained on lock down and additional military and police guarded all the principal buildings in town. The President and his immediate staff and supervisors had relocated to an underground facility outside the city, although this was never made public so as not to alarm people. One or two infectees managed to skirt security and in one instance an infectee entered the U.S. Department of State building and attacked several employees before agents from Diplomatic Security engaged the intruder and neutralized the threat. In another instance, an infectee gained entrance to the Capitol Building and attacked two staffers from a Senators Office before the Capital Police tracked down the person and killed him. The streets of DC looked like a bomb had been dropped in the city as only police and military could be seen moving through the city. All the monuments and normal visitor sites were closed and pedestrian traffic was non-existent.
Isolated reports of infectees and attacks were reported at several of the surrounding states but so far the virus had still not made it’s way to any of the western states or to the countries south of the border. The South American countries continued to forbid anyone from crossing their borders and all airline service had been completely stopped. Everyone was sure it was just a matter of time before the virus reached these countries. Scientists pointed out that the plague had somehow managed to cross-oceans and that this virus would do so too. Scientists knew that a flu virus could move from animals to humans and vice versa because of what is called antigenic shift. Antigenic shift occurs when the virus moves from a human or animal to another animal or human. The bird strain of this type infection can jump directly back to a human, while actually creating a new strain of the virus in the process. The new strain then evolves and spreads more rapidly from person to person and usually the end result is some sort of pandemic. Scientists and doctors feared that this is what was happening in Asia and that sooner or later some bird would make his way to South America and the evolution of the super virus would begin again.
Scientists and doctors were studying the antigenic shift theory while trying to see why the virus was progressing and changing differently in Asia than in the United States. They looked at some recent medical cases to see how some other types of viruses had changed over the course of their infection span. In one case, a person who had been infected by HIV became infected with another strain and the end result was a virus that progressed faster than the original and the people involved usually died. Even though they knew the three main viruses in Mengele’s super virus, they still did not know how he had antigenically shifted it to form the super virus. They knew that such things can happen naturally in nature but how Mengele had done so in a laboratory couldn’t be explained. They hoped that the team in Germany would uncover something in the war records to help them find the solution.
Antigenic Shift is the process by which two or more different strains of a virus, or strains of two or more different viruses, combine to form a new strain having a mixture of the surface antigens of the two or more original strains. In contrast, antigenic drift is when the process naturally mutates over time and the known strains become something new and different. The CDC and scientists from Fort Detrick were confidant that what was taking place around the world was a combination of antigenic shift and drift. The viruses and resulting behavior by those infected led doctors to believe that multiple mutations were taking place and even if a vaccine was found that worked in one area of the world, there was no guarantee that it would work in another part of the world. Doctors and scientists knew that the common flu was a good example of the antigenic shift and drift. Influenza A, B and C, all behave differently and so when people receive their yearly flu shots they receive a vaccine that is capable of handling these particular varieties of the virus. If something is introduced into that virus strain, the vaccine becomes whole or partially ineffective. That is why almost yearly new vaccines have to be developed in order to combat new strains that have made their appearance around the world. After people are inoculated they usually stay immune to the virus, however, when it changes, the body’s immune system can’t recognize the new strain and infection sets in. People usually have little or no immunity to a new flu subtype and an epidemic can quickly arise. The human immune system is effective in detecting outside threats to the body and coming up with antibodies to combat and defect an infection. When viruses mutate however, the body’s immune system has a hard time recognizing what it is encountering and so the body quickly becomes threatened. The end result is infection and, if the virus is left unchecked, death may result. Normal mutation occurs almost yearly and in some cases the end result can be devastating and end in pandemics, such as the 2009 swine flu or H1N1 viruses that resulted in pandemics in certain parts of the world. A similar mutation occurred in 1918-1919, when the Spanish flu spread throughout the world and killed millions of people who became exposed to its fury.
The scientists also believed that some domestic and wild animals and different types of birds were contributing to the spread of the virus. The virus was showing up in places where authorities were unable to document anyone from the outside coming into that area recently. They also knew that flu viruses could change very slowly over time or very rapidly for no apparent reason. All these combinations of things were contributing to what was happening in the world and especially Asia, which still appeared to be the hotbed of the infection. The doctors and scientists were gradually figuring out how Mengele and his group had engineered the three viruses involved, and believed that the introduction of the pneumonia virus into many of the people in Asia was accounting for what was happening there. The big question was how to tackle the infection given the fact that mutations could be involved not only in the areas where they were studying it, but also in other areas where the mutation could be quite different. Scientists and doctors were working with numerous pharmaceutical companies trying to develop at least a base vaccine that could be used as a starting point for combatting what was becoming a worldwide pandemic. Doctors also believed that cases in the U.S. were lower because children are vaccinated against a number of infections at a very early age and so their bodies become immune to many of the infections they may encounter throughout their lives. CDC recommended that all children, before they reach the age of two, be inoculated against 13 different infectious diseases, to include: measles, mumps, rubella (German measles), varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), Haemophilus influenza type B, polio, influenza, rotavirus and pneumococcal disease. Many of the countries elsewhere in the world also vaccinate their children in a similar manner; however, many do not. It was becoming apparent that many of the hardest hit cities and countries had a lower medical standard than the U.S. Tissue samples from the dead in numerous countries revealed varying degrees of infection. The countries with higher medical standards had fewer infections, but once a person became infected, the results were always the same, death or returning as a zombie like person. Many of the cities either couldn’t treat victims because their hospitals were overrun with sick people, or the country had decided that the only way to combat the spread of the deadly virus was to exterminate those who were infected, in an effort to stop further infections. As was seen at the beginning of the virus’s spread, many people who were sick with other maladies were mistaken for infectees and killed by security forces despite their insistence that they weren’t infected. Bodies piled up around the world and mass burials or cremations were held to rid the cities of the bodies. Pestilence began to spread in many areas and rats eating dead bodies became carriers for the super virus just as they had done during the plagues of the Middle Ages. Stores began to run out of food and the governments tried to set up food distribution stations around cities, however, most people were too afraid to venture outside their homes. Many thought it was better to starve to dead than to become infected and turn into a zombie like person, as could be seen on many of the streets. Fortunately most of the utilities remained in tact and people continued to have running water and electricity. Internet and cell phone service were still available in most of the larger cities, however, many smaller villages had either intermittent or no connections. News stations continued to try to keep people informed about what was happening both locally and abroad and most people feared the end was near. Churches, mosques and synagogues were filled as people prayed to their God to deliver them from this crisis. Many had already accepted the fact that the end of the world was near and prayed that when the end finally came, it would be quick and painless. Suicides and killings among families were on the rise, as some people couldn’t face the reality of what was happening and doubted that governments would be able to find a cure in time. Country leaders communicated daily among themselves trying to ascertain any new developments in either the spread of the virus or promising research that could help find a cure. The United Nations finally shut its doors as most foreign delegates desired to spend their final days back in their own country and with their families. Only a skeleton crew remained in New York and Geneva, monitoring events that they tried to pass on to the delegates. No airlines, trains or busses were operating except for military aircraft and ships, which continued to carry out their duties. Most gas stations had either run out of gas or were closed and locked and the only vehicles that could be seen were police and military vehicles that continued to patrol cities and main highway arteries. Some ships had made it out to sea before the virus started spreading and continued either cruising or anchored at sea to avoid contact with the infectees. Most passenger ships had enough food for a limited period but some were already starting to run out of food and essentials. As safe as the ships appeared, outbreaks did occur at sea and infectees killed over half the passengers and crew before ship’s security brought things under control on one vessel. On another vessel the Captain radioed back to shore that infectees were overrunning his ship and requested that the military take appropriate action. The military decided to dispatch two military aircraft to sink the boat for fear that the infectees might figure out how to navigate back to land. Scientists theorized that sea birds had infected one or two people and that the virus just took off in the closed quarters of the ship. In another case, a freighter became infected and the Captain saw a nearby military ship and informed them of the situation. The Captain of the military craft thanked the freighter Captain and wished him God speed before he launched a cruise missile, which sunk the freighter in a matter of minutes.
The U.S. President and his Security Council continued to monitor events and hoped that someone, somewhere, would discover something that could help end this pandemic.