Parts of the hospital are boarded up and chained off from the rest. I can hear sounds on the other side. Some bumping, rattling and shuffling of feet. I don’t know if there are grubs on the other side for sure, but I’ve been keeping my rifle prepared to fire since we got here. There’s a section of the hospital that is almost completely untouched. I was thinking they abandoned the ill when this started considering all the information about the flu. Either the hospital has been cleaned out long before the spread of whatever it is, or the dead are up walking around, maybe on the locked down side of the hospital. I’m curious what’s over there, but not enough to break the dividers. I’m more worried about Marki than anything.
We’ve been here a few days and tried a few different things, but I can’t seem to get her fever down, at least not in the long term. I’ve tried a few different medicines, but nothing worked for long. What’s left wouldn’t be my first choices, but it should have gotten the job done. Her fever will drop to a normal range, she’ll regain consciousness and eventually the fever will return before she’s out again. Marshall has shown faith in me but he’s just as confused as I am. It doesn’t matter how much I know about the human body and different kinds of medications; I’m not a doctor and I’m just taking a shot in the dark. Calculated, but still a shot in the dark.
I started to think the water we had been drinking might be contaminated. Even if Marshall and I weren’t sick, she could have been having some kind of allergic reaction. Luckily the hospital had plenty of equipment I could use to run all kinds of test. The water was clean, the food was clean. I’ve been putting off running a blood test because I know what the results will be.
Marki is part of our team and when we’re finally acting like a team, she’s become an object. She has no input on what we’re doing, where we’re going or even how she’s treated. She was the only thing keeping us together, but now she’s just an object we’re dragging around and occasionally poking needles into. It’s inhumane, she doesn’t even know what we’re doing to her. I try to explain it when she’s awake but even then, it’s as if she isn’t all there. She starts talking about childhood memories that don’t seem to align in any real order.
“She getting any better,” Marshall asks as he relives me of my turn monitoring Marki.
“For a moment she seemed awake, but then went back to sleep. You know how it goes.”
“Unfortunately. I read her file, she’s tough. I just don’t see her pulling through this one.”
“Sometimes miracles happen. Just have to keep the faith,” I exit the room.
I don’t go far, just to one of the hospital terminals. I’ve been trying to quickly sort through all the data I can about the colonist, the flu and the mutations. A lot of the information recorded her is poorly documented. It seems the lead doctor here was one of those that believed this would bring about the next step in evolution for humanity. He did very little to slow the process or prevent it’s spread. We need to do a better job of vetting who gets to join a colony and who doesn’t. Every few years some idiot or psychopath that shouldn’t have slipped through the cracks makes a huge problem for us to clean up.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
I remember a situation on Ignes Station where a woman managed to get an unauthorized gun on board. Since she was in charge of security, the cameras conveniently malfunctioned whenever she was out committing a murder. She had her own little hitman operation up and running six months after the station got going and it took another three months to stop her. If I had know what I know now, before stepping foot on this forlorn planet, I would have been glad to see a serial killer.
Where was I? Yes, they failed to develop or even begin production on a vaccine because Dr. Idiot decided this was the natural course of things. Either humanity would evolve, or it would just run it’s course. We probably would have been better off leaving an AI in charge of decision making down here. They did manage to collect a lot of information about transmission. If a person is bitten, or eaten, the brain is undamaged and there’s enough...human, left over then the body will repair itself with more Strux DNA sometimes creating something more Strux than human, or unrecognizable. I’ve witnessed enough to figure that part out on my own. The more concerning part is the transmission through bodily fluids.
Saliva, semen, blood, mucus, feces and just about everything else is listed as possible but unlikely. They all carry traces of the virus that can be infectious. However, the bodily fluids would need an open wound to enter through. If they’re just ingested, stomach acid will take care of that. This leads me to two conclusions. The first being that the virus may have already mutated. The data here is shaky and I’m piecing it together from files by dozens of different doctors. I’ve got no clue how fast the virus is mutating, especially if it really did start as a cold or flu.
My second is that Marki is probably done for. I just told Marshall to hope for a miracle, but there’s no coming back. She got a face and mouth full of blood. I know I’ve got some small cuts on my face from the crash and if I looked beneath the dirt, I’m sure Marki has some as well. It doesn’t take a large cut to provide a highway into the body. Could have also gotten into her eyes. I’ll keep treating the symptoms as best as I can, but she probably doesn’t have much longer. Sooner or later, one of those moments of awareness and consciousness will be her last. At least I’ll have the opportunity to monitor her for changes, see how the illness progresses. Does she die first, then mutat or is she already mutating and we haven’t noticed?
“What are you doing,” I ask myself out loud.
Marki is part of the team, she’s not some lab rat to be experimented on. I need to treat her with some kindness. Compassion, make her last moments barrable somehow. Even if she is a lost cause, that’s no reason to be treating her as if she’s not still human.
Footsteps on the floor above cut my thoughts short. I had felt like we were being watched from the time we stepped in here. Occasionally I’d hear things and assume it was just some automatic function in the building running as if things were okay, but those were footsteps. Not dragging and slow grub footsteps, but the footsteps of a human, running. Someone else is here.