The Zombie Virus (Book 1) by Paul Hetzer Read Free Book Online Page A

bucket of what was happening across the
planet.
    I talked to my wife and son one last time
before I called it a night. I prayed that this was a nightmare that
I would wake up from come morning, knowing that if it wasn’t, it
was going to be apocalyptic for our species. Even though I slept
fitfully that night in the lounge, I was thankful for the respite
from the horrors of the day.

CHAPTER 4

    At first I could only make assumptions as to what
was happening. I was pretty sure it was viral, or maybe even a
prion which is basically a self-reproducing protein structure that
can be quite infectious.
    Either one could have caused the symptoms I
was seeing. I immediately ruled out a bacterial source due to the
systemic nature of the disease. It was an equal opportunity
infector, it neither spared the young nor the old, the prince nor
the pauper, the politician nor the laborer.
    My mind worked feverishly trying to deduce
the cause of this pandemic while the equipment worked its magic on
the specimens. Hypotheses that Jennifer, Sung and I had tossed
around earlier were being supported by the data I was
generating.
    I had come to believe that the organic
molecules released from those small, burning particles of comet
were the harbingers of our doom. Then again, it wasn’t the true
start of the madness was it? No, this was only the next stage in
the long history of something that can truly be called the living
dead… a virus.
    A virus is not a living organism, but
straddles the line between the definition of a viable living
creature and a complex molecule. Without a host’s cell, a virus is
just an inanimate package of nucleic acids that can never reproduce
or grow on its own. They are by far the most abundant type of
biological entity on Earth and can infect every type of living
organism from the simplest to the most complex. They are tiny
particles averaging one one-hundredth the size of a typical
bacterium and can replicate in their limited range of hosts’ cells
at a breathtaking rate. Some viruses are even able to mask their
presence from the host’s immune system so that the body can never
mount a defense against the invasion, resulting in a chronic
infection of that host. All of this taken together makes it very
difficult to isolate and identify a new invading virus, let alone
develop an antibody to combat it.
    So when did it really start? I didn’t know,
probably no one ever would. I could guess that it was a long time
ago, millions of years most likely. Maybe at a time when our
distant ancestors were first crawling their way out of the thick
muck at the edge of some ancient primordial sea.
    No one ever suspected that an attack would
come from within our own bodies, or that we would become factories
of our own destruction.
    It was always assumed that any mass
epidemiological event would be from some external natural
reservoir, except it wasn’t. We ended up being the vault and fate
held the combination.
    Many believed that some alien organism had
been released from the comet and was causing this disease. That was
not the case. No deadly virus or bacteria had rained down upon our
heads like the sprinklings of dust from some demented fairy. Oh,
the actual disease was viral, no doubt about that, as I had
isolated these tiny packages of nucleic acid that causes the
disease and was present in most of the bodily fluids of the
infected, from saliva to plasma. However, the virus didn’t come
from the comet. It came from our own genome.
    Somewhere back in our ancient ancestry we
were infected by a virus. The RNA that this tiny molecule inserted
into our DNA must have evolved with us over millions of years. We
call these ancient strips of nucleic acid ‘fossil viruses’. All of
us have these remnants hidden within our DNA, probably left over
from long ago infections of our ancient primogenitors.
    Who knows what this little monster did to our
ancestors? Maybe nothing, maybe something like the horror it is
causing to our species