David Morrell - The Totem

Slaughter watched the medical examiner put down the micrograph beside the book that they'd been looking at. He studied it.

He thought about it quite a while. "Well, this one's thinner than the rabies virus."

"Yes, that's one of several contrasts. Normally we say a rabies virus has a bullet shape, but this one looks like, I don't know…"

"A missile," Owens said.

They glanced at him.

"Why not? All right, then, a missile." The medical examiner pointed at the micrograph again. "A missile is in keeping with the speed of this thing anyhow. The point is that a lot of viruses are shaped in general like this. Vesicular stomatitis would be one. But this thing isn't quite like any of them. It's much sleeker, and while there's an indentation at the bottom, there's no sign of an appendage there. What's more, the nervous system of the boy was not infected."

Slaughter looked at him. He knew enough from what he'd read that rabies moved along the nervous system, fed off it, and finally destroyed it. He frowned. "But I thought that-"

"Yes, I know. It shouldn't be. This is unlike any virus I've ever studied. It did infect his limbic brain, however."

Slaughter didn't understand. He tried to recollect what he had read, but nothing on that subject came to him.

"The limbic brain," the medical examiner repeated. "It's the part around which all the other sections of our brain developed. It's sometimes called reptilian, but I think of it as animal. It causes our survival instincts, our emotions and Aggressions. Infection there would help explain why that boy acted as he did. Put simply, he became an animal."

"But what about the coma he went into?"

"Just don't rush me. Wait until I get to that. It's my guess that this virus is transmitted through the bloodstream. That explains the quick communication through the body. You should know that when I looked at where the boy said he was cut by glass, I found some evidence that he'd been bitten. When the doctor at the hospital examined him, he had no reason to assume the boy was lying, and besides the wound was jagged as if from a broken bottle. But the boy was bitten, all right. There isn't any question. Not more than a day ago. The virus travels through the bloodstream. It's selective. Only certain cells appeal to it."

"The limbic brain."

The medical examiner nodded. "It produces the symptoms of rabies very quickly; passes through, let's say, a twelve-hour phase in humans, paralyzes, and produces a coma. Evidently when the brain shuts down, the virus becomes dormant. When the victim regains consciousness, the virus starts to work again. It's really quite efficient, feeding until it produces near death and then holding off until the victim can sustain it once again. Because it passes through the bloodstream, it would show up in the salivary glands, infect the spittle, and pass to another victim in a bite. But if you were cut already and you came in contact with its blood, you'd get it just the same."

The medical examiner pointed toward the scab on Slaughter's cheek, and Slaughter suddenly was worried, raising one hand to it, frowning.

"It's too late to worry, Slaughter. If you'd been infected, we'd have known about it yesterday. But next time don't be so damned cavalier."

"If what you say is true, there wasn't anything that you could do about it anyway."

"That's right. Our vaccine would be useless." The medical examiner reached up to touch his own face then, his lips scabbed and swollen. "I got lucky, too. I would have had it by now if this cut had been contaminated. As it is, I gave myself two antirabies shots. Absolutely useless. Christ, I don't know what we're going to do."

"You say you never saw a virus like this? You never even heard about it?" Slaughter asked.

The medical examiner shook his head.

"Well, I did," Owens told them.

They studied him.

"I read about it," Owens said. "Nineteen sixty-nine in Ethiopia. A herd of cattle came down with a special form of rabies, little frenzy, just paralysis. They all collapsed. The owner didn't know exactly what they had. He gave them up for dead, and then they all recovered."

"What?" The medical examiner looked astonished. "Nothing can survive it. That's impossible as far as I know."

"This herd did. The problem is they still retained the virus and in several days they manifested symptoms once again. They had to be destroyed.

"You're certain it was rabies?"

"Oh, yes, all the later tests confirmed it. And I read about another case in India two years ago, but this time it was water buffalo."

"But this thing isn't rabies. Any vaccine they developed wouldn't be of use here. Even if it would, there isn't any time to get it."

"What would cause a brand new kind of virus?" Slaughter asked.

"You tell me," the medical examiner responded. "You want to know the truth? I wonder why it doesn't happen all the time. Never mind a thing like legionnaires' disease, which evidently was around for quite a while, but no one diagnosed it. Never mind a thing like staph or gonorrhea which mutated into forms resistant to a drug like penicillin. Let's just go along with my contention that this virus is a new one. Asking what would cause it is like asking why our ancestors developed a big brain from their limbic system and turned into humans. There's no ready answer. Evolution is an accident. A cell develops in an unusual fashion. Something happens to the DNA. We like to think that everything is fixed and ordered. But it isn't. Things are changing all around us, not so quickly that we recognize the change, but it's occurring, people growing taller, dogs whose breeds are now defective, dying out. We recognize extremes, of course. We call them monsters. But the really startling changes are occurring in those simple life forms that we hardly ever notice. Cells. Their time scale is much different from our own, much faster. Evolution has sped up for them, the chance for random variants. But evolution doesn't even have to be in stages. Quantum leaps can happen in an instant. Every time a person gets an X ray, tiny bullets zinging past those chromosomes. You want a model? Let's try this one. Let's assume we've got a dog. The dog has rabies, but the symptoms haven't shown up yet. The dog is hurt, though. Let's say that it's got a broken leg or some internal swelling so the owner takes it in for X rays, and the dog is treated and gets better. But the damage has been done. The rabies virus has by chance been struck by just one X ray. Hell, it only takes one mutant cell that lodges in the limbic brain and starts to reproduce. Now the owner goes on holiday. He takes the dog up into the mountains. The dog goes crazy, and it runs away. Contagion starts."

"What you said about these dogs up in the hills. Psychopathic animal behavior," Slaughter told him.

"Sure. Just two roads from the valley," Owens said. "The mountains are around us, so the virus has been localized. But why did no one ever recognize it until now?"

"Because, so far as I remember, no one ever tested for it," the medical examiner said. "Ranchers maybe shot a few dogs and then buried them, but did you ever have a look at one?"

Owens shook his head.

"Well, there you have it."

"But you told me Friday night that people have been bitten by them," Slaughter said. "They would have come in for the rabies treatment but, in spite of that, have developed symptoms."

"And they did come in for treatment, and there wasn't any problem. So the dog that bit them didn't have the virus, or the virus didn't mutate until later. That's no argument against the model."

"But the virus is so virulent that everything would have it by now," Slaughter insisted.

"I don't think so. The attacks we've seen were plainly murderous. I doubt too many animals or people would survive them. Plus, the victims must be weakened by the virus. When the winter comes, it likely kills them. That's a natural control. We haven't studied any long term consequences of the virus. Maybe there's a calming process. I don't know at this point."