Under a Graveyard Sky-eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    “After the formication period things vary. There are so far twenty-four identified patients in the U.S. None of those have gone through the full series while under observation. Most have presented symptoms outside quarantine: In other words they were picked up by the cops as crazy, naked people before they were identified as being H7 infected. There have been nine of those in the U.S. so far who were in advanced neurological stage. One has died while under care and one is critical. That’s not a statistical study but it looks as if this is also a real killer neurologically.”
    “Twenty percent death rate?” Bateman asked.
    “Right at that is what it looks like,” Curry said, shrugging. “Data is still firming up. However, in the meantime they’re a handful. ‘Extreme homicidal psychosis with reduced mental capacity’ is the current psychobabble diagnosis. Think lobotomized and violent as hell. Very bitey. No coherent sentient response. No language per se. Just basically animal responses and aggressive animals at that. L.A. General is starting to fill up their padded rooms. One customer per or they try to kill each other.
    “Currently there’s a statistical lean to male. Of the twenty-four, sixteen are male. All three of the terminal were male, two of the three critical are male. But that could be from any number of factors including where the infection started and how it spread. SARS looked male leaning for a while due to how it was spreading. Again, we’ll know more in a week. They’re still examining suspect patients and known subjects who are identified as infected or probably infected. There’s a slightly less strong lean to male among those. Stats and other indicators as well as potential treatments will start firming up over the next few days. Again, first identification as an outbreak was only yesterday. These are early days.”
    “What do we do about it?” Bateman asked. “We being the bank as well as in general.”
    “If it had been a normal and natural outbreak I think we could get ahead of this thing,” Curry said, shrugging. “As it is… It’s spread all over, it has delayed onset of symptoms, two delays, and it’s infective as hell. Airborne and blood pathogen with a violent vector on the latter? That’s infective as hell. There are probably people going into neurological state all over the place that are being viewed as ‘the usual sort of thing.’”
    “The usual sort of thing?” Depene asked. “Naked people are normal ?”
    “Police have to deal with naked subjects more than most people realize,” Tom said. “Any large department will deal with someone nude and incoherent at least once a week. Often extremely violent. In New York as often as once a day. It really was only when L.A. was dealing with six in one day that anyone started looking for a central source and even then they were looking at drugs. Surprisingly it didn’t make the blogs at all. At least, not noticeably. It will soon.”
    “We’d been tracking this new ‘flu’ already, mind you,” Curry said. “It took about a day for UCLA Med to put two and two together. The sort of people who are naked and crazy normally have other illnesses and this sudden outbreak ‘seasonal flu’ was considered to be symptom rather than cause. Then CDC noted that this was not a seasonal flu so the alerts starting going up given the locus and spread was not following standard models. Then one of the police who had dealt with Patient Zero, and been bitten, started to manifest neurological symptoms At that point they realized they were dealing with a neurological pathogen.
    “To answer the original question: The only real chance we have is general public and government response. Strong influenza protocols along with some changes in Rules of Engagement by law enforcement will slow this, maybe even stop it. It’s less about the bug right now than it is about general immunology protocols. Your offices already have hand