CAUTION: Very Graphic
All of the information here about the virus Marburg is true, and based closely on Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone. "Hot" as it is used in this story does not refer to actual temperature, but rather, lethally infected.
Internal Warfare
Chapter One: Marburg
"No Mary," President Richards of the ESUN said to his personal assistant on the phone from bed, "I'm not feeling well. Please reschedule my meeting." James Richards rested his head once again on his pillow as he listened to the click of the phone as he hung it up. He put two pills in his mouth and with a loud gulp, swallowed them. The throbbing pain behind his eyeballs didn't seem to be hindered by the drugs he had put into his body. He regretted rescheduling this meeting, these matters NEEDED to be discussed immediately, but he couldn't seem to get rid of this awful headache.
Dr. Heero Yuy, scientist in charge of Biohazard Level 4 viruses at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), took a deep breath as he continued in his retelling of the recent events to the ESUN delegates. He wore a white lab coat and black slacks. His dark brown, unruly hair covered most of his face, but, if you looked carefully, you could see his prussian blue eyes sparkling like gems underneath. For a moment he made eye contact with Miss Relena Peacecraft, then looked back at the papers before him, and grasped the podium firmly. He wiped the sweat from his brow and began to speak once again. "As the day grew on, his headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. And then came the severe backache.
On the third day after this headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. His eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed to be almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer the housekeeper's questions, although he didn't seem to know exactly where he was.
"After a few days, Mary Kingly, his assistant, started to worry. She went to his house and immediately advised him to go to see a doctor. She drove him to the small town's hospital. But being such a small place, with no real capabilities, the doctors there could come up with no explanation. They advised him to go to the large hospital in New Port City, in the Sank Kingdom for treatment. Before he left, thinking this could be some bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness. Although he was most definitely ill, his case didn't seem to be critical. They told Mary not to worry, just put him on a plane. He was still competent enough to tell a cab driver where to go. And with that Mary drove him to the airport. The small hospital tried to contact the major hospital in New Port City, but all the lines were in use, so they decided he would be fine, and left it at that.
"His plane took off and headed for New Port City. It was a small airport, so the only plane traveling there was stopping just about everywhere in Europe first, it would seem. So the plane ride took about twenty-four hours all together. As the plane hit the sky, and the ground disappeared, Richards became airsick. He hunched over in his seat, and held the airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughed a deep cough and regurgitated something into the bag. The bag swelled up. He glanced around, his lips smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he had been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are now the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows. His whole head was turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face drooped. The connective tissue in his face dissolving, and his face appears to
hang from the underlying bone, as if the face has detached itself from the skull. He opened his mouth and gasped into the bag, and the vomiting went on endlessly. It did not stop, and he kept bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black, it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh arterial blood. It is a hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Richards closed the bag and rolls up the top. The bag is bulging and softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant." Heero pauses in his speech to breathe in deeply again, he has noticed
that many members of the ESUN had begun to squirm in their seats with his retelling of what happened just three days before.
He glanced in the direction of the Vice Foreign Minister Relena Peacecraft once more, and the four men next to her, three former Gundam Pilots and one older brother. Quatre was on the other side of the room with the colony delegates. Heero continued, "When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone 'extreme amplification.' This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim's blood may contain a hundred million particle of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification had
occurred in Richards, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
"At this point, he appears to be rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up; his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscle is beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn't seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automation. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive
rat brain, and lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of President Richards had already died while the what of President Richards continued to live.
"The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose and he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, clotless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won't coagulate, and the towels soak through. Finally, Richards slumped back in his seat and appeared to be dozing, though his red eyes move slightly around the cabin.
"The plane finally landed in New Port City, Richards stirred himself. He is still able to walk. He stands up, dripping, and stumbles off the plane, his shirt a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Richards has been transformed into a human virus bomb. He gets a taxi and is brought to the hospital.
"The sign on the door said CASUALTY DEPT. He moved to the reception window and indicated that he is very ill. He had great difficulty speaking.
"The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry." Heero commented sarcastically, earning himself a glare from the department head of the New Port City General Hospital. He ignored the glaring man and continued. "So, he sits down in the waiting room. Suddenly, Richards goes into the last phase; the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has 'crashed and bled out.' Or more politely they say that the victim has 'gone down.'
"Richards becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit blood and black matter while unconscious. Then comes a sound like a bed sheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. He has sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amounts of blood. Richards has crashed and is bleeding out.
"Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is 'trying' to find a new host." Heero paused again and swallowed deeply. The room had become incredibly quiet and a pin could have been heard by all, had anyone dared to drop one. Heero continued with a brief explanation of what happened next, "The doctor that treated him, Angus Filmore, also caught the virus. Most likely he will die. President James Richards of the ESUN died at 2:30AM on July 8 of this year AC 203." As Heero paused again a slow and uneasy hand was raised. Heero looked and with a small start, discovered the hand belonged to former Gundam Pilot Quatre Winner, now colony diplomat. "Yes Mr. Winner?"
Quatre took a moment to stand, "What virus is this?"
"It is called Marburg for the city in Germany in which it first appeared. It is of the family filovirus and has two sisters, both strains of Ebola, Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire, is the worst of the three and Marburg is called, 'the gentle sister'. If it is caught early, and the victim brought to the hospital and hooked up to life support machines, the chance of survival is still only 1 in 4. That means only one quarter of the people infected by Marburg survive." Heero kept his eyes trained on Quatre. Quatre nodded his head, signaling that his question had been answered.
Another diplomat stood, not bothering to wait his turn, "How did he transmit the virus?" he yelled.
"A joint investigation into that is going on as we speak, Preventers and some of my men as USAMRIID are working together to find that out. Most outbreaks in the past have been linked to primates who were infected. But, the President didn't seen to have any contact with primates." Heero replied as generally as possible.
"Are you ruling out the possibility of this being a form of biological warfare?" Someone else yelled.
"We aren't ruling anything out," Heero replied. That did it, the room erupted into argument and whispering. Heero stood there and watched with disgust.
Relena Peacecraft stared down at him from her seat. Caught deep in thoughts of how much he had changed, and thoughts of another war. She wiped back a tear and stood. As the people around her noticed that the Princess of the Sank Kingdom had something to say, they quieted. In fact, in a matter of moments, the entire congress was absolutely silent again. "What happed just three short days ago was a tragedy. No one should jump to any conclusions. How paranoid you have all become. I expect, Dr. Yuy, that you and your co-workers are doing all they can?" Heero nodded, "Than that's more than enough to satisfy me," and with that, she sat back down.
Vice President of the ESUN Charles Montgomery, moved in front of Heero at the podium. "If there are no more questions, then you are dismissed."
In a slow flood of footsteps, the assembly cleared out. All except for Relena, her brother and the four former Gundam pilots. They all stood and walked to where Heero now stood.
"Fowl play?" Trowa asked simply when they reached him, everyone else remained silent. Heero nodded.
"I know who, just not why yet. Once I find out, it will all be over," he said quietly.
((Author's note: I followed closely the chain of event in the book, The Hot Zone, because I had to have the timing right for an accurate description of Marburg. The Hot Zone, is a true story, therefor, the virus really exists and that is what happens to those who are infected. I'm reading the book for my Agri-Science class so if anyone has any questions just e-mail me at Littta1984@aol.com and they will be answered.))
All of the information here about the virus Marburg is true, and based closely on Richard Preston's book, The Hot Zone. "Hot" as it is used in this story does not refer to actual temperature, but rather, lethally infected.
Internal Warfare
Chapter One: Marburg
"No Mary," President Richards of the ESUN said to his personal assistant on the phone from bed, "I'm not feeling well. Please reschedule my meeting." James Richards rested his head once again on his pillow as he listened to the click of the phone as he hung it up. He put two pills in his mouth and with a loud gulp, swallowed them. The throbbing pain behind his eyeballs didn't seem to be hindered by the drugs he had put into his body. He regretted rescheduling this meeting, these matters NEEDED to be discussed immediately, but he couldn't seem to get rid of this awful headache.
Dr. Heero Yuy, scientist in charge of Biohazard Level 4 viruses at USAMRIID (United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), took a deep breath as he continued in his retelling of the recent events to the ESUN delegates. He wore a white lab coat and black slacks. His dark brown, unruly hair covered most of his face, but, if you looked carefully, you could see his prussian blue eyes sparkling like gems underneath. For a moment he made eye contact with Miss Relena Peacecraft, then looked back at the papers before him, and grasped the podium firmly. He wiped the sweat from his brow and began to speak once again. "As the day grew on, his headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. And then came the severe backache.
On the third day after this headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. His eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed to be almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer the housekeeper's questions, although he didn't seem to know exactly where he was.
"After a few days, Mary Kingly, his assistant, started to worry. She went to his house and immediately advised him to go to see a doctor. She drove him to the small town's hospital. But being such a small place, with no real capabilities, the doctors there could come up with no explanation. They advised him to go to the large hospital in New Port City, in the Sank Kingdom for treatment. Before he left, thinking this could be some bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness. Although he was most definitely ill, his case didn't seem to be critical. They told Mary not to worry, just put him on a plane. He was still competent enough to tell a cab driver where to go. And with that Mary drove him to the airport. The small hospital tried to contact the major hospital in New Port City, but all the lines were in use, so they decided he would be fine, and left it at that.
"His plane took off and headed for New Port City. It was a small airport, so the only plane traveling there was stopping just about everywhere in Europe first, it would seem. So the plane ride took about twenty-four hours all together. As the plane hit the sky, and the ground disappeared, Richards became airsick. He hunched over in his seat, and held the airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughed a deep cough and regurgitated something into the bag. The bag swelled up. He glanced around, his lips smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he had been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are now the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows. His whole head was turning black-and-blue. The muscles of his face drooped. The connective tissue in his face dissolving, and his face appears to
hang from the underlying bone, as if the face has detached itself from the skull. He opened his mouth and gasped into the bag, and the vomiting went on endlessly. It did not stop, and he kept bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as vomito negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black, it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh arterial blood. It is a hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Richards closed the bag and rolls up the top. The bag is bulging and softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant." Heero pauses in his speech to breathe in deeply again, he has noticed
that many members of the ESUN had begun to squirm in their seats with his retelling of what happened just three days before.
He glanced in the direction of the Vice Foreign Minister Relena Peacecraft once more, and the four men next to her, three former Gundam Pilots and one older brother. Quatre was on the other side of the room with the colony delegates. Heero continued, "When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone 'extreme amplification.' This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim's blood may contain a hundred million particle of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification had
occurred in Richards, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
"At this point, he appears to be rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up; his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscle is beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn't seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automation. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive
rat brain, and lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of President Richards had already died while the what of President Richards continued to live.
"The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose and he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, clotless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won't coagulate, and the towels soak through. Finally, Richards slumped back in his seat and appeared to be dozing, though his red eyes move slightly around the cabin.
"The plane finally landed in New Port City, Richards stirred himself. He is still able to walk. He stands up, dripping, and stumbles off the plane, his shirt a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Richards has been transformed into a human virus bomb. He gets a taxi and is brought to the hospital.
"The sign on the door said CASUALTY DEPT. He moved to the reception window and indicated that he is very ill. He had great difficulty speaking.
"The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry." Heero commented sarcastically, earning himself a glare from the department head of the New Port City General Hospital. He ignored the glaring man and continued. "So, he sits down in the waiting room. Suddenly, Richards goes into the last phase; the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has 'crashed and bled out.' Or more politely they say that the victim has 'gone down.'
"Richards becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. He is going into shock. He leans over, head on his knees, and brings up an incredible quantity of blood from his stomach and spills it onto the floor with a gasping groan. He loses consciousness and pitches forward onto the floor. The only sound is a choking in his throat as he continues to vomit blood and black matter while unconscious. Then comes a sound like a bed sheet being torn in half, which is the sound of his bowels opening and venting blood from the anus. The blood is mixed with intestinal lining. He has sloughed his gut. The linings of his intestines have come off and are being expelled along with huge amounts of blood. Richards has crashed and is bleeding out.
"Pools of blood spread out around him, enlarging rapidly. Having destroyed its host, the hot agent is now coming out of every orifice, and is 'trying' to find a new host." Heero paused again and swallowed deeply. The room had become incredibly quiet and a pin could have been heard by all, had anyone dared to drop one. Heero continued with a brief explanation of what happened next, "The doctor that treated him, Angus Filmore, also caught the virus. Most likely he will die. President James Richards of the ESUN died at 2:30AM on July 8 of this year AC 203." As Heero paused again a slow and uneasy hand was raised. Heero looked and with a small start, discovered the hand belonged to former Gundam Pilot Quatre Winner, now colony diplomat. "Yes Mr. Winner?"
Quatre took a moment to stand, "What virus is this?"
"It is called Marburg for the city in Germany in which it first appeared. It is of the family filovirus and has two sisters, both strains of Ebola, Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Ebola Zaire, is the worst of the three and Marburg is called, 'the gentle sister'. If it is caught early, and the victim brought to the hospital and hooked up to life support machines, the chance of survival is still only 1 in 4. That means only one quarter of the people infected by Marburg survive." Heero kept his eyes trained on Quatre. Quatre nodded his head, signaling that his question had been answered.
Another diplomat stood, not bothering to wait his turn, "How did he transmit the virus?" he yelled.
"A joint investigation into that is going on as we speak, Preventers and some of my men as USAMRIID are working together to find that out. Most outbreaks in the past have been linked to primates who were infected. But, the President didn't seen to have any contact with primates." Heero replied as generally as possible.
"Are you ruling out the possibility of this being a form of biological warfare?" Someone else yelled.
"We aren't ruling anything out," Heero replied. That did it, the room erupted into argument and whispering. Heero stood there and watched with disgust.
Relena Peacecraft stared down at him from her seat. Caught deep in thoughts of how much he had changed, and thoughts of another war. She wiped back a tear and stood. As the people around her noticed that the Princess of the Sank Kingdom had something to say, they quieted. In fact, in a matter of moments, the entire congress was absolutely silent again. "What happed just three short days ago was a tragedy. No one should jump to any conclusions. How paranoid you have all become. I expect, Dr. Yuy, that you and your co-workers are doing all they can?" Heero nodded, "Than that's more than enough to satisfy me," and with that, she sat back down.
Vice President of the ESUN Charles Montgomery, moved in front of Heero at the podium. "If there are no more questions, then you are dismissed."
In a slow flood of footsteps, the assembly cleared out. All except for Relena, her brother and the four former Gundam pilots. They all stood and walked to where Heero now stood.
"Fowl play?" Trowa asked simply when they reached him, everyone else remained silent. Heero nodded.
"I know who, just not why yet. Once I find out, it will all be over," he said quietly.
((Author's note: I followed closely the chain of event in the book, The Hot Zone, because I had to have the timing right for an accurate description of Marburg. The Hot Zone, is a true story, therefor, the virus really exists and that is what happens to those who are infected. I'm reading the book for my Agri-Science class so if anyone has any questions just e-mail me at Littta1984@aol.com and they will be answered.))