Arriving in New Mexico

Arriving in New Mexico
Day 23 post-Outbreak

Well, looks like I’m in New Mexico. And by “looks like” I mean “there was a sign that said so”. Personally I have no fucking clue. I haven’t had a fucking clue about anything in what feels like a long time, but what my watch tells me has only been twenty three days. Twenty three. Barely three weeks. Funny that, how relative time is; back in London, I could barely get anything done in a lab in three weeks. You try hurrying a restriction digest, you’ll look a right fool! Haha! That, I would pay to see...

So I might be losing it a little, I’m rambling, I’m all over the place. Was I like this before? I don’t know. Who can answer that now if I can’t? This heat is killing me. Is it like this all the time in this goddamn state? My god. Well, time to get moving, can’t sit around dictating all day. Useful thing, this dictaphone. Runs off AAA batteries and I’ve got more of those than I can count. As for the storage, well, I’m sure I’ll find SD cards somewhere. For now these few will have to do.

Day 24 post-Outbreak

So I wandered yesterday. Found a town. “Farmington”. What the hell kind of name is that, “Farmington”? Sounds like one of those shitty games I was getting spam from pre-Outbreak. Man, I miss those shitty games. How will I pass the hours waiting for minipreps to centrifuge now? What am I even saying, I’m sure it’ll be a while before I find a functioning centrifuge... As it turns out, the power grid gives out when that significant a chunk of the population dies! On that matter, I haven’t actually detailed what happened have I? I’ve kind of assumed that the only one who would hear this would be me, and I was pretty in the loop, being at the CDC and all. So in case anyone finds these at a later date or non-CDC scientists want more information, I guess I’ll dictate what I know. It goes a little like this:

Round about three weeks ago, nearly four now, people started getting sick. Now, this wasn’t a typical disease, trust me on this one, I know a typical disease when I see one. No, this was something else entirely. I’ve seen one or two survivors. Killed all of them. I wasn’t proud, but a man’s got to survive. Or have fun, whatever. I whacked ‘em around the head with the closest thing I could find. One was a rock, one was a plank of of wood... In the first few days, the drugs I scavenged from the hospital came in handy. I killed some people to survive, but I killed more to help them. And me.

Most people won’t have been in a hospital after it hit, but it was quite a sight. I didn’t know it was physically possible to fit that many people in a room. I didn’t know what effect most of those drugs would have either... But hey, I got some good data, and afterwards, I ended their lives with levomorphan. They almost immediately went into respiratory failure, as expected. The few days I got in my lab yielded little in the way of answers about the disease - I must admit, in all my years, I’ve never made such little progress whilst in the lab. If I had to qualify it, I would say it was a virus. Not just “a virus” in fact, “THE virus”. Never seen anything spread in such a perfect way. You know what, I like it. It’s catchy. “The Virus”. From now, I’ll refer to it as that. I’ll probably forget, to tell you true, but I’ll try and standardise to “The Virus”.

Anyway, to get back to my miserable failure, I didn’t manage to isolate the viral genetic material. Its protein coat was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Every time I ran tests I just... Just, what?! I still have no idea. Never seen such bullshit. What the fuck kind of virus mutates to the extent that its PAMPs are entirely different from one generation to the other? In any case, if some layfolk get ahold of these recordings, all I have to say is: be thankful. Be very thankful. You survived that motherfucker and for that, you should praise whatever deity or higher power you worship because frankly, it seems to me like we could not have been luckier in this life than by surviving. I don’t know the statistics, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that the population density fell right down. Haven’t seen anyone on my travels since leaving Atlanta. Granted I’ve been in the countryside, but other than dead bodies, I haven’t had any company on the way.

<span style="font-size:15px;font-family:Arial;color:#000000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;">That lack is beginning to get to me. I can tell.