Zombie Apocalypse

Heather Martin

Working as a scientist in Chicago Illinois we deal with some pretty controversial research. One of my most passionate experiments also happens to be the most controversial. My team and I had been trying to restore function to dead tissue. It can be life changing if we can successfully accomplish this. We were very successful in returning functions to the severed limbs of small animals when we decided it was time to find a human test subject. An eight year old child, named Sarah, had been in a devastating car accident that left her in a complete vegetative state. Her father died in the car accident and her mother was desperate so she agreed to let us experiment on her daughter. Sarah was hooked up to an EEG and it showed no brain activity to verbal stimulus, in the cerebellum, or painful stimulus, the thalamus. The thalamus is the sensory switchboard in the brain; it receives transmissions from all of the senses, except smell, and transmits them to the higher regions of the brain. In a person with normal brain functions if you prick them on the finger with a pin it will send a pain impulse, using different nociceptors, to the nerve cells which will then be sent up the spinal cord to the sensory cortex in the parietal lobe. After preforming our nuerosyntesis experiment on Sarah’s brain we had nothing left to do but wait to see how her body will respond. We were hoping that it would go well and that her young age would work to our advantage. Unfortunately Sarah’s heart stopped and she was pronounced dead only two hours after the procedure. Sarah was left connected to the monitors after twenty minutes of her being pronounced dead we started getting extremely, almost unnaturally high reading in the hypothalamus part of her brain, controlling hunger. It was the strangest thing because she was still dead, she was not breathing and her heart was not beating, but somehow she had brain function. We took a sample of her blood and sent it to the lab as a rush. I needed to know if we had somehow changed her genetic material. After the blood was taken she was awake and moaning and moving but in an uncoordinated matter. She had no response to verbal stimulation and seemed to have no memories of her mother. While Sarah was restrained, her mother sat at the edge of her bed and showed her pictures of her and her father and told her stories. Yet, the temporal lobe showed no kind of activity. There were no synapses or anything at all that would indicate that she remembered, or even understood anything that was being said. I think Sarah’s mother almost gave up hope, but she insisted that we take her daughter outside. She used to live outside and that was all she needed and she would be back to normal, her mother was certain of it. Her mother was helping her walk because, while she had no real trouble moving, she had no sense of coordination. So while the motor cortex showed activity and Acetylcholine (ACh) was being sent from the brain to the muscle cell receptors the ACh producing neurons had been deteriorated. While her mother was helping her down the hallway to the door Sarah bit her on the arm. Shocked that her daughter had just bitten her she let her daughter go and let her guard down to inspect her arm. Then we all heard a blood curdling scream come from the mother and as we all ran to see what was happening none of us were prepared for what we saw. Sarah’s mother was lying on the floor trying to get Sarah off her while Sarah ripped open her mother’s stomach devouring her. We pulled Sarah off her mother and took her to an isolated room strapped her down and sent her to get a functioning MRI. About twenty minutes later we had finally gotten a good handle on Sarah so we went back to check on her mother. We all knew she was dead she had lost so much blood and tissue there was no sense in hurrying. There was nothing we could do to help her. Surprisingly, when we got there she was gone, not like she had been moved though, there were bloody footprints leading outside. I sent a few members of my team to look for her. Then the results of the functioning MRI came back. It was as if the only strong brain function that Sarah had was hunger. She broke her own arm fighting my crew while trying to remove her from her mother and she didn’t even wince. Even now as she struggles to get free from her restraints she has no regards for the pain from her broken arm. Her MRI shows her brain was flooded with serotonin, the neurotransmitter that affects hunger sleep and arousal. It is very clear that all she thinks about is eating, and all she wants to eat is human flesh. We tried so many other things like, hamburgers and steak and spaghetti and sandwiches she showed no reaction to any of it. Her brain also showed high levels neurotransmitters called endorphins which is your body’s natural pain killer. This is why she had no regard for the pain that should’ve been caused by her broken arm. At this point none of us are really sure what to do with this child that we made to be a monster. That’s when her blood results came back from the lab we had created a gene mutation, a virus, and we have no idea how it spreads. Most of my staff wanted to destroy Sarah and any proof of what we had done before it was too late. We were certain our day could not get any worse, and then it did. My staff members that I sent looking for Sarah’s mother returned, they had no luck in finding her, she was gone. I called all local hospitals and told them to be on the lookout for a woman who had been disemboweled by what looked to be a wild animal. Now we had to study Sarah and see how this virus could be stopped. We had gone from synthesizing life to how to destroy it and Sarah was our only hope. Luckily we locked down the hospital after the escape of Sarah’s mother because somehow Sarah got out of her restraints and was wandering the hospital. Naturally this terrified everyone because we all saw what she did to her mother. My staff was looking for Sarah when I got my first phone call; a man had been attacked looked like a wild animal. The “animal” had chewed his arm right off they didn’t know if he would make it. As I hung up the phone I heard a gunshot. I started running in the direction of the first shot when I heard the second, then the third, then the fourth, now silence. I reached the source it was our security guard he had been bit on the neck by Sarah. He said she surprised him but as soon as he got bit he threw her off of him and started shooting first the leg to disable her, she didn’t blink, so the stomach, still nothing, the heart, she was still getting closer. Then finally, head shot, Sarah’s head exploded everywhere and she went limp, she was dead, again. We tried to stop the bleeding on the security guard but it was unsuccessful, he died slumped over in the hallway. I started to wonder how all of this had happened. We had great results for our experiments on animals how did we get to this. We just killed an eight year old little girl that we were supposed to be giving new life to. Instead, we turned her into an animal driven only by the need to feed. She felt no pain she had no memory no emotions no personality. My phone rang again interupting my thought process. What now, what could possibly get worse? It was the hospital again the man had died, but now he was stumbling through the halls moaning he had bitten couple people so they locked him in a room by himself. “I don’t understand,” the doctor told me “I know he was dead I pronounced it myself. He had no pulse he wasn’t breathing; I worked on him for ten minutes and still nothing. We covered him up he was just waiting for the morgue to send someone to get him when he started walking around.” What was going on the doctor was begging me for answers yet but I didn’t know. I told her to isolate the ones that had gotten bit and observe them and keep me posted. We moved our security guard to isolation just in case. Soon more hospitals were calling me asking for answers I still had none for certain yet. But I told them all that I was pretty sure that it was the bites only the fatal ones though. If a person died as a result to a bite they were going to come back and start looking for food, I didn’t know it yet but I was so wrong. The first doctor called me back all of the victims with bites had progressively gotten worse, then they looked like they were sleeping but about five minutes later they were moaning and in search of food. It was time to go public I knew enough to allow people to defend themselves. I called the local news channels that were all over the city reporting instances of people eating people and had no idea what was happening and told them I had answers and that they needed to come to my lab. Twenty minutes later they were all here and it was time for a little demonstration. I showed them everything I knew starting with brain function these people had to know that they were no longer their friends or loved ones. I put the security guard into a functioning MRI and called him by his name, Jason, and talked to him about his wife, Amber, and daughter, Stacey. There were very low traces of any of the neurotransmitters that express emotion, dopamine and that was explained because dopamine also controls movement and Jason was desperately trying to get out of his restraints. Again the movement of his arms and legs explains why he had trace amounts of Acetylcholine, not only responsible for muscle action but also learning and memory. Jason looked like Jason but only had a desire to feed. Much like Sarah his hypothalamus was flooded with serotonin. All he could think about was human flesh. I tried to make it very clear to stay inside your homes. Board up the windows and do not go searching for anyone. If someone gets bit they will turn, it’s just a matter of time. Lastly and most important, they feel no pain period and the only way to destroy them is to destroy the brain. I told them as of right now there is no cure for this virus but I assured them that I would work around the clock. That was a year ago. Shortly after my news broadcast the Army came in and quarantined the area, it was already too late. I’m not sure the numbers that were affected but I do not that it spread like wildfire. My team and I contain to work on a cure we still have nothing so far but we are in contact with other scientists, so hopefully someday soon we will have created a cure and we make everything right again. As of right now we call it the Sarah virus.

Works Cited

Myers D. G. (2011). Exploring Psychology 9e. New York: Worth Publishers.
www.braintumor.org/patients-family-friends/about-brain-tumors/brain-anatomy.html

Cited: Myers D. G. (2011). Exploring Psychology 9e. New York: Worth Publishers. www.braintumor.org/patients-family-friends/about-brain-tumors/brain-anatomy.html