Sea of Gray

SEA OF GRAY

Text Log #2

Dr Roman Igloria

Day 357, log 625

CDC researcher team

Back up sequence named priority.

This Dr Roman Igloria,

It's nearing a year and six months since the infection went viral in all major cities simultaneously. I’ve exclusively quarantined along with two other biological and genetic researchers, near the estimated ground zero of the infection. While the modular, air tight, containment/research center/lab is an aggressive, fleeting but hopeful last attempt towards a solution, the center and lack of success is beginning to make the other researchers and myself become… agitated. While the benefit of verbal expression of my own personal is appreciated, the backup logs are full and forcing text based entries only. This also has the benefit of restricting my partners from viewing my inner thoughts, secrets, and grim predictions of the nearing future.

There’s no cure in the near future. There’s no vaccine, there’s no visual or recognizable progress. There’s just rats. Loads and loads of rats.

…

Loads of Rats.

While we don’t understand what effectively caused the virus, how to deter, demotivate or eliminate the virus in any capacity, we in relative terms understand the origin, the cause, and detrimental destruction of what is labeled VIRUS STRAIN X734 as a calamity type event. It wasn’t unrecognizably hard to see in all major cities across the world: strangely enough it began with the animals, some went immediately rashing, teeth flailing and mad, others began despicably chasing their own end. Birds in triumph swarms crashing into skyscrapers, other domesticated pets in more fortunate locations dove to their demise, others in more domesticated terms, followed through with whatever means to end the rabid mania set on the animal population.

I’m not here to describe what should have been done. My position, and well survival and existence is dependent on finding a cure. In retrospect this wasn’t the cliche corny movie, “the earth and revolting against the pest humanity”.. this was another species winning.

Carnivorous of Specie, Defense Mechanism or Biological Inevitability The Domination of Increased Evolution

Humanity has had a good run. It wasn’t the aliens, universal calamity or war or nuclear devastation, it was evolutionary inevitability.

A few hypothetical for easing my manic mind:

You harvest three bundles of fruit, of each bundle just a few are infested with maggots.. Do you throw away the entire bundle of apples or keep the remaining of your fruit?

You are in the West in the Early Americas on the First Frontier, established; as a local cattle farmer you notice several cattle began to succumb to a strange disease, how would you deal with your…. Issue?

Remove the sick cows for treatment? And then what?

What if the illness among your cattle is malignant? Spreading rapidly? Hope for the best with your product? Justified slaughter correct?

You’re a CDC researcher, the population of the United States in the year 2040 exceeded 4 billion, a cataclysmic level infection is quickly blimping hotspots all across the country? How would you deal with your issue?

You may ask, how bad is the infection? Oh It’s bad brother.

Puddles of Rats

While even myself and my team cannot explain the exact cause of the virus; the effect is the same: extinction of humanity as we know it. While the throads of dead domesticated pets and strays, began filling the back alleys of major cities, a bizarre phenomena occurred, the mass piling of carcasses, the stench and pooling of conjoined escarpment an interesting development began being tracked and followed, the rats abandoned their established food sources in turn for the over piled stacks of diseased meat. In grayish black swelled and furious blurs they only left behind alley ways painted with red musk.

Some small press coverage. Nothing major. The smell eventually faded but the alleys full of carcasses remained red, a fitting tribute to the futility rather fragility of a deranged mind, the comfort brief, as the rats' new food supply dwindled.

Beginning of the End.

In New York City, there used to be a local joke(not so funny anymore): there are as many rats as people living in NYC. Some exterminators say in reality there are twice as many rats. Today’s world is that world but ten times worse. I’m not sure how many people have survived the second wave of the infection. It has been several weeks since any radio signal has been detected even within several hundred miles of our modular lab.

While the plexiglass surrounding our encampment is supposedly eerily sound-proof, the comfort of sound was quickly dissipated when the source of a new noise, rather the source movement came to fruition.

My colleague, alarmed from the break of silence, suggested “helicopters!”

it was almost the sound of living adjacent to train tracks, rumbling, violent shaking. We weren’t able to pinpoint the sound, but it was at ground level and sometimes a bit higher.

It wasn’t until the same colleague intrigued was intently fixated on what the source of the noise was, had noticed a deer. She exclaimed “a.. a.. deer? A deer in the middle of the city?” the rumbling continued.

Low estimates suggest the bubonic plague exterminated 75 million people. It wasn’t until several hundred years later that rats were even suggested as the culprit. From Mongolia, an invasive species with an incredible reproductive rate, rats have spread essentially in every nook and cranny in both rural and urban environments; the infestation over several hundred years has grown to apocalypse level proportions. What came first New York City, sky-scrapers, and intricate subway systems or rats? For those left in the United States, they came with us on ships, and thrived nearly as well as humanity.

It’s not like we communally sat around with the rats and sang kumbaya; poison, traps, exterminators, shit; teams of exterminators, but it couldn’t stop them. They learned, they evolved. The UK experienced the first wave. Captured rats displayed immunity to even the most deadly of mammals developed poison, several thousand times the sufficient amount to eliminate even a medium sized mammal, such as a cat, or a dog. Anything that could eat the rat, its droppings or nesting materials suffered the fate that the rats were intended to.

The still silence, juxtaposed the ominous rumbling, the deer noticeably frantic; ran, and truthfully I wish I was able to remain ignorant. The sound of movement, the vibrations were earthquake level activity, suddenly the deer darted back in view of the plexiglass it seemed.. terrified. The trembling encroached closer, more rapid, louder; closer and closer.

The grey blur darted towards the deer, rolling, the competing flashes of gray and grayish black, rolled over each other, always pushing forward its momentum visible in which the gray blur quickly filled whatever open space was not already filled with spots of gray. The deer was cornered, with nowhere to run and surrounded by the ocean of rats.

The only visible remainder of the deer after the sea of vermin dissipated, were the bones, antlers, and a red paste that filled the alley where the deer was cornered in.

We waited for the gray sea to move towards another location, they never left the view of the plexiglass.

After the rats consumed the carcasses of deceased pets, they became more food aggressive, unfearing of humans, and more desperate for larger prey. The virus had to have been spread through rat bites and breathing in pores from rat droppings; there is no other way. In cities around the world children became ill with a new virus, contagious in multiple effects; and almost always lethal, but not before mass spreading episodes occurred. Entire apartment sections, projects, neighborhoods were quarantined and placed under martial law and subsequently burned to the ground, in a few short weeks, the world as we knew it would begin to split at its seams. Governments, secret organizations, military operations were brought to their knees, a sickness that was a losing battle, no progress for a cure, that brought humanity to a crawl.

Later that night, the bones had settled and the grey sea still had not disappeared, the sea of gray inched closer and closer toward the modular containment facility, and at first light the horror was revealed. The rats surrounded the facility, more girth and amount of the rats swallowed the facility, they had arrived and they were not leaving.

Last Thoughts:

The moans and the creaking of the modular lab was an ominous but sure set inevitability set in by the sea of grey. The event forced the debate: what's worse, the building being infiltrated, being eaten alive by a million starving rats, or combining every single chemical in the lab, splitting it with my colleagues poisoning the rats on my way out. Our research, our effort; our hope was for nothing. I’m not sure if there is anyone left. I wonder if the deer, the pets experienced a similar feeling, just a powerless bag of meat, in a losing battle. There is one certainty, I will be the same pile of bones and red paste as the deer if the rats don’t find a more lucrative food source, just a pile of bones, clothes and maybe my heart-shaped locket with a photo of my deceased wife.

If there isn’t another update, the sea of gray has swallowed the remainder of my team, or we somehow managed to escape on the brink of death, the result is the same; this facility is no longer safe.

END OF TRANSMISSION