Day 96 - Infection Story

Infection Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Apparently the worst thing a person could do was touch it. It was fast acting and would soak through the skin almost instantly and then came the infection. It spread quickly and there was no known way to slow it or remove it or cure it. Of course, no one knew this yet. And the infection happened so swiftly, no one had time to figure out these lessons to be learned or to share them with anyone else.

There had been a sudden volcanic explosion at the Messel Pit in Germany. It was odd and unexpected and there wasn’t an easy scientific explanation. There were no other tectonic shifts or anomalies that day. One theory was that a large buildup of reactive gases had finally erupted. Because of the region’s archaeological significance there was much scientific interest and a near immediate response and investigation.

The ants began dying. They were attaching themselves to leaves and then sitting there until they died.  It was strange behavior, but not unheard of. It was a fungus. It made the ants act strange. It made them simply stop and wait to die. Or wait until the fungus consumed them. Either way, they would die. Then, when the fungus was ready to reproduce, it would grow and expand within the ant’s head until it ruptured and released more spores. Exploding heads is not the prettiest of ways to go.

No one noticed at first. Headless ants clinging to leaves might be a strange sight, but very few people go out of their way to look around the neighborhood park for a few dead ants. So the ants were dying off and their heads were exploding and no one had seen them yet or made the connection.

The Messel Pit contained an abundance of fossil remains. The pit deposits were formed some 47 million years prior, give or take a few millenniums, and contained among its many examples flora and fauna, fossilized carpenter ants containing Ophiocordyceps unilaterali, colloquially known as the Zombie Fungus.

The ants were the first noticeable occurrence. But there was something new and unheard of. The men and women that came to investigate Messel would not survive the day. The men and women that came to investigate the death and destruction of the first responders would find decapitation and the exploded remains of what at one point were men and women.

And then there was the bloody black ooze. The ooze that would seep through hazmat suits like they were nothing and could not be washed, cleaned or burned off. It consumed and grew and spread and meant an agonizing death for anyone that came in touch with it.

There had been a red streak and then an explosion in the sky. Fragments flew and struck the earth and mixed with the shale oil and sank to the depths below. The jungle regrew and the Earth forgot. Time wound on and a secret was buried and preserved. It would be millions of years before man would exist or ever begin to take note of such events. The visitor could wait. It had no thought process or concept of time. It just existed and waited for something living to finally come along. It had neither initiative nor agenda. But it had the future and time aplenty. All it had to do was wait and nature would eventually take care of the rest.