Pale Rider: Zombies versus Dinosaurs by James Livingood

PROLOGUE
     
     
    An article from the New Eye City Government
    Titled “Janus”
    Published on the network
    Date unknown, Author unknown
     

     
    Blue brains, blues, or zombies as they are
commonly referred, did not happen overnight. Like most medical
issues, the problem started with a child. Janus Sands, a young
toddler from a rural farm community, had trouble walking. Janus’s
parents took the child to their pediatrician who then referred a
developmental specialist. After extensive and expensive probing,
the prognosis was “Metachromatic Leukodystrophy”. A genetic
disorder and the second biggest misdiagnosis in history. Faced with
mounting medical bills, Janus’s parents chose to wait and try home
remedies.
    While Janus gained some semblance of
mobility, he often shook like a Parkinson's patient. Janus’s
parents filled the home with walking bars and canes to help ease
the child’s progress. Perhaps surprisingly, speech is thought to
have occurred during these formative years. Most agree that
mumbling did take place, but the idea of Janus creating fully
formed sentences is unknown.
    The first real clue came from a cat scan near
Janus’s 7th birthday. The scan was repeated several times to verify
the accuracy. Janus’s grey brain matter was increasing while his
white brain matter did not increase. Unfortunately for humanity,
this was the largest misdiagnosis in history. If they had been able
to open Janus’s skull, they would have seen blue brain matter, not
grey. No one knows if a parent was a carrier, or if both parents
were carriers. What is known is that Janus’s myelin, the “white
matter” had mutated. Fearing an auto-immune disease, Janus’s
doctors began a regimen of drug sampling. Some focused on the
symptoms while others were wild guesses at the illness.
    When Janus was reaching near 12, his parents
tried a bone marrow transplant. After a year of looking for
compatible donors, they found a match. History is no longer sure if
something went wrong in transplant, or if puberty was a factor.
What is known is that shortly after that procedure, the first blue
entered the world.
    Janus began to crave flesh and started
hunting small animals. As his little victims increased, his
humanity shrunk back. Nearing 16 Janus attacked and killed his
parents. After eating them for a week solid, he disappeared into
the woods.
    Mislabeled a psychopath, the hunt began for
Janus. During the days that followed, it is well documented from
the police report that:
    “ I shot him in the mid-section, beneath
the navel. Instead of slumping over he kept coming at me. The wound
appeared to stop bleeding nearly instantly. He bit me, but I was
able to push him off. It took almost the entire squad firing
several dozen shots to finally kill him. The brain was
blue.”
    As others turned, it was thought that Janus
was the start of a rare virus. A virus that allowed a near instant
coagulation of blood from wounds and increased rage. We now know,
after extensive DNA mapping, that Janus’s kiss is both a DNA defect
and a spreadable virus. Furthermore, while rare, there is film of
blues mating. Blues often form in small packs of 4-5.
    Blues are easy to mistake for human. While
human in appearance and movement, they rarely use tools and hunt
like wolves. Young blues do not take part but are often spectators.
Those exposed to the virus through blood or saliva lose their
humanity. We refer to this event as “the clearing” and the process
can take 3-4 days. Symptoms often involve shaking and short term
memory loss within a few hours. As the days progress, long-term
memories are wiped out. The victim becomes more aggressive and
agitated. Speech moves from short sentences, to grunts, to nothing
at all. By the end of the process, feeding and mating appear to be
the primary motivations.
    We do not understand the virus or genetic
mutation Janus encountered, but we do know that blues appear to
focus on eating humans. Blues have been seen feasting