Ian’s brain had weak connections between the neurons that shaped thought. He never felt empathy or sympathy for anyone, no matter how badly that person suffered. He tortured the family cat when he was a little boy just to test his own indifference to pain. This didn’t bother him at all.
It didn’t help that his parents drank too much. Sometimes, his mother would go to the bars alone at night, claiming to be meeting friends. She would come home the next day, disheveled and sullen, which led to violent fights, injuries, visits from the police, and so on. His father beat him regularly, often for unstated reasons. Ian had no idea what love meant.
Guilt seemed like nothing more than a deviant form of weakness to Ian. He never felt anxiety. At the same time, he saw himself as the victim in every unpleasant encounter. He especially resented the fact that people didn’t understand his genius. This was both a blessing and a curse. By his 27th birthday, he had earned a PhD in virology and was working in a renowned West Coast research lab. This, combined with his contempt for humanity, made him dangerous.
Ian decided to create a new virus and unleash it on America. He would generate it by taking an existing virus and inserting new DNA into its viral backbone to make it more pathogenic. He thought of his mission in car terms. It would be like buying a Mustang frame, putting in a Viper engine, using Indy car tires, and so on—a piecemeal approach. He got the DNA sequence he wanted from the National Institutes of Health website, a public source. Many viral strain sequences were open source and could be found online since their researchers were funded by government grants. This meant the results were public property.
He just needed to swap out certain portions of the virus to enable it to infect a particular cell type. The virus would then hijack the natural machinery of the cell, and the cell would start replicating massive quantities of the virus without even knowing it was doing so, like a blind machine just reading DNA blueprint codes and cranking out the product.
He exchanged the receptor specificity (by deleting that gene and inserting a new gene) for a lung cell and inputted the specificity for another tissue-specific receptor, which he called Death Receptor-1 (DR1). DR1 could only be expressed on fibrocytes, or skin cells. In this way, Ian successfully managed the DNA sequence for a virus with the flu DNA backbone and swapped out the receptor specificity for a new tissue target.
He had to go high volume, so he grew the virus in a non-human cell line called BHKs, (baby hamster kidney cells). They were a very long-lived cell line that doubled slowly, so the virus could enter the cells, and the cell would make lots of new virus before eventually dying from toxicity in the culture plate. The BHK cells made so much virus that it was now just as deadly as flu but would infect the skin cells instead of the lungs. The outcome would be a whole-body burning sensation, followed by the skin literally melting off the body due to extremely high fever brought on by the body’s natural defense against viral infection.
On a brittle Monday morning three days before Christmas, Ian donned gloves, a heavy coat, and a dust mask. Then he covered his face with a scarf and walked to the downtown business district. He dropped a newspaper infected with his newly created virus on the seat of a crowded subway, exited at the next stop, and disappeared into the crowd.
Tony Lupo was heading home from his graveyard shift. He picked up the newspaper and turned to the sports section. After a few minutes, he scratched his neck and complained about how hot it was to the elderly woman sitting next to him. She agreed and began scratching herself, too.
By the time Tony reached his house, his hands and arms were covered in a severe rash. He ripped his coat and shirt off to better diagnose the problem, but the damage had been done. As his body hemorrhaged beneath the top layer of skin, causing the dermal layers to burst, his dead skin cells floated through the air, landing on his unsuspecting wife, teenage daughter, and three-year-old son. The family jumped in their car and raced to the hospital.
When the Lupos reached the emergency room, they were burning with fever. The entire hospital was quarantined. The medical staff listened to reports of a city in the early stages of a cataclysm. They knew the virus would ravage their bodies in the same way. No one had ever seen teeth fall out so quickly. They had certainly never seen flesh melting off of human bodies. And Ian had left no one with a cure.
