James M Watson

Symptomless. A dystopian future novel.

An initial expert from the novel is available to read below.

[Chapter 1] — DECLINE

It had been 182 days since the start of lockdown; 182 days since society had broken down and 182 days since any sense of normality in people’s day to day lives had disappeared. It was a cold day, just approaching the start of winter, but any sense of time had been abandoned long ago. Brown leaves curled up like the arthritic fingers of an old woman, amassing in their thousands on the ground below . Complete silence in every direction. Air so still in deathly silence you could here a pin drop. The kind of silence where one scream could carry for miles in the bitter morning breeze.

Since that day the essence of what it meant to be alive had since died. People became less concerned about the big picture and more concerned with the petty details. With a disaster like this stranding people in their homes for months on end, society was bound to break down at some point. The human decency and courtesy of before had been done away with in leu of the predatory human instinct to survive. Selfishness was the biggest disease of all, in modern day society, as people began to look out only for themselves and disregard others. As the five of them each knew only too well, people will do anything to survive.

After the first couple months any form of structure or hierarchy in society began to break down leaving in it’s places a wake of destruction. No Government, no law and certainly no humanity. If this had taught the population anything, it was that fear is the only thing that makes you human. The fear of a mother repetitively smashing a rolling pin into the temple of a man twice her size to protect her seven year old daughter; the fear of a father braking off a chair leg and later using it to impale his own brother with it to protect his young son and the fear of husband snapping another mans neck over the kitchen counter to save his pregnant wife.

The luxuries of sparkling china plates stacked with home cooked food, clean running water over aged bones and beds enveloping weary bodies in a blanket of warmth had all disappeared. Instead all clothes were riddle with tears and caked in blood and dirt and the average person smelt of the inside of a sewage pipe on the hot July day. Food was another luxury, but one you didn’t pay for with money. Most people fished for scraps in dustbins and half-empty canteens but any hoarding food products was suicide unless you knew a secure place to hide it. It often ended up being that people paid for a can of beans or a tin of tuna with their lives.

Rows of derelict houses with splintered doors and smashed windows boarded with flimsy cardboard lined every street; everything that was possible to loot had been looted: grocery stores and supermarkets, home stores and appliance stores, malls and boutiques had all been raided along with the jewellery stores, high end retail stores and banks, but unfortunately for the people looting the latter money didn’t mean anything anymore . Even the schools and hospitals had been stripped for inventory when people became desperate.

The clever ones never took more than enough supplies for two days at a time, anymore than that and you’re just asking to die. Unsurprisingly firearms were the first thing to be swept from the shelves with the thousands upon thousands stocked disappearing in minutes. If everyone in America didn’t own a gun before, they certainly did now.

Although whilst gun violence had contributed to the decline of the population there weren’t nearly as many deaths from bullets as from those who had been infected. The virus seemed to just take hold of its victims unlike any other before. Once it entered your system it spread to every inch of your body, before attacking individual cells and reconfiguring your genetic make up until you were no longer human. It made sure to attach itself to the brain last creating severe head ringing and powerful migraines, like a creature wrapping its suctioned tentacles around your cerebral tissue and squeezing the brain until it’s starved of all oxygen. It is at this point when the transformation happens. The transformation from a thinking being to a carnal beast.

You could spot a infected man or woman from a mile off, the pulsating blue veins protruding from their flesh; their skin peeling with a layer of dead-skin, blisters and sores clinging to their stripped and bloody faces ; their heads cocked to the side unable to fully fathom the primitive level at which they operate and theirs eyes glazed and black on the surface while squinting, to imitate the human emotion of pain without actually feeling any .The infected were free from human emotion, they were just two legs walking forward and two arms that flailed blindly at their sides, attached to a mind that was barred in purgatory for an eternity, utterly unable to compute the basic principles of reason or logic. Although the impairment of their vision was made up for by a heightened sense of hearing and smell which they put towards the one basic principle that whirred in their otherwise uninhabited minds which was their source of their next meal.

Although these people weren’t exactly gods gift at Calculus or Physics they had no physical deficiencies. In fact they were faster and stronger than the average human as the mutation caused their hormone levels to spike, triggering overstimulated levels of rage and aggression, which without any interference was powerful enough to tear an adult male that was over 6 ft limb from limb in a matter of minutes. These people didn’t have any code or conduct and mainly ate raw meat as the sustenance and nutrients travelled to their bloodstream faster, allowing tissue to repair itself almost instantly and grow back bigger and stronger. They would eat whatever they could tear their long bony fingers into: horses, cows, deer, pigs… but above all they valued human flesh. The way the sweet red blood oozes from a person’s pale neck when you clamp your teeth into it. They had to feed on their own in order to survive and multiply. Day after day, week after week more and more people fell pray to the swarm of infected that began to run rampant across America, until the uninfected became the minority.

It hadn’t always been like this though. Several months earlier the government had spewed claims that they had “control” over the virus and that it would be gone in a matter of weeks. They placed their faith in the faltering awareness of the general population whilst behind office doors and in board meetings the most powerful men in America decided the fate of millions of people. Eventually the scientists and statisticians were silenced and ignored, whilst the faces of the operation condemned millions of people to death by letting them regain elements of their normal lives. Anyone who tried to speak out against the crimes the government was committing were massacred by the press and forced back into their homes to watch in terror as society collapsed in front of their eyes.

Eventually the whole of America became impatient, like an insolent child cutting the line at a theme park, and decided it was time to leave their homes whether the government authorized it or not. This was when the virus began to spread over the country at an exponential rate, like a great and unstoppable plague, but no one could have predicted what followed. Once the many millions of people had been outside for a sustained period, the virus manifested into a more deadly pathogen and began to cause the sickening mutation mentioned before. By then it was to late though, there was nothing the many great scientific minds could do to stop the mutation, despite their best efforts. With so many of them dying in hospitals and laboratories it became a lost cause, with the final cohort returning back to their families to protect them from the apocalyptic nightmare that was just starting to sweep the nation.

Over time the new version of the virus became stronger and more potent, it could be spread by any exchange of bodily fluids from coughing and sneezing to kissing and just sharing food. People began to leave the big cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in the North where the virus was most prevalent and move to the country for a fresh start, but that only made the virus spread faster. The breakdown of organized society was inevitable and the longer the virus kept growing the further from hope humanity became.

But, their was one last hope as one scientist, a man name John Randal, first discovered while trying to leave the city with his son Jamie to meet his mother in Missouri . It was while John had pulled his packed up Toyota into the nearby gas station that a miracle happened. He left the car with Jamie inside while he went to go pay for gas. No sooner had he done this than a crazed middle aged woman with empty black eyes had smashed through the car window and was grabbing 15 year old Jamie by the arm, while he thrashed and yelled out to try and save himself.

It was at this moment John saw what was happening and rushed outside to save his son.

However, it was too late, the woman had already made a sizeable gash in the Jamie’s arm. As Jamie nursed his sizeable wound, his father picked up a nearby by rock and used it to club the woman square in the eyes – Now the virus being at the stage it was usually took approximately 30 seconds to act, after which the mutation occurred – John then turned around to address his son’s injury. It had been almost a full minute since Jamie was bitten. The wound was still fresh with blood and tender flesh exposed, but apart from the tears in his eyes, it seemed not to have had any other effects. “How are you feeling, are you feeling okay?” asked John, trying to assess the extent of the harm the virus had done to his son but all the boy could say was “ It hurts!” in a mumbled fashion under his breath. In this time another minute had passed since the incident but still no negative effects. This marked the first piece of conclusive evidence that children were immune to the virus.

Since John’s finding he had spent every waking moment trying to discover what it was that made children immune to the virus and what it was about their immune systems that was so special. When he realized his findings were not yielding any results on a small scale studying his son Jamie he endeavoured to increase his research with a wider audience. He sought to protect vulnerable children in need of help who he believed were humanities last hope . He found an abandoned hospital in with the capabilities to do this in Kansas City, at first only operating on a local scale for children in the surrounding areas. However soon word spread and more and more children from all over the country made the journey to seek refuge, some with parents that had not yet been infected, but many without. However any parents were turned away, leaving their screaming children behind in order to protect them.

Randal soon realized that the hospital would not be big enough to accommodate the rapidly growing numbers of children in his care and with the help some hundred or so of the older members he bordered off the surrounding community to create the Randal institute which centred around the abandoned hospital which he later turned into the Randal centre. The children at the institute ranged from infants of 3 as the youngest residents up to 19 and 20 as some of the oldest residents in the institute. It operated on a system where everyone had a duty, and everyone had a role. The oldest children usually had the most important roles and duties, and had more important jobs in the hierarchy of the institute. Randal also hired some of the older children to be his support team and help him with any personal tasks he needed taken care of. It also often ended up being that the older children were tasked with taking care of the younger children and making them feel safe and at ease.

And so children continued to grow and develop in the institute, which acted as a haven, away from the brutality and hardship facing the rest of society. A rota system was put in place where each child would help with chores such as cooking, cleaning, farming, maintenance and repairs, teaching and even working in hospitals to treat the wounded children. However, Randal realized this still was not enough so he a since set about re-working the few radio towers in the city to transmit a broadcast calling to all the children that were still stranded across the country to come and seek refuge at the institute in Moussuri. It was his hope that he could get as many children as possible to security in the hope that they would outlive the virus and grew up to start a new and better civilization where the virus no longer existed; and as it just so happened, Randal was right. There were thousands more uninfected spread all over the country who were just now hearing about this amazing institute that would take in children seeking safety, three of which were about to cross paths at that very moment.

James Watson, 2019