First 12 Chapters - How I Became A Crazy Cat Lady To Survive A Zombpocalyse

7

Chapter 7

Waking up in the morning Babette found a new resolve she wasn't going to die from this she wasn't going to end up like Bill who locked himself in a freezer to die alone because he had no one left to bury him and was afraid of rumors about the illness. At first, she couldn't understand some of the crazy stories overheard from customers that he mentioned one night during a phone call. It sounded like one of the zombie novels she had disregarded in the horror fiction section of the library, and he dropped the notion when she laughed. Resisting the urge to start reading the fiction, Babs decided to look up the facts first. She began pulling books on fungi, fungal infections, pathophysiology, and several medical journals. She also used the library resources to access and print out hundreds of pages of information on the fifth pandemic disease. Researchers and doctors were certain the VRFS of Pandemic 4 was not the thing that caused Pandemic 5. It was something new, possibly a fungal-viral or fungal-bacterial chimeric microorganism with an airborne transmission route, but from her reading, Babs was certain Pandemic was something that the doctors had not figured out before they all died as well.

For the next two days, she learned everything she could about fungal infections of the lungs, eyes, and organs. She studied the symptoms and tried to message people who had posted to medical blogs and social media threads. There were pictures of victims and crazy claims of some becoming zombies, which led down a voodoo zombie rabbit hole and information on fungal zombiism in rainforest ants around the world. Doing what she had been trained to do as a librarian, she began collecting and collating all the information she could on the disease that was causing Pandemic Five

On the morning of the third day, she stared at a man who could easily be the drunk that tried to mug her three weeks earlier. Babs began reading. The person who posted the picture was looking for him, she claimed to be his wife, but the missing person thread had not been updated for over a week. There were thousands of other threads; some looking for people who 'wandered away while very sick'. Many posts begged for help because they were ill, or because their loved ones had died. Over and over, she saw pictures of people with purplish-black lips and caked eyes weeping sooty tears, mixed with pictures of the pandemic victims people claimed came back from the dead. The claims made Babs wonder if hallucinations were part of the disease. There were a few stranger blogs about how people's pet housecats saved them for their family members and neighbors. Cats seemed to attack the sick during the end stages of the disease or allegedly after they returned from the dead. One from a woman who claimed her cats licked the place she was bitten by her dead sister and cured her, but the woman also claimed that eating any kind of preserved food would make people more susceptible to the infection because her cats refused to eat or let her eat it so she encouraged people to eat pet kibble.

Her blog linked to a very official looking US Navy Blog page that told people to not eat foods preserved with Pharaoh's Yeast Extract and advising everyone to keep their domestic cats close because the infected dead seemed to avoid them. Babs laughed out loud at the assertion that the 'curse' was actually in extra-terrestrial organism found and first eaten. when a meteorite crashed into the Sahara Desert. It blamed the same Fourth Dynasty prince Mrs. Thorpe asked her about, then it talked about a lost city and the first modern zombiism outbreak after the discovery of King Tut's tomb. The mention of her eldest patron's grandfather, Lord Carnarvon, and the citing of articles claiming his death was a result of the Pharaoh's Curse had Babs closing the page. It was a very well written fiction mimicking a scientific blog and she wondered if the person who wrote it was still alive, but it wouldn't help her find the truth about the cause or a cure, so she went back to researching.

When the lights dimmed, she realized she skipped lunch again. She had piles of printouts from websites and blogs because she feared the internet would go out. Several servers on the west coast were already coming back with Gateway 404 errors. She decided tomorrow she would risk going down to the copy and printing shop a few blocks away and getting a book binding machine. She needed to preserve this digital record in printed form for the future, if there was a future. She hoped tomorrow would be a sunny day because it seemed those infected by Pandemic 5 did not like bright sunlight.