Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(41)
The latest U.S. census lists persons infected with lobos at 5.2 percent.
Lobos is not a bacteria and it is not a virus, despite its commonly being referred to as such. It is a prion—a word derived from protein and infection and assigned to infectious agents that are made not of nucleic acids but instead of misfolded protein. Prions come in multiple strains, like viruses, capable of producing different symptoms in different hosts. Mad cow disease is another common example, chronic wasting disease another. All known prion diseases affect the brain and neural tissue, creating vacuoles in the nerve fibers that eventually lesion and degenerate into spongiform encephalopathy. The pathogen is untreatable but the degenerative process is slow enough that humans typically do not live long enough for the pathogen to prove fatal.
In an article by Amant J. Dewan, professor of history at Harvard University, Augustus learns that widespread infection began in Scandinavia, where, in the Faroe Islands, the brains of wolves were ritually eaten on the night of the winter solstice. It is believed—through the cross-checking of dozens of runic Old Norse documents—that lobos first broke out in the early seventh century among the wolf population, as chronicled in their loss of balance, shaking, and physical wasting. An apparent incessant itching overcame the animals and caused them to scratch their hindquarters on anything available, even after their fur and skin were scraped away. The villagers had always believed they consumed the strength and cunning of the wolf—but at this time, they feasted instead on highly infectious prions that mutated in their human host.
Everyone responds to the pathogen differently. For some, the incubation period is several weeks. For others, ten years or more. The adrenal gland stimulates the lobos prions. The parts of the brain most affected: the amygdala, which controls anger, and the hypothalamus, which controls hunger. Like a virus, its aim is to reproduce. It does so when the host lashes out. Because the gums bleed during transformation, the prions propagate themselves through a bite, often directed to the back of the neck, seeking out the closest route to neural tissue.
Sweat cannot carry the disease; a cough or a sneeze cannot carry the disease. You cannot get lobos from shaking hands or sharing a soda. You cannot get lobos from a scratch. Like AIDS, it can pass from parent to child and must be blood-borne or sexually transmitted to successfully find a new host. Whether the host is in a latent or heightened (commonly known as “transformed”) state does not matter: the disease is in the host’s blood and that blood remains contagious.
The word lobos comes from wolf, as does lobotomy, an operation that puts one out of one’s mind—and isn’t that the very essence of the infection?
Most people with the disease live healthy, happy lives. Volpexx, lycan groups claim, is merely a safeguard. Lycan attacks are in fact as uncommon as shark attacks—but in both cases, media attention makes them seem more prevalent than they are. The average lycan, one website says, would no more attack a human than the average hunter would turn a gun on a friend.
The Lupine Republic was established in 1948 after nearly two thousand years of dispersal and more than fifty years of attempts to create a lycan homeland. It is located between Finland and Russia, a northern territory largely uninhabited at the time and now populated by several million lycans and U.S. personnel. The country has prospered, with the discovery of uranium reserves, but the past fifteen years especially have been rife with conflict as a result of terror attacks by extremist forces protesting U.S. occupation and advocating state autonomy. They are in the minority, with 80 percent of lycans supporting uranium extraction and U.S. involvement for the economic stability and physical security.
Augustus creates a favorites folder for several dozen webpages—and then pauses for a long time, with his pen in his hand and the glow of his laptop swimming across his glasses, when he discovers there are five prion research centers in the country, one of them based at the University of Oregon.
*
The showerhead is caked white with mineral deposits. From it comes sulfur-smelling water, but Claire steps into it happily. For too long she has not bathed except to splash herself with water and soap in gas station restrooms. A whorl of dirt forms around the drain and doesn’t go away. Nothing has ever felt so good. She showers until the hot water fades and she begins to shiver. When she pulls aside the curtain, the air eddies with fog as though a cloud has descended upon the room.
She has conditioned her hair three times and even then cannot get the knots out of it. After she towels off, she opens the vanity and finds a pair of styling scissors. She swipes a hand across the mirror and almost immediately the clear patch gives way to fog. She turns on the fan and the fog spins slowly away. For some time she regards her reflection in the mirror. A swollen black bruise veins out of her temple.
She grips the scissors. She holds out a length of hair. She snips, once, and then again. It gets easier with every cut. She tosses big damp clumps in the toilet. She stops when her hair is jaw length and the person in the mirror looks like a stranger.
She steps from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Miriam appears in the doorway of her bedroom and blinks hard at the sight of her. “Hardly recognize you.”
“That’s the idea, I guess.”
Miriam waves Claire into the room. Her bed, a queen with a wrought-iron frame, takes up most of the space. A lamp and a handgun rest on the nightstand. A pine bureau squats beneath one of the two windows, both of them boarded over. Miriam says, “You a size four?”