My name is Norman Monk. I was a private business consultant, but now I am a documenter of the hypersite war, and a zombie killer.
The thing about zombies is that they’re dead of course, but with incredible accuracy you can also say that they’re ugly, clumsy, smelly, and they have unpleasant social skills- if one considers eating the neighbor’s children bad etiquette. One attribute of zombies that you will never hear in polite conversations around the backyard grill is how smart they are, because they aren’t. In all of the super-natural mythologies, they are actually walking dead, and in science fiction the “virus” always takes over the brain and leaves the ex-human in a state of cognitive vegetation, incapable of rational thought. Hell, they can’t keep both shoes on so rational thought is a light year away.
I am prefacing my story with these facts about zombies so that you, the reader- perhaps many years from now -will understand that when I use the term “zombie,” it is meant as literary technique. The zombies I have documented, are not ugly per se, and usually not any smellier than your standard unwashed human. They are neither slow nor clumsy, nor do they eat people … though no guarantees about the safety of the neighbor kids.
Where It All Started
Initially, the zombies I am documenting were people who chose to donate their bodies for an experimental project that sprang out of the military industrial complex. They voluntarily submitted to the surgical insertion of a “hypersite,” a genetically created centipede-like symbiot.
Once implanted, the hypersite attaches itself to the spinal nerve bundle at the base of the volunteer’s skull. Many 
people today call them parasites but this is incorrect. A parasite feeds off its host without even so much as a thank you, whereas this organism is a symbiot in that it takes its nutrition from the host’s blood but gives back a crazy bit of chemical soup it excretes into the blood stream. This soup is full of insulin, endorphins, and chemicals still not fully understood but which allow the human host to do inhuman things.
The hypersite implanted hosts develop enhanced muscle mass, translating into stronger and faster. The chemicals also enhance neuron activity, allowing the hosts to calculate faster and to quickly activate muscle memory making them them quicker and more dexterous. And, it gives them a confidence boost, making them feel unstoppable.
Later, the mad scientists (if ever that moniker was deserved it is here) discovered the hypersite also aided in the repair of damaged cells allowing the host to heal quicker than normal. A cut that might take a week to fully heal would heal overnight on a hypersite host.
As you might imagine, Murphy’s Law bumbled onto the scene, spilled its drink on the mad scientist’s control board, and took all the fun out of things. The scientists quickly discovered they had several challenges. People implanted with hypersites needed more food, and more sleep. This was not initially considered a challenge by the hypersite geneticists, since the intended purpose was to create shock troops that could fearlessly and quickly insert themselves into hostile situations, establish control, and neutralize the threat within minutes.
The hypersite facilitated this without failure, however, on the down-side the host soldier could only go full tilt for 2 hours before they slowed down substantially, and if pushed, would literally collapse into unconsciousness for several hours. On a cognitive level, the hypersite endowed the host with intense feelings epitomizing the idea of semper fi. When not controlled, these emotions frequently turned- sometimes without warning -into paranoia, and in many cases rage.
Again, the developers decided that for the volatile operations these soldiers would be a part of, a little rage was a good thing. I mean, after all, you can’t make an omelet and all that. However, the host soldiers had to be trained to accept the mental and emotional stress inherent with being a host, as well as being mentored in how best to use their enhanced physical attributes.
Several test subjects, five men and three women, believed to be volunteers from a local minimum security prison, were implanted without their knowledge and were not trained. Of the five men, three attacked each other during a game of basketball- not normally seen as a full contact sport. The fight was interrupted by guards with livestock grade stun sticks who rendered all three unconscious. Later, one of the three men hung himself, while the other two men descended slowly into insanity, consistently reporting to their counselors the odd dreams and voices consistent with schizophrenia.
The women fared no better. Six months after they were implanted one of the women, Shelly Smith, a paralegal and an embezzler, killed the other two women during breakfast. The 46 year old grandmother used a butter knife to dispatch her peers, then fought her way through four armed guards to escape the building. She scaled the inside barrier fence without concern for the fence’s razor wire, dropped to the other side, and jumped onto the outer high-voltage electric fence. Hundreds of amps plowed through her body, blowing off skin and muscle, and cracking bones, however she still managed to make it half way to the top.
In field tests, the trained soldiers kept their wits during insertion, and utilized their physical enhancements with deadly efficiency. However, loading twelve immensely strong and tentatively unstable people into a retrieval transport vehicle after a mission had its challenges. In the early days of the program three crews were lost when several hosts lost their tentative grip on reality and ripped each other apart, literally.
Eventually the government cancelled the program but secret government programs being what they are, the hypersites were not actually destroyed. Only one year after the hypersite program shut down, a group of hosts, escaped from the Barks Point Government Reservation, a really nice prison camp, housing the remaining volunteers. For some unknown reason, they attempted an armed liberation of a cache of 200 hypersites from a secure weapons depot in a secluded mountain location. Federal law enforcement reported that they had lost two-thirds of their agents, however in the next breath they congratulated themselves for, “successfully foiling the plot.” During the clean-up, it was discovered and leaked that more than one-hundred hypersites remained unaccounted and may have been released into the mountain ecosystem. This information made most average citizens question the governments interpretation of the word, “success.”
Subsequent press reports quoted “leading scientists” (all working at government facilities) as claiming the frailty of the hypersite organism left little room for survival in a natural, unprotected environment. Most environmentalists, many politicians, and all conspiracy theorists found that the term, “little room for survival” lacked the nailed-down quality they hoped for. Neither did anyone care that the hypersites had been liberated from cryogenic capsules where the temperature was far below that of natural mountain temperatures.
Oddly enough during interrogation of survivors none of the host soldiers could ever give any reason for the attempted theft or what they planned to do with the hypersites should they have been successful. The host soldiers, as well as the any other “guests” still on the Barks Point reservation, were now seen as a liability. They began encountering misfortunes and accidents that statistically are only seen in the realm of high-stakes poker. Within three months all host soldiers died in accidents or of natural causes.
Things Were Not Quite Finished
Only a year later, the first whispers of a problem were heard. A female hiker was found dead along a mountain trail only 25 miles from the heretofore mentioned secret weapons depot. It was horrendous and since a sitting US Senator called the nearest town “home,” the body was autopsied immediately. It was determened through forensic analysis of the body and the scene, that the young woman had been picked up by an arm and bashed against a large tree multiple times.
They found her boyfriend, a Mr. Hans Juuna, two days later, when he attacked a small Search & Rescue group sent to look for him. Of the five team members, Mr. Juuna- a five-eleven, one hundred–twenty pound, pediatrician, killed three of the large, Rugby playing rescue workers in the first three minutes of contact.
It seemed clear that his intentions were to kill the other two rescuers so one of the remaining members drew his .357 magnum, kept as hedge against bears, and pumped all six bullets into the man until he finally stopped moving.
Medical personnel quickly rushed Mr. Juuna’s body to a local medical facility. In my research, I found no record of emergency procedures or an autopsy. Put simply, Mr. Juuna disappeared. I did some research a couple of years later using news articles and police reports collected from the area where the “Juuna Murders,” took place and over the next five years, several odd occurrences were reported in this area.
The incidents ranged from very similar to grossly comedic to horrendously awful. In one case the police discovered a murder-suicide in which the woman beat her husband bloody with a frying pan then totally trashed her kitchen, and ended by cutting her own throat with a kitchen knife. Her last parting thought scrawled onto the refrigerator door in her own blood right next to her little girl’s artwork read, “voices.”
In another incident several cows in a herd of thirty were seen attempting to walk on their back legs for over an hour, then they proceeded to rush head first into a nearby rock outcropping breaking their necks. Government agricultural officials were abnormally quick to respond to this incident. They collected the animals, incinerated them, then loaded the left-over bones and ashes into large metal boxes and hauled them away.
The real nightmare began on a quiet night in late summer when a man named Jerry Blass was seen leaving his motel room after returning from a two-day mountain hike. The night manager noticed him as he loaded his luggage into his sedan though he paid for another day. The whole time Jerry talked loudly to himself.
The manager reported it to the police the next morning when housekeeping found the body of a local prostitute in the bath tub. The coroner reported no evidence of sexual assault, nor any obvious cause of death. However they did discover a small hole at the base of the dead woman’s skull. Later lab reports indicated that the woman’s blood showed extreme levels of crack cocaine, and also traces of an unidentifiable chemical cocktail present at the wound site.
The manager told police that Mr. Blass checked in two days prior to the incident and seemed friendly, intending on “seeing mother nature” but acted to the contrary the night he left. The manager told authorities that Mr. Blass was agitated and threw his luggage into the car while talked either to himself or to someone on a blue tooth phone. When asked, the manager said that he assumed it was a blue-tooth phone because he never saw a phone.
I have documented a portion of the interview transcript:
“I heard him talk’n loudly like, ‘I hear you.’ ‘I am going as fast as I can.’ ‘I know it’s important.’ Stuff like that.”
He also told the police Blass said,
“I know where they need to go, but it’s 500 miles away and will take some time to get there.”
Mr. Blass next surfaced on camera at an ATM machine 500 miles way, and soon after the video was taken, police reports concerning death, mutilation, suicide, and all began in the same area of Mr. Blass’ ATM. It was the epicenter of what we now know as ground zero. Of specific interest was a condemned apartment building where Mr. Blass resided. The city totally collapsed into dangerous chaos four and a half months later, and in the same time, other cities began to show signs of infestation.
Eventually the federal government developed “sniffers,” machines capable of sensing a hypersite in a person. However, in an attempt not to cause a panic, the G-folk told the public that they designed the sniffer to detect a new hallucinogenic drug now on the market causing extreme rage and violence in the user.
This new technology lead to the quarantining of entire sections of cities, or whole communities so that agents could systematically discover and eliminate any carriers of the hypersite. “Elimination” never meant that the host was left alive. While this strategy reduced overall incidents it did nothing to explain that the hypersites were apparently implemented a strategy of their own.
Interestingly enough, no one ever adequately answered the question of where the initial organisms in the hypersite experiments were obtained. Since they looked like centipedes everyone just assumed … and there you go. Of course all of the “experts” said that this talk of intelligent hypersites was a rumor, coincidence, urban legend, anything but the truth, and just caused unnecessary panic, and, of course, it left the general public uninformed which is how the hypersite infestation spread across the entire planet.
Fortunately, researchers developed a vaccine against the infestation, barely avoiding human extinction. Unfortunately, distribution of the vaccine only made it to a third of the world before the factories and labs collapsed from host attack, and the vaccine was lost.
This Is Where I Enter the Scene
As it happened, I worked in a hospital administrative position and became one of the first to be inoculated. Interestingly enough, though the vaccine can stop the hypersite from attaching itself and creating a host, the inoculations cannot stop a bullet, or a baseball bat, or a Host simply ripping your arms from your body.
When Host overran the hospital I grabbed an unused sniffer from an equipment locker, a couple EMT bags that sat near the door, and a dead security officer’s pistol. With the entire hospital in chaos I was not amazed I made it to my car with no questions. An hour later, of what should have been a thirty minute transit, I pulled into my driveway. Entering my house through the broken door, I found my wife’s body stuck through the wall between the living room and the kitchen, half in each room as if slung there. Cybil, my little girl was lucky. She had been hit in the head once and left without further mutilation. It’s funny how one can be so thankful for the smallest things.
I lost it for about an hour and don’t remember anything, but when life came back into focus I was sitting in my pick-up looking at house from the road – it was completely engorged by flames while three very dead zombies lay in my yard. I glanced to my right to see a bloody baseball bat and machete laying in the floor of the passenger seat and dimly remembered using them.
I drove away and through luck, divine intervention or … something, I made it nearly unmolested past the edge of town and out into the country. I drove north, along less traveled highways, until the sun began to set, then looked for an out-of-the-way place to park for the night. That’s when I met up with a group of survivors.
They all seemed “rational” if anyone who had survived a Host attack could be such, but I still used the sniffer on them, and they all passed. We sat around a campfire that night, surrounded by rock outcroppings, guards sitting atop each, and I listened to their stories, with family tragedies similar to mine.
Since that day, about five years ago (seems like a lifetime) the gang and I have been traveling about, living off the land, and the remnants of civilization. We don’t really have any lofty plans to restore civilization, or even to live a “normal” life somewhere, just to live another day.
So, here I am. I have the tools, the time and the will to fight, and I’ll probably die trying. I intend to record this new history of our world as it happens but I will also try to memorialize some of the heroic people that I’ve interviewed. I have attempted to write their story, not worrying so much about complete accuracy but attempting to be their voice. I hope I do them justice.
Maybe this will help me unload some of the crap that I’ve carried around. I hope it will be of value to future people, or maybe it won’t be, I don’t really know and actually, I don’t really care- it’s good for me.
To paraphrase a movie character played by the actress Betty Davis in 1950, “Hold on, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride!”