Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days Read online

  Five years into this program and millions of human DNA samples later, the pharmaceutical companies launched a clinical trial to test if people could receive immunity equal to the individual-DNA-based vaccines if they included a single set of one hundred and forty-six nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA, in every vaccine. A year later, the pharmaceutical companies announced that they had achieved results comparable to the individual vaccines with the inclusion of this strand of DNA, which they were now calling “The 146.” Within six months, all vaccines included The 146.

  The discovery and use of The 146 led antibiotic manufacturers to create human-DNA-individualized antibiotics. These new antibiotics were miraculous. Resistant bacterial strains were eliminated completely. At the beginning of the following year, the antibiotic manufacturers launched the “Be specific, not non-specific” marketing campaign. It had a catchy jingle and a lot of promotion. Within two years, older, general, wide-spectrum antibiotics such as penicillin, were no longer manufactured.

  While pharmaceutical companies were working on DNA-based vaccines and antibiotics, plant geneticists joined the pesticide manufacturers in their efforts to reinvent plants. They started by genetically modifying corn and soybeans. Impressed by the results of human vaccination campaigns, these companies used the same technology to modify food crops. Modified corn and soy were fed to livestock with great results. Soon grains such as wheat, rice, and oats were modified. By the time the National Institute of Health declared the war on disease to be over, every link in the food chain had been modified.

  After successfully using The 146 in vaccines to conquer human disease, scientists turned their attention to the lucrative luxury market. Within two years, there were vaccines for everything from chronic pain to writer’s block. People began getting vaccinated every year to uphold immunity to things like obesity. The most popular luxury vaccinations were for issues once relegated to expensive plastic surgery -- penis size, large breasts, and round behinds. One shot, once a year, and you could have the body you dreamed of. Luxury vaccines were created for people from every walk of life. There seemed to be no downside. Overall, people started living longer, and, worldwide, the birthrate went down.

  Soon, food was genetically modified to accommodate the individual climates on every continent. Soon, even the most arid corner of the world had transformed into a bountiful bread-basket. China jumped in with their own versions of genetically modified food. Within five years, the entire continent of Asia, including the poorest of poor in India, were well fed and disease free. Globally, people were living longer, and prosperity reigned.

  Veterinary medicine was the only holdout. In 2021, the American Kennel Club (AKC) tested a vaccine and found that it changed an animal’s temperament. The AKC ruled against use of the vaccines. More than one animal lost his Westminster Dog Show title because of the discovery of vaccine use. The head of the AKC’s eldest son happened to be a Senator. He passed a bill which banned the use of DNA-based vaccines in animals in the United States. The EU followed suit. A year later, under the “Cruelty to Animals” act of 2033, the ban was modified to exclude some farm animals - -- particularly chickens, turkey, and beef.

  The end of disease reduced the need for medical personnel. Low-paid technicians took over the duties of seasoned, well-educated doctors. Countries closed their health departments, and the World Health Organization was reduced to a skeleton crew. The world was healthy and well fed. There was no need to fund these organizations. Without oversight, The 146 was used to improve cleaning supplies and other household products.

  What no one realized is that every vaccine and food product contained the same DNA sequence -- The 146. Food researchers had piggybacked on the successful vaccine by using The 146 as a DNA anchor for the food-specific modification. The world was awash in The 146 and the protein created by it, The 146-protein.

  For more than ten years, most people received a 146-based vaccine at least once a year and ate 146-modified food. At first, the only repercussion was greater health and vitality. Then, quietly, in out-of-the-way places, there were reports of trouble. The kooks of the world bred terror over vaccines. Even Dr. Bonner’s label told of the coming apocalypse caused by The 146. Most people did not notice anything was seriously wrong until it was too late to do anything about it.

  I had never received a vaccine until I moved into this cell. The new vaccines were too expensive for Indian Health Services, and the US Government wasn’t about to give away their fancy vaccinations to freeloading Indians.

  My pueblo had its own store of seeds. Our gardens and farms were grown from seeds handed down over the generations. Even if we could afford the new, modified seeds, we had no interest in them. The Native American population as a whole was so small, that no one noticed we weren’t participating in The 146-based vaccination and food programs.

  Prison is the exact opposite from the pueblo. Prison populations are among the first vaccinated. The officials say it’s because of the close quarters in prisons, but prisoners know they were being used as guinea pigs for the general population. Every year, without fail, we’d get a needle full of something that was supposed to keep us calm, compliant, and disease free.

  George had received every single vaccine, going back to childhood. In the Pen, they vaccinated him first, so that he could help enforce the vaccinating the rest of the prison. I was often overlooked. I think I’ve had five vaccines in my entire life.

  The food at the Pen was the cheapest they could find -- mostly food-like products made out of modified soy and corn. We rarely ate anything that remotely resembled a vegetable. Day in and day out, the prison population was dosed with food and vaccines modified by The 146.

  The last round of vaccination went like clockwork. A technician came to the Pen and dropped off the vaccine. This time, the vaccine included modifications to decrease depression and reduce sexual aggression. The government was attempting to end sexual assault the way they had ended disease.

  George was the fifth person in the world to get this vaccine. We know this because we found his vial a few years after everything happened. His vial was numbered 00000000005.

  At exercise that day, he had laughed about being a guinea pig. It was a beautiful day -- warm and clear. George was in a great mood because he’d just been informed that he would be released in two years. Although he never would have admitted it, he was also excited to be free of his sexual aggression. The idea of a life free of the sexual aggression which had defined his life made George laugh so hard that the sound echoed off the building. I stood in the yard, looking up at the blue, cloudless sky and listened to that echo for what seemed like an hour. It was a single moment of joy -- profound only because of what happened next.

  Eight hours later, he came to my cell. Or I should say that his soul came to my cell. Well, more like a part of his soul came to my cell. Ah hell, I don’t really know what part of George came to my cell. I’d never seen a split soul before that night. And I don’t know if George had always had a fractured soul or if it happened that night.

  I raised the alarm that George was ill. When the guards found him, he was lying in a fetal position on the floor of his cell. He was shivering with fever and unresponsive. The guards dragged George’s body to the infirmary. The technician in the infirmary said he’d had a stroke, but I knew differently. The bright, wonderful, charming predator I’d known as George was gone. They let him stay in the infirmary for three days. The medical technician said there was nothing they could do, so the guards dragged him to his cell to recover. When he returned, he could barely move. He was no longer able to speak. During our exercise hour, he worked through a single exercise routine, the same one we do now, without his traditional daily variation.

  Within three months of George’s “stroke,” they began distributing the new vaccine worldwide. They vaccinated about half the Pen population in one day. By nightfall, my cell was full of souls again. I worked to send them along, but unlike any natural death, these souls w
ere tethered to the Pen by some unnatural force. Even those souls who wanted to move on, begging to join the afterlife, were stuck at the Pen.

  I heard more than saw what happened next. Bodies bereft of souls began eating their way through the prison population. The screams and cries of those eaten in their bunks echoed through the Pen. By nightfall, my cell was packed with souls. I worked day and night to send along the untethered souls, the souls of those eaten. Outside my locked steel cell, on its quiet, forgotten hallway in the lower basement of the Pen, the massacre continued.

  When the sun rose the next day, October 31, 2046, the violence was unstoppable. The guards thought they could contain the carnage by keeping the prison in lockdown. They were wrong. I didn’t receive a meal that day or any day after that.

  The guards let George out to fight these soulless cannibals. But George was too ill. Instead, he stole a set of keys from a dead guard, came into my cell, and broke the key off in the lock. Even in his witless state, he knew I would care for him. He knew that I was his friend.

  We waited out the siege together.

  We drank water from my sink. We didn’t eat for almost a month. I was so busy sending along all of those souls. I barely noticed the hunger. But George suffered. No longer able to speak, he whimpered and mewed like a lost kitten. It was his suffering that forced me out of our cell. I fought with the cell lock and door for days until, in the middle of a bright day at the beginning of December, judicious use of my pocket knife dislodged the broken key and the door swung open.

  I won’t describe to you what I found. There aren’t words to describe that kind of slaughter. The unnatural bloodbath haunts my dreams to this day.

  As my grandmother had predicted, the invaders to our lands had turned into wasps. The combination of the modified food and vaccine had turned the prison population into the violent, mindless creatures without souls most often called zombies. I prefer the name my ancestor gave them -- wasps.

  For the next month or more, I would build a maze of bonfires from the human remains. Despite the open and broken windows, the prison filled with the smoke and stench of the pyres. The smoke kept the wasps away from George and me.

  I left our cell every morning, piled another stack of bodies or body parts, and lit them on fire. With the wasps on my trail, I would race to the kitchen and lock the door. We had electricity and natural gas then so the refrigerators, freezers, and stoves functioned. I’d cook a feast for George and pack it into cotton bags which I would tie onto my back. Through the fire and smoke, I retreated to our cell.

  By accident or divine design, George began to heal. The monthlong water fast had flushed the free-floating 146 out of his system. Through my care, his fragmented soul reintegrated, possibly for the first time, and returned to him. Once I was able to provide food, his body began to heal. But his mind has never been the same.

  We spent the next month like that -- eating, sleeping, and waiting. The prison had received a shipment of dry-food supplies the day before the prison was inoculated. We had enough food in the freezers to last us for years. In fact, by the time we lost electricity, George and I were hunting game and farming the exercise yard.

  I am spent just thinking about this awful time in my life. I need to quit for today or I’ll lose hope altogether. I’ll try to write more tomorrow.

  Emil by George

  11/03/2056

  How could this happen? I’ve asked this question for years. If I get a chance, I’ll go over the specific science of how people turned into wasps. For now, here’s an overview of what I learned from scientists prior to their destruction.

  DNA’s primary purpose is to create proteins to be used in the host. One hundred and forty-six nucleobases is a tiny piece of DNA. The 146 was taken from what seemed like empty, unused human DNA code. In order for it to work, The 146 needed to merge with human DNA. This meant that every time any protein was made, this set of codes was available to make protein.

  Unbeknownst to anyone, The 146 creates a tiny protein that destroys higher brain function. Scientists called this protein ‘The 146-protein’ when they discovered it. This brain-melting protein was not eliminated by the liver or excreted in waste. The 146-prrotein built up in the blood. And, given enough time, even people who had never received a vaccine would eventually morph into to wasps.

  The only reason The 146-protein didn’t immediately disable people was that it was unable to cross the blood-brain barrier. This was a known flaw in the vaccine protocol. For example, despite all of their best efforts, scientists were never able to create a luxury genius vaccine. The original developers of The 146 believed this was a safety feature. The next generation saw it as a drawback that left them unable to treat mental illness.

  The last vaccine resolved this problem by blowing a metaphorical hole in the blood-brain barrier. Once the hole was created, each heartbeat brought the brain a flood of The 146-protein. The result was that people transformed to wasps overnight. This transformation would eventually be called “The Great Human Transition” by the yet-unaffected media. 1 billion vials of this particular vaccine were created. They gave out a little less than 500 million of them.

  By the time George fell ill, most farm animals had been eating The 146-modified feed and receiving The 146-modified vaccines. They were in the same situation as human beings. Farm animals began turning right about the time people changed. Many wild animals and birds of prey transitioned because they had been eating rodents who, in turn, had been eating modified seed. The 146-protein transformed humans and animals into wasps overnight. The wasps’ brains had turned into a liquid mush the consistency of oatmeal. They became so infirm, I wondered if they had been deteriorating bit by bit all along.

  Like the white man coming to this continent, the wasps killed, maimed, and pillaged everything in their path. When wasps eat, they kill. And they eat only living tissue. The wasps went through the Pen in the matter of days. They left the Pen in waves and brought their brand of death to anyone or anything in their path.

  The 146-protein affected people differently based on how much of The 146 they’d come in contact with. Here are some examples of the variations at the Pen:

  * The warden grew up on a commune and made enough money to eat mostly non-146 food. As a warden, his job required that he stay vaccinated. When the transition happened, he kept his mind but lost his bodily functions. He was trapped in his office unable to eat or relieve himself. I dispatched him in one of my early visits through the prison.

  * Two guards, who were both ex-military, lost their minds and bodily function along with their souls. I found them in a closet they had hidden in. Mad and unable to move, they died of starvation.

  * One guard managed to keep some of his mental processes but lost his soul. George and I fought him for a year. He finally succumbed to The 146. We found him stuck in a corner in the big Pen.

  * The rest of the prison staff turned to wasps. With George’s help, we tracked down, and dispatched, any prison guards, office workers, and staff still remaining in the Pen.

  * George lost only the speaking and analytical part of his mind. He became simple, and sweet, but not dumb and savage. I believe that the one-month fast and George’s overall tremendous physical condition were the only reasons he did not deteriorate more.

  While the Great Human Transition happened on October 31, 2046, people continued to transition long after the vaccine was destroyed. The 146 DNA from food and the vaccines had integrated into human DNA. This meant that every human being who’d eaten 146-modified food or had even one vaccine continued to make the protein. And the DNA was passed from parents to children.

  After the Great Human Transition, people stopped taking the vaccines. They started growing non-modified foods. The poorest of the poor made this transition first because they had received the modified seed the last. Poor farmers from India and Africa became brokers for unmodified seed. For a few years, there was hope that the transition had affected only those given the last vaccine.<
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  But The 146 was too insidious. The DNA was now a part of the human genome. Children who had never received a vaccine nor eaten the modified food transitioned to wasp around their fifth birthday.

  The 146-protein continued to build up in the blood until some people and some farm animals transitioned on their own, without intervention. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies threw themselves at the problem. With so many copies of The 146 now lodged within the human genome, there was no way to remove them. The researchers found only dead ends before succumbing to The 146.

  The Great Human Transition was followed by significant, but lesser, transitions until The 146 Suicide Project eliminated great portions of the population. As far as I can tell, human beings have either transitioned to wasps or killed themselves.

  I, too, may someday succumb to The 146-protein.

  Before we lost electricity, we heard reports of people who were a kind of half-breed like George. They’d lost some amount of functioning due to the 146-protein, but their deterioration had been arrested, at least for some amount of time. The military was working on a formula that would do just that. We’ve heard that they succeeded and that, now, these half-breeds control armies of wasps on the large military bases. But we have no evidence to suggest that this is true.

  Until I leave this prison, I simply will not know. Right now, what we know is true is that every single person who lived at the Santa Fe Penitentiary in 2046 has either transitioned to wasp or been eaten. The entire city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, stands empty. No human beings or livestock have survived.

  Except me.