The first time I ever saw a dead body was January 27th, 3015. It sure as h--- wasn’t the last time, though. Most people think of zombies as these brain-eating monsters that bite other people and all of a sudden, the whole world goes to c---. That’s not the case at all. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. “Zombies,” as they’re so called, aren’t flesh-eating creatures that have moldy faces and limbs falling off their body. There’s nothing different about them at all, in fact. They’re just normal human beings with a handicap.
In the year 2089, a new mental disorder was discovered. It really wasn’t a big deal at the time. It was like the new anxiety, almost. People would all of a sudden zone out, their eyes turning a grayish black color. Zoning out was the first symptom of the zombie disorder. Although, the scientific term is Zomnie Anxine. That was what it was originally called before people started freaking out and calling it, “the zombie.”
The next symptom was the lips. The lips of the person wearing them would turn snowy white. Their features would turn pale. Eyes would turn see-through blue or white, while their skin paled in complexion. First it was the face, then the pale color slowly made its way over the fingers and down the body. So now this person was as pale as could be, no matter the color they originally were when born. Their eyes only turned dark during an episode. We would call an “episode” in older times an anxiety attack. It consisted of the person day dreaming, zoning out of reality and finding themselves in another dimension. Some people compared it to a schizophrenic episode, a form of psychosis.
No one really knows how this mental disorder originated or why it affects people physically. Once diagnosed, though, people tend to stay away from you. After months of living with the disorder, the brain slowly eats certain parts of itself away. For example, parts of the hypothalamus will collapse in on itself in the limbic system of the brain. Translated out of nerd vocabulary, it means that the part of the brain that controls emotion and memory will collapse. People that have Zomnie Anxine typically remain either emotionless, or their moods reach hysterics. What’s worse is if the amygdala and the hippocampus collapse. It controls basically the same things, but on a higher spectrum. If the previous two collapse, you’ll be put in a mental asylum and spend the rest of your life heavily medicated in a floating hospital bed.
My role in all of this is simple. I work at one of these hospital for people with “the zombie.” It’s not as cool as it sounds. Eye colors and skin pigments changing sounds kinda cool, right? But no. I take care of the patients when they have episodes of rage, which generally include throwing things across the room and stabbing themselves with whatever sharp objects they can come across. One of my patients bit down on the metal part of his bed until his jaw shattered and his teeth started falling out. This story is a gory one at parts, so bare with me. I’ll try keep it simple, but there is nothing simple about this.
Besides calming patients down, I also remove dead bodies from their rooms. That was the first thing I did when I entered the MediZo on January 27th, 3015. The Medizo is the main hospital where the “zombies” go. I know, it all sounds like a very boring process. For being so futuristic, you’d think we’d have more resources to take care of them.
Treatments range from old-school lobotomys, where doctors remove the eyes of the patients and burn the frontal lobe of their brain, to cutting off the patient’s fingers so they can’t scratch themselves or anyone else. That’s not really a treatment, just a precautionary measure. It happens quite a bit.
There’s a machine that’s only used on the really crazy patients. No one
really has a name for. The scientific name is long, boring, and hard to pronounce, so people just call it The Lung Sucker. People who contract Zomnie Anxine will more often than not start to develop black spots on their lungs after having the disease/disorder for more than two years. That’s where The Lung Sucker comes into play. The lungs of the patient are removed through the throat by a vacuum-like machine and replaced with a thin layer of metal shaped perfectly to the patient’s body type. For some reason, the voice cords are always ripped out by the vacuum on the way back up the throat. Voice cords are irreplaceable. Scientists and medical professionals have found no way to replicate those to implant in a human’s throat to make them able to speak again. Nine times out of ten, someone who goes to The Lung Sucker will come back mute.