the dark-walkers

I have been entirely lost in a new work, The Dark-Walkers. The idea was about three years ago, as a friend and I sat in my room contemplating a story we could write together. We didn’t end up writing the story, but the idea remained in my head, slowly but beautifully etching itself out on napkins, paper plates, and sketches in notebooks. I don’t eat; I don’t sleep; this story consumes me. My only apprehension is that people might believe it to be a plagiarism of I Am Legend. It’s not. It’s wildly different.

The Story

The story is a series of vignettes telling the story of a global plague that drives people crazy, latches them into a coma, and then “resurrects” them as bloodthirsty, murderous organisms. The story follows a survivor on his journey to a safe-house of other survivors in Aspen, Colorado. It is a drama, not a horror. It speaks of tragedy, despair, and hopelessness. It is about the degradation and decomposition of a society void of order and morality. It is about the nature of man: his goodness and his evil. It is a story of the conflict between hope and resignation.

The Procyon Strain

The culprit is a space-borne germ (dubbed The Procyon Strain) that is airborne. It enters the human system through the respiratory tract. Through the capillaries of the lungs it enters the bloodstream, and it immediately attacks the brain. Its presence in the human body is marked by bleeding through the capillaries in the face; the capillaries rupture, causing bleeding through the nose, eyes, and ears. Blood is sometimes visible through the mouth as the capillaries in the lungs have ruptured (causing coughing as the germ begins to spread. The germ attacks the brain and destroys the cortex; in this quick process, the victim becomes ridden with dementia and hysteria. The person then seems to die; however, they are only in a deep coma. Over a period of three days, the Procyon germ exponentially replicates in the brain, gaining the power and prominence to stimulate the brain stem. The victims come out of their comas, though they are only hollow shells of what they once were: personality, emotions, and thoughts (which flowed from the now-destroyed-cortex) are absent. All that is left is what appears to be a human being, though it is a mindless body, an organism of primal instincts and impulses, driven by an insatiable hunger and a thirst for survival, driven mad by the germ. They are murderous fiends who only come out at night, for sunlight will kill the germ. They are not the “living dead”; they are, simply, sick humans—sick beyond deliverance.