Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [19]
Those whom the cough didn’t kill faced nausea, vomiting, agonizing joint pain, a rigidity in the muscles and the spine that made it impossible to bend, to turn the head. Contemporary physicians described some victims’ flesh as literally stiffening to the consistency of wood.
By now the fever was so high it boiled the brain; victims babbled and raved, had to be tied down to keep from harming themselves or others, assuming they had not been abandoned by those fearing the contagion themselves. Some died then, others when the lymph nodes in their necks enlarged so greatly that their throats closed and they strangled, all this within a day or two of the first symptoms. Those who survived beyond this faced the worst of all: the rash.
It wasn’t really a rash, but the pooling of blood beneath the skin, signifying that the capillaries were disintegrating, internal organs liquefying. By then the only hope was for death, and soon.
Worst of all was the solitude. The rudimentary clinics the settlers had been able to set up before the illness struck were soon filled to overflowing, with medical staff dying almost as quickly as their patients. Those stricken in their homes were abandoned there; no one wanted to risk contamination. Whole families were sometimes sealed up in their houses, the living along with the dying and the dead. Corpses were dumped in common graves until there was no one left with the strength to bury them; the last of the dead were heaped up and burned or left to the scavengers where they lay.
When it was over, one out of every two healthy adults had died. The incidence of death among infants, children, elders, and the sickly was never accurately measured. Later statisticians estimated that if fewer than one hundred more of the entire population had died, the Sundered would have gone extinct, lacking enough viable members to breed a new generation.
When it was over, it was referred to simply as the Gnawing, a demon which inhabited the body and consumed it from within. Those few who survived it passed like wraiths among the healthy, possessed of a hunger that could never be satisfied. No matter how much they ate, they never recovered the strength and muscle mass lost to the fight against the disease.
The etiology was eventually traced to a bacillus native to the soil of Romulus whose spores, like those of tetanus on Earth, could lie dormant, encapsulated, surviving extremes of temperature in the driest soils for a century or more, until activated. Had the simple act of turning over the soil to plant crops disturbed them? Or was it that combined with the amount of wind and rain that year, the temperature, the angle of the sun, the position of the planet in its orbit, evil spirits, the wrath of unknown, offended gods?
And once disturbed, infiltrating the lungs of the farmer in his field, absently rubbed into a minor cut on the hand of a clerk in the village, ingested by an infant crawling along the floor, how did it become contagious, passing from host to host?
Perhaps if they had studied this more closely, those early Romulans might not have suffered from the fear of the thing millennia later. But once the Gnawing was over and the last victim disposed of, a kind of societal amnesia took hold. No one took the trouble to develop a cure, much less a vaccine, no one followed up on the anecdotal realization that some very few of their number were immune, and could pass among the suffering without so much as a cough.
When, down the centuries, an occasional outbreak was reported in a rural area, usually among school-age children, antibiotics were administered, and no one died. Grateful for that, the average Romulan followed the news report and then moved on, unaware.
Unaware that the parent bacteria could