Zombie at work! Word count: 10,015
Moving on from the events in Botswana, I have to say I miss it! Realized last night why everything was sounding so academic: reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, which is just getting into this ridiculous description of a whole ton of insane events, but is calm as can be, very academic, etc. It’s coloring my descriptions, but also turned me into a third-person narrator instead of the memoir-style it started as. Nice thing about NaNo is you can just say, “Oh well, fuck it,” and keep going with whatever. There’s no time or place to be going back and changing things…. So I’m somehow going to make it work out for my own sake, and keep on motoring. Passed 10,000 today which means this thing has some amount of weight and I will (most likely) stick with it enough to finish. (Word 10,000: best).
Moving on to the virus victim whose name was given to it: Thomas Wayne Westphail — the name Westphail is, I realized, a subconscious bastardization of the name of someone I saw a few days before NaNo started. Hilarious! Threw Wayne in as his middle name since he is a convicted murderer and as Philip Wayne Martin knows, everyone with Wayne as their middle name ends up in jail for murder at some point. It’s just a matter of time, Phil.
Three days later, scientists finally had their chance to look at a live one. Thomas Wayne Westphail, a 32-year-old Texas man who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a 9-year-old girl and was sitting on death row, went through Stage IV. He’d complained of a severe flu and had been moved to the infirmary of the Allan B. Polunsky Unit Supermax prison in West Livingston, Texas. Westphail was an incorrigible and difficult prisoner, so he had been handcuffed to the bed in the medical unit, a precaution which proved incredibly useful to the scientists, and most likely saved the lives of several of the staff in the building.
Westphail passed through Stage IV in the middle of the night, much like Basadi. The infirmary was empty save for him, and there was just a skeleton crew on duty, none of whom noticed the once-dead-to-the-world Westphail suddenly straining against the locked bracelet on his wrist.
At 6:30 that morning, the prison staff was surprised by the arrival of a FEMA team, some SpecOps types, and a half dozen Men in Black types along with a National Guard unit who’d been roused and dispatched from their garrison in Galveston. This last group formed a cordon around the prison, blocking it off from the rest of the world. Tower guards were now faced with the perplexing image of being guarded themselves — men in camoflage with automatic weapons patrolled uneasily outside the walls. The FEMA team set up in a large RV-type vehicle directly outside the main entrance to the prison building. They were deadly efficient, getting their portable generator running, their quarantine space ready to receive, their MOPP suits on. The SpecOps made ready to storm the building, while the CIA spooks (for they were obviously CIA spooks) stood around and spoke into their cell phones and generally looked as if they were running the show but had nothing to do.