The Stillness

Note: This illness is fictional only. I am not a doctor. This is for creative purposes only

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The bite didn’t hurt. That was the first lie her body told her.

Zora was running laps in the park—the same route she’d run for three years, past the pond with the geese, under the old oaks, past the benches where homeless men sometimes slept. It was autumn. The light was golden. She was thinking about the Sunday forecast: a cold front sliding down from Canada, temperatures dropping ten degrees, a chance of flurries by evening. She’d practiced her on-camera delivery during the second mile.

She didn’t see him until he was on her.

Later, the police would call him “an unaffiliated male, approximately forty years old, exhibiting signs of malnourishment and agitated behavior.” The security camera from the library across the street showed him rising from a bench, stumbling toward the path, and lunging at Zora as she passed. He grabbed her arm. She tried to pull away. He bit her.

Not a nip. A full, grinding bite, just above her left wrist.

She screamed. Two other joggers pulled him off. He didn’t speak, didn’t fight back—just sat on the grass, staring at nothing, a thin line of drool from his lip. Someone called 911.

At the ER, a tired resident cleaned the wound. “Human bite. You’re up to date on tetanus?”

“Yes.”

“Any history of IV drug use? Unprotected sex? Travel to areas with rabies?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll be fine. Keep it clean. Watch for redness.” He wrote a prescription for antibiotics. “Just in case.”

“What was wrong with that man?” Zora asked.

The resident shrugged. “Homeless. Probably meth-induced psychosis. Or malnutrition. He’ll be evaluated.”

Zora went home. Marcus was reading on the couch. Quinnen, seven years old, was already asleep. Marcus kissed her bandaged arm.

“You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

She believed it.

Three weeks later, Zora woke up tired. Not the usual morning sluggishness—a bone-deep exhaustion, as if she’d run a marathon in her sleep. She dragged herself to the station, did the 6 AM weather segment, and almost dropped her coffee in the green room.

Her left hand was stiff. The bite scar had faded, but the fingers felt wrong.

By the end of the week, she had a rash. A butterfly-shaped redness across her cheeks, the bridge of her nose. It looked exactly like the lupus rash her aunt had carried for twenty years.

“I’m fine,” she told Marcus. “Probably a reaction to a new cleanser.”

Marcus touched her face. “You’re warm.”

“I run warm.”

“You don’t run a fever.”

She did, though. One hundred point four. She took ibuprofen and went to bed.

The next week, her joints ached. Her knees, her knuckles, her wrists. Opening a jar of pickles required two attempts and a string of curses. Quinnen watched her and asked, “Mama, why are you mad at the pickles?”

“I’m not mad, sweetie. My hands are tired.”

Her doctor ordered blood work. The ANA came back positive. Anti-dsDNA elevated. ESR high. Everything pointed to systemic lupus erythematosus. The rheumatologist nodded, made notes, prescribed hydroxychloroquine and a short course of prednisone.

“Lupus is manageable,” she said. “We’ll start with these, and you should feel better in a few weeks.”

Zora took the pills. She felt worse.

The fatigue deepened. The rash darkened. And something else began—something she couldn’t say out loud.

She was hungry.

Not normal hungry. Not the craving for chocolate or bread or the pad thai from the place on Main Street. This was a raw hunger. A wanting for something that wasn’t on any menu.

She was a vegan. Seven years. She’d given up cheese, eggs, honey, leather, wool—everything. The smell of meat made her nauseous. Until now.

Now she stood in front of the butcher counter at the grocery store, staring at the ribeyes. Her mouth watered. She bought a small package of ground beef, took it home, and cooked it medium-rare.

It wasn’t enough.

She ate it cold from the fridge at 2 AM.

It still wasn’t enough.

She bit into a raw slice, standing over the sink, and wept while she chewed.

~*~

Marcus found the raw chicken in the trash. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at Zora with eyes she couldn’t meet.

“Iron deficiency,” she said. “The doctor said it happens.”

“No doctor said that.”

“The rheumatologist—”

“Zora. You haven’t eaten meat in seven years. You cried when Quinnen accidentally ate a chicken nugget at a birthday party. Now you’re hiding raw chicken in the trash. That’s not lupus.”

She started crying. He held her. She let him, but she didn’t tell him the rest. The dreams. The way she looked at Quinnen’s neck sometimes, the pulse visible under the thin skin. The way she’d started locking her own bedroom door at night, not from fear of intruders, but from fear of herself.

One night, she woke up standing in her daughter’s doorway. She didn’t remember walking there. Quinnen was breathing softly, her stuffed rabbit tucked under her arm.

Zora stood there for a long time. Then she closed the door, went to the kitchen, and wrote a note.

Marcus—
I’m sick. Not lupus. Something else. Something I can’t control. I’m leaving to protect you and Quinnen. Don’t look for me. I love you both more than I can say. Tell Quinnen her mother loves her. Tell her I’m sorry.
Z.

She left her phone on the counter. Took cash, a jacket, and walked out the front door at 3 AM. The air was cold. The stars were out. She walked until her legs gave out, then she walked more.

She didn’t know where she was going. Somewhere empty. Somewhere she couldn’t hurt anyone.

~*~

Marcus woke up to an empty bed and a note on the kitchen table. He read it three times. Then he called her phone—heard it buzzing from the counter—and felt the world tilt.

He called the police. They took a report, said they’d be in touch, didn’t seem worried. “Adult female, no signs of foul play, she left voluntarily. Probably just needs some space.”

Marcus wanted to scream. Instead, he called Carl Hashoff.

Carl came over at 7 AM in a bathrobe. He was a comparative literature professor, a specialist in postcolonial horror and folklore. He listened while Marcus paced and talked and paced and talked. Then Carl said something that stopped him cold.

“You said she had a rash. Joint pain. Fatigue. Then tremors. Then cravings for raw meat. Has she forgotten things? Gotten lost?”

“Yes. Last week she couldn’t remember how to get to the grocery store. She’s lived here for ten years.”

Carl was quiet for a long time. “Marcus, you know I don’t use this word lightly. And you know I respect the traditions it comes from. My adoptive mother was Haitian. She told me stories about the zonbi—not the Hollywood version, but the real thing. A body without a soul. A person who’s still moving but no longer themselves. Sometimes caused by a curse, sometimes by a poison. Sometimes... by something you couldn’t name.”

“You think Zora is a zombie?”

“I think she’s sick with something that looks like a zombie. And I think the doctors made it worse.”

Marcus stared at him. “The prednisone.”

“The prednisone suppresses the immune system. What if her immune system was fighting it? What if the lupus wasn’t the disease—it was the response to the disease?”

Marcus sat down. Put his head in his hands. “Then I’ve been helping her die.”

“You didn’t know. Now you do.”

~*~

It took Marcus three weeks to find Zora. He tracked her bank card—she’d withdrawn cash from a rural ATM two hours away. He drove there, found a librarian who recognized her from TV, and eventually located an abandoned barn on a fallow farm.

He watched from a distance. She was thinner. Her hair was dull. She moved slowly, stiffly, like an old woman. She was eating something raw—he couldn’t see what—and her hands shook so badly she dropped it twice.

He didn’t approach. He couldn’t. Not yet. He needed help.

He found Dr. Miriam Voss through a veterinary school alumni directory. She was large-animal, retired, living fifty miles away. He called her, told her enough to get her attention, and showed up at her door with photos.

Dr. Voss was in her sixties, gray-haired, strong-handed. She looked at the photos. Looked at Marcus.

“You’re not crazy,” she said. “But you might be stupid. Taking me to see her is a liability.”

“Can you help her?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve seen something like this. In a chimp colony in the nineties. They called it ‘the stillness.’ The CDC came in and euthanized the whole troop. We never found out what it was.”

“Zora isn’t a chimp.”

“No. But she’s dying. So let’s go.”

~*~

Dr. Voss set the two syringes on the dashboard. The truck’s heater ticked. Outside, the barn stood dark against a bruised sky.

“One is a high-dose sedative,” she said quietly. “It will let you hold her while she sleeps. The other is pentobarbital. It will let her go. I’m not supposed to give you either.” She paused. “But you’ve been watching your wife become a ghost, and I’ve been watching you become one too. Choose.”

She got out. Walked toward the barn. Left Marcus alone with the syringes and the rising sun.

He stared at them for a long time.

The sedative was in a clear barrel, no label. The pentobarbital was in an orange-capped vial. He knew which was which. He’d read enough. He’d spent enough sleepless nights on medical journals, on prion papers, on forums for caregivers who had made this choice.

His hand hovered over the orange cap.

He thought about Quinnen. Her eighth birthday was in three weeks. She’d asked for a unicorn cake. Marcus had already ordered the sprinkles.

He thought about Zora on their first date, spilling coffee on his shirt and laughing for ten minutes straight.

He thought about the weather map, her hand moving across the screen, confident, sure. Scattered showers moving east. But don’t worry—I’ll be here tomorrow.

His hand moved.

Not to the orange cap.

He picked up the sedative.

Then he reached into the cooler beside him—the one with the blood vials, the CSF, the tissue samples Finch had requested. He pulled out an empty syringe and a butterfly needle.

He wasn’t going to kill her.

He was going to study her.

Marcus got out of the truck. Walked to the barn. Dr. Voss was standing just inside the door, arms crossed, watching Zora sleep on a pile of hay.

“No,” Marcus said. “Not that.”

Dr. Voss raised an eyebrow.

He held up the sedative. “We slow her. We keep her stable. We draw more samples. We send them to Finch. And then we find something that works. Not a cure. I’m not stupid. But something that gives her more time.”

“She might not want more time like this.”

“Then she can tell me herself.” His voice cracked. “When she can speak again. When she can choose. I’m not taking that away from her.”

Dr. Voss studied him. Then, slowly, she nodded.

“You’ll need more than one dose. And you’ll need to keep her sedated during transport.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll need to explain to your daughter why her mother isn’t coming home yet.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll need to accept that this might fail. That she might decline anyway. That you’ll have watched her fade for nothing.”

Marcus looked at Zora. Her chest rose and fell. Her left hand twitched in her sleep.

“I know,” he said. “But she tried. When she could barely hold a spoon, she tried. She tried to say Quinnen’s name. She tried to draw a heart. She tried to stay human. I owe her the same.”

He knelt beside Zora. Took her trembling hand.

“We’re not giving up,” he whispered. “Not yet. I’m sorry it’s taking so long. But I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to get you help. And one day—I don’t know when—you’re going to blow bubbles with Quinnen again. I promise.”

He didn’t know if she heard him. Her eyes didn’t open. Her fingers didn’t squeeze back.

But he made the promise anyway.

Then he picked up the sedative.

They went at dusk. Zora was in the barn, sitting on a pile of old hay. She didn’t look up when they entered. Her eyes were fixed on a patch of light on the wall—the last gold of sunset through a knothole.

“Zora,” Marcus said. “It’s me.”

No response. Her head didn’t turn. But her fingers curled into the hay.

“Zora, I brought someone who wants to help.”

Her head turned slowly. Too slowly. Like a reptile tracking heat. Her eyes found Marcus—and for a moment, something flickered. Recognition? Or just the ghost of it, a reflex from a dying circuit. Then her gaze shifted to Dr. Voss.

Zora’s face didn’t go flat.

It changed.

Her nostrils flared. Her lips pulled back from her teeth. A sound came from her throat—not a word, not a growl. A hunger sound. Low and wet and wrong.

“Zora,” Marcus said, stepping forward. “It’s okay. She’s a friend.”

She erupted.

Later, Marcus would replay that moment a hundred times. The way she moved—not like his wife, who had been clumsy in the mornings and graceful on camera. This was fast. Animal fast. She lunged from the hay with her hands out, fingers hooked, mouth open.

Dr. Voss stepped back, already reaching for the sedative in her bag.

Marcus grabbed Zora’s arms. She was stronger than she should have been. Her nails raked his forearm. He felt the sting, the warm trickle of blood.

“Zora! Stop! It’s me!”

For half a second, she froze. Her eyes met his. Behind the rage, behind the bulging veins and the trembling pupils, he saw something else. Terror. Her terror. She was watching herself do this and couldn’t stop.

Then her teeth came for his face.

Dr. Voss jabbed the needle into Zora’s thigh. Zora shrieked—a sound Marcus had never heard from a human throat—and collapsed. Her body went limp. Her eyes stayed open, staring at the rafters. Then they closed.

Marcus knelt beside her, breathing hard. Blood dripped from his forearm onto her shirt.

He started to cry.

“She volunteered at shelters,” he whispered. “She took our dog to visit sick kids. She was the gentlest person I ever knew.”

Dr. Voss was already drawing blood from Zora’s arm. She didn’t look up.

“I know,” she said. “I read her blog.”

Marcus touched Zora’s face. Her cheek was still warm.

“Come back to me,” he said. “Please. Come back.”

The barn was silent. The last light faded from the knothole.

Dr. Voss capped the vial. “We need to go. She’ll wake up in an hour, and she won’t remember any of this. But you will.”

Marcus didn’t move.

“Marcus. Now. “

He stood. Looked down at his wife—his kind, gentle, shelter-volunteering wife—lying in the hay with her teeth still bared even in sleep.

“I’m going to save you,” he said. “I don’t know how. But I’m going to save you.”

Then he followed Dr. Voss into the dark.

~*~

The blood went to Dr. Alistair Finch.

Finch lived in a farmhouse even more remote than the barn. His front yard had a goat (Hilbert), a telescope, and a satellite dish. His living room had been converted into a lab—BSL-2 protocols scrawled on Post-it notes, freezers humming, a whiteboard covered in protein structures.

He opened the cooler, looked at the vials, and said, “Your wife is either very brave or very infected.”

“Both,” Marcus said.

Finch snorted. “Nouns. I like you. Sit down. Tell me everything.”

Marcus told him. The bite. The lupus diagnosis. The prednisone. The decline. The cravings. The tremor. The memory loss. The vet’s chimp story.

Finch listened without interrupting. At the end, he said: “You know what this looks like? Not a prion. Prions are too slow. This is something that lives in the immune system first, then crosses into the brain. A two-stage agent. I’ve been chasing something like this for twenty years. Everyone thought I was mad.”

“The goat thinks you’re mad,” Marcus said.

“Hilbert thinks I’m a god. Don’t listen to him.” Finch put on his glasses. “I’ll run the samples. Come back in a week.”

~*~

A week later, Finch had results.

“It’s not a virus. It’s not a bacteria. It’s not a prion. It’s something else—a proteinaceous agent that uses immune cells as a transport system. It hides in macrophages. It doesn’t kill them. It just rides them to the brain. Once inside, it triggers a cascade—Parkinson’s-like motor symptoms from basal ganglia damage, Alzheimer’s-like memory loss from hippocampal erosion.”

“Can you stop it?”

“In vitro? Maybe. In vivo?” Finch shrugged. “We have to try. Stop the prednisone immediately. Switch to amantadine for the tremors. High-dose IVIG might help—it floods the system with antibodies, passive immunity.”

Marcus wrote it all down. “Anything else?”

Finch hesitated. “There’s something... unconventional. A mushroom. Hericium erinaceus. Lion’s Mane. It’s been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier and stimulate Nerve Growth Factor. In mouse models of Alzheimer’s, it slows cognitive decline. Doesn’t reverse damage, but protects remaining neurons.”

“You want to try a mushroom.”

“I want to try anything that won’t kill her. This won’t. At worst, nothing happens. At best, it buys us time.”

“Time for what?”

Finch pulled a dusty journal from the shelf. “Fifteen years ago, a marine biologist in Australia isolated a compound from a rare mesophotic algae—Coralline A. It stabilizes misfolded proteins. Crosses the blood-brain barrier. They tested it on mouse models of Alzheimer’s. Good results. Then the funding dried up.”

“You want to try algae.”

“I want to try everything. Your wife is dying, Marcus. She’s dying slowly, which means we have time to be wrong a few times before we’re right. Start with the amantadine, the IVIG, and the Lion’s Mane. I’ll track down the algae.”

~*~

The algae came from a reef off the coast of Western Australia, 400 feet down, in a zone so dark and cold that no sunlight reached it. It had no name except a taxonomic designation. It grew in thin purple mats on dead coral.

The marine biologist had a culture. She FedExed it to Finch in a thermos.

Finch extracted Coralline A. He purified it. He tested it on Zora’s blood samples, then on mouse neurons, then on a culture of the agent itself. It didn’t kill the agent. But it stabilized it—like a chaperone, holding the misfolded proteins in place, preventing them from spreading.

“The goal isn’t a cure,” Finch told Marcus. “The goal is a functional plateau. If this works, she won’t get better. But she won’t get worse. She’ll stay where she is right now. Maybe for months. Maybe for years.”

“Can she come home?”

“She can try.”

~*~

The Lion’s Mane came in a white powder. Marcus mixed it into applesauce. Zora sat in the barn, propped against hay bales, her eyes half-closed. Her hands were tied loosely—not to punish her, but to stop her from scratching her own face during the fits.

“Open up,” Marcus said.

She didn’t.

He dipped the spoon in the applesauce and touched it to her lips. Her tongue flickered out. Then her mouth opened. He fed her slowly, one spoonful at a time. She swallowed. She didn’t bite him.

He did this twice a day for three weeks.

Nothing happened. Then, on day twenty-two, something did.

Marcus was reading aloud—he’d taken to reading The King’s Gremlin to her, because the voice actor in his head was the same one who’d read it to Quinnen. He got to the part where Vayrn talks to himself, and he did the voice, the wretched wheeze, and Zora hummed.

Not a word. A hum. The same hum she used to make when she was happy. When Quinnen did something cute. When Marcus brought home her favorite coffee.

He stopped reading. “Zora?”

She hummed again. Louder. Then she turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were cloudy, but there was something behind them. Not full recognition. A question.

He called Finch. “She hummed.”

“Hummed?”

“Like she used to. When she was happy.”

Finch was quiet. “The amantadine didn’t do that. The IVIG didn’t do that. The Lion’s Mane with the algae... maybe. Keep going.”

~*~

Twenty-four hours after that conversation, she picked up a spoon without dropping it.

Forty-eight hours, she said, “Water.”

Seventy-two, she said, “Quinnen.” Not perfectly—”Kin-nen”—but close enough that Marcus wept.

A week later, she asked, “What happened to me?”

Marcus told her. Slowly. Carefully. He told her about the bite, the lupus, the prednisone, the leaving. He told her about the barn, the vet, the researcher, the algae. He told her about Quinnen, who was staying with her grandmother and drawing pictures every day.

Zora listened. She cried. Then she said, “I want to go home.”

Home was different. Zora was different.

She couldn’t work. The weather girl who’d smiled at half a million viewers every morning now had a tremor in her left hand and gaps in her memory. She forgot appointments. She forgot what she’d said five minutes earlier. She forgot, sometimes, that she’d already eaten.

But she remembered Quinnen.

The first night home, Quinnen stood in the doorway of the bedroom. Zora was sitting up in bed, a blanket over her legs. Her face was thinner, her eyes older. But they lit up when she saw her daughter.

“Come here, baby.”

Quinnen ran. She climbed onto the bed and wrapped her arms around Zora’s neck. Zora held her. Her hands shook, but she held.

“My mum had a stroke,” Quinnen had told her teacher. That was the story they’d agreed on. It was easier. It protected Zora from questions she couldn’t answer.

But Quinnen knew the truth—not the whole truth, but enough. Her mother had been sick. Very sick. And now she was better, but not all the way. Like a house after a flood: still standing, but some rooms were closed.

~*~

The plateau lasted. Not perfectly—there were bad days, days when Zora couldn’t get out of bed, days when her speech slurred and her hand shook too badly to hold a fork. But the decline had stopped. The hunger for raw meat faded to a whisper. The tremors became manageable.

Zora started a blog. She called it Living with the Unnamed. She wrote about her symptoms, her misdiagnosis, her treatment. She didn’t use the word “zombie”—Carl had advised against it, and she agreed. But she wrote about the fear. The shame. The hunger. The leaving.

“I walked away from my family because I was afraid I would eat them. Not metaphorically. I was afraid I would literally bite my daughter. That is the kind of terror this disease creates. And no one knows it exists because the doctors keep calling it lupus.”

The blog went viral in the small world of rare disease advocacy. Other families reached out. A woman in Oregon described her husband’s identical journey. A man in Florida had been diagnosed with “early-onset Parkinson’s” at thirty-two. A teenager in Ohio had a malar rash and a tremor and a mother who was terrified.

Marcus read the messages. He printed them out. He brought them to Finch.

“There are more,” Marcus said. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

Finch nodded slowly. “Then you know what you have to do.”

~*~

The hearing was closed to the public. State health officials, a representative from the CDC, two epidemiologists, and a lawyer. Marcus sat at a table with a folder of evidence: medical records, lab results, photographs, Quinnen’s drawings.

Dr. Voss testified first. She described the chimp colony in the nineties. She described Zora’s symptoms. She described the withdrawal of immunosuppressants and the improvement with amantadine and IVIG.

Dr. Finch testified next. He used words like “chimeric agent” and “proteinaceous pathogen” and “iatrogenic acceleration.” He presented his data. He named the algae.

Then Marcus spoke.

He didn’t use the word zombie. He said: “Unidentified Neuroimmune Syndrome. UNIS. That’s what I’m calling it, because it doesn’t have a name yet. My wife was infected by a bite. She was diagnosed with lupus. She was treated with prednisone. The prednisone made her worse. By the time we stopped it, she had lost her memory, her speech, and nearly her life.”

He paused. He had written a speech, but he didn’t look at it.

“There is no test for UNIS. No surveillance. No public awareness. Patients are being misdiagnosed every day. They are being prescribed medications that accelerate their decline. Some of them are dying. Some of them are hurting people. Not because they’re monsters. Because they’re sick, and the system is failing them.”

He held up a photo of Zora from before—the weather girl, smiling at the camera, pointing at a map of the state.

“This is my wife. She is not a zombie. She is a person with a disease we don’t understand yet. And she deserves help. So do the others.”

The room was silent.

The CDC representative said, “We’ll need to see your data.”

Finch handed over a hard drive. “It’s all there. Including the algae.”

~*~

One year later. A small backyard. The grill was smoking. Marcus stood over it, flipping veggie burgers. Quinnen was blowing bubbles, her wand held high, iridescent spheres drifting into the maple tree.

Zora sat in a chair, a blanket over her legs. The rash was gone. The tremor was still there, a fine shivering in her left hand, but it didn’t stop her from holding her daughter’s drawing. It was a heart. Lopsided, with a crack down the middle, but a heart.

She tucked it into her pocket.

“Uncle Carl is coming,” Quinnen announced.

“Don’t call him Uncle Carl,” Marcus said from the grill. “He’s not your uncle.”

“He gave me a copy of The Cavedwellers. That’s uncle behavior.”

Zora laughed. It was a rusty sound—the door of a cottage opening after a long winter—but it was a laugh.

Dr. Voss arrived with a cooler. She set it beside the picnic table and hugged Zora carefully.

“You look good,” Dr. Voss said.

“I look like I was hit by a truck,” Zora said. “But the truck was polite about it.”

Finch showed up an hour later, Hilbert the goat on a leash. Quinnen immediately abandoned her bubbles to pet the goat.

“Alpaca?” she asked.

“Goat,” Finch said. “Smarter than most of my colleagues.”

“You don’t have colleagues,” Marcus said.

“Exactly.”

They ate on paper plates. The food was simple—burgers, potato salad, corn on the cob. Zora ate slowly, deliberately, her hand trembling between bites. But she ate. She didn’t spill. She didn’t forget what she was doing.

After dinner, Quinnen brought out a new bubble wand. Bigger. The kind that made giant bubbles. She dipped it, swung it, and a huge iridescent sphere floated toward Zora.

Zora reached up. The bubble landed on her nose and popped.

She laughed. That rusty, beautiful laugh.

Quinnen laughed too. Marcus watched from the grill, a spatula in his hand, and smiled.

The sun was low. The maple leaves were turning gold. The air smelled like charcoal and cut grass and something else—something like hope, but not as loud. Something quieter. Something that had been fought for.

Zora leaned her head against Marcus’s shoulder. He put his arm around her.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking about the algae,” she said. “Down in the dark. Growing where no one can see it. And I’m thinking that the world is full of things we don’t know yet. And some of them are terrible. And some of them are purple and small and live on dead coral.”

“That’s very poetic.”

“I was a weather girl. We’re all poets.”

They sat in the fading light. Quinnen ran through the grass, chasing bubbles. Hilbert the goat grazed on what remained of the marigolds.

There was no cure. There might never be. But there was tonight. There was laughter. There was a heart drawn in crayon, folded carefully in a mother’s pocket.

And that, Marcus thought, was enough.

~*~

Two years after the hearing, the CDC established the UNIS Working Group. Dr. Alistair Finch was appointed senior advisor. Dr. Miriam Voss consulted on cross-species transmission.

The algae Coralline A entered Phase II clinical trials. It was not a cure. It offered a plateau—a pause in the decline—for patients who received it early enough.

Marcus quit his teaching position. He became the director of the UNIS Family Alliance, a support network for patients and caregivers. He wrote a book. He called it The Stillness.

Zora never worked on television again. But she became the public face of UNIS awareness—testifying, speaking, blogging. Her tremor was visible on camera. Her speech was sometimes halting. But she was there. She was fighting.

Quinnen grew up. She never forgot the year her mother disappeared. But she also never forgot the bubbles, the crayon heart, the night Zora said her name correctly for the first time in months.

There is no cure. There may never be.

But there is the plateau. There is the fight. There is the family, sitting in the backyard, watching the bubbles rise.

And sometimes, that is enough.

---

Author’s Note

I am terrified of zombies.

Not the metaphor. Not the social commentary. The actual, crawling, hungry, they used to be people thing. I have written about elves and vampires and werewolves without flinching. But zombies? They undo me. Because elves are better than us. Vampires are worse but still choose. Werewolves rage and return. Zombies just erase. The person you loved is still there—every atom, every memory—but the light behind the eyes is gone, replaced by appetite. That is the only horror I cannot outrun.

So naturally, I had to write about them.

This story came from a simple, stubborn decision: challenge yourself with the thing that scares you most. I sat down and asked, “What if the zombie infection moved slowly? What if it looked like lupus, then Parkinson’s, then Alzheimer’s? What if the doctors misread it, and the treatments made it worse? What if no one even knew the word ‘zombie’ because in this world, it doesn’t exist?”

And then I asked the harder question: “What if love was the only thing that kept someone human?”

That became Zora. That became Marcus. That became Quinnen blowing bubbles in the backyard.

I don’t expect everyone to understand why this story matters to me. But I hope that someone else who is afraid—of illness, of losing themselves, of the slow erosion of someone they love—will see themselves in these pages and feel less alone.

We don’t write to escape our fears. We write to walk into them, to look around, and to find that on the other side there is still a family, still a laugh, still a crayon heart folded in a pocket.

There may be no cure. But there is trying. And trying is enough.

— Charlotte