Meanwhile, off out on the coast of Mozambique...

While I was busy trading jabs against my bullies at the airport, a new development occurred worldwide. I didn't know it at the time until later, but I will try to portray the turn of events of how the plague came to be, based on several accounts of survivors and the various theories I heard along the way.

I will try to make it as close to the truth as possible.

A recent graduate from Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Dr. Ryan Krasinsky, the son of a prominent Republican Senator from Ohio, succumbed to a high fever after contracting an unknown illness.

Dr. Krasinsky was a recent addition to the Doctors Without Borders program, assigned to Mozambique in south-eastern Africa, joining an international team of twelve in the coastal town of Lucete. He was twenty-eight, handsome from the pictures paraded on the news after his illness and the media firestorm that followed after his death.

As I got ready for my flight in my own home during the early hours of April 9th, it was already noon in Mozambique. Dr. Krasinsky and six other doctors, given a weekend break, took the opportunity to board a charter plane to the Comoros Islands less than two hundred miles off the coast. On that same day, they prepared for a hiking trip.

They took a helicopter ride to the town of Badjanani, where Dr. Krasinsky and his friends flew close to the rim of Mount Karthala, the island's active volcano, intending to hike around it. It was an excellent opportunity for Instagram-worthy pictures that would no doubt accumulate thousands of likes. I believed that was what Dr. Krasinsky intended to do. The doctor was trendy on social media, garnering over eight hundred thousand followers due to his popularity on Buzzfeed's list of: "The Most Handsome Sons of Politicians You Don't Know!"

After an hour of hiking, the group arrived close to the rim by mid-afternoon. They took pictures against the stacks of thin mist rising out of the rocky vents, the pitched-black blanket of volcanic earth, and then ate their lunch that they brought with them to the summit, enjoying the beautiful vista of the island. Dr. Krasinsky had a few biscuits and jerky with him, including an apple and a banana, per the report I read.

While they rested, a massive swarm of fruit bats flew over them. And while it unquestionably would be awesome to see it, let alone perfect for social media, Dr. Krasinsky didn't notice that a little fruit bat landed on his lunch box and took a nibble out of his apple.

At some point, Dr. Krasinsky scared the bat away. He then finished his lunch, took a bite of the same apple, not knowing that the bat got to it first. It was a perfect day, the sun was shining, and Dr. Krasinsky was satisfied with his mini-vacation, not knowing that a growing plague had entered his system. The group hiked back to the helipad and returned to Badjanani for a fun night of drinks and festivities.

A scientist deduced that the fruit bat that bit the doctor's apple died hours later of a bat-related fungal infection it already had in its brain. This disease was akin to the fungal infection found in ants in the tropics, the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a disabling pathogen that could alter the behavioral pattern of the infected host. In bats, it was a relatively new disease and hardly found anywhere else in the world...Only in the Comoros Islands.

It wasn't until later that it was named Cordyceps Pteropodidaesus Comoros (CPC), or Cordyceps of the family Pteropodidae, the family the fruit bats belonged to in Comoros.

The report theorized that the bat might have burrowed deep in its cave with a proper humidity of around sixty percent to die. This allowed the fungal parasite to sprout out its fruiting bodies from the bat's orifices--and sometimes, broke out of their skin--and rupturing to release the fungal spores, allowing it to infect more of the bat's colony.

In bats, the communicability of CPC within the species was around fifteen percent.

To humans, Never. It was close to impossible.

Then, how did Dr. Krasinsky got infected, you may ask?

It drew genetics, environmental factors, health predisposition, and just a good ole' plain fucking bad luck.

It wasn't just the bite of the apple that infected Dr. Krasinsky. It was the spores sprouting out of the bat that sprinkled all over his food on his lunchbox. During his hike, the doctor inhaled those spores as he ate them.

But that wasn't all.

Theories suggested that the fruit bat infected the young doctor wasn't just affected by CPC; it also succumbed to an aggressive strain of lyssavirus, a virus most commonly attributed to .

Instead of ultimately infecting the animal and killing it as common rabies viruses do, the rabies virus infected the parasitic fungi instead, morphing to a symbiotic relationship between the fungal parasite and the parasitic-like virus inside the bat.

The rabies virus used the fungal parasite for its high rate of communicability. In return, the parasite used the rabies virus's wildfire potency to significant effect—Mother Earth's biological weapon against the human race.

But still, it could only transmit to humans at barely 0.000001%.

Those statistics placed it around a 1 in 1 million chance of infection. Back when the planet's global population reached close to 7.8 billion, only seventy-eight thousand people could get infected.

The only way for a human to get the disease from bat-to-human contact was when you were already infected by rabies before.

It was precisely what was happening in Dr. Krasinky's body.

See, way back in the past, a rabid fox in his father's farm infected the doctor with rabies, saved only by the miracles of modern medicine by a rabies vaccine that administered an Itwould halt the spread of the virus, allowing him to create antibodies that would fight off the said infection.

These antibodies would remain inside him. And it was what the mutated parasite would take advantage of to a deadly degree into the precursor disease that could transmit through humans without the need of a bat carrier.

The new strain of rabies virus inside the fungal parasite tricked these antibodies into attacking the host's healthy cells, allowing it to bypass the host's brain where the parasite would make it its home.

This process allowed Dr. Krasinsky to show symptoms of the infection within four hours after the infection.

That same night, and by the time I was flying to New York City, Dr. Krasinsky fell ill in his hotel room with a mellow throbbing pain at the back of his skull. A few hours later, the young doctor would bleed from his eyes, nose, and mouth after suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage due to encephalitis, a swelling of the brain, causing a staggering 104-degree fever that would put him into a coma.

Dr. Krasinsky was rushed to a nearby local hospital that same night and placed into intensive care. Quarantine was in effect when the doctors mistakenly determined his condition as Ebola, detained Dr. Krasinsky's co-workers with him.

Due to the prominence of Dr. Krasinsky's family as an esteemed member of western politics and their close, loyal relationship to the current United States president, Republican Senator Graham Krasinsky of Ohio, his father pulled a few strings to bring his son and the other two Americans back home.

They were transferred to the prestigious New York-Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University, where a top-notch crew of doctors would attend to them-- the same university I would be visiting. Dr. Krasinsky arrived in the hospital at the exact hour of my arrival into the city.

He died within one day and seventeen hours after contact, and I was only thirty blocks away, just checking into my hotel and planned a good night's rest after a jet lag. When I woke up the next morning, a new plague would quickly spread in one of the largest cities in the world; A city with a population of nine million.

Dr. Krasinsky wouldn't be a zombie yet, for lack of a better term. What he contracted was the to the disease that would soon plague the world.

Unfortunately for the rest of humanity, most everyone didn't have antibodies against rabies, which forced the pathogen to mutate. This mutation would force the host (us) to become one of the shambling, homicidal infected instead of killing us off the bat as it did with Dr. Krasinsky.

Dr. Krasinksy might be a fresh corpse on that hospital bed, but the people around him, the doctors, nurses, and technicians who took care of him, the spores coming out of his body without knowing it because they wore the wrong air filter in their mask.

These people without antibodies for rabies would become what we know as zombies.

The precursor disease killed Dr. Krasinsky in almost two days.

The next one would do it in an hour, and at most, less than a day.

And it came with a new name:

Ophiocorydyceps-Sapiens Lyssanitremus sensu lato .

But let's call it its most common name:

.

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Notes:

[1] Ophiocordyceps is the genus of the fungi, Sapiens stands for humans (Homo Sapiens), Lyssa- is Greek for rage, and intremus for the Latin "intremo," which means a quiver or a quake (which is associated with infected individuals). sensu lato, in Latin, means "in the broad sense."