"Patient Zero"

"I found "Patient Zero" behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right toe had been. He was writhing like an animal, a gag muffled his growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was "cursed". I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag...I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter...I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both radius and ulna stabbed through his gray flesh...the boy didn't cry out, didn't even seem to notice.."(7)

World War Z - Max Brooks
Biotechnology and genetics

Max Brooks uses another point of view, and a different narrator for this chapter to show how other countries dealt with the zombie outbreak. In this town in China, they thought that the people were cursed and contagious and didn't understand why they were acting so animalistic. They saw the tiny bite marks and couldn't figure out which animal they came from. They probably never even thought that they could be from a human or that any human disease could turn this violent this fast or be this degenerative. The disease completely changed the human body. There was no blood, no heart beat, no pulse and yet he was alive. They even accidentally snapped his arm in half and yet the boy didn't even notice. It's easy to think that he could be cursed or something like that because no one has ever had to deal with a human in this state and they're scared and desperate for answers. This entry shows that all of us are scared and don't know what to do in a time of crisis. We're all looking for answers and we don't know where to find them. But we're too stubborn to ask any other country for help because we don't want them to find us weak or have something against us. It shows how little humans know and how little they're willing to find answers out side of themselves.