Blood of Life

Blood of Life

by

K C

The date, just a few years from now.

Dr. John Adams sat at the window. He was in full view of anybody below. He picked up the last bottle of pure water he had. And waited for the inevitable bullet that would end his life. He chuckled to himself as he looked at the half empty bottle of water. That's what he would be killed for, a bottle of water. Just a few short months ago we all took water for granted. No one would kill for a bottle of water back then. But now with the world's supply tainted we fought like animals over the last few bottles that still contained the sweet liquid.

John Adams thought back to the days when he worked as a Forensic Pathologist for the West Midland Police force where it all had started.

*

It had all seamed just a simple accident. A gardener, just taking his hobby too far. A man trying to develop a new type of water Lilly, for God's sake! That’s all!

Man had been altering nature for thousands of years. Making things better for us all. That is until Biological Engineering came along with it gene splicing and manipulation.

It wasn't long before there were kits for the amateur enthusiastic to have a go. There were millions who wanted to play God! The good old fashioned gardener, over night became a Frankenstein, a creator of new life forms and now death.

*
An owner of a garden centre had been found dead. When the staff had arrived that morning they found the owner in one of the green houses. His body bloated and purplish in colour. His face a picture of tortured terror. He had died in agony and it had taken quite a long time. He had crawled well over a hundred meters through the green house stopping in several places where he seemed to have had some sort of convulsions and then crawled on towards the door to the outside. But he never made it. He died in agony only meters from that door. His body lay there on the floor, every limb rigid. Every muscle frozen in a picture of agony.
My first diagnosis was poisoning by substances unknown. The Police and I treated the case as murder. We later found it to be the greatest murder of all time; dawn of the end of life on Mother Earth!

I quickly established the poison to be a mixture of plant and animal poisons but, not a mixture as one poison was added to the other. One poison had been genetically spliced to the other. Their genetics had bean merged into a new and more deadly combination. The deadliest of the animal Kingdom and the deadliest of the Plant World were now combined to kill anything and every thing on Earth except themselves! So has the Bible said the meek would inherit the Earth. The Meek being a small water based plant of the Water Lilly family.

This garden centre owner had genetically engineered this water Lilly so it would flower all year round and would not be eaten by any animals or fish. He had done a very good job. A very good job indeed! He had taken the common water lily, Nuphar lutea which in its self is poisonous if eaten. Mixed it with a few genes from the Hemlock water-dropwort family, very poisonous. And a plant from the Amazon, not even got a proper name yet, new to Science. Which has the amazing ability to make all the water around it crystal clear. Was it by filtering or some more diabolical method it did this. Science didn't know, it had no time to study it. The Garden Centre owner didn't care. The plant cleaned pool that was all he was interested in. We also found out from his notes that he had thrown in some genes from fish that live in the frozen Antarctic seas. The Arctic Lion's Mane jellie fish, is a predator - it kills and eats other living creatures from the "animal" kingdom using its poison. And then there is the Antarctic Nototheniid fish living in close proximity to ice have evolved glycoprotein antifreeze in their body fluids to prevent freezing.

What a mixture of traits! The garden centre owner had just thought of his own small area of expertise never for a moment did he think of the wider implications of his work. All he wanted to do was keep peoples pools clear and in the process make a little money for himself. He had got part of his wish anyway, all the waterways of the world were now clean. All life had been wiped out. The oceans and seas were almost dead. In a few months they too to their deepest recesses would be cleaned of all life. Even now the rain that fell from the sky carried that deadly poison from the contaminated oceans. There had been extinctions on Earth before. 65 million years ago the dinosaurs had been wiped out by an asteroid. Millions of years before that 99% of all life had been wiped out by a super ice age when the whole world was turned into a snow ball. But, the earth had recovered from these. A little colony of life had survived to repopulate when the time was right. The only thing that life needed was pure water in liquid form. The earth of the future would have trillions upon trillions of gallons of water but every drop would be contaminated with the deadliest poison yet found by man. Even the water lilies that carried the poison would die when they had nothing else to feed on. But, they would not decay for there would be no bacteria to eat their dead bodies they would just sink into the waters they had poisoned just to lie there to the end of time.

If we had only worked it out earlier we may have stood a chance. The results of the science was staring us in the face. But many would not believe it. There must be something wrong, they would go back and check their figures again, and again would not believe them. When the realisation of how serious the problem was finally broke through into conscious thinking and we accepted it. It was already too late.

After the Garden Centres owners death the garden centre was allowed to carry on operating only the sheds the owner used as his laboratory were cordoned off. The pool at the back of the garden centre, the pool with the very nice pinky white water lilies on it was not even looked at until an employee noticed dead fish and animals around it. It was found that this pool was fed by a natural stream which ran on from the pool and finally ended up in a local reservoir. It was two days after this that the mass deaths in Walsall in the Midlands started. It was the people in the South West of the town that were the first to suffer. Being the closest to the reservoir their water was tainted first.

The Reynolds family consisted of John Reynolds a school caretaker. Pamela Reynolds, his wife and mother of their two children Alan aged seven and Penny aged five. John Reynolds would get home from work at 4:30 p.m. weekdays. He liked to have his evening meal with his family at this time. At 6 p.m. he would report back to the school until 9 p.m. when the evening classes there finished, he would then lock up and return home to his wife. He worked long hours but, he loved his afternoon meal with his family. Pamela Reynolds worked as well, part-time mornings. After she dropped the children off at school she went to work. After work she just had enough time to pick her children up from school, get them home and prepare and cook the families evening meal.

That Tuesday was no different to any other Tuesday. John got home from work at 4:45 p.m. the family was sitting at their kitchen table to eat their dinner at 5 p.m. at 5:05 p.m. John Reynolds staggered from his front door with little Penny in his arms. Her little body was racked with muscle spasms and white foam came from her mouth. Her skin was turning blue. John made it to the middle of the road outside their house before he collapsed in agony. His screams brought many people out from their houses to see what the matter was.

By the time the first ambulance arrived the Reynolds family were not the only victims. Most of the rest of the street had succumbed to the poison in their water supply. By 7 p.m. that evening 6000 people were dead in Walsall. By the following morning 200,000 people had succumbed to the deadly waters in the north Birmingham area.

A national emergency was declared by the government. It was believed at first that there had been a terrorist attack. News reports spoke of the possibility that terrorists had released a deadly biological agent over the affected areas. This was quickly disproved by the fact that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction to the spread of the deaths. Any agent released into the air would follow the wind. Another 24 hours was wasted trying to ascertain which of the communicable diseases this was. No bacterial or viral strain was found. It was finally suggested that the water supply was the culprit. But, this was hard to believe. There was no poison known that could be added to a water supply on this scale that would not show up on the standard tests for water purity.

It was at about this time that some of the medical staff realised that the symptoms shown by the bodies that were being brought in were very similar to that of a garden centre owner brought in a few days earlier. Another 36 hours were wasted confirming that the garden centre owner had been patent zero. By this time the first cases were showing up on the continent. No one could find out how the plant had crossed the channel into France. Industrial espionage was high on the list of suspects for a water lilly that would keep your pond water clean and flower all year around as wall, was worth real money in the world of the garden centre. But, it was not until the Americans got involved that the real answer was found.

The Centre For Disease Control And Prevention in Atlanta hosted a conference and invited a number of European scientists who had been working on this problem to come and bring their American colleges up to speed. It was two weeks into this collaboration before the first outbreaks in the US started. At first all were around the Atlanta area but, outbreaks started in other city, some over a thousand miles away. At first it was thought that terrorists were carrying and planting these deadly plants as weapons. However, it was quickly found that where ever there was an outbreak a member of the investigating team had recently arrived there.

It was at about this time that Biologists dispatched to the Amazon basin discovered that the parent plant from the Amazon was asexual in nature spreading by the use of rhizomes, a shoot that grows out from the parent plant and forms a new plant linked to the old one. Some of the plants they were investigating could be described has a single plant covering many square miles of these pools along the edges of the Amazon river. The scientists also fond out why the water was so clear around these pools when the water flowing in the Amazon river only a few feet away was dark brown and full of life down to the smallest microbe. The poison the plants excreted into the water could kill all living things it came into contact with except one. A bacteria unknown to science was found. It only lived in the waters under the death plants and it was this organism that decomposed the dead animals, fish and all other life that blundered into this garden of death. This symbiotic relationship between plant and bacteria was thought to be the answer. Kill the bacteria and the plant would die from starvation. But, when the figures were calculated if we could kill all the bacteria today the plants would live on long enough to kill the entire World population of seven and a half billion twice over before it its self died out. There was also the problem of the poison that would stay in the water supply for hundreds of years to come.

This plant had the ability to grow not only from rhizomes reproduction but from cutting. Cuttings as little as a few cells clustered together. Something as small as a cluster of cells washed away by a stream or blown away by the wind would root itself if it landed near water. This was how it was spreading the scientists who were trying to wipe the threat out were in effect carrying it with them on their clothing, their skin, shoes, even inside their bodies as they had breathed them in or swallowed them. They then carried them to where ever they travelled. Once the plant had started to grow and was seen above the water it was too late. That area and its water was tainted.

USA closed its boarder and imposed travel restrictions on its citizens. That's when the riots started. The plan had been to deploy the army and national guard to destroy, by any and all means the so called Death Plant. But, now they were having to be used to restore order to the civilian population.

A riot started at a Walmart store on the outskirts of Tampa Florida when it ran out of bottled water. The rioters set fire to the store before heading into town. Picking up recruits on the way. By night fall most of the west side of the city was on fire and more than a hundred and fifty rioters and police were dead. Thousands of residents fled the city.

This was the fuse that set the world off. As the news of the riot flashed around the world similar disturbances broke out in other cities both in the US and world wide. The only places that were quiet were those that were already grave yards. Who's inhabitants had already succumbed to the Death Plant poison. In Britain the complete population of Birmingham a city of over a million people and the towns to its north west, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Walsall where the poison had first started all those months ago. Now were the tombs of some two million or more people.

It was the same all over the world. The plant took hold. The water supplies were compromised. The bottled water supplies ran out. Then mass rioting broke out and finally all was quiet as the population succumbed to fighting, thirst, poison or suicide. The battle against the Death Plants, has they had been named tailed off as people faught each other for survival.

As the armed forces of different countries went rogue. Fighting over the last remaining water supplies the governments of the world decided to evacuate to their respective safe havens. The British P.M. And his cabinet and other high ranking individuals made for the nuclear bunkers at the Central Government War HQ located in the Bath Stone Mines near Corsham, Wiltshire. This bunker had the most fresh water supplies of all the bunkers the British had. Like governments in all other countries they confiscated vast quantities of fresh bottled water and spirited them away to their respective bolt holes. The UK government could survive for two years underground. The Americans had supplies in its bunkers for more that five years. But, what would these politicians emerge into?

The poison from the plants would spread world wide. From the tops of snow capped mountains to the bottom of the deepest oceans. Has the super genetically enhanced water plants released their poisons into the rivers and then the sea. It would spread out through the waters of the world's oceans. The sun would heat those oceans forming clouds. Which would carry their poisonous cargo back across the land. Falling has snow on the mountains and as rain on the land poisoning everything it came into contact with. All animals and plants would die. Those in the hottest deserts would last the longest but, finally it would rain even in these places and the end would come. The last to die would not even rot away for them there would not be any bacteria left to corrupt their bodies. They would become the mummified remains of life on this planet.

In the end even the Death Plants would die out as they consume all the nutriments that kept them alive. Only their poison would be left continually circulating around with the oceans and weather of the world. No one knew how many thousands of years it would take for the poison to dissipate, if it ever would.

There have been five mass extinctions events in the history of life on Earth. But, all had been natural events. Even the Snowball Earth event, when there was a planetary ice age that killed 99% of life, but that 1% left had turned into all the wonderful life we have today; or had. Man is more thorough than nature he leaves no stone unturned. No fact unknown. No job half done. When man is the cause of a mass extinction, he leaves no room for error, no room at all.

*

Dr. John Adams sat in the window his one leg hanging over the window sill holding the half bottle of water in this hand. He looked at the bottle and was going to take a last sip of that life giving substance when he saw a flash in the darkness, out side he heard no sound. He was dead before the report of the shot reached him. His body tipped forward, he fell from the window landing on the soft earth. A hole in his temple where a rifle bullet had ended his life. The half bottle of water which had cost him his existence draining away into the damp earth.

The End of Everything