Captain Bowdd Chaplinn stared at the screen quietly. As he read it to himself once again, as he did one hundred times previously, his fingers touched these few simple words…then the single one that punctuated the end. The words were harsh and desperate, lacking any hopeful euphemisms or even the distant clinical descriptions the Union of Medics were known for - the medical jargon that made some people suspicious but caused most people to push it aside. Yet, when he sighed, it was not out of sadness, not because of the ancient loss of lives he would never have known. It was the loss of a perfectly functioning killing machine - a predator - that knew no limits except the ravages of war and the empty destruction of life it brought with it.
Yeshlakazz (Ye-shla-kass) - "Illness of the Damned" as the early settlers called it. Complex RNA destabilizing virus. Known to replicate itself into the host's RNA, causing multiplication to increase exponentially. Host soon becomes ill with symptoms ranging from black whelts much like the Bubonicc Panaxx ((black plaque)) to cancerous skin variation. Pre-War cases were considered incurable and those stricken were isolated and placed in a catatonic state until death to prevent suffering. App. time before death occurs- 93 hours. No form of mutation or core virus has been detected in Post-War times. It is thought the virus could not survive in radiated hosts.
Known Cure: None.
Chaplinn did not consider himself homicidal. There was no apparent madness in his beliefs. He just enjoyed the efficiency a disease engendered. Bullets left wounded. Bullets missed. There was nothing a person could do to defend against disease except to fight it - or to hide from it. There were no crosshairs to line up. There was only a single breath that invited the invasion. A war within a single body. There was beauty in disease, of course. Much like the beauty in a divided atom.
"I want them unharmed," Chaplinn shouted to the impressive group of armed men. He pressed his ear to a radio and spoke back against the sudden hiss. An indiscernible chatter responded, to which he said, "Take care to corral them into a line. It would be rather difficult to find them all once they had scattered, understood?" Chaplinn reached into one of the portals mounted on the roof of the semi trailer he stood atop and retrieved a contained environmental helmet, which he placed over his head.
Lieutenant Mikaell Carmichaell brought a pair of binoculars to his helmet's visor, peering through it out of the front window of the semi cab and out towards the horizon. A mercenary mounted on a motorcycle adjusted his weight, and Carmichaell took slight notice.
"Send them in," Carmichaell ordered in his most authoritative tone.