"Glanders, my friends, Glanders — a disease of horses, not common among humans. But, never fear, Science can easily make it universal. And these are its symptoms. Violent pains in all the joints. Pustules over the whole body. Below the skin hard swellings, which finally burst and turn into sloughing ulcers. Meanwhile the mucous membrane of the nose becomes inflamed and exudes a copious discharge of stinking pus. Ulcers rapidly form within the nostrils and eat away the surrounding bone and cartilage. From the nose the infection passes to the eyes, mouth, throat and bronchial passages. Within three weeks most of the patients are dead. To see that all shall die has been the task of some of those brilliant young D.Sc's now in the employ of your government. And not of your government only: of all the other elected or self-appointed organizers of the world's collective schizophrenia."
— Narrator, Ape And Essence
Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers' money, someone had finally invented a Chain Letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.
David: Okay, hypothesis #2: we can't find any genetic information that will prove the Ebola gene is in the camel pox genome. Why? Because we are dealing with a chemically synthesized gene. Ebola kills, right? But it doesn't spread very easily. Camel pox spreads easily, but it can be fought with a drug. So, if you could connect them, the Ebola DNA would get a free ride on the camel pox.
[...]
Caroline: Are you saying this thing is deliberate?
David: Yeah, well, nothing else makes any sense. I mean, if creating a killing machine makes any fucking sense.
[...]
Caroline: Are you saying this thing is deliberate?
David: Yeah, well, nothing else makes any sense. I mean, if creating a killing machine makes any fucking sense.
"You want to know what happened? What I think really happened? Somebody fucked up! Something got loose that wasn't meant to get loose. Somebody grew this thing in a lab, and he felt real proud of himself. And he thought how smart he was, and how he was going to get a raise and be real important. Only one day, that thing in the lab got bigger than he was. And it bit him. And it escaped out into the world, and the dying started. All because of one asshole with too much time on his hands."
—Jeremiah, Jeremiah, "The Long Road"
