The NecroResistance

First off, I would like to thank everyone for making me feel so at home the last couple of weeks. It was a tough decision to come here and leave what family I had left to help Tom with necro-research, and the members of the compound have made me feel more than welcome. Very kind of you all.

I would also like to give you a little background on myself so that you will feel more comfortable with me as well. My name is Theodore Shylar, and I was a biology professor at the Delanar University of Biological Medicine. I spent six years teaching there before leaving to study the rare beetles in the plagued lands of Africa. While there with my son and his wife, I received an email from Tom asking if I knew anything of zombies and how their primitive minds and bodies might operate after they had completely turned. Quite honestly, I thought of this man as insane and deleted the email. A couple of weeks later, I received another email from him. Mr. Bordonix is very persuasive when he wants to be.

It was about three days after his last email that I came across a particular beetle called the Manticora scabra, or Giant Tiger Beetle. They are commonly found in the United States, as they were brought here by accident on cargo ships many years ago and simply never left. But this beetle was a little different compared to other beetles in the group. The Giant Tiger Beetle normally eats other insects as a natural food source, but this one, a somewhat sickly-looking creature, was lumbering after its fellow Tigers and trying to eat them. He was also going for their heads first, which was also very odd. So after sedating the vicious beetle, I cut him open to see if I could figure out what was wrong with him. I knew it had to be some kind of sickness, something that would cause confusion with possible hysteria to make it resort to such cannibalism. What I found was shocking.

Most of the creature’s organs were in early stages of decomposition, as if it had been dead for a few hours already. The pieces of its fellow Giant Tigers were resting in a sort of sludge inside the lower abdomen, undigested as there was no longer a whole stomach to do the work. After dissecting the brain, which took more than a little time it seemed to have toughened into an almost stone-like state, I found that the frontal lobe had been infected with some form of viral entity. I cut out the brain, as it was so small that no other options were available, and sent it off to a colleague at Delanar, and a week later he phoned me to say that my sample had been destroyed by two men who claimed to be Interpol. My friend said that they looked more like government agents and had American accents.

I immediately replied to Tom’s email asking how fast he needed me here at the compound, and sent me tickets that very afternoon. That was less than a month ago, and the beetle stays fresh in my mind each and every day as I prepare to do the first research into zombies that I have ever done. So once again, thank you all for welcoming me and having me in your home, and I hope together we can stop what Tom refers to as the “inevitable”.

Sincerely,
Dr. Theodore Shylar