Day 304

It happened slowly at first, cases weren't even reported until the condition hit the hundreds.
Too many for the public to ignore and too few for a national emergency.
Enough for global panic.

It began with a tight feeling beneath the skin, random muscle spasms and fatigue followed.
Bruises and swelling appeared around the joints especially around the jaw.
Those with the disease also suffered severe skin lesions around the extremities.

In the worst cases (pre-death) the bones of the fingers, toes and lower jaw were completely exposed.
Surveillance of patients with the condition showed somnophilic behaviours.
Specifically patients were found to be tearing at their own skin, somehow whilst in REM sleep.

Hypnosis of patients proved they had no subconscious awareness of their nightly activities.
Those in the final stages of the disease were kept in maximum security as a precaution.
Final stage patients and post death patients were contained in mixed rooms until movements ceased.

While this may seem unorthodox and even cruel to the living patients, I assure you it was necessary.
It's just that, well... it became hard to tell when a patient was actually dead.
They just kept moving, no matter how much flesh they'd lost.

Some would scrape themselves along the floor on stumps of bone, lower jaws totally gone.
Others just sat, still trying to remove their flesh by scraping their upper jaw on whatever they could.
There was no cure and there never will be.

Whatever this is it's nothing to do with the brain nor is it a contagion.
Their bodies and minds aren't infected - it's their bones.
We've found brain cell growths within the marrow that form a brain structure within their skeletons.

No, nobody has an explanation for this and no we haven't found a way to test for it.
Something must be triggered within the bones themselves to cause this growth.
Can you imagine Doctor, a body alive within another being?

So far attempts as communicating verbally with the far gone have yielded no result.
They are capable of speech, most still retain functioning vocal chords.
Footage from the patient's rooms shows them using head gestures as a form of speech.

We have yet to decipher this new form of body language but there are people working on it.
Whatever they're saying it seems to be about organisation among the infected.
Every night they shuffle into a line facing the camera and nod in a rhythm.

It's Morse code.

They keep saying the same thing, every night for at least eight hours constant.

T-H-E - F-L-E-S-H - W-I-L-L - N-O-T - L-A-S-T