Killer respiratory virus - State of the body

efreysson

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The climax of my fantasy WIP has a group of sorcerers cast a curse on a small village. It kills everyone there in a way that superficially resembles a plague outbreak. The protagonists arrive afterwards and I'm looking for ideas on how the scene might look.

I'm thinking that the curse-plague attacks the respiratory system. What might a person killed by such a killer virus look like? And might there be a particular smell about the corpse?
 

amschilling

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Um. My answer may be kind of gross. So...don't eat while reading?

Physical appearance depends on the type of plague. In most cases though you're going to get what are called Buboes. They can be pretty large (but in most cases up to 10cm) and they'll discharge pus and blood if opened. They'll focus around the armpits and neck. There's also usually petechiae (tiny broken blood vessels). You might also get acral gangrene in the fingers, and vomiting blood. All those things are typically associated with "the Black Death" that swept Europe. Pneumonic plague, which is respiratory, I don't believe causes quite so graphic symptoms. Still pretty deadly, though.

As for smell, any dead body is going to smell pretty bad. Think of what raw chicken left in a trash can smells like after a day or two... Add that in w/ evacuated bowels and pus and blood.... uck. Though it really depends on how long the bodies have been laying there. Also temperature and humidity.
 

efreysson

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Pneumonic plague, which is respiratory, I don't believe causes quite so graphic symptoms. Still pretty deadly, though.

But are there visible physical symptoms? Do people cough up blood or suffer broken vessels or something?

As for smell, any dead body is going to smell pretty bad. Think of what raw chicken left in a trash can smells like after a day or two... Add that in w/ evacuated bowels and pus and blood.... uck. Though it really depends on how long the bodies have been laying there. Also temperature and humidity.
Well the corpses are just a few hours old. I was wondering if people might cough up anything particularly foul smelling.
 

waylander

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With a respiratory virus I think the victims may well be coughing up blood so a bloody foam around the mouth could well be one sign.
 

Kitti

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If you're trying to do something that mimics pneumatic plague, then they'd definitely be coughing up blood. That sometimes happened on its own and sometimes happened in conjunction with the buboes and "tokens". I'd expect to find blood sprays around everywhere, especially on pieces of cloth that the dying people held to their mouths, on their bedding, and on the clothes they were wearing. There wouldn't be any particular smell (well, other than the usual corpse and blood smells) - the reason you always read about people holding flowers and other things to their noses during epidemics had to do with miasma theories of infection/contagion, not because there was some particular smell they were trying to mask.
 

GeorgeK

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If you cough a lot the eyes get very blood shot and you can even have bleeding into the sclera (whites of the eyes). Are the wizards simply wanting to kill the village, or are they also wanting to send a message to other nearby villages? If they want the bodies to be found and their descriptions relayed to others then pustules would be a nice scary thing. You might look up pictures of smallpox.