Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28060931-20160506143219

I decided on starting this diary, so that any who may find it in the near to late future, may, indeed, be brightened about how the world came to be this way. If humanity is going to thrive and rebuild itself in the proceeding centuries, then let this diary be a warning, a guide to how we could avoid a apocalypse.

Most assume it started in 2022, but you know what they say about assuming? It makes an ass out of you and me. The sickness started in 2019. First it appeared to be a mere cold. A lot of people reported coughs and blocked noses, doctors, as normal, assumed it was the common cold, so they prescribed lots of rest and thick broth. But, you do know what they say about assuming.

When the cases of common cold only thrived for two or three weeks doctors suspected chest infections and flus. So they prescribed Amoxil and Clarithromycin. When the list of symptoms only increased, they blamed it on people being ignorant as to the seriousness of the influenza virus. I know all this because I was a intern in a medical clinic at the time.

At first I did not see a reason to disagree with the aforementioned speculations, but, after a while, I became uneasy about the amount of people coming into the clinic with “chest infections”. After all, I worked in a small, isolated clinic that got about ten visitors a month during the harshest of winters.

I highly doubted that there was a sudden outbreak of pneumonia and acute bronchitis that affected three quarters of Massachusetts. The clients in our clinics multiplied faster than Albert Einstein on Adderall. At first, we got a few dozen complaints of ceaseless, frantic coughs, per day. After two months we added Insomnia unto the list. After that we added severe fits of vomiting. Soon, the news was filled with reports of hospitals overflowing with patients. At this point we did not bother lying to each other, we all knew this was a new disease.

Every thing indicated a bacterial infection, so we prescribed antibiotics to the increasing number of increasingly sicker patients. One day when I was sitting in the office, prescribing Cefuroxime to a elderly man and filling in for the doctor I was helping, who was taking blood samples in a back room, I received a message from the secretary that went like this:

“Sir, Dr. Peters thinks you should take the rest of the day off. You know, go visit your mother, maybe talk to her doctor.”

I got the message: something happened to my mother and I should probably hurry to her. She was in her mid to late forties and had severe terminal cancer. Upon arriving at the door step of the slightly dilapidated mansion, I burst through the door and started up the stairs.

When I reached the door, her doctor was standing outside it, he put a thumb to his lips and made a ‘shh' sound. He motioned me into the sitting room and poured me some scotch into a glass.

“Look son,’ he began. ‘It's going to be hard to convey this to you, but your mother is well... She is umm...” I knew what was coming. I have studied medicine and seen enough doctors do this. My eyes became engulfed in tears.

‘Son, I'm sorry, but your mother is dying. Though it's not the cancer.’ This made me look up.

‘You have, no doubt, heard of this new disease on the news. The hospitals overflowing and the severe Insomnia and coughs.’

‘Yes, yes I have, but I had no idea it's fatal.’

‘I'm afraid it is. There have been nine confirmed deaths. The disease seems to be evolving over time. You know your mother is weak because of cancer, there is no way she can withstand this disease. I'll give her maybe twelve hours.’

‘Twelve hours! Doc, are you fucking insane.’

‘I'm not insane, no. I gave her all I could, I frantically tried to cure her or delay the death, but I can't do anything else. Perhaps it'd be best if I left you with your mother.’

I nodded and gently proceeded upstairs. My mother was breathing heavily while she slept. Her face was thinner and more pallid than that of a skeleton. She looked ghastly in her white, dirty nightgown. Her hair was both sparse, and grey.

I sat at her bedside, muffling my unrelenting tears. When the old grandfather clock struck twelve she opened her blood-shot eyes and mumbled something unintelligible to me. A shadow of a smile lit her ghastly face up. I smiled back, tightening my grip on her bony arm.

At a moments notice, she threw her face the opposite direction and produced a ghoulish chocking sound. The eldritch noise made me chock. It was one of the most terrifying sounds that have ever abused my ears.

In my flurry of panic I failed to do more than merely observe the horror of my own mother chocking on her vomit. When I came to my senses she had no pulse.

Death is a curious thing: First comes the denial, the denial renders you oblivious to this funny, unpredictable event called death. Then comes the realisation, it hits you harder than being massacred by a stampede of wild animals. You cry furiously until you run out of tears. Lastly there comes acceptance, it kind of feels like a hangover wearing off. I woke up resting alongside my mother, my phone was dead, despite being 96% charged the past twenty-eight hours of coping with my mothers death.

I knew my mothers death was coming in the nearest year or two, but I was not prepared for it so soon. After reviewing the six dozen messages and missed calls on my phone I organized my mothers funeral.

When it finished and I received the two million dollars, and her mansion that she left me, I returned to my apartment with ten bottles of Jack Daniels.

I returned to work the next Friday. I was blazing with rage, I was nearly set off into a frenzy as I saw the usual lines of patients afflicted with what killed my mom. I wasted a few hundred dollars of her hard earned money she left just to drown my self in my own sorrow. This is not what she would have wanted, I thought, she would have wanted me to tear her fucking killer to shreds. I thought hard for days and days.

Then finally a idea struck me. I published adds in the newspapers to recruit people into a organization determined to combat the new disease. I was merely a intern, but I hoped the big story reporters made out of the death of my mother would come in handy.

Indeed, it did come in handy, since it was either sympathy or the two million dollars and access to allot of research on the disease that me and the doctor I worked with had gathered that got people to join.

After a month, our small team of seven consisted of Dr. Johnathan Whitehill, PhD, Ed.D, Dr. Evan Collins, PhD, M.D., M.Res, Prof. Edward O' Connell, Ed.D, George Avery, student at Brown University, Connor Kinney, M.S., B.S., A.S, Kyle Poole, student at Oxford, and myself.

We agreed to set up lab at Johnathan’s house since he ran a private business which meant he had equipment we needed, and what he did not have I bought. His place was also a good idea because he was a childless widower, so we did not disturb any one.

We had a budget of about one and a half million dollars. A third of that was spent on equipment. I never, in my life, worked harder than then. We had about ten foot high stacks of research paper filled with hypotheses and different combinations of chemical ingredients which in the end cost about four-hundred thousand dollars(I counted this apart from the science equipment such as machines.).

We ran door to door inquiring about any sick people we can examine. Some morgues were nice enough to let us examine recently dead victims of this new plague. We grew more desperate the more deadly this vile, vicious plague became. We soon wore hazmat suits when examining the more advance cases in fear of catching this disease.

Though this did not stop Evan and Kyle catching this disease, they started working from home sending us blood tests and emails. The world started to become aware of this threat as time passed. Government started giving colossal funding’s to hospitals.

We felt we were losing our minds while working fifteen hours a day on the research. Connor did lose his mind and upon being diagnosed with this disease came to work with a 38. Cal Smith and Weston, and emptied four chambers in our direction. After that, he ran out of the house, shot a kid playing outside and used the last bullet on himself.

The kid died, but we only got hit with shrapnel. The world started to become more anarchic: the demand for a cure was higher than ever, people were losing their loved ones and friends faster and faster, the research on a cure was going no where, and people were becoming so desperate that they would kill for a temporary cure, and people preferred to stay with dying family than go to work.

When Evan died, I felt devastated. I worked harder than ever before, missing days of sleep. Combining all the research we made, and published, I wrote down everything we knew about this disease:

-It's Bacterial -It attacks lungs and immune system -Immune to all know antibiotics except Amoxicillin which temporarily suppresses vomiting, but provides no long term effects. I though hard, until, I came across something with some potential: I mixed Amoxicillin with Bacitracin, Tazobactam, and oxytetracycline along with other things which I will not mention in fear of someone re-creating this, if the world, one day, could be at least a resemblance of its former self.

Kyle was dying, and he knew it. So he did not hesitate in trying this nrw concoction. He reported a strong headache and severe nausea. When he woke up the next morning he screamed in happiness and Immediatly called us, saying all the symptoms were gone and that he only had a extreme headache.

We performed a MRI on him, and got back good results showing only minor, short-term damage. We contacted the appropriate authorities and informed them about a possible cure. After going through usual, boring, and prolonged tests, we were told that we will get ten million dollars and if we can perfect the cure, it will be distributed to every single sick person.

This made us ecstatic, and motivated us to work harder than ever. The news leaked after three weeks and a massive crowd formed outside our HQ and started rioting and demanding the cure Immediatly. A large police force encircled our base of operations, so to speak, and fended off the frenzied rioters.

After a month we testes a new phial of gelatinous, crimson liquid on a dying volunteer. It turned out we perfected this new remedy to a near immaculate condition, reducing the extreme headache to a small bit of temporary nausea.

When the government and several Health Associations approved this antibiotic, we yelled in joy in front of the director of one of the larger, and more influential associations.

This filled me with a happiness never yet felt before. I finally defeated my moms killer, I saved the whole world. Though there was one catch: Each phial we produced cost about 8,576.50 dollars. It was hugely expensive, but the government gave us half a billion dollars and a modern laboratory along with seventy professional scientists as workers. After six months we produced about five million phials of antibiotics. But the demand was higher than ever: people started to raid warehouses, attack people outside pharmacies, steal supplies and attempt to make their own replica of our antibiotic. The source of all this chaos was desperation.

One cold October night I sat in my study, now having a net worth of half a billion dollars. I struck a match alight and light a candle, the melancholy light it cast illuminated my desk and atlas laying the aforementioned piece of furniture.

The irony is that the candle casting light on the atlas enlightened me as to the anarchic state of the world, and I was the one who made it that way, if there was no cure we would have just died in peace. I took the used match I stroke alight a few minutes ago.

I dipped it in the melted wax and stuck it in the melancholy, wavering flame of the candle. When it flared brightly, I set it down on candle holder, and observed.

I chuckled, as I watched the charred, fiery mess contort in queer ways under the immense heat. It perfectly represented the world in its current state: being set ablaze and burning all the way to hell, it was even I who set the match on fire.

As it burned out, I spotted a piece of unharmed wood, and thought to myself.

“Oh good candle tell me, is this fore-shadowing what is going to happen to this ghastly world?”

Yes, yes it was. After the supplies of our antibiotic went out, the whole world started rioting, the air, and seaports closed down, people went crazy: spend their last days on earth doing any and everything, robbed stores and locked themselves away from the word in fear of contracting the disease. I did the same, but did not rob any store, rather I but a whole truck load of food and water.

When I was down to a weeks worth of supplies, I emerged into an alien land. My first city encounter was terrifying. The building were run down and had graffiti all over them. Cars randomly parked on pavement and parking lots switched place with decaying cadavers.

There were giant signs saying: “WE WANT MEDICINE” at every corner. The desolate streets filled me with a great sense of eerie solitude. But I learned this was better when I had my first confrontation with a sublunary being. Namely a gun wielding maniac inside a dilapidated McDonald’s.

He pulled out a hunting rifle and opened fire on me, but I took cover behind a freezer that smelled with rot. I only had a glock on me, but three precise shots earned me more ammo, a new gun, and supplies, along with a feeling of no remorse when it comes to murder. 