Sunrise, Sunset
Part 1 of a series by Bacter
A faint clicking was the first sign that night had come. Barely audible from the surface, it was the sound of valves opening. Steam rushed up through tubes, escaping through tiny cracks and floating away in the frigid air. As the rusty generators spun, lights flickered on, and the temperature inside public buildings rose eleven degrees. Rats had discovered this effect, and had taken to living in the libraries and government offices. There was no-one to stop them.
The town was silent, and the wind whistled through it. The rats had made short work of most of the remaining supplies, and were beginning to starve. One particular colony had long determined that it was impossible to gain entrance to the
The illness had been untraceable when it first arrived- at first a very mild fever was its only sign, then even that was gone- it drifted from person to person until every body on the island was a carrier, the plague hiding, waiting. It had a nearly worldwide spread by the time an Australian doctor had isolated it, and once it was found the world was thrown into panic. Every nation responded in their own way- some closed airports, borders, shipyards in an attempt to keep the disease away. Some established martial law and curfews.
Pouring most of the nation’s budget into the project, the automated hospital was to be the beacon of the new age of health care- built with the finest protocols and the most expensive materials, the auto-hospital was designed to be utterly self-sufficient, running on Greenland’s vast reserves of geothermal power. It would handle both patient care and research. The hospital was a smashing success and became the toast of the world overnight, hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. It was far too late.
Nothing had ever evolved as quickly and as disastrously as the new disease, which was referred to as the pox because of the spots it left on victims. The spots were the first sign, then encephalitis, nausea, necrosis, and kidney failure. With an amazingly high death rate and the human immune system unable to provide protection, people fell in droves. Governments took to handing out masks, giving bottled water, and burning bodies to slow down the infection, but to no avail. It surged through
Within thirty days, the hospital had run out of the samples provided by the technicians. The error correction software in the computer quickly realized that there was an abundant source of the plague left- in the bodies of the rats. It began trapping them, and dissecting their bodies for more plague to experiment on. Exactly two hundred and fifty days later, the completion of the vaccine was announced to an empty world.
Empty, that is, except for one city:
This post references Pandemic II. Greenland's hospitals will stay open even if every person on the island is dead as of this post, and Madagascar is jolly well impossible to invade without it closing it's shipyard. It will occasionally close it's airport, though the island doesn't have one.
5 comments:
An awesome post! The last line had me in stiches :D
Brilliant post love it!
Excellent!
Fabulous.
Excellent work.
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