Instant Death Disease

'''INSTANT DEATH DISEASE '''

I was a worker, working at Colkinom Laboratories, Wales. We work with drugs and medical elements, creating cures and vaccines. My boss told me that whatever I do, I should never tell anyone about what we are doing. He began acting strangely only a few weeks ago, when we began Project Axolotl: We were aiming to give humans the ability to regenerate lost limbs.

But it went wrong. Horribly wrong.

My boss called me up to see him. He is a tall man with dark hair. He told me that there seemed to be a problem with Testing Area 5B, where my best friend was working. Of course, I immediately took the job of going down there and checking with him if all was good. It was not.

My friend was sweating terribly and breathing heavily. His hands were shaking and he backed away from the testing area. I had never been in a testing area; well, not while there was a professor at work, anyway. I worked upstairs, where we formed chemical combinations and researched, dissected and examined. I thought that, in the testing area, we'd be testing on animals. No matter how cruel that sounds, it sounded a whole lot better than what they were actually doing.

Testing on humans.

He backed away from the glass panel and I stared through, asking what was wrong. His hands trembled and he tried to pull me away, telling me not to look. The humans were there, all dead. I was immediately sickened, the idea of testing on each other sounded horrible to me. But I noticed that one was alive. She held her child in her arms. We were also testing on small children.

Suddenly, she looked at the corpses. She looked at us, and mouthed something. I looked away and didn't see; the sight of death itself proved too much for me. But I heard a sickly groan from my friend. Dread filled me. I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. He gave a hollow rattle, as if there were no internal organs in him. I felt the sudden need to get as far away as I could. I cupped my hands over my ears and closed my eyes, running (although bumping into walls) all the way back to my boss' office.

I told him frantically what happened, waving my arms madly. My boss' eyes opened wide. But then he smiled. He grinned. Began laughing. That laugh was not of mirth, it was of insanity, it drove me mad, his demonic chuckle screaming through the room.

He explained.

We had been forming a disease. A new, special disease. It would instantly kill our opponents. He had injected one dose into the test subjects in 5B, then told one of the men to read off a card. Once he read it, he gave out a sickening gasp. He was dead. When his body was examined by scientists just a few rooms away from me (the thought of this caused me to vomit) they found that he had lost all of his internal organs. All at the same time. His death had been instant, but excruciatingly painful for that fraction of a second.

The thing is, the woman next to him heard what he said and suffered a similar fate, only mouthing the words to the man next to her. He then shouted the words; only heard by the baby; the last woman was deaf and mute. The woman was terrified at losing her baby. She went insane, but did not show symptoms of the disease. She cradled the baby, and wrote to the scientists;

'Why won't my baby drink? Why is he so pale? How come he's so cold?'

This was too much to bear; the card was shown again, and after reading it, and mouthing the words to my best friend, died. Anyone who says the name of the disease, reads it, hears it, sees it lip-read, feels it in braille, sees it in Morse code or click code or any language, is instantly killed. Instant; although unbelievably painful, he said.

He asked me if I wanted to know the name of the disease.

I screamed no, covered my ears and ran outside the door.

When I peered back, my boss was laughing. He hadn't even said it.

I went home, trying not to think about it. When I went to bed, I dismissed it as A: A crazy dream or B: My boss pulling a prank. However, I felt like I was lying to myself. I couldn't help but feel that way. I couldn't get to sleep. I felt a churning in the pit of my stomach, my head throbbed like it was imploding and I felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to my shins. Deciding to call in sick, I rung up my boss in the morning. I explained to him. He just laughed, his sickening chuckle dissolve into a disconcerting giggle. He told me, OK, but I'd be missing out.

It was in all the newspapers.

Colkinom Laboratories shut down. All employees found dead. Company President Mr. B. H. Large found dead in office. No evidence of how deaths occurred, no weapon found, no gas leaks/sign of accident. Only worker survived: C. W. Dickenson, stayed home sick.

I couldn't take it. I packed everything I could grab into a suitcase, smashed open my rainy day jar (the contents of which amounted to about fifty pounds) and stuffed the notes and coins into my wallet, which now felt like a lead weight. I started up my car, cranked up the radio, regardless of what was on, and floored it. I drove as far as I could, until I had almost crossed the border. My radio buzzed.

This just in from the Colkinom Laboratories case; the dead seem to have no internal organs. There is no sign of lacerations or wounds. It is almost as if their internal organs simply vanished. This seems instant, but recordings, CCTV and a three-letter message scrawled by one of the employees may prove that it certainly wasn't painless.

I crammed a CD in and slammed the pedal, doing a half-ish U-Turn (an L-Turn?) and went for the countryside. I drove and drove, aimlessly following roads roughly north. I didn't stop until I ran out of gas; where I grabbed my cases and ran. When I entered a field and I couldn't carry my cases anymore, I threw them in a ditch. As long as I could run, I ran, I didn't sleep until my body dropped.

I awoke tired and groggy, my bones aching. I knew I had to run from what I knew. There was a virus going around. I knew exactly what my boss had done. He had shouted the name of the disease over the loudspeakers. Everyone who heard died. Some tried to block their ears but the words flashed on the computers, the lights blinked it in Morse code. Everyone in that building was now dead. The terror they must have felt, the split-second of reality-bending agony, all the friends, the men and women I used to know.

I'm now sleeping in a hotel room I found. It's far away, it's old and quaint, I think I'll be fine here. They don't have TV and I always stay away from the radio. I'll live. I know a harrowing truth. But I can't tell.

I have a name for the disease. It's simple. It's blunt. It does exactly-what-it-says-on-the-can. I call it...

Instant death dis