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It did work – magnificently. I couldn’t believe it when it happened. It was so sporadic and haphazardly put together, but the serum I developed kept the bacteria dead. For good.

I wanted to show it to my coworkers, but decided it was best to keep it hidden from them. I’d bring it directly to Afalsi for his approval. I knew he’d appreciate my work, if anybody would. After all, he was the man who hired me. He couldn’t have wanted me for nothing. And we’d gotten well acquainted since my first day at Pharand. As soon as I saw him at lunch, I showed him my cultures of completely decimated Athan’s cultures. I told him it was derived from the other two men’s work – which, in part, it was – and we began talking about distribution. Those coworkers of mine suddenly received no attention at all. They might have been fired, but by then I wasn’t paying attention to them anymore. I was getting so much attention from Afalsi that I couldn’t pay attention to anything but him. We worked for the rest of the day to mass-produce my serum. We tested it on infected lab rats to ensure that it did what it was supposed to do. We tested it on dead lab rats as well – it even woke up those dead rats! I finally felt as though I had accomplished the impossible. I, Ethan Hemmings, had defeated Death.

But that wasn’t the end. On particularly large specimens the antidote took a great time to fix. One took over a day to get well. Another took two days. Surprised, I wanted to get back to work on the antidote to see if I could make it work more efficiently, but I was told that there was no time. I found that out myself as well – on the news, all over the television stations, reporters were pointing out that humans were mysteriously dropping dead. My excitement was cut completely short when I heard this. As the days passed by, more reports of this came in. The disease was finally making its mark – people like Shane and the warehouse worker, who had been out in the open, were transferring their disease to others. It was being transmitted throughout the world and spreading quickly.

Humans had little time to act.

Anybody could have been holding this disease inside them. The tourist on the street was probably the most likely – and by this time I had learned the horrible truth about Athan’s: That the bacteria were smart. They could be transmitted through a wide array of mediums. In my tests, I had noticed that several were equipped to travel through fluids, while the majority was prepared to soar through the air to get to their victim. As I continued feeding my antibiotic to them, I noticed that they were learning how to avoid it. I had to destroy the culture before they evolved enough to become completely resistant to the antibiotic.

One day I noticed something about the Athan’s bacteria that I’d never noticed before. Pharand had much more advanced equipment than the hospital had, leaving me able to take a closer look at Athan’s. Upon inspection, I saw that they did have DNA after all – but a very strange organization of DNA. It was not organized in any chromosomal structure, but it was not scattered, either. Rather, it was arranged in a completely organized manner. Genes were lined in an array – in the winged bacteria it was a very precise two thousand by five thousand grid of rectangular dark spots. That explained why I had never spotted this strange “ghost DNA” before. It didn’t look like DNA at all. It was wound strange, it was organized oddly – one had to wonder how it was doing anything at all. But it was clearly efficient, and allowed the bacteria to mutate their own genes quickly. I became worried – would they defeat my antibiotic after all?

I continued making more powerful versions of my antibiotic. I derived extra parts of it from Emeticillin, and made the bacteria literally blow themselves up from the inside. That seemed to be the only way to destroy them. I watched it happen in slow motion – over the course of an hour, an entire culture of tens of thousands of Athan’s bacterium rotting from the inside out. When the process was over, there was nothing left but a pile of residue that used to be a living organism.

I continued developing this technology with Afalsi directly. We had ceased mass-producing the old serum I’d concocted, which no longer worked to treat the bacteria. But this worked every time, regardless of what strain of Athan’s devoured the serum. It was cleverly disguised as a sugar, so that Athan’s would be attracted to it. However, when they devoured the medicine it caused a chemical reaction within their cellular makeup that literally turned them into miniature bombs. When testing on the rats it proved to be a non-lethal substance. It seemed that the cure had once again resurfaced. It might have been the most powerful antibiotic on the planet. It was the most powerful antibiotic on the planet.

I was told it should not be taken lightly. I shrugged. I made it – why should I be told how it should be taken? I knew precisely how it worked. I didn’t think that anybody else understood, in part because I thought that nobody besides me understood Athan’s. I was completely wrong – no, I was more than wrong. I was downright ignorant.

I didn’t have time to realize this. By the time I did, I was long gone from Pharand. I was put in charge of distribution. Pharand wanted the antibiotic out as fast as possible. It had been a few weeks since the reports on the television. Now they were becoming commonplace. Several reports were telling me new information: some cities had been infected with the disease for years, but had remained contained. Now that it was getting out, the world saw these cities as a threat.

On a warm day Dr. Afalsi approached me. “You may have been told that you’ll be in charge of distribution, but I don’t think you understand what that means. Doradwe has told me directly how he wants the situation handled.”

“And how would he like the ‘situation’ handled, Doctor?” I crossed my arms and raised one eyebrow. He wasn’t sending me out into infected areas – he couldn’t possibly be thinking to do that.

“You’ll be going by yourself to test the antibiotic in select areas. We’ve got quite a few locations here, and arranged flights for you to arrive at the first one by tomorrow.” I couldn’t believe it. He was actually planning to ship me off to some foreign area and risk my health to distribute the antibiotic!

“Sir, that is completely unreasonable.” I wasn’t going to be the one to die the temporary death in this battle.

“I don’t believe so. It’s your cure, not mine. And given that you’re currently unemployed if I let you go, I’d say you’d better be off to catch this next flight. I’ve slipped the plane tickets in your mailbox. The flight is tomorrow – make sure you dress for warm weather. And don’t worry about gathering up the medicine. We’ve already shipped boxes of the stuff for you. You should be able to find it at any local hospital. They’ve been given instructions not to touch it until you arrive there. Keep it locked in a safe, or do whatever they need with it until you get there, except use it on a patient.”

I had a choice. I could leave the job, and make everything I’d done up to this point completely pointless, or I could carry out the rest of my work and go to whatever Afalsi wanted to send me and distribute the cure. I didn’t want to play missionary for a greedy pharmaceutical company, but I didn’t have much of a choice – not logically, in any case. I conceded and told him that I would go, and that I would be packed by the next day. He smiled and thanked me. I think he saw how upset I was that I’d be moving again, but I could also tell that he was indifferent. That he knew I would be moving again, and again, again. That my life from that point would be a never-ending airplane flight to escape all the destinations of the world.

I packed my things and bid Pharand farewell. My two coworkers, as well as my other partners whom I had worked with for such a short few weeks, did not bother to say goodbye. They had been there for so long that they did not notice that I was leaving. They didn’t care, either. Turnover rate must have been quite high in Pharand; they were so unflinching when I told them that I was leaving that it seemed inhuman. Nobody could care so little about their working partner unless that sort of thing happened all the time – and I was curious, for a moment, why such a thing would happen so often. For a moment, the paranoid man within me suspected a setup. I thought back to the secret organization that had sent me here. Doradwe. What was his history of sending people to Pharand? I brushed the thoughts aside – they were ludicrous. They made no sense. This was the first time man had seen Athan’s Disease crop up in such a widespread manner. There was no reason for him to have ever sent anybody but me here.

I didn’t have time to think about it before I was sent off. The next day I was leaving Pharand, Inc. By noon I was gone, and on the plane. But to where was I flying? I looked at the plane ticket while riding in the taxi that Afalsi had arranged for me to be picked up in. Westendorf, Austria. I did not know what kind of city it was, but I was prepared to face whatever was going on inside its boundaries. I assumed that whatever was happening there was pretty bad if it was the first place I was being sent to. I prepared myself for the worst – for nobody to be alive when I arrived, for a single person to wake up and wonder why all of his or her friends and family were dead next to him or her… I prepared myself to give that person the antidote, and prepared myself to be far too afraid to give the antidote to a dead person lying on the ground. When I arrived at the airport, the same airport that I had entered only a few weeks ago, I wanted to run outside and never go back in. Was I really about to become a missionary for this pharmaceutical company? I felt despicable doing it, as though the viscous ooze had crept up on me yet again, but this time it was alive and was devouring me whole. I was trapped in it, and I could not escape. I would feel this way for eternity.

But I made it into the airport. I flew Austrian Air to Westendorf, shivering the entire way to the city and unsure about what to do or how to act when I arrived. During the flight ambivalence crowded around me, and I fought to gain control of my sanity, not knowing whether it had actually been lost a long time ago, back when Shane Evans first woke from death. Now it seemed so normal to speak of somebody dying. It was a commonplace event. In Pharand if somebody was dead nobody knew if they were alive or not, and on the news reports, which everybody watched, we would frequently discuss that none of the people in the report were actually dead. What Pharand enjoyed calling it was “sustained hibernation.” What Doradwe’s organization would have called it was the human metamorphosis, and wherever Athan’s spread would have been called the Land of the Lord. Doradwe had fire in his eyes akin not to mine, but to Shane’s, to Victor’s, to Kasten’s fire – it was a strange fire, a burning passion to continue living forward through the end of time and beyond it. It was a fire that burned only to blast down the walls of time, so that they might no longer exist.

I wanted to contact Shane and tell him I knew what was happening to him. I wanted to tell him loudly that he would outlive his wife if something weren’t done. I wanted to tell him that he could hardly be called human anymore, that he transcended humanity. That was what Athan’s did. It stole a person’s humanity. Shane might have only been half of a human when he was out breaking his arms and legs, but now he was no human at all. He was Athan’s Disease – a giant walking mass of snow-colored bacteria. On the outside he looked like Shane, but on the inside he was not. He couldn’t have been. Athan’s had a hold of him, just like it had a hold of Dr. Doradwe, and everybody else. It was what had caused the warehouse worker to join Doradwe and his cult of the forever living.

But I couldn’t contact Shane, or Dr. Doradwe, or the warehouse worker, to tell them anything. On the plane, there was no contact with anybody – even with the use of cell phones and the internet and all modern conveniences, there was nothing I could do to tell Shane what was happening. I had no words for it. Communication was possible, but what would I say? He would know soon enough that he wasn’t alone. He might have already known at that time, that he was no longer one of the four to be infected with Athan’s Disease, a disease that the world had never heard of because its name was kept a dark secret. Only in the hands of Doctor Doradwe would it be set free, and I knew he had no plans to do that any time soon. He wanted to preserve himself, and his organization. They were special, and he couldn’t let them go so easily.

That was why he and his cohorts were the only humans to know the words “Athan’s Disease.”

I fell asleep on the plane, after attempting for hours to accomplish the feat. I hadn’t had a proper dream since arriving at Pharand. I dreamt about Pharand, and everything related to it. There was the wide-open rural area of Wales where it was situated and beyond it the mountains. There was the taxi man who had driven me. “Out ‘ere there are ten sheep to every person! Or was it a hundred?” he said. And then the building began to melt. Everybody melted into a singular giant, yellow glob, which continued to liquefy under the heat of the sun. It was agar.

The agar seeped into the ground, and sprung up moments later as agar plate plants. The plates were not yet filled, but they would be soon. I saw white speckles on the plates. I saw the white speckles grow, and grow. They expanded faster and faster, until Athan’s Disease was overflowing every plate around the landscape. The landscape became white, fresh with snowfall. But it wasn’t snow; it was bacteria. I tried to step above the ground, but they had a hold of me.

Suddenly, every bacterium was gone. But as a side effect, everything in Wales was now twice its size. They had transformed, become their hosts. By manipulating the grass, the sky, the trees and the mountains, they formed a picture. But it wasn’t just any picture. It was the painting I had taken with me to Pharand, the one from my kitchen, the one from the hospital, the one from Doradwe’s building’s secret ceiling. The bacteria were telling me something. I had forgotten to take the painting with me after leaving Pharand. Now it was there forever, and I wasn’t going back to retrieve it until I’d visited wherever Afalsi told me to go. I woke up at that point, and lamented the loss of that painting – no longer would I eat lunch under Dr. Nicholaes Tulp’s splendid visage. What he had been showing to his fervently attentive students would now always be a mystery to me. Those accusing gazes would never look back to give me revelations when I needed them most. I felt half empty knowing that the painting was gone. It felt useless not a day before. Knowing it was gone, however, made its value skyrocket in my mind.

I arrived in Vienna late that night, and slept for five hours in a random hotel before finding a bus to Westendorf. It took another few hours to reach Westendorf, but once I was there it was obvious. This was a town unlike any other – a small mountain village that seemed, unless there were strange outside forces acting upon it, peaceful. It looked like a wonderful spot to take a relaxing vacation. It was tidy, neat and simple. Everybody there more than likely lived modest lives in their small sized homes. I was told that most everybody spoke English, so that I would have no problems interacting with the residents. I would learn soon enough how disturbing this town truly was, and why it was perfect that it was so secluded from everywhere else in the nation of Austria.

I got off the bus, which had dropped me off in the central area of Westendorf – a small circle surrounded by beautiful flowers. In the middle of this circle was a large pole, oddly configured and oddly sculpted. It was not a flagpole. It was just a very strange, very tall pole, possibly a sculpture of some sort because it was very colorful and had a tree-like ornament at the top. It was difficult to miss, because one could see it from far beyond the town. It brought travelers to the center of town. That day, it brought me to the center of town, and into the middle of a crisis that had apparently been going on for weeks and weeks.

A little girl was roaming the streets, holding a balloon and skipping along, singing in Austrian. It was truly a beautiful day. I imagined she was singing about the beautiful day, but my imagination stopped short when her mother came by, noticing that the girl was skipping towards me. Perhaps she wanted to say hello, but I never found out, because at that moment her mother tore her away from the street. “Don’t go there!” she screamed in English. It must have been the common language in Westendorf, and from that moment on I knew I would never be sent to an area filled with foreign tongues. “Not near the man! Oh!” She grabbed her daughter just in time to stop her from coming near to me. But she would not touch the little girl for long – only long enough to pull her in the opposite direction and beckon her to go the other way. The mother walked towards me, “I am sorry,” she said. “We do not allow her to go near strangers. She is ill.”

Yes, but ill with what? I wondered. The mother would not stay to answer. She was afraid to be around me herself. She ran off into the distance, entering what looked like one of the largest homes in the area, but not as large as the two inns that were nearby. I suppose everything was nearby in that town; it was so small. Its only businesses seemed to be the grocery store and the mountain patch that travelers could follow. It took you up the mountains that surrounded the village, for a fee. The view at the top was supposedly spectacular, but I would never have time to see it. I would end up far too busy dealing with the people in Westendorf, for they were sick. So very sick. They were not necessarily sick with disease, as I found out.

I perused the town in hopes of finding a soul outside besides that little girl and her mother, but nobody came outside. The town was as good as deserted, and even the flowers on the windowsills of every house refused to come out into the light beyond their sills. They were turned towards the windows, and unnatural position that made me second-guess my own eyes. Finally, I saw somebody out bike riding. It was an old man, possibly over seventy-five. He was fit enough to ride a bike around town; I assumed he was one of the fittest people in Westendorf, considering he was the only man outside.

“Hello!” I said. “Do you know where I might find a room to stay for the night?”

The man stopped biking and looked at me. He thoroughly examined my face and body, and came to the conclusion that I was not of Westendorf heritage. Seeing this, he turned around and bicycled away, without saying a single word. Why was everybody so afraid of me? Or were they afraid of something greater?

I found an inn to stay in for the night and dropped everything I had with me off into the room. After that it was off to the local hospital. I asked the concierge for direction to the hospital. Everything was down the road, make one turn. Nothing was far away. I liked Westendorf for that; it made getting around easy, unlike the suburbs back home, and the city nearby that. I still believed that navigating the city back home was a nightmare.

I found the hospital, but it took a while. It looked exactly like every other building in town – it was short (although slightly taller than most buildings around the area), brown and white, very traditionally styled building. Being in that hospital felt like being at home – it was not fancy, nor did it have the latest technology, and yet I was told that Westendorf’s residents were among the healthiest in Austria. Most lived to be almost one hundred years old, explaining why the seventy-five year old was riding a bike. This was normal practice for Westendorf residents. It didn’t shock them to see a man so physically fit, as it would in the United States. In the United States we were all so unfit physically that to see a man over forty riding a bicycle was a surprise, and a testimony to human strength and endurance. In Austria, they made a mockery of that, by showing what humans were really capable of.

The hospital told me that they had received no shipments of medicine, but that they were expecting a package to come soon. I was told to explore the town, meet some of the people. I was given one address in particular of a woman whom I was urged to meet. They said that I would never find a woman so nice as her – and so unfortunate. I knew at that moment that she was going to be my most important patient in this town, and that she was likely the first to be exposed to Athan’s Disease in Westendorf. I took the time that day to visit her. She was only one street down and one turn away, after all.

Her house was decorated with the most beautiful flowers in the city, all facing towards the sun and arranged in a way that made their vibrant colors even more radiant than the most colorful arrangements I had seen yet. I knocked on the door. A plump, jolly woman opened the door, accompanied by her younger daughter, a slender teen who must have been the envy of all her friends, for she looked nothing like her mother. But as soon as the two women saw me they panicked and wore the most disturbed of faces – the face of the awakened dead. They tried to shut the door and keep me out, but I held one hand firm and kept it open. “Please leave,” the mother said, pushing hard to keep the door closed. “Nothing is here for you.”

“I was sent here to see you. Please let me in.” I held the door open firmly with a single hand; she could not match my strength, no matter how hard she pushed. She gave in and let me enter her house. Her daughter almost began to cry and ran away, deep into the house. It was a comfortable three-story home, but each story only had two rooms. It was too large for just a mother and daughter to occupy. “Is there a father?” I asked.

“He is gone,” said the mother, who began sobbing. So, he was dead. They’d probably mistakenly buried him, not knowing that it was Athan’s Disease. I expected, sadly, to see a lot of that. Without delayed autopsies like Shane Evans, or persons with knowledge of Athan’s to delay the autopsy for the person, like myself, there was no way that these people could have known that their husband and father was still alive.

“I’m so sorry,” I told them, imitating the greatest sympathy I could muster. In truth, I could not find the proper sympathy. I felt immune to death.

“Do not be sorry,” the mother said to me. “That asshole left me and his daughter. We have little money, and now I am sick. My daughter is feeling sick as well, but she is much better than I am. She has energy to get up in the morning, and enough energy to help me get up. She is much better than my ungrateful husband, who is so afraid of sickness that he runs away! Just like all the others, all cowards who run.” She scoffed and turned around, as if to go somewhere. But there was nowhere for her to go. She turned back around. “I am sorry, I did not mean to say those things to you. You do not want to hear those things… you are here for other business, yes? Please sit down, let me make you some tea.”

As she made me tea, she told me the tragic story of her husband and the sickness spreading throughout the village. It had begun about two months prior.

“My daughter was going to school, you see, when once of her friends fell on the street. They were walking, and all of a sudden the girl falls and does not get up! We rush her to the hospital together, not knowing what to do. They keep her there for a week, say she is fine, and breathing regularly they say she was. I heard that she was not breathing regularly from other doctors, but no doctors agreed on anything. Nobody knows what happened to the girl in the week, but after that week she died. The doctors examined the body and found strange substances…”

“This sounds awfully familiar to me. In fact, it’s the reason why I’m here, ma’am.” I was going to tell her that I had the cure, but the stark look on her face became desolation and I didn’t dare speak another word until she said her next sentence.

“You are here to collect the dead people?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t feel any pain or pang of death, but apparently neither did she. “The dead people,” she had said. It sounded almost like they were keeping a mound of them somewhere far away, where nobody but the sick knew how to find. I imagined sick people waking to this pile, lying down on top of it, on top of their soon-to-be next of kin. They would lie there and simply never wake up, having put themselves on the pile of the dead. I shivered. Even if I was immune to death, I was not immune to many dead all in one spot. “I am not here to collect any dead. I’m here to…”

What was I going to say next? “I am here to bring your dead back to life?” I might have gone to Westendorf to do just that, but I could not make myself sound like some religious savior, which I most certainly wasn’t. “I’m here to cure the sick before they die, so that nobody will have to come and collect the dead people.” I narrowly avoided stating my true purpose, and what I actually said wasn’t really a lie, either. It was the truth. I did plan on curing the sick before the dead, but I knew my priority would deal with reviving the dead people in a discreet manner. I hadn’t actually gone over how to deal with the situation, and I wasn’t sure how people in Westendorf would react to seeing their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and other related family suddenly spring back to life as though they’d never been dead.

But what I didn’t know at that point was that this had already happened. The clues were all around me, linking my mind to this town’s vile, austere history. I just needed to explore a little more to find out. Once I gave in to my urge to explore, everything would be revealed to me. This mother was just the first step, and all that I thought I needed to focus on at that moment.