Chapter VII - A Hostile Hullabaloo

"YES!" – An exultant Ma'am Merl celebrated as soon as she entered our office. "The printing press approved our request!"

I almost jumped off my seat. "That's great then! So, what are the terms?"

"Actually, after they checked my transaction history with them, they agreed with our demands – and gave it to us for free!"

My eyes bulged upon hearing that the corrections will be applied at no cost. No matter how cynical I was beforehand, it still worked out. Also, it wasn't really an implausible idea that just because she was Emerlina Arnante, she perfectly executed the plan. At the end of the day, she's one of the most acknowledged teachers in the region.

"When will we get the copies?" I asked.

"On Friday. That gives us three more days to make sure that everything is arranged before we release them to the entire school."

"Alright. That should be easy. What are we supposed to do now?"

"Prepare for the upcoming Intramurals."

"Wait, what? Isn't it too early for that? Besides, it's only January."

"Right. Well, since our school has already adapted the August-December and January-May format, it was supposed to happen last month. However, because of the strong typhoon, it was suspended. Hence, moving it to the 17th until the 19th of this month."

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It was almost seven in the evening when I finished editing several articles, including news and literary pieces, which will be used in the upcoming Nexus issues. Before I completed everything, I received a weird-looking email from an unknown sender.

Nothing really looked peculiar at first. But its title caught my attention – "The Infamous Recession Scheme."

As I scanned it, I realized that it was an editorial about the Novel Coronavirus or nCoV written in English. It made me wonder how and why it was sent to me. Besides, I didn't even know who disseminated it. Worse, why was it about the virus?

There was a paragraph where its author gave a hint regarding a certain powerful country who wanted to spark the third world war without using any artillery. It made me think how this chaos really started.

To my surprise, a friend also sent me a photograph of a portion of a Dean Koontz written book, "The Eyes of Darkness." Here's what page 353 of such book contained:

"I'm not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare," Tina said. "Right now Ijust want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place."

"To understand that," Dombey said, "you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected ti the United States, carrying a diskette record of China's most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff "Wuhan-400" because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was their four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.

"Wuhan-400 Is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can't survive outside a living body for longer than a minute, which means it can't permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?"

The specificity of Koontz's words gave me goose bumps. After reading everything, a lot of questions clobbered my gray matter – which made me forget it was almost eight in the evening and I was still in the office. I took all my stuff, put them in my bag and speedily went home.

"It's almost nine, Pat," mom said as I bolted to my room. "Where have you been?"

"I was stuck in our office, Ma. Ma'am Merl left me with a bunch of articles that needed editing," I answered. "I made sure to finish all of them.

"Isn't that too much? I mean, you just got into the publication."

"I'm not surprised at all, Ma."

As soon as she left, I locked my room and started browsing the internet. I searched for the book's most notable phrases about Koontz's future predictions. Our residence wasn't really the most feasible for a smooth reception, but it was just enough to get the information I needed. There were numerous search results – but one of them really stood out. It was a picture of a page from Koontz's book – the page wasn't shown – but it talked about the year 2020.

"In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely."

I was startled. The fact that Koontz really stated the year 2020 in his prophecy made it even spookier. Now that it all made sense, I checked if my memory served me right. But before doing so, I first listed all the things I knew before verifying them – I was thinking of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS.

Based from what I recalled, SARS probably boomed between 2000 and 2005. I wasn't even ten years old by then, but I knew my retention would not fail me. Afterwards, I went back to the internet to validate my conspiracy.

The World Health Organization website shown that SARS was identified in 2003. It was thought to be an animal virus from an as-yet-uncertain animal reservoir, perhaps bats, that spread to other animals (civet cats) and first infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002.

Furthermore, Brenda L. Teslini, MD, of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, discussed the coronaviruses in their website, MSD Manual Professional Version. What she wrote gave me a clearer picture of the virus.

Coronaviruses are enveloped RNA viruses that cause respiratory illnesses of varying severity from the common cold to fatal pneumonia. Numerous coronaviruses, first discovered in domestic poultry in the 1930s, cause respiratory, gastrointestinal, liver, and neurologic diseases in animals. Only 7 coronaviruses are known to cause disease in humans.

Four of the 7 coronaviruses most frequently cause symptoms of the common cold. Three of the 7 coronaviruses cause more severe, and sometimes fatal, respiratory infections in humans than other coronaviruses and have caused major outbreaks of deadly pneumonia in the 21st century:

SARS-CoV2 is a novel coronavirus identified as the cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that began in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and spread worldwide.

MERS-CoV was identified in 2012 as the cause of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

SARS-CoV was identified in 2002 as the cause of an outbreak of sever acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

These coronaviruses that cause severe respiratory infections are the zoonotic pathogens, which begin in infected animals and are transmitted from animals to people.

It was clear that COVID-19 was a strain of the original SARS virus which was notorious in 2003.

Therefore, Koontz made sense when he declared that the virus will vanish quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later.

But, what I was really hoping for was the next phase – for this destructive virus to disappear completely.