Publish Or Perish

@arty_enigma | Prompt 1 • Jul'18

Sleepless by arty_enigma [published on 13-07-2018, word count: 1786]

Samantha shook off her sleep for what seemed like the thousandth time. She hadn't had a lie-in for the last four or five days, but she kept telling herself to keep awake. She had no other option.

Yet her heart kept voicing her overwhelming desire to embrace the diameter of her fluffy feather pillow and drift off to a sweet and blissful void. A void where nothing but serenity existed.

They've not got you, her heart repeated, you're untouched, but her head told otherwise. She cradled herself in her arms, surrounded by nothing but loneliness and her own voice in her head in the emptiness within the four walls of her bedroom.

Her eyes kept darting towards the local newspaper kept a few feet away from her on the bed.

'Unprecedented virus epidemic reaches town, dormant until host sleeps.'

She still shivered on reading the text. She had read it so many times that she had memorized almost all of it.

'The unknown "Dormesi" virus that has caught half the world in a frenzy has finally made its way to Harvista. The first case of the disease was reported on Sunday. As medics have never met a similar predicament before, they are unsure as to what to do. The casualty, Paul Reuben, has been admitted to the intensive care unit in isolation after reports of unknown symptoms just days after he returned to Harvista from a trip to Detroit, Michigan.

The most unusual thing about this new virus is that it does not show any effect until the host sleeps after getting the infection. Once the host sleeps, the virus activates and multiplies with a dangerously fast speed, resulting in headaches, weakness, blood vomits in the early hours leading to bodily dysfunction, extreme deformation of the skin and ultimately death. The virus is extremely contagious and the number of reported cases in the world is increasing each hour. Residents of the town are advised not to leave their homes and avoid physical contact with others.

The newspaper's text sounded fairly neutral. The catch? The newspaper was a week old. And the virus that already spread before Rueben's case had been reported. Reuben's segregation had been done too late. The damage had been done. Since then, the Dormesi virus had spread like crazy. Almost all activity in the town had come to a halt. Nobody wanted to leave their home. A large part of the town's population was either dead or being eaten away by those . . . things.

What the newspaper did not tell was that once the virus got activated, not only did it do physical harm, but it also did serious damage to the brain, leaving the host more or less like half-dead zombies. Samantha had witnessed the condition with her own eyes. No one in their right mind was leaving home. The only ones roaming the streets were the infected ones—the ones who had been rejected as pariahs because no one wanted to come in contact with them, to become one of them. Samantha had dared to step out one day but she had returned in no less than two minutes. The scene outside had been no less than one from The Walking Dead.