Good writing, or simply terrifying?

I found this on reddit, true or not this is one captivating story.  Hopefully they follow up.  I just stumbled across this on the front page and I'm fairly new to reddit (I know, I know... I need to get with the program), so I'm sorry if this is old news.

*Edit- Okay I just realized this is fiction writing.  This is the description of the subreddit: NoSleep is a place for authors to share their original horror stories. Both nonfiction and realistic fiction are allowed.

Anyhow, I still think it's entertaining and plan to look for further updates by whoever posted it.

stillrunning wrote:

 

 

 

Before I get into this, I need to make something clear.

This isn’t happening right now. I’m not going to beg for advice or help, because I’m beyond any of your help. I’ve had to give up everything in my life that ever mattered. This happened more than 9 years ago, and I’m finally taking the risk to share it. World events are seriously scaring me, and I have more…personal reasons that I can get into later.

To post this, I’ve driven around town for forty minutes before I found an unsecured internet connection. I’m not risking posting this from my own. I made a throwaway account, which has no ties to anything related to my life.

I’m well and truly fucked, and it’s all because of an email that I should never have received.

In the summer of 2005 I thought I had everything I ever needed from life. I had just finished grad school and begun teaching English at a local community college, had married the love of my life that January in an awesome and geeky ceremony, we had moved into a fix-it-up bungalow on three acres of land, and we had just rescued an Elkhound puppy from a local shelter. Life was good.

Looking back, I wish I had enjoyed those days more.

My wife (I’ll call her Fay, not her real name) and I had just finished working outside one night in July, and we were relaxing with a beer on the porch. Fireflies were doing their little “I glow, you glow, we all fuck like rabbits” dance, and our puppy was gnawing on a pair of my socks I had tied into a knot for him. I asked Fay if she would mind if I checked my email before we went to bed; I was expecting a notification about the classes I was going to teach in the fall, and was looking forward to actually using my degree.

Fay went up to bed, and I logged into my work email account. There wasn’t an email from my department chair, but there was a new email entitled “Progress of EBOV-7x.” I figured it was spam, but I impulsively clicked on it anyway.

The email’s intended address was literally two letters off from mine, and it came with an attachment named “E-7x results and suggestions.” It was addressed to a man named Mark, and it read as follows:

"Mark,

Attached are the prelim results from the last batch of tests on EBOV-7. The x-generation seems to be holding up much better to the modifications. Remember this is EYES ONLY, so don’t print this out or anything. You’re new here, and we all think your help is really what’s gotten us off the ground on this. If you have anything to add, let me know ASAP.

Provided this gen holds up, we’ll have a much better quarterly report for the bigwigs than we did last time. Don’t wear the tie with the mustard stain on it, OK?

Reagan"

I had no clue who either of these people were, and I didn’t recognize domain name of the email address. The only part I could make out was “Detrick.” Just as I finished reading it, Fay called and asked if I was ready to head to bed. I told her I would only be a minute, the cursor hovering over the download link for the PDF file. Every reasonable part of me said to just delete the email, to pretend I never saw it…but, as you can probably tell, I was youthful and impulsive. I clicked the download link, and after a few seconds, the downloaded file popped up in my downloads. I opened it, fully expecting it to be password locked – I mean, from the tone of the email, wouldn’t you?

It wasn’t. Fuck, I wish it had been.

After it opened, I was bombarded with sentences so thick with scientific lingo that I had difficulty even parsing them out. I was a Liberal Arts major, for fuck’s sake. There was one diagram I recognized, though, from having a friend in undergrad who majored in epidemiology.

It looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/DLcrT80.jpg.

For those of you who don’t know, that’s Ebola.

I skimmed down, until I finally found a paragraph that summarized what I had been struggling to read:

"With the iteration of EBOV-7x and the hiring of new personnel, we believe we have finally addressed the main desires of the client. EBOV-7x contains the following alterations from the base EBOV-0:

A) Increased incubation time of 12 to 40 days as opposed to EBOV-0 incubation of 2 to 12 days.

B) Suppressed the lack-of-appetite common in EBOV-0, thus removing one of the major diagnosable tools.

C) Increased durability of the virus, allowing it to remain hot for up to 8 hours outside the human body (See Test 100BA for applicable data).

D) Decreased rate of fever increase by 20%, allowing for upwards of 35% more time before patient becomes immobilized."

I pushed my chair away from the computer and simply stared for a minute. I rubbed my eyes, and reread the paragraph over and over again. I couldn’t believe what I was reading – what would be the point to this? Who would want these changes to an already deadly virus?

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to relax. I wasn’t an expert on anything related to Ebola, but one of my strengths had always been an ability to think outside the box and move past my own internal assumptions. I asked myself, what purpose would these changes have? What would be the goal behind it?

As I asked myself that, the answer came to me quickly. It wasn’t about making a vaccine, or wanting to remove the danger from the virus.

Someone was altering Ebola to make it less noticeable, to make it less easily diagnosable.

Someone was making a version of Ebola that wouldn’t burn itself out.

A version of Ebola that COULD be a pandemic.

Holy Shit.

Holy.

Fucking.

Shit.

On pure autopilot, I copied the file onto a USB stick and put it in my messenger bag I used for work. I marked the email as unread and deleted it, then went upstairs to bed. As Fay snored beside me and the puppy curled himself into the crook of my neck, sleep did not find me. I had no clue what to do. Should I go to the police? The news? Should I just forget it ever happened?

Eventually I fell asleep, and got up the next morning. I debated telling Fay about the email – I had never kept anything from her for the four years we had dated – but I decided against it. For all I knew it was nothing, and there was no reason to worry her.

I drove to work, and tried to forget about it. I worked on getting my office situated to my liking, and was about to call Fay to meet me for lunch when two men in dark suits knocked on the open door.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Dr. George?” they asked. (No, that’s not my real name. You won’t find my real name.)

“Yes?” I repeated.

“This is Mr. Rein, and I’m Mr. Frol,” one of them said. If you asked me now, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which was which. They were both middle aged white men, brown hair, clean shaven, and wearing dark sunglasses. “You may have received an email from our company server by mistake last night. Did you?”

OK, I’m gonna have to cut it off here. The family whose WIFI I’m ripping off have looked out the window four times at my car, and now someone has a phone in their hand. I’ll have to be more careful next time. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Stay safe.