TIPPING POINT is FREE!
May 5th ~ 9th only
Book #1 of my post-apocalyptic series
Click HERE for all Amazon sites
The other day I was talking to a friend about how viruses spread, because he was unsure why, in this current climate, items bought from a local shop should be wiped with a disinfectant, or why it mattered that under some circumstances people aren't bothering about social distancing.
Later, it occurred to me afterwards that I should have just sent him this short excerpt from Tipping Point, about how Nick, my Patient Zero, became 'a one-man fever dispenser' ~ here, in case you would like to read, or pass on to anyone else who doesn't understand!
I must point out that my 'bat fever' (I wrote this in 2017, honest!) is 100% fatal and is airborne (for very short distances and time periods only), but the principle is roughly the same.
😷😷😷
Nick Greenaway would not start to feel ill
until the next morning, though the virus was at its most contagious in that first twenty-four hours
of infection. At the gym he enjoyed a
full upper body workout, whooping when he exceeded his personal best on the
running machine, oblivious to the pathogens released as he puffed and
sweated into the air. The owner of the gym had packed in as many machines as he could; so close together were they that the bare arms on either side of Nick were soon spotted with tiny molecules of his perspiration. On his left was a
doctor who'd received the vaccination several days before; on his right, a
hairdresser called Annika had not.
The next day, Annika would board a plane for her annual holiday in the sun with her girlfriends, feeling a little ill but not considering, even for a moment, that a slight summer cold should stop her enjoying her two weeks in Turkey.
The woman who served her airport Costa Coffee would
feel a strange shudder of darkness as Annika put money into her hand, but
choose to ignore it. She was to remember
that sensation the following Thursday, as she gasped her final breath.
Twenty-eight hours later, when Annika
stepped onto the Turkish tarmac, twenty-seven people would be
infected on that plane alone.
Back at the gym that Sunday, Nick sat in
the steam room after his workout, to relax his muscles and empty his pores of a
week's impurities. He removed the towel
from his neck and placed it on the bench before closing his eyes and leaning
his head back. Next to him, an
acquaintance called Wayne picked it up to wipe the sweat from his brow,
before realising he'd taken the wrong one.
"Sorry, mate, I just used your towel
by mistake," said Wayne.
"No worries," said Nick, even
though it irritated the hell out of him; Nick was fanatical about personal
hygiene.
During the next twenty-four hours, the two
men would be responsible for the exponential growth of the virus in South
London.
When Wayne left the gym an hour or so later, he lit a cigarette
and threw it on the pavement half-smoked, where it was swooped upon by a vagrant
once called Reverend William Sallis (he had long forgotten about the 'Reverend'
bit), who didn't care that the end was coated with another man's saliva. Later, Sallis would drink from a bottle of
White Lightning cider and pass it around his friends. Later still, during a visit to hospital after
a drunken collision with a passing car, molecules of mucus from his sneeze
would land on his doctor, an hour before she clocked off for two hours of
passion with her married lover.
A woman jammed up against the married
lover in the underground rush hour crush the next morning delivered the first
recorded case of bat fever to North Yorkshire, while a young man called Akio
Ishikawa took two presents back to his family in Kyoto; the other was a working
model of the London Eye.
As for Nick Greenaway, he coughed while the
assistant in the flower shop wrapped the very tasteful bunch of irises for his
sister, lifting his hand to his mouth a moment too late and signing the death
warrant for the poor florist (whose vaccination date was the very next day).
As the deadly micro-organisms in his body
multiplied, Nick became a one-man fever dispenser. At lunch time, he passed the virus first to
the barman, then to a couple he squeezed past as he juggled three
pints back to his table, then to his friend Greg (Aaron happened to be
naturally immune, though he would die a violent death the following year in a
fight over three litres of bottled water), and, later, he and his girlfriend
had sex for the last time in either of their lives.
Of the seventy million people in the UK in
2024, the majority were yet to be vaccinated against bat fever. Across the world, many heads of state,
members of parliament and congress, a few local and national government
officials, royal families, heads of global corporations, members of certain
aristocracies and the military had received their shot before vaccination
programmes commenced, as had a very small number of scientists, doctors and
technicians from selected industries.
Some, like Aaron, would be immune.
But not very many.
😷😷😷
FYI, an excellent list that explains all types of transmission: HERE
TIPPING POINT: FREE!
May 5th ~ 9th only
Click HERE for all Amazon sites
