Wuhan Lab

Someday, this will be over– only remembered like some half-felt and fading nightmare.  We should have never been messing around with this deadly stuff in the first place.  We were working with bats, collecting and testing samples from wild bats and eventually identifying them as the source of the pathogen.  I can’t count how many dark caves I was in, but it was a lot as my co-workers had given me the title of “Bat Woman”.  I was searching for a SARS-like virus in bats that had the potential to jump directly to humans and resisted treatments used against SARS.  My brother was bit on the neck by one of those nasty blood sucking bats and I wanted to save his life and I was way more than knee deep into this and I wasn’t going to settle for anything less than a cure.

My brother was very sick within a day after being bit, but he was cooperative and he let us draw all the blood that we needed from him for testing purposes.  Our lab was set up for containment and we had all the necessary Personal Protective Equipment that we needed to block anything from escaping, or at least we thought that we did.  With all of the lab workers hidden under gowns, gloves and masks, it looked like we were getting ready to pull off a heist.  Someone dropped a vial of infected blood on the floor and we were under the assumption, that if we cleaned up the spill and disinfected the area, that we would all be safe.  We were wrong as the infected blood seeped into the air ventilation system like a tidal wave and everything was infected and we were all going to die.  My brother could no longer talk but he was able to scribble down some words on a scrap of paper which read, “This is a punishment from nature, for us acting without using our noggin”.

Written for Sheryl’s Daily Word Prompt – Heist, for the Daily Spur prompt – Assumption, for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie First Line Friday hosted by Dylan, for FOWC with Fandango – Block, for May Writing Prompts – Knee deep, for Ragtag Community – Settle, for Di’s Three Things Challenge prompt words – Scribble Draw Scrap, for Rachel Poli I Read I Write I Create – Time To Write – Title and for Word of the Day Challenge Prompt – Noggin.