This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
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Due Date: 126 days away
I was one of the ones who didn’t think it would get that bad.
“You know we’re going to come back with that virus!”
I laughed. So did he.
They were headed to Vegas for the annual conference.
Our accountant asked my boss if he’d forgotten to pack his suitcase. I must have missed something. He asked like they’d started this conversation earlier.
“No, no. But I left it at home. I have to go get it.”
Like he forgot it at home? Or he left it on purpose? I couldn’t tell. Neither sounded great. Either sounded worse than whatever disease everyone was talking about.
Toward the beginning of the year, I had deleted Facebook off my phone. I didn’t tell anyone. Tom would’ve been like, “Can your phone even do Facebook, Ben?” The nice part about not having Facebook on my phone was that I stopped waking up from 15 minutes of scrolling wondering what happened to the past hour. The downside… well, the downside was not knowing what this virus was even called.
Around lunch, Jerry repeated the joke he’d told me the day before, something about his part-time gig herding cattle off a barge, from somewhere called Wuhan. That probably wasn’t the joke, but I was so out of it that it didn’t click with me.
I laughed anyway. So did he.
Jerry was the only one in the office with an American flag hanging behind his desk, one of those guys who did a full 180 from his past life.
“People are really freaking out about this,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You’d think there were thousands of people with it.”
He cut one of his boneless chicken wings in half.
“So what’s going on with it?” I asked. “I mean, what do you think?”
“They closed everything down. People are quarantined in their houses. No one can go outside. Have you seen the pictures?”
“Not really.”
“They have a few thousand cases of it. In a country of one billion.”
“And they’re getting it from animals?”
“That’s what they thought at first. Now, they’re saying it’s spreading like the flu. All I can say is, I’m not buying anything from China.”
I laughed. So did he.
What I didn’t mention was that I’d just picked up a new pair of pants on Amazon. The labels on the inside were all printed in Chinese.
I wasn’t worried about it. I was enjoying my Asian Zing with a side of blue cheese. I was one of the ones who didn’t think it would get that bad.
As it turned out, they confirmed the first case in Kentucky later that day. And I walked into it when I got home.
