He was the most unusual patient Dr. Hart had ever seen. He was covered with orange polka dots from head to toe. "We'll have to do some blood tests to give you a full diagnosis. The nurse will take you into Room 3."
The man got up, slightly shaking his head, and stumbled out of the room. Dr. Louis Hart came after him and shut the door, then collapsed into his chair with a sigh. He opened his laptop and booted up Firefox. He searched "chickenpox," hoping to find a shred of information that would lead him to the odd disease. There was a grim feeling of dread in his stomach; he had been an M.D for eleven years and he had not once heard of or seen such a strange malady.
Louis was, after all, a very competent doctor, and he just knew this wasn't right. It was against his nature to cast the issue aside and stop worrying about it; he was a goodhearted and rather paranoid person.
After searching for a half-hour, his shift was over and the search had yielded no results. Louis grabbed his briefcase, disappointed with no answers for his many questions, and had to resist dashing out of the office.
At home that night, Louis watched the news at six-thirty like always; and uncovered more about the mysterious ailment. The broadcast stated that there was a mild virus circulating along the Eastern Seaboard, that it was nothing to fret about, all of the customary newscaster deceit, and he became worried. His experience with the media had taught him that they were all liars, that they hid things. He remembered the patient he'd seen earlier that day and began to wonder.
**************
Five days later, Louis was sitting in his office, now wearing a full-body silicon suit, an air filter mask, and gloves. Metal barriers were mounted over the windows in the room, and everything had been disinfected that morning. The orange-spot virus now had a name and a reputation; canis comedenti morbus: dog-eater sickness. It was named for the first carrier of the virus in its severe state; in a video circulating across the Internet, a blood-covered, orange-spotted man was shown chowing down on his dog(already dead, thank God.) That video had caused nationwide, even worldwide panic; and the next thing they knew, American citizens were cut off from the rest of the world. Quarantined. "Like rabid dogs," snarled Louis under his breath, recalling the common name the infected were given. When one caught the virus, they were called a bertalonie, after the surname of the original dog-eater.
He was reviewing the notes he had taken on the patients he'd seen in the last few days. Most of them were infected with dog-eater sickness, and most of them had been in the first stage of the virus's effect. However, there had been one patient, a middle-aged woman, who had gone into a frenzy shortly after going unconscious and had lunged for Louis, hissing and snarling like an animal. Luckily he was able to restrain her and sedate her with a syringe, but he'd been shaken to the core ever since.
And now, almost everyone was afflicted by the virus, and were staggering about outside his office, throughout the city, over the countryside. Louis shook his head, thinking about the low number of conscious and non-infected humans left.
scriiiitch-scriitch.
He jerked his head to the sound instinctively, like a dog that has heard a high whine. The metal on his window was rattling. Slowly, slowly, Louis got to his feet and crept across the carpet, taking care to be as silent as possible. He slid open the small slot in the barrier that allowed him to look outside.
scritch-scritch-a-scritch.
His jaw dropped. Standing there was a bertalonie, raking the window barrier, but this was unlike any other he'd seen before. It had been thought that there were three stages to the virus: one, marked by pale skin, nausea, and of course the orange spots; two, unconsciousness for a short period of time; three, the so-called 'final' stage where the virus had fully developed, where the person would become hysterical, nonresponsive, and violent towards others, as well as losing their life's memory completely as the sickness ate away their brain cells. But this, this looked like a fourth stage. The man looked like he was in his twenties, with dark hair and ice blue eyes. He was splattered with blood and covered in bruises, but the spots were gone – huge, gnarled growths had erupted from them, pulsing with hundreds of veins and looking very sharp, like the tusks of a boar. The man's eyes had gone completely red with swollen vessels, and his tongue was nothing more than a black, disintegrated jelly mashed against the inside of his scarlet mouth.
One of the growths was protruding from the man's decrepit hand. Louis screamed in terror as it sliced apart the steel with one swipe, exposing the glass of the window. The bertalonie seemed to grin at him as it reached inside and clutched Louis's neck with its left hand while raising its right in preparation for a slash.
Then Louis saw the hand descend and tear open his lower neck. The last thing he felt was a warm, sticky liquid gushing down his chest. To his now hazy, slipping mind, it felt like some odd fondue until he looked down at himself and saw the blood gushing out of his throat.
Leaving the man for dead, the bertalonie grunted, scraping its clawlike hand against the wall. For a moment it stood there dumbly, not comprehending, until it slowly turned and continued its drunken wandering. Louis Hart lay on the carpeted floor of his office, his lifeblood leaking from him, his hands fruitlessly clutching at his ruined throat.
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