The Virus Read Online Free PDF

noticeably yellowed. She looked
quickly over the rest of the receptionist and also noticed that the
woman was feverishly scratching her arm, and what looked like dead
skin was falling from the spot in the process. Immediately, Delilah
wished that she had not seen the proof she was looking for, but it
was right there before her eyes. It would’ve been better had it
been all in her head (even though that alone had already scared her
to hysteria), but it wasn’t. It was real…and she was
next.
    Not caring anymore about the shocked
and staring faces, Delilah sprinted to the elevator and back to her
room. She nearly broke down her room door rushing into it, and
locked every lock once she was in. She wanted to yell for her
father. She snatched up the phone with her awkward gloves and
pressed the numbers to her father’s cell phone furiously. The bulky
towels wrapped around her hands pressed three and four numbers at a
time and made it impossible to make a call this way. She grunted in
anger. She wanted her father desperately. Somehow, his money would
make things better. It always did. But in order to make the call,
she’d have to unwrap her hands and risk contamination. She threw
herself onto the bed and squealed in the ear shattering tone of a
frustrated newborn, unable to think of anything else to do. All of
her fancy clothes, her thousand dollar hairdo, not even this $2,800
a night luxury hotel room—none of it was effecting its usual magic
whereby everything in life, no matter how unpleasant for everyone
else, was cool and comfortable for her, and thus, she was left lost
and afraid.
    Just like a small, abandoned child who
screams in tantrum until she’s sore from exertion, only to find
that her tirade has failed to produce what was sought after,
Delilah found that her outburst meant absolutely nothing here. If
she wanted to talk with her father, she’d have to pick up the phone
like any other human being and dial the numbers…and, yes, risk
infection in the process. Filling incredibly sorry for herself for
how cruel reality was treating her, she did just that. Lenard
answered on the first ring. One of the things his wife had taught
him before her passing was to answer promptly whenever the women in
his life beckoned.
    “Oh, Daddy!” Delilah shouted, before
again bursting into panic-stricken sobs. For the next forty-five
minutes, she unloaded all of her angst upon his shoulders (or
rather, into his ear). She had no idea that at the very moment she
had called, her father was in a meeting with some of his colleagues
discussing the very thing that had her upset. She hadn’t been
watching the news. In fact, she hadn’t been doing anything except
engaging in raging fits—but if she had been, she would’ve known
that the possible infection was no longer a rumor, but a
substantiated reality. Seemingly within the last few hours, women
of every age, color, and nationality all across the planet, began
displaying the jaundiced yellow eyes and itchy, flaking skin just
like the receptionist Delilah had seen earlier. In reality, though,
the phenomenon had been taking place and spreading slowly amongst
the collective female population since the meteor incident. It was
just recently that these unusual symptoms had spread to enough
people to make things truly alarming.
    Lenard’s business partners had called
the meeting with him because, as they spent most of their time at
luxury hotel locations owned by the company, they mistakenly
thought that perhaps whatever was happening to their wives and
daughters had something to do with their hotel buildings. It was
during the meeting, an hour or so before Delilah’s frantic call,
that Lenard’s secretary informed him that he may want to turn on
the news in the conference room where he and the associates sat.
All of them were blaring the same headlines.
    “Well, at least we know it has nothing
to do with our hotels,” one of Lenard’s professional partners joked
dryly, as every news