Michael Douglas laughed and leaned back in his chair. He took a swig and of his drink, something cocktail he remembered. Jonny told him something that couldn’t quite be heard over the blaring tune from the club’s speakers. Michael laughed, and Jonny pulled something out of his pocket. It was a metal cylinder, with a screw-on lid and the words “Cocaine” stamped in big, bold letters across the side. Jonny unscrew it and tipped it onto the table. Bill looked over from his conversation with the man in the booth next to him on the probability of Mundus being an alternate universe and grinned broadly, turning back towards his friends. He grabbed some plastic straws from the bar and handed them to Michael and Jonny. They tipped their straws together, perhaps in an imitation of a drinking toast, and began.
Michael sat up in his bed the next morning. He felt sick. Very sick. It wasn’t just the usual symptoms of a hangover. He found it hard to breathe, like he’d just surfaced into the air after accidentally taking a gulp of pool water. He felt sick, like he could throw his gups. All the while he was sweating buckets and strangely, his skin seemed to be turning blue. He wasn’t sure if it was the lighting in his room or if he was going crazy. He felt like he was dying. He reached out and grabbed his phone off his bedside table, dialling the health service, only to be informed that the waiting list for the talking to the operator was several hundred people long. He threw the phone onto the floor and sighed. He crawled back into bed only to heave up a mix of vomit and a yellow fluid. He groaned and laid there as all energy abandoning him.
--
Nurse Joesephine watched as the latest patient was pulled out of the ambulance. They had had such a sudden influx of patients in the last hour that the various hospital wards had been flooded with moaning patients. They had never had a night like this. The doctors had been quick to diagnose the mass of patients with Ricin poisoning, though how thousands of people, for the problem was happening all around the country, had all been exposed to it was a mystery.
They could do nothing for many of their patients, most of them had inhaled doses dozens of times greater than the amount that was fatal, and they could only be eased towards their deaths. Even the rich, such as Henry Tuttler (billionaire seller of antique and fancy garden gnomes), could only be informed that death was inevitable.
