We All Fall Down

Untitled Part 1

"At this moment workers are investigating this strange meteorite which crashed through the atmosphere at 23:47 last night." The newsreader's voice drawled through the crackly speakers.

I groaned. This story had already been on the news since three in the morning. I usually enjoyed a bit of radio when I woke up, but I was fed up of all this monotony about the asteroid landing in the Pacific Ocean and so on.

It was OK when they first put it on but it was 7:00 now – listening to four hours of blabbing about a rock was far too much for me.

So three more days went past pretty normally with everyone working to move the thing of weirdness, but on the fourth...

Disaster struck out its fingers of doom.

On the four o' clock news, there was a rather freakish report that one of the workmen in contact with the operations had been found dead on the floor of his house with a book on his head.

Turns out that the rock might have had something to do with it – he had no injuries or marks anywhere.

Exactly four days after he had come near the meteor, as reports from the forensics said, he had simply dropped dead on the floor.

It wasn't long before another almost identical news breakout (lacking the book) had happened two streets away. A man called William Renkle had been good friends with the worker and by the looks of it, a handshake would be enough to subject someone to this terrible disease – the forensics informed us the contagion had spread from there.

Now, a curfew was put in place and the rock was quarantined.

Two days later, an old church minister was found wandering the streets – most people had thought Gary Anthrope to be a kind, honest and sensible man, but the infection had broken him. He hadn't actually caught it but I reckon he was sad for his people – this was the one thing he could not protect them from.

He was apparently found in Rutland Terrace gibbering and occasionally throwing himself down and praying madly.

Jackson Renkle had also become a victim of the fatality – old William's son. However, it just so happened that Libby, William's wife, was perfectly healthy, despite the fact that she had been in close contact with the infection.

I began to get worried by these reports.

Only men and boys had been affected so far, so that could make me a soon-to-be victim.

Ever since it had landed, everyone had wondered what it was made of, where it came from, but certainly not 'does it carry an alien disease?'!

However, what had happened was nothing to laugh about. In fact, it was pure trouble.

The update on the news again was that there was some sort of inspection going on around the cities in the area, because apparently the local doctor had made some sort of breakthrough and says he has found the virus we are looking for.

'Unfortunately, we have yet to make an antidote,' reported Ron Wyton from the news 'But luckily the fact that the main problem has been discovered means that we are one step closer to banishing this disease altogether!'

Now the sad thing is I never did trust the weather forecast, so I don't really wish to put my life on the line for a theory from Doctor Blythford and the rest of the community either.

It wasn't twenty seconds before Ron also added the fact that they were going to need a candidate for testing – now they had the virus in the laboratory, they would need to thoroughly study it to try and find the final cure for what had come to be known as the 'Stealth' after the fact that it is an unusually quick and elusive killer compared to most other diseases.