This is a gripping tale of an intensivist grappling with the mayhem a novel corona virus has unleashed on the World in year 2020.
In a story scanning across continents and oceans, find how an un-celled organism gained its virulence and lethality? Where and how did it origin? Why it chose humans as vector and host? Be witness to this drama, step by step, as the virus clutches the whole planet in its jaws, with no one spared, no government unaffected and no city untouched. Find the utter desperation of modern healthcare and brilliant minds to invent a cure, a miracle pill perhaps, where no conventional medicine seems to be working. Notice the deluge of hospitals with plethora of geriatrics, huffing and gasping to vie for limited ventilators. They naively pursued disseminating the virus in unsuspecting paramedics with each cough, with each sneeze and sometimes with just a tender touch! With mighty governments, shrewd diplomats, royal aristocrats and menacing military stooped down to their knees, bowing as supplicants to this tiny fragment of apparently innocuous nucleic acid in both, reverence and hate.
Ravi Kumar, a middle aged celibate intensivist, guileless of what this new invisible yet pervasive demon is bringing in his life, worked with nonchalance in his intensive care Unit. Soon he finds himself locked in remote squalid dilapidated isolation camp, hounded equally by military and media. He became the victim not only of this outbreak, but also of the people, the constitution and the government. Can he survive this onslaught? Can he escape death? Can he achieve redemption? Will he ever stand vindicated or will just be another irrelevant pawn in this tidal wave of death. Get ready to dive in this tsunami of unprecedented global pandemic, the outbreak 2020.
Geoff and Naomi are dead, and they're depressed, but when Geoff's cat Bernie dies as well, they embark on a wild journey to find it in the underworld.
*****
When Geoff dies, alongside his girlfriend Naomi, they end up sharing an apartment in the Underworld as skeletons. But after a few years, Geoff starts suffering a mid-death crisis. What's the purpose of going through the motions as a skeleton if you can't really live? Then he gets word that his cat, Bernie, just died and he can collect him and bring him home! Geoff and Naomi hurry to get Bernie only to discover that, due to a clerical error, their cat has been lost. With the hunt for Bernie giving new purpose to Geoff's un-life, he and Naomi begin a quest to get back their cat. Battling skeleton pirates, climbing the sky ladder and facing off against the villain who took Bernie, Geoff is determined to find his purpose - or die a second time trying!
[[2018 Wattys Winner - The Originals]]
[[word count: 30,000-40,000 words]]