Transfusion — Marc Platt

The dominant rhesus macaque monkey sat on his perch in the misty dawn of the Kashmir morning. If one looked closely, there was a steamy tear streaming down his face as he moaned a deep-throated cry. He mourned the death of his mate and his whole colony as he struggled with his last breath. Unknown to the macaque, what had happened to his group would start a chain of events that changed the very fabric of human society.

Ike filled his syringe with his newly purchased heroin, noting that it was somewhat cloudy, but nevertheless he took his hit. Five days later, he was found unconscious and drowning in his own body fluids and taken to Saint Christopher's Hospital, where the cardiologist Dr. Linda Rothstein found him to be in overwhelming heart failure and with an acute pneumonia. Unbeknownst to her, Ike had given a unit of blood for drug money and already it had passed a test for infection and was being given to a cardiac bypass patient.

Linda has no idea that this chain of events is sealing the fate of the total world population and will bring chaos and a breakdown of social order. The dead will line the streets and fill makeshift hospitals. As if God had struck from the heavens, the plague will spread indiscriminately and unrelentingly in its consumption of humans.

This is the fate ignorance and self-righteousness have brought upon the world; it will be up to Linda and her infectious diseases associate Dr. David Hawkins to save the world.