© Sascha Darlington
It had been five years since the Collier Xenogenics Lab had been shut down. It still sits vacant and the government is even afraid to demolish it, not convinced that it’s been completely sterilized. Fifty-seven men and women and several hundred lab animals from chimps to mice all died when the genetically engineered virus named Lot 476 escaped into the main complex through a faulty seal. Fortunately, 476 could survive in an open atmosphere only thirteen minutes but it only took four minutes to kill.
Joseph Morgan stood outside the abandoned parking lot looking at the “No Trespassing” sign and seeing the locked gate. He shuddered at the memory of those Fifty-seven bodies bleeding out on the floors of the three labs in the building as he regained consciousness. In a panic, he ran not considering the consequences of opening the outside security doors. Why should he? His wife was just showing him around where she worked.
But that was after 476 itself had died. No one knew Joseph was the only survivor of the accident. However, he knew that the cancer that was killing him five years ago had completely vanished and he hadn’t aged a day since.
I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge for February 18th 2018. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for creating a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 196.
Last night, I watched the 2011 film Contagion for the first time. It has what is referred to as “an all-star cast” and actually the writing was really good. I looked at a few reviews and its technical accuracy while not flawless, is better than most medical thrillers.
With that in mind, I decided to create my own little medical disaster, one that killed fifty-seven people and cured one.
To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.
poweredbyrobots.com 
Aren’t accidents like what happened to Joseph what makes superheroes?
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Only in fiction. In real life, they just make you dead.
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Excellent start to a longer medical thriller!
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Just another immortal created by a freak virus. Nothing more to see here. Move along. Move along. 😉
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Not much of a trade 57 for 1, but if they could figure out how it had acted on his cancer they may be onto something.
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My guess is that there’s something unique about his body chemistry. The vast majority of people would die when exposed to 476 and only a tiny handful would be cured of all diseases.
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well done.
there is a lot like this one that i jog past every day. there must be another way into it because it’s strewn with cigarette butts, that slower way to cancer.
cheers.
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Thank you. Yeah, cigarette smoking isn’t a good thing to do.
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Good story, James, although I struggled with the tense changes in the first three sentences.
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The curse of writing too fast and not enough editing. Thanks.
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He had better hide, as someone be be wanting to get hold of his DNA.
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That’s why I made a point of saying no one knows he’s the only survivor of the accident, Mike.
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It’s a fine balance I guess. If you don’t push the boundaries of scientific research, you can’t ‘progress’, but if you push it too far or too fast, you get Lot 467.
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I’m sure the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta keeps a lot of nasty bugs around but in real life they don’t get away (as far as anyone knows). However that makes for a boring story.
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Oooh… to live without the one you love. Good, but sad too.
Just finished a Jonathan Kellerman book where obscure drugging was used to in an attempt to discredit an heir.
Nasty stuff chemicals.
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That they are but in my case it was a virus. Thanks.
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Virus… isn’t that also a chemical composition?
The hydroxyl group of a phosphate on one nucleotide undergoes a condensation reaction with the hydroxyl group on the carbohydrate ring of another nucleotide. The process may continue, building up nucleic acid molecules. These are polymers called polynucleotides. Nucleic acids are the ‘building blocks’ of DNA and RNA….
Is not acid a chemical? Or am I being too technical?
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Maybe a tad. I tend to think of a virus as an organism although you are correct, viruses and people are biochemical entities.
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🙂 Well being an organism… puts a spin on that story… helping or co-exiting with your gent. 😉
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