What started as legitimate medical experimentation ended up causing a domino effect of destruction. Dr. D.W. Lombardi and his assistant, Dr. Jack Everett, worked in Dr. Lombardi’s lab, experimenting on medicines to alleviate or possibly cure the common cold. However, as Dr. Everett would explain later, Dr. Lombardi’s once genuine desire to help people became a mania. Dr. Lombardi started to perform bizarre experiments, and he began injecting patients with different cold viruses to try his developmental and unproven medications. When months passed without any breakthroughs, he started injecting them with several viruses at once, causing the real tragedy. After a one-week vacation, Dr. Everett walked in to find Dr. Lombardi running a series of tests on several people. Dr. Everett started to work through the logs to discover what was happening. He saw that Dr. Lombardi had infected people with things like Ebola, AIDS, and Marburg disease. Then Lombardi started to inject them with dangerous chemical compounds, sometimes mixed with other rare viruses. Dr. Everett tried valiantly to stop Dr. Lombardi, and a fight ensued. Dr. Lombardi pushed Dr. Everett into a rack of chemicals next to a lit Bunsen burner. The accident caused a massive spill and a volatile fire. One by one, like dominos, flames and explosions broke beakers and destroyed testing stations. Toxins, viruses, and noxious chemicals dissipated into the air.
Later, Dr. D.W. Lombardi and all his patients were found deceased. A lucky survivor, Dr. Everett, was located just outside the lab, suffering from smoke inhalation and minor wounds. A thorough investigation declared how overwhelmingly lucky Dr. Everett was. In the analysis of the evidence, they found he had no involvement in the crimes committed. When Dr. Everett was transported to the hospital to recuperate, the lab and surrounding areas were sanitized, cleaned, and disinfected. Burned items and ashes were disposed of properly, thinking at the time was that they had contained the virus and rare diseases. They did not know until later that ash particulates encompassed a new so-called mega virus that worked its way into the city’s air and water supply. Once one person was infected, it spread like wildfire until it was a mass pandemic. It did not take long for it to leave the United States’ shores and infect other countries. Those who contracted the scourge could expect, as the disease took them on a slow downward spiral in ever-increasing intensities: Extreme muscle stiffness. Insomnia. Acute migraines. Severe nausea and intestinal cramps. Pneumonia. Ulcerated skin. And eventually, as they descended deeper and deeper into the symptoms, they would welcome certain death.
When everything was at its bleakest, Dr. Everett had fully recuperated and was back at home. The young man was brilliant, just twenty-seven-years-old and well into his first year as a Doctor of Chemistry when he had started studying with Dr. D.W. Lombardi to become an expert in infectious diseases. When the trial and investigation began, the one big regret Dr. Everett said he had was not trying to stop Dr. Lombardi sooner. Even before his vacation, Dr. Everett had started to wonder about a few questionable things. However, Dr. Everett had been fond of the old doctor and had looked up to him at that time. Coupled with the fact that he didn’t know the extent of Dr. Lombardi’s reprehensible trials, he had kept quiet. As a dual alibi, the notebooks showed Dr. Lombardi had conducted his most sinister tests alone while Dr. Everett was on vacation. Dr. Everett was finally proven innocent of any wrongdoing. It took a while for the populace to forgive and trust Dr. Everett; however, everyone eventually realized it wasn’t his fault. Helpful to redeeming his innocence was that as soon as he was able, Dr. Everett started to work posthaste to find a cure for the Lombardi Plague. By chance, he had already taken many of Dr. Lombardi’s notes and binders home to study. Because of this, the preservation of much of Dr. Lombardi’s work and understanding of what went right and, more importantly, what went wrong was available for research. However, nobody knew if Dr. Everett’s experiments, to be done under the scrutiny of an eagle-eyed medical ethics committee, would be successful nor how long they would take. Patience wasn’t just in short supply because of restlessness, but because there simply wouldn’t be time to save humanity if the cure took more than a few months.
When the sitting president, President Bagen, had become infected, the nation watched with fevered anticipation—both in the physical and emotional sense. Dr. Everett was working on his vaccine, but the tests had not gone as well as people had hoped. While some symptoms could be alleviated, people were still dying at an alarming rate. When President Bagen made a speech about how doctors estimated that he only had a few weeks to live, his face was already sunken in and ashen, and his speech was coming out in short bursts between labored breaths. He didn’t even make it two weeks, and the decimated nation laid their President to rest. Next in line, the Vice President didn’t even make it to her turn to be president as people died out of order of the succession list, creating an odd game of political leapfrog that nobody was winning. When it got down to Mrs. Shepard, oddly enough, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, it sufficed to say people were more than alarmed and worried about who they might end up with for POTUS. While most people had concerns above and beyond who might be
