The first email was sent around midnight. I was up cramming for a test and I heard my notification go off. I have a very specific tone for academic things, and it surprised me to hear it that late. I checked it out, and I felt that tingly, lower belly excitement, the kind that only comes from seeing someone fuck up catastrophically.
It was, very clearly, not an email that was meant to be sent from that account. It was only one sentence, and it wasn’t signed. It had been sent to the entire student body and staff, and it was coming from the Administrative office. All it said was:
Is anyone else seeing flashing lights when they try to sleep?
I read the email a couple of times before I Googled the message. I wondered if maybe it was a reference to something, a movie or a TV show. But I didn’t come up with anything that I thought was related. Mostly just alien abduction accounts, or WebMD horror stories about detached retinas. I closed the browser, finished studying, and went to bed. I watched the back of my eyelids for a bit. No flashes. I passed out.
The next morning, the chaos I’d anticipated was very much a reality. We’re a small rural college, and not a lot of excitement happens here, so any event tends to throw us all overboard. Some of the more dramatic girls were terrified, and I heard a lot of whispered conversations about ‘terrorists’. It took a lot of self restraint to avoid politely informing them how asinine that idea was.
Most people just wanted to know who’d done it, and there were a lot of guesses. Obviously, it had to be someone who either had the password to the account, or knew enough to hack it, and in both cases it pointed to one of the office interns. There were only a handful of those, and one in particular was known to be very good with computers, so most people leaned toward him.
The teachers, having also received the email, assured us that the school was looking into it, and that pranks were taken very seriously when they involved such a huge breach of confidentiality.
Later that evening, after a day of rumors and speculation, an official email from the Administration was released. It claimed that the breach had been located and patched up by the IT team. There was no mention of the culprit. With the mystery defused, if not exactly solved, the excitement faded, and by the next day we’d mostly forgotten about it.
Until the second email came out.
We were in the middle of class, and those of us with our phones on received a notification. I pulled mine out of my pocket, ignoring the teacher’s monologue about the importance of paying attention, to see what I’d gotten. The email was, again, only one sentence, and sent from the same Admin address.
It really hurts to sleep, are any of you noticing it too?
Murmurs rippled through the class, and the teacher, sensing that something had happened, checked his email. He read the message, shut his laptop, and called the front office. He spoke quietly and listened for a moment before hanging up.
“Alright, this is all very strange and interesting, but let’s get back to the subject here.”
No one was focused, but we made it through the class with no further interruption.
In my room that night, I looked at the two messages side by side.
Is anyone else seeing flashing lights when they try to sleep?
It really hurts to sleep, are any of you noticing it too?
I took a sip of my drink and thought about it.
I found it strange that someone would go through so much trouble to send emails to the student body. Surely they could have just hacked the account, taken the addresses, and sent the emails with a throw-away account. But for whatever reason, they chose to use the official Admin account. For the first breach, they might have been suspended, maybe had a scholarship taken away. It could have been an accident.
But for this, an intentional use of the account, this would almost certainly mean that they’d be kicked out. Hell, they might even face jail time. What could possibly be so worth the risk? What could they do on the Admin account that they couldn’t do any other way?
I sat and stared at the messages, thought for a while. What was so important that was worth potential jail time? What would I consider that critical, that necessary to spread as widely as possible?
Suddenly inspired, I Googled flashing lights behind the eyes as a symptom. Migraine headaches, detached retinas, stroke, eye disease, certain infections. A thought began to form, a distant memory of something I’d read a long time ago. Putting it aside, I moved on to the second email.
'It hurts to sleep’; that was a bit harder to figure out. Did they mean it physically hurt to sleep? I looked up Restless Leg Syndrome, which was described as incessant tingling or the constant, driving need to move the legs. Was that what they meant? Or did they mean that it hurt to sleep because the things they dreamed of were painful?
I wondered if the things described were meant to be taken literally or if it was an allusion, a poem of sorts. It seemed unlikely, given that the first message seemed consistent with a physical ailment.
I was troubled, and I dug a little deeper. Certain infections of the sinuses, of the lining of the brain, could cause pain even while in REM sleep. I sat back and looked at the emails again. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I tried to keep things in perspective, but my heart was beating a little faster. I decided that the best thing to do was wait. I studied for a test the next day, and went to bed. I slept fine.
In the afternoon, the Administration called for a mandatory, all-school assembly. They addressed the emails, and urged whoever was doing it to come forward. If they did so, they would avoid expulsion. But no one did, so the rest of the assembly was spent discussing internet safety, expected student behaviors, things like that. All of us studied each other, looking for anyone who stuck out, who was too uncomfortable or appeared even vaguely guilty.
After the assembly, a few people claimed unofficial responsibility, but these claims were debunked quickly. So the speculation continued, and a lot of theories were thrown around; some were similar to mine, others wildly different.
The consensus, however, was that whoever was doing it wanted something. What was it? Help? Advice? An answer? What? We couldn’t respond to them, so what exactly did they hope to gain from the emails?
As the emails continued, the memory I’d had on the back-burner came forward, and more and more, I felt sure that I knew what the anonymous writer was asking for. I didn’t share my views, but I began to prepare.
The emails were sent at staggered times. Each from the Admin account. As time passed, they became less and less coherent:
Do your eyelids feel tighter?
If you start to have trouble remembering colors, get help.
Sinus burning is part of it, I think.
Pay attention. Wear masks.
Despite being what most people believed, and were assured was, a prank, the school became enveloped in a kind of hysteria. The culprit was using proxies, and other means to avoid detection. Although the Admin email was supposedly protected, they gained access easily. Many students began to suspect that they were attempting to report a cover-up of some sort.
Was there something going on that the Administration didn’t want us to know? What information was this person, who people started calling Proxy (as he was mistakenly referred to in an Admin response email), trying so hard to pass along to us? And what did he mean by masks?
Many students began wearing medical masks, convinced that some kind of “superflu” was going around behind the scenes. The campus hospital released their current number of patients, assured the student body that nothing was wrong, but the emails kept coming, and the hysteria grew. I stayed to the side and watched. The masks were the best thing Proxy could have offered us.
Can you still sleep? God, the lights are so damn bright. Cover all lights no matter how small.
People bought blackout curtains, took sleeping pills, avoided anyone who appeared to be tired. Somehow, the disease morphed into a kind of fatal, infectious insomnia, and people started sleeping through classes. Desperate to sleep more than enough, to avoid the illness, they stocked up on pills and alcohol and pot, anything to make them tired. The Administration attempted damage control, but the emails kept coming.
I continued to do my research, solidifying my theory. In place of my finals, I spent hours combing the internet, looking for symptoms, matching them, piecing them together into a final, awful picture. I made a trip into town, to a see a doctor I knew well, and convinced him to write me a scrip for a medication. Meanwhile, the emails continued in a steady stream.
I can’t close my eyes, can you close your eyes?
Nyquil hurts so much it hurts so much don’t take it
What’s the sky again I cnat remember
if the btton starts to psh yu have to lstn
it hurts asprn has to be crushd to help
its cmng
masks dnt help im sry
up
And then, the emails stopped. The campus held its breath, waiting. The silence was deafening. We waited.
They found his body on the roof of the gym three days later.
We saw the ambulance and fire trucks pull up, and a huge crowd of us came to watch. No one told us that someone had died, but we knew, and we also knew that it was him, the student we called Proxy. No one spoke while his body was lowered off the roof in a bag. As it was rolled into the ambulance bay, someone behind me quietly pointed out the strange shape of the bag.
The details came soon after. Proxy’s real name was Oliver. He was a quiet sophomore who almost no one knew. After his death, his personal computer was taken away to be analyzed, and we heard nothing more about it.
The emails stopped, and although things calmed down, many students still wore masks. They still tried to decode the messages Oliver left behind. Groups met up in the evenings in various dorms to talk about them and what they meant. He became a kind of cultural icon among these groups.
A strange, unknown student who had inspired an entire school to fly into hysteria, and had left us at the peak of his fame. The only things they knew about him they gleaned from what little was available on the internet. He was working toward an environmental studies major. He loved computers, was evidently very proficient with them. He had a cat named Mo. No one knew what had happened to Mo.
His life was picked apart and studied and turned over for any clues as to what had happened to him. I sat in on these groups and listened, never trying to steer anyone in the right direction. They’d know soon enough.
Around two weeks after Oliver’s death, people started getting sick.
It started slowly at first. The emails were largely forgotten by this time, save for a few select, die-hard fans that clung to them. Here and there, students would get sick, drop out, and go home to recover. It was close to the end of the year, and we were all cramming for finals, so we hardly noticed that they didn’t come back.
Most people met up in the library in large groups to help each other study. I kept to myself, in the silence of my room, and I listened to my neighbors. In class, I sat in the back and became a ghost, picking up on any conversation I could hear.
People started to complain of headaches. Stiff necks. Strange, floating specks in their vision, like little sparks. The campus hospital started seeing an influx of these ailments, and issued a mandatory vaccination for meningitis. We all received it, but the ailment continued to spread. The headaches, I heard, were severe. Even in sleep, they could be felt, pounding in the front of the head and behind the sinus cavities. People complained of eyes that bugged out; their eyelids barely covered them anymore, and it was hard to see.
There were frequent nosebleeds in class. It was now common for students to carry boxes of tissues to staunch them. The Administration addressed this new influx of illnesses, advising students with symptoms to rest and avoid going to class. But finals were close, and most soldiered through what was being referred to as a 'flu’. The girl who sat in front of me sent a text to her friend, which I read over her shoulder:
does ur nose burn when it bleeds? fuck it feels like ive been snorting glass or something
Memory problems started to set in. Soon, people were having trouble completing sentences. They looked terrible. Their eyes were bloodshot, terribly bugged out. Their faces were pale, sometimes smeared with blood from the nosebleeds that never seemed to stop.
It wasn’t uncommon to see these students wandering the campus blankly, having forgotten where they were going, or where their dorms were. The Administration sent out jumbled emails, advising students that classes for the next week would be cancelled, as the majority of staff was out with the flu.
Drink , plenty of see-through liquids nad be sre to stay out of conatct of those who are sick. Classess will resume on May 3dr.
I stopped attending classes. I took the bus into town and purchased a small stockpile of food, water, and toiletries. Then I locked my room, sealed the door and AC vent with duct tape, and began using a plastic bucket to collect my waste. When the bucket was full, I would open the window briefly and empty it outside.
I sat in my room, surviving on my rations, and waited for the final stage, which I now suspected would happen very soon. Through the walls, I could hear my neighbors moaning, tossing in bed, occasionally vomiting or moving in rhythmic patterns. Sometimes they talked to themselves; sometimes they just screamed.
I lay in bed at night and listened to them move furniture around, trying to block out the light from outside, then moving it so that they could leave their rooms and move up to the next floor, driven by a false flight instinct. When the electricity to the campus died, I popped batteries in my flashlights and camping lanterns. I kept my door sealed, and I waited.
On the morning of May 5th, I woke to complete silence. Knowing what had happened, I put on a surgical mask and unsealed my door. I followed the blood trails to the elevator, but I didn’t take it. Instead, I took the stairs, followed the smeared hand prints on the walls up to the roof access, which had been propped open with a textbook.
I went out the door and stepped onto the roof, but there was very little space to put my feet. I had to stand on a few fingers, but I doubted their owners would mind.
On the roof, and on every roof I could see from my position, the students and faculty had gathered together in a great mass. Some were on their knees, some sitting Indian style. Others, the weaker ones, were propped up on their friends, their heads flopped back, mouths open. The birds hadn’t gotten all of their eyes yet, though they were making fast work of them. They perched on the students’ shoulders and ignored the strange, brownish stems that the optic nerves had become in favor of the succulent, cherry-red berries on top.
The student closest to me, a young man whose name I couldn’t recall, had not yet lost his eyes, and I studied him closely. From the swollen, bloody sockets, the stalks of his nerves jutted upward almost a foot. I could see the fibers had been torn from being forced to stretch so much, but the calcification prevented them from sagging or breaking. The eyes themselves were full of coagulated blood, which made them bulge and weep.
His mouth gaped open, and the blood from his nose had pooled in it. Bending down, I could see that his soft palate had collapsed, and in its place were a network of dark, slimy roots. The palate lay on his tongue, an almost bubble-gum pink.
I stood, looked at the collective mass of humanity, and the timer on my watch began to go off. I pulled a bottle out of my pocket and swallowed a pill dry. I put the bottle back and took a last look at the roof. Two hundred people, maybe more, their heads tilted to the sky, their eyes on stalks.
If I squinted, it was almost beautiful. A field of red berries. A crow settled nearby, called, and plucked one of the berries from the stalk. The berry popped in a gush of fluid that covered the crow’s beak and chest. I took my leave.
On the drive into town, I composed the email that I would send from the police station. I would send it to all neighboring counties, as well as the CDC. This was assuming, of course, no one else had figured it out yet. I would make it very brief. There was no room for poetry anymore.
It is an airborne fungus, a mutant strain. Mucus membranes are the first to be affected. If you are sick, it is too late. Resist the urge to go up. Do not spread your spores to other people or animals. Prepare. Stock up on anything necessary. Find a room, seal it completely. Do not leave for any reason. Fluconazole.
–
Credits to: abldr
Comments