The Outer-edges

Where most husbands created a ‘man-cave,’ Jasper Clarke had a study. It’s here that he had been spending longer than normal hours, reading, writing, and in essence, studying everything he could about COVID-19.

He thought it a wise use of his ‘self-isolation’ time.

A self-directed courses in virology wasn’t his normal interest, as usually he’d be searching out something more specific, more understandable, more relatable to his chosen genre of horror-fiction. But at the moment, Jasper Clarke couldn’t find any greater horror than the one the country and the world faced at that moment.

If ever there was a Lovecraftian monster roaming the outer-edges of both imagination and reality, Clarke couldn’t find it, and yet he couldn’t tell from the majority of his Internet searches, whether the virus was as great or less a threat than being made out.

Abnormal, accursed, amorphous, antediluvian, blasphemous, cyclopean, daemonic, eldritch, fetid, gibbering, indescribable, iridescent, loathsome, squamous, unmentionable, unnameable, unutterable. This left Clarke more than worried, because here was a true monster that defied all description.

Not only was the threat otherworldly, in the form of unseen, but to the real world, his world, this could be a monster so great that it might never be able to put back in the shadows. Because of this, sleep refused to fill Clarke’s eyes or head as he sat at his desk into the darker hours of the early morning.

Questions abound: does hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin work? Certainly they can inhibit the ability of malaria to act, but malaria is a parasite and not a virus.

But further more, can any component within the COVID-19 virus be effected by these two common drugs? There seemed to be nothing but opinion over opinion, those for nay, those for yay, on the subject.

Plus, he couldn’t help but recall how his father had suffered from malaria over the years. And even with this first hand knowledge, he couldn’t tell if he were on the right path to a good horror story.

Next was the use of ventilators. Should they be used in only the most dire of circumstance and could they be the cause of lung damage as witnessed in x-ray after x-ray?

And could the problem actually be not a lack of oxygen but an inability to transfer oxygen, because there was a difference. But again, he was uncertain given the myriad of differing opinions he discovered.

He felt a chilled sweat coat his body as the idea, could this confusion of fact and opinion, be purposeful? He shuttered at the thought.

Then there were the numbers, numbers that failed to register to the level of pandemic, yet people were dying. This much Clarke knew and fully understood.

Further, Clarke could not get beyond the fact that he could see basic freedoms being shed and that with their shedding came a loss. But of what? Nefarious didn’t cover all of the bases in this situation, even for a seasoned horror-fiction writer.

Then he stumbled onto something called ‘Event 201,’ an exercise between the US and China, portrayed as a ‘doomsday scenario,’ with an ultimate outcome of “world wide vaccines and RFID chips.” This discovery tied into a real-life program called, ‘ID 2020,’ which has the same goal in mind, which Clarke read about earlier in the evening.

It was 3:13 am when Clarke decided to begin tapping at his keyboard:

“There are things outside the confines of my home, right outside this window,” Nate Olson wrote in his private journal, “Things seen and unseen and both as deadly to the body and soul as either.

Olson decided at that moment that he should remain hidden in his study, in his home, holed up, but prepared to repel and terminate any monster that came for him or his family. And if he couldn’t do that, he’d terminate his family.

“That is the fear of the thing,” he added, before turning off his desk lamp.

Jasper Clarke coughed hard, realizing he was too winded and exhausted to continue.