Marigold (eBook)

May 18, 2051 – Davis

Davis couldn’t remember when President Everett took office in May of 2027. It happened twenty-four years ago when she was newly born. She had been the first infant to receive the Marigold Injection, so-called because of the inoculation medicine’s golden yellow-orange hue. Depending on a person’s skin tone, they took on some variation of that hue themselves. A fair-skinned recipient took on the full color in their skin, from the tips of their toes to the top of their head, for several days as it protected the said recipient from the dreaded Lombardi Plague. Darker-skinned recipients held the color in the sclera of their eyes, their nailbeds, and in some cases, their skin could look gold-flecked. The Marigold Injection was the cure to the Lombardi Plague, named because of the person who brought the pandemic to the masses.

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 president, this was additional stress added to the United States’ unsure future. After Mr. Cooper, the Secretary of Homeland Security went to his final resting place; there were no more options. The United States was sans a president. With the county in flux and so many ill people, nobody knew what would become of the country or the presidential offices.

Then, a ray of sunshine beamed into the world.

Baby Davis was born. All seven pounds, four ounces, and nineteen inches entered the world screaming on April 21, 2027. Her mother had become infected with the plague, and there was an absolute certainty that baby Davis herself would be born with it. And she had been. In the short history scrapbook of her life Davis received at the state care facility she grew up in, it told of a baby girl who had been born that day. Her mother was on a list to find possible cures and happened to be the top name when labor started. Some unsuccessful tests had taken place before Davis’s arrival, but a new medicine that previously tested well in lab settings was administered to Davis and her mom. Baby Davis and her mother would be the very first humans to receive the Marigold Injection and possibly be the test subjects that would hopefully show the planet a way out of inevitable extinction. As the collective world—at least what remained of it—held its breath to see if the panacea would work, baby Davis was escorted away into a private care facility and monitored by top health professionals and Dr. Everett. They had attempted to inject baby Davis’s mother as well. However, Dr. Everett sadly announced that she had passed because of the virus and a difficult labor and delivery. On the brighter side of things, a week after baby Davis was born, it was reported to the world and told far and wide that the Marigold Injection had been a massive success. Results had been almost immediate in the baby girl. First, she temporarily turned a bright golden-yellow due to the medicine, and then she ceased to have any symptoms of the Lombardi Plague and was indeed found free of the virus in test after test. The world had the first patient ever to survive and be cured of the dreaded Lombardi Plague.

However, with only a handful of senators, congresspeople, and governors left in office, the nation found itself without prominent elected officials. The remaining state and federal representatives organized an emergency election almost immediately after the triumphant vaccination announcement. There were three names to choose from: Mr. Louis, a senator from Wisconsin; Mrs. Chiu, the governor of New York; and Dr. Everett of California. In a monumental election, it was a landslide decision that Dr. Everett would become president, even though at the age of twenty-seven, he was younger than the minimum age to run for president. So many people had elevated him to the role of a savior that it made him unbeatable. The resolution before the election was to return to the system that was used prior to 1804. That system directed that the runner-up in the election was to be the vice president. However, since the vast majority of votes went to President Everett and the other two candidates received so few, they decided no vice president would be appointed. Instead, every remaining politician,...