The new epidemic is already beyond its patient zero. Whether or not I am infected, I am confident that Mr. Blackwood will soon have me murdered. He will do this in order to keep the disease’s name unknown. I won’t let him win, though. At least not completely.

Although this may be the most important writeup of my life, I admit that I may somehow still be wrong in my medical assessment. It is possible that I am simply losing my mind. For that reason, I will not violate my oaths as a physician, nor will I violate HIPAA. With that said, what follows are the facts of this case to the best of my knowledge.

I am a hospice physician, and a patient under my care is dying of something contagious for which there is no official name. My efforts to perform independent research are being suppressed, and I suspect that I will soon be silenced permanently. As I attend to the palliative needs of what is likely this new disease’s “index case,” I will do my best to report what I have learned during my patient’s final days.

I suspect that the virus must be a new mutation within the Rhabdoviridae family. The patient’s history suggests that this is an extreme-latency virus with a highly variable incubation period. It can likely infect a person without producing any symptoms at all—at first. This asymptomatic period may last for an extended amount of time. The virus is probably also never fully eliminated by the immune system of an infected person, meaning that there can be relapses and transmission of the virus even if a patient seems to recover.

In the case of my terminally-ill patient, the most obvious symptoms have been largely reminiscent of textbook rabies. Statements from those listed as his family members report early behavioral changes in the man. Most notably, the reports describe facial spasms marked by characteristic back-and-forth oscillations of the eyes. This was followed by a hyperreactive and violently erratic episode during which patient zero was first hospitalized.

Most prominent in the early, prodromal stage of the disease were reports of uncontrolled eye movements. Both eyes were said to randomly “seek” rapidly across the patient’s field of vision in a back-and-forth pattern. In hospice, this motion of the eyes still occurs periodically. I have observed it myself. The patient largely suffers from prolonged absence seizures with random periods of writhing, screaming, silent crying, and semi-coherent vocalizations. These behaviors are interspersed unpredictably throughout his otherwise comatose presentation.

The coverup of this disease’s existence has been sanctioned by powerful forces. It is already active. Security cameras show that two men forced their way into my locked office last week. They somehow infiltrated the hospice facility in the middle of the night, and they carried off heaping armfuls of the medical records that I had stored there. Somehow, the facility’s alarm systems had been completely deactivated before those two men arrived. There was no security or police response until I discovered the break-in myself the next morning.

The following day, I received a phone call in which the caller threatened my life. It came from a self-described “government agent” who spoke with a voice like a mellified dog bark. He did not identify himself or the alleged nature of his affiliation with the United States. The honey-soaked rasp on the phone told me, “You’ll be lucky if you only lose your medical license after this is all through.” He then told me details about myself: my age and sex, my work history, and my home address. The voice said that I was very close to drawing “an unsafe kind attention” to myself. “The kind of attention,” he added just before hanging up, “that leaves you humiliated before you die in agony.”

To give a sense of the challenges in treating an advanced rhabdovirus infection, let me briefly explain the world’s only current “cure” for a rabies infection that’s been allowed to take hold in the human nervous system. The Milwaukee Protocol is believed to be only sparingly effective at best, and yet it is the best treatment that modern medicine currently has. It has saved the lives of less than a quarter of the rabies victims it has been attempted on.

The procedure involves subjecting the patient to a sustained, medically-induced coma by about by the use of broad spectrum anesthetics. Heavy antiviral doses are then administered while the patient’s nervous system is still in this “shut down” state. The patient’s body is brought into a near-death twilight, and their barely functional circulation system is then inundated with virus-hostile chemicals until the rabies virus has been eliminated within the nonresponsive body. Again, this severe treatment does not usually even work.

Scientists think that the first HIV cases in humans occurred in the early 1900s. The first known cases in the United States were likely documented erroneously as other conditions as early as the 50s or 60s. The medical community didn’t officially recognize HIV and AIDS until the 1980s. Something like that could happen again. A new virus could be circulating right now, spreading from person to person, evading detection for years before anyone realizes that an epidemic is underway.