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way.
    I’ll copy out here in full:
Miguel Santarrez followed the well-worn path down the mountain to the little Colombian town of Carallaya. The young man had made this journey on foot every month since he was a boy when his family brought the sheep down to market. He knew every switchback turn, where to ford the river now in flood from the spring rains. Always he’d made the journey by day, only now he followed the dangerous path at night in the teeth of a gale that howled with pitiless savagery along the ravine. In his arms he carried his infant son. The fever that wracked the little body had reduced the baby’s cries to a whimper. Miguel knew the only chance for the boy’s survival lay with the doctor in town.
Two hours later Miguel walked along the windswept streets of Carallaya. He passed through the deserted market square by shuttered stores and cantinas. With the time long past midnight he no longer expected to find the doctor awake, but the sight that met his eyes was enough to stop him dead in the street. A house lay with its front door swinging back and forth in the storm. Lights still burned, but there was no one home. Miguel saw it was the same with the neighboring house, and the next, and the next. The once bustling town of twenty thousand lay deserted. Not a living soul remained. And when the desperate Miguel Santarrez telephoned the city hospital in Barranquilla, his call went unanswered. When he switched on a radio in an abandoned home all he heard was static. . . .
    Get the picture? The article tells it like a mystery story, or a weird piece of Forteana—an abandoned town hidden in the mountains of South America. All exotic-sounding, all faraway and, when all’s said and done, not a blind thing to do with us.
    Only it started to get closer to home. Creeping north through South America men and women began to abandon their towns and cities. Nation governments down there worked like fury to contain the news and stop the panic. But it was a case of “Here comes the Flood.” Once it started there was no way of turning back the flow.
    You’ll know about rabies. You know dogs, bats, even people foam at the mouth and die. But did you know a symptom of the disease is hydrophobia? A victim of rabies becomes terrified of water. There’s no way you can sit the person down and say, “Look, this is only a glass of water. It can’t harm you.” No, show a rabid man a glass of water and he’ll go crazy with fear. He’d jump through a tenth-story window rather than have that glass near him. Throw the glass of water in his face and pure fear would kill him stone dead.
    Something like that got into the air or water system in South America. No one knows exactly how it was transmitted. But that bug moved fast. From what they could tell it began with symptoms like gastric flu, triggering bouts of stomachache, diarrhea and low-grade fever. Nothing life-threatening. At least not what they thought was dangerous. But scientists reckon the virus . . . if it was a virus . . . moved into the brain after the initial bout of the craps. Like hydrophobia in rabies or aversion to light in meningitis, people developed a morbid fear of illness. And I mean real fear. A fear so large and so overwhelming and so God almighty powerful that people were terrified to visit a relative in the hospital in case they inhaled bacteria and became sick themselves. There’s footage of sufferers being carried into hospitals for treatment, but they’re so terrified they hold their breath to stop inhaling disease bugs and just pass out right on the floor. Some stopped breathing altogether. Terror jerked their throat muscles into spasm, sealing the airway, and good-bye, Earth.
    You can read later news reports, when medical experts started to understand this plague. It seemed there was something like a 90 percent infection rate. And those patients completely recovered from the physical effects of stomachache and diarrhea ( exploding underpants