Thursday, July 1, 8:52 A.M. Just got into work. Samantha told me that Paul Adams, the head of entomology here at the university, left a package for me. According to Sam, one of Paul's assistants delivered it around 8:15. Unfortunately I have a meeting in less than 10 minutes and won't have a chance to open it until later today.

7:47 P.M. Just now opened Paul's package. This is AMAZING! He sent me a sample of gastric juices that he extracted from a mosquito that had been preserved in amber. His note says that a friend of his found three pieces of amber at an archeological dig somewhere in the mountains of Lebanon, and estimated them to be from the Lower Cretaceous period. One piece (which was sent to Paul) contained four mosquitoes, one contained 12 mosquitoes, and one contained three mosquitoes, a fly, and a weevil. He said he managed to extract the gastric juices from one of the mosquitoes, but mysteriously there was no blood. He wants me to check out the fluid to see if I can find anything, since he is not a biologist and does not have the proper equipment, as our department has, to run the tests. Unfortunately, Sam and I are having dinner tonight with her parents, who flew in from L.A. to see their "little girl." She insisted I come along so they could finally meet the professor who gave her an A+ in his biology class and then hired her as his assistant right after graduation.

Friday, July 2, 7:17A.M. Sam and I started to examine the gastric juice from the mosquito with an electron microscope. Never in our lives did we expect to find anything. While examining the fluid, we discovered a living, one-celled organism I had never seen before (Sam has nicknamed it POCO, an acronym for Prehistoric One-Celled Organism).

First thing this morning when Professor Toni Yarnell returns from her vacation, we plan to show POCO to her. Since she is the head of the biology unit, and far more experienced than Sam and I, hopefully she will know exactly what kind of cell POCO is. Then the fun of trying to figure out how it survived for millions of years inside a mosquito begins.

7:53A.M. To our surprise, upon examining POCO with Professor Yarnell, we found that there are now two one-celled organisms in the petri dish. Evidently POCO is asexual. Professor Yarnell said she has never seen anything like POCO before in her entire career. She also suggested that we videotape POCO at various magnifications through the electron microscope, so we can monitor any unusual occurrences that might take place. We now have four videotapes running 24 hours a day.

8:54 A.M. This just keeps getting better. While monitoring POCO, Sam witnessed the original POCO consume the POCO it had produced. This would account for how it managed to stay nourished for all those years: cannibalism. Professor Yarnell suggested that next time it reproduces, we should separate them, and to keep doing so each time they reproduce so that we will have more to examine.

10:20 A.M. SPECTACULAR! POCO is reproducing at a rate of five times an hour and we've managed to separate them almost every time. We now have 238 individual cells. We've placed 200 of them into a single petri dish while the rest remain alone, reproducing then consuming their offspring. Professor Yarnell wants to continue to separate the single ones so that we can produce enough to start some experiments. I also sent a picture of POCO to Professor Leonard Santoro, the head paleontologist at the university. I was hoping he could tell me if he found any POCOs in any of the DNA samples he managed to collect from various dinosaur bones the university has obtained.

12:15 P.M. Professor Yarnell prepared six petri dishes, each containing one drop of different body fluids (saliva, blood, urine, cerebrospinal fluid, gastric juices, and tears). She then added five POCOs to each dish to see how they react and/or adapt to the fluids.

2:27 P.M. Incredible! While Sam, Professor Yarnell, and I were out to lunch, the five POCOs placed in the saliva, urine, cerebrospinal fluid, gastric juices, and tears have not grown in numbers and the fluid levels have not changed. These five sets of POCOs just keep reproducing and consuming each other for nutrition as the original one did in the mosquito's gastric juices for all of those years. Meanwhile, the five POCOs in the blood have reproduced to an astonishing 10,000+ while the blood level they are in has diminished by nearly 75 percent.

4:32 P.M. The POCOs in the blood have consumed almost all the blood they are living in. Professor Yarnell has increased the quantity of blood from one drop to one-quarter ounce. She has prepared additional petri dishes, each containing a one-quarter ounce of the various blood types. Again we have placed five POCOs in each dish to see how they react to the different blood types. She has also prepared six additional petri dishes containing blood samples from people who have been diagnosed with hepatitis B, AIDS, cancer, diabetes, leukemia, and sickle-cell anemia, to see how and if POCO adapts to the various diseases.

4:58 P.M. Well, everyone seems to be getting ready for the holiday weekend. Sam is taking her parents to visit her younger sister upstate. I am finally going to get in some deep-sea fishing that I've wanting to do for the longest time, and Professor Yarnell says she's just going to sit at home, barbecue, and go to the annual fireworks display at the university. POCO will hopefully rest comfortably over the three-day weekend in the fluids in the petri dishes.

Tuesday, July 5, 7:00 A.M. This is weird. Sam just called me and said that numerous patients were admitted into University Hospital in the past two days. She said all the patients appeared to be in shock and no one knows why. The ambulance crews all stated the same thing on their call reports: witnesses told them the patients each broke out in a cold sweat and complained of feeling cold just before falling into unconsciousness. Apparently the ER tried taking blood samples from the patients so they could run tests, but unfortunately all the patients appear to be dehydrated to the point that neither nurses nor doctors could find veins to draw from. Guess I'll find out more when I get to work.

8:21 A.M. I just arrived in the lab. I brought in enough fresh tuna for the entire lab and a couple of shark steaks for Sam. Professor Yarnell apparently has been here most of the weekend. She is very awestruck. She said she stopped in Saturday to pick up a book and came into the lab to check on our little friend POCO. It seems the original five POCOs we placed in the blood have reproduced into mass amounts. What started out as five have grown well into the millions, while the blood supply continues to diminish. The same goes for the POCOs in the infected blood. It appears that the more blood there is, the faster they reproduce, and the faster they reproduce, the more blood they consume.

What has her amazed is that the infected blood is being consumed while the diseased cells remain. It appears POCO is, literally, a bloodsucker, and apparently immune to our modern diseases. She also said that during the night she took numerous POCO samples and experimented with them to see how they react to light, darkness, heat, and cold. She said they have no reaction whatsoever to any of them. She even froze some in liquid nitrogen for over 30 hours. When defrosted, they started right where they left off: consuming each other, then reproducing.

9:06 A.M. I ran into John Roberts from University Hospital. He informed me that County General had called him. They wanted to know if the doctors at University Hospital found anything concerning the rash of patients being admitted with shocklike symptoms. Roberts told them University Hospital is just as baffled as County General.

11:51 A.M. Professor Yarnell just gave me good and bad news. After I left Friday night she sent a sample of the POCOs to her friend Bill Johnstone at a nearby lab. He injected them into three lab rats and placed them in a cage with three other rats. The good news is that the three rats not injected were not affected by the three that were. This means that POCO cannot be transmitted via air. The bad news is that the three rats injected died. Her friend did a mini-autopsy on the three rats this morning and said they died from what seems to be hemorrhagic shock. He said the strange thing is that there was no blood in the cage, and the three rats appeared to have been sucked dry of all blood.

2:49 P.M. Sam, Professor Yarnell, and I just got out of an emergency meeting with John Roberts and the entire board. We told them about POCO and what we have discovered. The decision was unanimous that we discontinue any further experiments with POCO and notify the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia of our findings.

3:46 P.M. I just got off the phone with Jerry Hansen, a member of the CDC. He told me that his people would be here first thing in the morning to collect all of the data, samples, and experiments we performed on POCO.

Wednesday, July 6, 9:07 A.M. I had just finished packing up the last of our experiments with POCO when the CDC people arrived. They told me they would keep us informed as to their findings after all experiments had been completed. Sam was kind of upset that we were handing over this astonishing find to the CDC, but knew it was the right thing to do.

10:13 A.M. Sam asked me to take a look at the videos of POCO she had dubbed before the CDC came. In all four of the videos, at the same time on Friday afternoon while we were out to lunch, there is a disturbance in the blood in which POCO was living. While watching the videos, she noticed a few black lines appear here and there on the outer corner of the picture. On the video with the strongest magnification, the entire video goes black at the same moment the black lines appear on the least magnified one. She sent a copy of the videos to a couple of friends, asking them if they could determine what the disturbance was.

12:35 P.M. I just met John Roberts in the cafeteria. Apparently, between Sunday and this morning over 450 people have been brought in between us and County General with the same shocklike symptoms. Both hospitals seem to be stumped as to what is causing this. And of all the people who were brought in, over half of them have died within the first five hours. The rest are not expected to survive the remainder of the day. The mayor has been notified but is refusing to call the governor and possibly quarantine the entire city. I told Roberts if he liked and if it was possible, he could send over a few samples of blood taken from various dead bodies and I would examine them. He thanked me for my offer of help and told me that University and County General had exchanged samples, and that he would send over a few vials from each hospital as soon as he returned to work.

12:43 P.M. Professor Yarnell just came in with some very disturbing news. Her friend Bill at the lab called and asked her about the sample of POCO she had sent him last week. He said the local police stopped by and asked him to examine a few pieces of evidence for them. They said they found hundreds of frogs and numerous fish dead at a lake just outside the city limits. After examining some of the fish and frogs, he said that their blood seems to have been sucked dry exactly like the three rats he injected with POCO. He also told her that he hasn't informed the authorities about his findings yet, but would have to very soon. He said he wanted to give her a heads-up first, and that he was sending over body fluid samples from the frogs and fish for her to examine. I also showed her the video and the black lines that mysteriously appear. She's just as puzzled as Sam and I.

1:03 P.M. The messenger arrived from Bill's lab with the fluid samples from the frogs and fish. Professor Yarnell is checking the fluid for any abnormalities and trying to make some connection between these strange sudden deaths and the outbreak within the human population.

1:16 P.M. One of Sam's friends called. I told him she was out to lunch with her parents and that I would take a message. He said he could not be a hundred percent sure what the black lines are, but told me what the lines on the second-least magnified video looked like. If he is right, this would explain the deaths of the fish, frogs, and humans. I pray he's wrong.

1:30 P.M. I just got back from bringing a copy ofthe videos to Paul Adams' office. Unfortunately, his secretary told me thathe was out to lunch. I asked her to page him with my number and to put in a 911. Hopefully, he's at lunch and not playing golf somewhere.

2:05 P.M. I just got off the phone with Bill from the lab. I asked if he could look at all the dead frogs and fish the police brought him, and told him what I needed him to look for. I begged him to let me know as soon as he found anything.

2:12 P.M. Paul finally called. I told him all about POCO, the experiments, the videos, and my theories on how they all tie into the mass outbreak of deaths in the city. He said he would apologize to his luncheon date and head back to the university to have a look at the videos and get back to me as soon as he was done. No sooner did I hang up the phone when in walked an intern from the hospital. She told me she had full vials of the blood samples I requested from Roberts, but when I opened the container to retrieve them they were one-third full. She apologized and said they must have spilled, but was confused to find no blood on the bottom of the carrier. I told her not to worry about it; there was probably a mix-up at the hospital. The last thing I needed to do was panic this young intern with my theory.

2:45 P.M. The news just reported that over 1,000 people have died from the mysterious epidemic plaguing our area. Reports are coming in of people being rushed into hospitals with the epidemic from as far as 500 miles away. The mayor has finally called the governor, who has called out the National Guard. A lot of good that'll do.

2:51 P.M. Professor Yarnell came in to give me the results of her tests on the fluids from the frogs and fish. I knew it wasn't good news from the moment I saw her. She was white as a ghost and shaking. She handed me her notes to read because she was too upset to talk. Her results were not what I wanted to see. POCO! In every sample of fluid sent over by Bill, POCO was found. I wanted to tell her about the blood samples I was working on, but could see that in her current state she wouldn't be able to handle the possibility of POCO being the cause of the outbreak.

3:04 P.M. I just listened to my phone messages. Professor Santoro called regarding the picture of POCO I sent him. He told me that he showed the picture to some colleagues. He said they seem to be the same type of cell they found in every dinosaur sample on which they performed tests, but could not be sure since the picture is of a living cell and they've only seen them fossilized.

3:08 P.M. My worst nightmare has just come true. Paul called with his results of the videos. He confirmed what Sam's friend could not. Paul said that without a doubt in his mind, the black lines that appear on the videos are the legs of a mosquito.

3:22 P.M. I can't believe this. Not only has my worst nightmare come true, but my worst nightmare's nightmare has now come true. The blood samples taken from the dead bodies at the hospitals ALL contain POCOs. Millions upon millions of POCOs contaminate each vial, or should I say what little blood is left in each vial.

3:34 P.M. Sam just called me from County General, crying hysterically. She said that during lunch both her parents became very sick and were rushed to the hospital. The doctors there told her it appears they have the same bug that, now, has claimed more than 1,000 lives. I told her to try to stay calm and to be strong, for her parents' sakes. I didn't have the heart to tell her that both she and I are responsible not only for her parents' fate, but possibly for the fate of all mankind.

6:11 P.M. My God! What have we done? Three very intelligent people making one very fatal, stupid mistake. Failing to secure the cover of a petri dish while we went out to lunch. And while we dined on our steak, one mosquito feasted on our stupidity. Now the world will have to pay for our wrong. And pay dearly it shall. At the rate people are dying, in a matter of weeks it appears the entire human race will face the same destiny as those massive creatures of millennia ago. And there's nothing that we can do to stop it.