Nap Lapkin doesn’t get sympathy pains
A young man develops stomach pains. As the evening progresses, they get worse. His family gathers around him and soon, they too are developing the same symptoms. Concerned, they call the EMTs who arrive on site and before they can even load the unfortunate young man into their ambulance, they too are writhing in pain. Upon hearing this, the hospital is worried they might be looking at some sort of infectious pandemic event.
They get even more concerned when everyone at the hospital who had been involved with receiving the initial call from the medics and those who reached out to the CDC for advice also begin to come down with the same symptoms.
It seemed impossible.
Later that evening, someone told the local news about the situation and they broke into the regularly scheduled program to tell the public about what was going on at the hospital.
Soon, the station was flooded with calls because every viewer that had watched the News Flash was now showing the same debilitating signs of stomach distress.
Not long afterwards, the national media picked up on the story and within only a few hours, fully half the people in the United States were lying on their sides in agony.
No medicines seemed to help. No reasons for the malady could be found.
And no international news outlet could resist making it their top story.
A week later, the entire world was in the grip of this mysterious ailment. Most developed countries were in midst of chaos as fully 95% of their population was out of commission. Cities began to burn as there were no firemen to put out even the simplest blaze. Power started to go out and there were no technicians to put things right. Just going to the grocery store seemed beyond the abilities of most people and eventually, those who hadn’t contracted the bug were told what was going on… and that was all it took.
The fate of the world hung in the balance.
And that’s the world that Nap Lapkin returned to after his delightful two-week camping trip in Prince William Forest Park. He sensed something was amiss as the road back to Langley was completely and utterly deserted. Were it not that tumbleweeds are not indigenous to Virginia, one of them would not have looked entirely out of place tumbling along. There were a few cars abandoned along the way, their drivers having heard the news via radio and therefore were unable to make it home or to their place of work before the pains became too intense to operate a motor vehicle, but other than that, it was nothing but open highway and blue skies. He enjoyed it but knew there would be a price to pay for the lack of traffic eventually.
The bill came due soon after.
He walked into CIA headquarters to find it virtually empty. The few remaining agents and staff had been asked to stay in their offices and under no circumstances turn on any TV or radio, read a newspaper, or pull up any social media sites on their devices. A literal information quarantine was in place. They were told that they would be given further instructions at a later date.
Nap’s superiors had sent him emails over the course of the phenomenon but he was only now getting a chance to read them. They were vague, written like riddles and left him with more questions than answers. The only thing he knew for sure was that action was required.
His first action?
Check up on Madonna, his on-again, off-again girlfriend.
He found her in the same state as everyone else, due to a recent briefing on the outbreak, clutching her stomach and trying to keep down the food that would later fuel her next round of diarrhea. She was at her wits end and pleaded for Nap to do something, anything to help. She couldn’t give him anything concrete to go on so he felt his frustration growing. Whether on-again or off-again, he cared a great deal for Madonna and it killed him to see her in pain.
“That’s it!” he said to himself.
You wouldn’t have thought an exclamation point was necessary when referring to someone talking to themselves, but this was possibly a world-saving epiphany, so you’ll excuse his enthusiasm.
“I know you can’t tell me any details, but can you at least tell me who patient zero was?” he asked his struggling fellow agent.
“I can’t see how that would hurt,” said a hurting Madonna, and she proceeded to give him his name and location.
“Be... careful,” she said as Nap departed. Even though it came between sharp pains, the “be” and the “careful” separated by at least two full seconds, it was clear to anyone listening that, even in her weakened condition, she felt much more on-again than off-again about Nap.
A few hours later, Nap landed in Milwaukee, courtesy of perhaps the last functional pilot in the country. He was dying to explain his theory but knew he could say nothing lest he jeopardize the pilot’s safety. And perhaps even his own. If he was right about what caused this incident, then he was going to have to keep his mind from trying to figure it all out.
“One minute I’m staring up at the stars without a care in the world, next thing you know, I’m dragged back into saving the damn world again,” he grumbled to himself a few hours later as he approached the humble two-story home of the boy who started the whole mess.
He knocked on the door but knew that nobody was in any condition to answer, so he let himself in. As expected, he found them all in the living room. Laying on the floor or on the sofa or chairs, moaning and whimpering, buckets of puke sitting by each them. The boy, his parents, and his brother.
Just then, his eye caught a family portrait hanging over the mantle. The five of them smiling away. The boy, his parents, his brother… and his sister.
“Just as I thought,” Nap thought to himself, sans exclamation point (although honestly, nobody would have blamed him if he stuck one in). He turned and marched right upstairs. Once there, he looked down the hall and spotted the room he was looking for. It was adorned by stars and pink unicorns and he kicked it in without a second to waste (definitely what the trailer for the movie will highlight).
“Aha!!” he yelled. Loud enough to warrant two exclamation points and, if this is ever translated into Spanish, an upside down one before the “A.”
On the bed sat a teenage girl. Not writhing or clutching her stomach at all. Instead, she was playing a hand-held video game. A game she promptly dropped as the shock of Nap’s entrance made its way into her amygdale.
“I knew it. Sort of... mostly,” Nap said as the girl stared up at him. “It’s too late to pretend to have stomach problems now, lassie.”
He wasn’t sure why he called her lassie. She didn’t appear to have a drop of Scottish blood in her. Sometimes, I guess people get carried away after using exclamation points (especially upside down ones, estoy en lo cierto?)
“Don’t you have something to confess to your brother?” he asked her.
She turned bright red and Nap ushered her out of the room and down the stairs to her afflicted family.
“So let me get this straight,” said a visibly-confused-yet-perfectly-healthy Madonna. “This whole thing was caused because the boy’s sister wasn’t feeling empathy when he was having stomach issues?”
“Yep. Simple as that. Once she admitted to her family that she didn’t really care if her brother was hurting, the spell was broken and everything returned to normal,” Nap stated in a tone that indicated that he felt that everything he said made complete sense.
“Spell?” asked Madonna.
“Well, sorcery or karma or whatever. I deduced that the only way that these symptoms could affect people who were not exposed to the original carrier would be through a transmission process that made no sense whatsoever. Beyond our understanding and whatnot.”
Madonna was having none of it. She shook her head slowly from side to side. “No. Nope.”
“Look, when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes said that,” said Nap.
“You realize Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character so he couldn’t have actually said anything?” countered Madonna.
“Then whoever wrote the Sherlock Holmes books. I believe Watson was his name. His first name eludes me though. Ed maybe? Either way, it just proves my point.” Once again Nap sat back with a “the defense rests” look on his face.
“How does that prove your point? What was your point anyway?” an exhausted Madonna inquired.
“If a fictional character can come up with such a good point, why question when another fictional character figures out a mystery that on the face of it seemed unsolvable?”
Madonna’s mouth fell open. “Obviously, I appreciate you saving the world and all, specifically me, but did you just refer to yourself as a fictional character?”
“Come on Madonna, you must realize by now that this is just a story. We’re all just characters in a story. Whatever I did to fix the problem, however I approached it, it would have fixed the problem. As long as it was absurd and I believed in what I was doing.” (A statement that will definitely not feature in the trailer.)
In some strange way, his words suddenly made sense to her. They not only explained a lot but gave her comfort for whatever else might happen in the future.
“You never asked me about my vacation,” he said after a long pause.
Madonna, who had until his recent appearance at her door been sitting on the floor painting her toenails, looked up at him, finished up her big toe with a flourish and asked about his vacation.
“It was nice. Very relaxing.” He smiled at her and wondered if she could tell that he’d missed her.
“You know, it would have been better if you had invited me along,” she noted.
“Yes, but then things might have not gone the way they went. We would have put the whole world at risk by not sticking to the script.”
“Maybe… but if it’s all just a story, we could have just changed then ending.” She smiled at how comfortable she had become talking nonsense with Nap.
Nap smiled, happy that she was finally getting it.
She, of course, wasn’t.