“…on combining three of the most deadly things possible into one simple fluid. He called it ‘Sporad.’” She coughs for a few moments, and spits out the blood in the bucket on the floor. “What were those things, daddy?” my daughter asks, sleepily. I find the accompanying postcard, showing my father in a lab suit, and start reading. “One of them was this thing called anthrax…”

Back in the day anthrax was what everyone was afraid of, like a crack in the wall today. You could send it in the mail to a random person and, if they opened the package, they would die. The second thing was a flesh-eating bacterium, or, uh… germ. If it touched you, you basically had no chance of surviving. And, worst of all, the last thing was radioactive bismuth. Radioactivity, which is why we don’t go outside, is something that spreads very easily. It floats in the air, and kills you slow and painfully. And, somehow, he combined these three things into a liquid. And when my father died, all the rights…