“Pick up de phone Amber,” John Sipos paced and ran a calloused hand through his white hair. He held his bulky satellite phone to his head. John was an environmental survey site administrator for the United Nations and he was on assignment.
“Hallo? Who is this?” an aging woman with a thick Hungarian accent said into the shop phone.
“It’s me Amber! You have to call Paliki, go home, pack the truck and get ready for the end of the world!” John was dead serious about that last part. His job put him in the nastiest and most dangerous locations in the world. Today he was responding to a possible virus outbreak in western China near the Three Gorges Dam. What the team had just discovered was impossible to believe and impossible to ignore.
“Oh Johnny…” Started his wife of 43 years, “Is it really? again? The end of-”
He cut her off, “Amber,” he spoke uncharacteristically slow and calm, “this time, this time…”
“Ok, I will get Paliki from work, we will prepare as you say. What about you? So far away.”
“Too late.”