The race is on. It is them against us. They, furiously trying, to guess our next move. We, constantly trying to stay alive. It is a race for survival. When they think they have one up on us, we are ready with a twist.

We are amazed at their unrelenting determination to win. Their superior race with highly developed brains believes they can beat us. Yet our simple existence and adaptability baffles them. Their new technologies and super machines should give them superiority and dominance over us. But it is our simple nature that gives us our advantage. We have but one goal and that is – survival. For this they despise us.

The recent globalization of the world has heightened their concern. The geographical barriers between us are diminishing daily. It is their technology that has allowed us to travel throughout the world, and they hate us for it. With airplanes leaving daily to and from thousands of destinations, we can move very quickly. This same technology though has made it possible for them to keep better track of us. They think this gives them an advantage over us. We sincerely doubt it.

When they have succeeded in capturing a few of us, they have tried to keep us separated from mankind. Even keeping the knowledge from them about what they are doing with their prisoners. In captivity they attempt to study us to learn the secrets of our nature, yet we reveal little. They patiently wait for us to multiply so they can perform controlled experiments.

“Hey, over here!  Come a little closer to this good-looking woman. You know you want to talk to her. After all, what else is there to do right now?  Isn’t that why you came to this bar? You could be back at your hotel waiting for tomorrow’s meeting?  She is smiling at you, what are you waiting for?”

“Hi, can I buy you a drink?” You ask as you take the seat next to her.

“Sure.” You start talking and take a few peanuts out of the bowl in the middle of the table. Popping them in his mouth, he asks her about herself.

“Lady, eat some more peanuts, we silently whisper over and over again, hoping she hears us.”  We don’t know if she really can or not, but she reaches in the bowl, grabs a couple and then licks the salt off her fingers.

The conversation is animated now. The alcohol they have consumed helps them talk like old acquaintances out for the night which holds promises of something more. The peanuts are nearly gone now. We are absolutely delighted. The evening is going well.

Neither one of them is happy that the evening has to come to an end, but all evenings must. Of course, this is something that we are counting on. And as they part ways so do we.

Our adventure has just begun. They have no clue what we have up our sleeves. But we can guarantee that they will not be happy when they find out.

Within 24 hours, we have assembled our forces. Our numbers have grown, and we are stronger. We are ready for anything they can throw our way. We will soon have a new name to go with our new disguise. This will make them miserable.

“Sir, traveling to England today?” The nice lady on the other side of the counter asks him.

“Bless you.” 

“Yes, bless you indeed. For helping us with our plan that is.”

He catches a sneeze on the back of his hand and wipes it against his shirt. In doing so, he brushes the airline ticket against the minuscule drops of saliva he deposited on his shirt. Then he hands the ticket to her.

“That’s my first stop on the way back to New York. I will stay the night in London, take the tunnel to France during the day, and then go back home on Sunday.”

“Why he gave her so much information, who knows?  We don’t think she really cared. Perhaps it was the beginning of a fever that was creeping up on him. Whatever it was, we, of course, were delighted.”

The lady at the counter licks her finger as she turns each page of the five-part ticket.

“Oh, this is so exciting, we can hardly contain ourselves!””

The man takes his ticket and heads to the gate. In the meantime, the lady helps one passenger after another, each time depositing a little saliva on their airline ticket before handing it back.

“It is going much better than planned. Soon our forces will multiply within her. Shortly after that, we will be on our way to world domination. We could have not found a better host.”

The man is early for this flight, so he decides to stop at the snack bar to pick up a cup of coffee. He sits at a small table drinking away and reading a newspaper he picked up at the hotel. A sneeze catches him by surprise and some of the coffee splashes onto the table. He wipes his nose with the napkin and the uses it to mop up the spill.

He heads for the trashcan to dispose of the napkin.

“Now boarding flight HEA782 to London.”  A loud voice booms over the public speaker. He realizes this is his flight, checks his watch wondering where time has gone, swigs down the last of his coffee, and heads to the gate as the napkin falls to the floor.

A family of four headed for New Zealand spots the empty table.

After just a few bites, the younger child deciding her food no longer amuses her, pushes her plate to the middle of the table. In doing so, her hamburger slips off the plate and onto the table. With a sharp looking reprimand, her father picks it up. “There is no sense in wasting good food.” He mumbles as his mouth closes in around it. Before the day is over, he will have kissed his wife and shared his drink with the kids. This was just too easy.

Another family was moving away from the ticket counter. The mother was trying frantically to recollect her brood.

“Johnny, get that out of your mouth!  What did you think you were doing eating our tickets?  I swear, I will not go on another trip until you kids are eighteen. Another day of this would find me committed.”

The race is on and they don’t even know it. It will be a few days before they catch up with us. That is the way it always is. We get ahead a couple of days, they figure out what we have been up to, they make their move, we counteract, they try something stronger… it goes on and on.

The airport janitor takes off his gloves after emptying the trashcan. Then he notices the napkin on the floor and picks it up. “Way to go dude! We love you.” I can hear my colleagues call out to me as the man walks away to his gate.

The janitor passed by the water fountain and noticed it was clogged. He reached for his tools and fixed the issue. Meanwhile some of my colleagues rubbed off on the waterspout where they prepared to be launched right into the next unsuspecting mouth.

These first thirty minutes at the airport have been absolutely productive. We could not have counted on a more unsuspecting ally than our lady at the ticket counter. That nasty habit of licking her finger to turn each page – well, we can dream of nothing better. And children, we love children. We can always count on children.

Yes, in the first thirty minutes, we were on the move. A lot of us headed to England, others to New Zealand, and thanks to our lovely lady behind the counter, before the day was over, we would be on our way to Spain, France, Poland, Korea, and Russia.

The excitement among us was growing. On each of the airplanes, there would be opportunities to catch rides to hundreds of exotic destinations. A cough here and a sneeze there and we would be on our way from one person to the other.

I am still hanging out on the man at the bar, so let’s follow him over a few days. The flight for him was pretty uneventful, except for the conversation he had with the man next to him. They started talking about the national soccer cup and who would win. As their excitement rose and his tongue got twisted, he sprayed saliva over his neighbor and his neighbor’s glass. I said farewell to some of my comrades, as they took leave on their own adventure.

He was greeted in London by a business colleague. They shook hands and he helped him with his bag. In the car, they shared male bonding time before arriving at the flat where his wife and dinner guests were awaiting their arrival. He catches another sneeze with his hands before arriving at their destination. Then proceeds to shake each hand he is introduced to. We bid adieu to more of our friends as they rub off onto their new hosts.

Finally, he says his good nights, asking his host for something to take for this slight sore throat and scratchy cough. The host offers him a night cap.

“There is nothing some good scotch won’t take care off. I have one of the finest.”

A couple of scotches later, the sore throat and cough are forgotten among the laughter and the reminiscing on times past.

The next morning, they are off to France to more business meetings. To my delight, he is speaking to a group of almost one hundred. We didn’t know that we had picked a winner, but boy didn’t we. Apparently, this was some famous New York consultant who had been hired to speak to a group of French engineers. There was a reception after the speech. Lots of handshakes and airspace was exchanged. Again, time to bid adieu to more comrades.

“Thank God it is a short day. I can’t wait to get to my hotel room.” He mutters under his breath as he enters the car that will take him back to London. His plane leaves for home in the morning. Morning cannot come too soon. He rings room service and asks the concierge if there is a nearby pharmacy or if they have some Tylenol. Fever is starting to get the best of him now.

He gets hold of some drugs. That doesn’t make us happy at all. But we are pretty well equipped now for most over the counter medications. In fact, we are delighted that he is taking the Tylenol because, although we like to cause misery and illness, fever is not our friend. Fevers are the body’s defense against us.

You see your body is such an awesome machine; that is why we prey on it. But this is also why we struggle so hard to survive. Luckily for us though, over the counter meds, that you consider medical advances, are most of the time, our ally. They counteract some of your body’s natural defenses. Such is the case with fevers. You see, we cannot reproduce inside your cells as easily when your temperature is elevated. This elevated temperature keeps us from taking over your cell’s DNA and reproducing ourselves. When you take Tylenol and bring your fever down, you are providing us an optimal environment to wreak havoc. Thank you!

None the less, you take two Tylenols when you wake up in the morning. After all, it masks the problem and gets you on the way to the airport. By the time you get home, we will grown in numbers within your body and have had the opportunity to infect hundreds of others who will in turn infect others.

In three days, hundreds of people will be reporting to their doctors with what we call acid throat. A sore throat that feels like acid has been thrown on it. This is complicated by cough, being stopped up, difficulty breathing, and running a fever. Your doctor will see so many of these cases within the next few days that he will report it to them. You know them, the CDC – The Centers for Disease control, that is how they will discover what we have been up to.

Then they will do their investigation, figure out the source of the disease, plot a geographical pattern and link it directly back to the man at the bar. It is amazing how they do this. Then they will look at all their research and wonder how they missed it.

After all, they grow us in their Petri dishes, subject us to multiple tests, modify our environment in attempts to get us to mutate so that they can stay ahead of the race. Every year, they create over fifty thousand mutations of us. Statisticians run probabilities to try to pinpoint which mutation is most likely to hit this flu season, and that is what they make the flu vaccine against. But they may as well be playing the lottery.

We have you as our ally. You see, it is humans working against humans.  You have done it, stopped taking antibiotics before you finished your prescription. We love you for that, for those of us that survive, mutate and come back stronger. One of the most exciting things going for us is the fact that you do not understand the difference between a bacterium and a virus. And this, believe me, thrills both of us. How else do you think streptococcus became antibiotic resistant?  You did it to yourself.

We laugh every time you get a sniffle and you reach for that left over antibiotic. It doesn’t do anything to us. Instead, it weakens your own immune system. And when you self-medicate, we normally party since, as we mentioned before, you are working against yourself.

You also ignore your symptoms and fail to isolate yourself by staying home when you are sick. We know we can count on you to do that. Humans are such social creatures and so afraid to show their vulnerability. So, you go about your normal day, totally clueless about what we are up to.

We might be small and simple organisms unable to reproduce on our own, but at the rate things are going, you are going to help us win this race. You will be the demise of your own race.

————– End ————

I am certain that many of you will now wash your hands incessantly and will think twice about that trip out of your house. While I don’t like the social isolation any more than you do, I urge you to take it seriously. We depend on each other to fight this enemy that does not care whose life it affects. Take care during the Corona Virus Pandemic. Reach out if you want to c