These aren't the stories your mother told you.

No, these are the other stories.

Benjans Affliction, written by Daniel Wilcox,

narrated by Ian McEwan.

Nobody really thinks about it anymore, the way it all started,

the first seed that grew a forest of merciless destruction in its wake.

What had begun as so small a thing took the world as fire takes to a sheet of wool,

and the prophets began rolling in.

Phyllis Morin had been the first to receive the vaccination, a droplet the size of a flea

swimming around in the cylindrical tube of the needle. It was hidden in the guise of a flu vaccination,

and took all of two days before the coughs racked her frail dying body, spreading, floating

around as deadly droplets in the air for her husband and family to breathe in. Another week,

and everyone that had come into contact with Phyllis and her husband had spread the toxin

along the chain, a lethal game of dominoes

that grew bigger and bigger until it was all the media could talk about.

They released information saying that the symptoms to war.

Morin's disease.

That's what they called it.

Boils my blood to think that, at the end of it all, I'd get no credit.

But hey, if money talks, then I'm the one that became a freaking god.

Not some choked-out witch from Tennessee.

Once the spread had reached the borders and the airlines shut down, it wasn't long at all until the White House ordered the best minds in the business to create a cure.

...