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People started calling it Commuter Syndrome, which sounded a lot better than ‘what-the-fuck-is-happening’ disease. Normal people, with no history of health issues, started checking into Amity General with a host of symptoms including nausea, vomiting, temperature fluctuations that spiked into febrile seizures and dropped into hypothermia, and the degradation of tissues scarily similar to acute radiation poisoning. Half of the hospital was pulling their hair out over the stress, and the other half had it falling out in clumps. The whole system was already overwhelmed by rolling blackouts the previous week, and the influx of people coming unstitched at the seams was definitely a cause for some good old ‘what-the-FUCK-is-happening???’.
The similarities to radiation poisoning caused a mass panic both within the halls of the hospital and in the greater Amity population, until men in crisply pressed HAZMAT suits and wielding Geiger counters arrived and were able to conclusively say that there was nothing radioactive in the area. That didn’t stop the panic, and in fact just seemed to open the floodgates to a horde of conspiracy nuts chiming in with what was really happening. The two people in the parking lot, wearing rumpled, brightly-stained HAZMAT suits and shouting about ghostly interference were customarily ignored, as they always were. Of course, finding out that radiation definitely wasn’t causing the deaths numbering in the hundreds by the second week of the crisis is a poor substitute for actually preventing them.
So far, all that was known about the illness was that it was definitely killing people who did not live in the greater Amity area or parts of West Elmerton, maybe killing people who had moved to Amity instead of being born there, and so far, was not fatal for anyone under the age of twenty. The severity of symptoms seemed to vary wildly, from a mild case no greater than an upset stomach and a persistent chill from a fourteen-year-old (who came in for an unrelated accident) to a thirty-year-old whose bone and tissue density declined rapidly to the point of almost…melting.
The one thing that was consistent across all cases was the presence of an unidentifiable, green, phlegmy substance. It was leaked out of mucous membranes, traces of it were diffused in every part of the patient, it gathered in dermal and subdermal cysts across the face, chest and back. At first, doctors thought that it was a chemical irritant or a reaction to one, slowly dissolving living tissues, that was the cause of the disease. The range of reactions made it seem more like an eldritch allergen than a poison, and no one on staff could even identify the chemical makeup of the substance as samples sublimated within seconds of being taken.
By the fourth day, the government men returned in the form of a frazzled looking older man, flanked by an honor guard in white suits. They practically quarantined the hospital and started trying a variety of aggressive treatments, breaking down the contaminate with little regard for the people contaminated. By the third week, there were no new cases of Commuter Syndrome, gone just as suddenly as it had appeared. Quite a few survivors were also gone just as suddenly as the disease appeared as well.
The rest were released back into the general population, nothing to officially show for their ordeal other than thousands in debt and significant nerve damage. There was talk of a preventative medication being prescribed to residents by the government, but the funding fell short and became nothing more than a rumor. A few crackpots sold ‘cures’ or preventions to Commuter Syndrome such as tinctures, teas, and something that glowed an ominous red color (courtesy of the Drs. Fenton), but the rash of unexplainable deaths at the end of the summer in a modest midwestern city was quickly phased out of the national news cycle and was forgotten about by the public at large. In total, 1,236 deaths were attributed to Commuter Syndrome, and a few thousand more moved away from the area at their earliest convivence.
And that, it seemed, was that. Until about a month later, when the ghosts started showing up.