The Madness to Her Method

Nov 09, 2025

Nora Evangelista wasn’t angry. Not anymore. Her rage had calcified into something quieter — and far more dangerous. She hated the whole world, because it had been targeting her for far too long.

She’d been left abandoned in a dumpster when she was only a few weeks old. No one knew who her parents were. She’d bounced around the foster system for years, experiencing every heartbreak imaginable — things no child should ever have to endure.

But she’d overcome it. She’d studied and used her sharp mind and quick wit to get a scholarship, and she’d graduated with a degree in biology, which she’d then parlayed into advanced degrees in microbiology and molecular biology.

Nora had believed she would win the game of life. She’d worked hard and excelled, eventually landing her dream job at the CDC. She was happy.

Then she met Steven. Happy didn’t even begin to cover what she’d felt when he asked her out. They’d clicked in a way she’d never experienced before. He understood her passions and shared them. He’d had a rough childhood, too. They were perfect for one another.

He’d asked her to marry him, and she’d instantly said yes. No hesitation. Steven was her soulmate…

Things were good for several years. Then she got pregnant. Steven wasn’t thrilled about that; he didn’t want to bring a child into a world so full of evil, but Nora was convinced he’d come around.

He didn’t. Instead, Steven turned to Angela — a young lab tech with perky tits and thighs Nora imagined spread at the first sign of male interest. Not that she was biased…

Nora had caught him bending Angela over a table in his lab when she’d stopped by unexpectedly to ask him out for lunch. There had been endless apologies and excuses, pleas for forgiveness, and blame.

But in the end, he didn’t want a child, and Nora was pregnant. So things ended. And Nora had clung to life in her womb as the only soulmate she really needed. She nested and prepared, talked to the fetus, ate healthy and longed for the birth that was still four months away.

Then she lost the baby.

The doctors couldn’t explain it. They said sometimes these things just happened…

No. Nora didn’t believe that for a second. She was convinced she’d been exposed to something at the CDC that had caused the miscarriage. She accused them, but they calmly insisted she was wrong.

So she’d found a lawyer and sued them, spent her life savings to fight the government. And she’d lost.

And, of course, she’d lost her job. To top it off, they’d blackballed her in the U.S. virology and microbiology industry.

She was out of money and out of time. The eviction notice had arrived a couple of weeks ago.

But she had her basement lab for a few more days, and she had a plan to get even with all of them. Every single person who’d put her in this position was going to pay…

The idea had started as a joke — wishing she could somehow curse them all. But the idea of a curse had stuck with her. So she’d begun doing some research — just googling at first. Then she’d sought out a local sorceress.

Turned out there was such a thing. Who knew?

And the woman had been quite helpful. She’d given Nora advice on what type of hex to use and what ingredients were needed. Step-by-step instructions to hex her ex.

But Nora didn’t just want Steven to suffer. She wanted Angela to lose all her hair and get warts all over her face. She wanted her old boss to lose his mind and his job. She wanted the CDC to go down in flames.

At this point, she wanted everyone else to be as miserable as she was.

So she’d had the idea to combine the curse idea with her existing skills. She picked the common cold because nobody panicked over a sniffle. She tucked a whisper into its genome — a short, strange peptide encoded in a back alley of viral letters — and watched, in the way only someone who’d read a thousand sequence files could, as the host’s epigenetic marks began to move to a new rhythm.

It didn’t smash brains so much as change their background music: people hummed different songs, said private things aloud, folded their days into tiny rituals. Some would shrug it off; some would keep the new tune forever.

It was the kind of elegant cruelty that left no fingerprints, and she had worked and schemed to find a way to keep herself from hearing the same notes. But she was out of time; she only had one day left before they kicked her out, and she lost access to her home lab.

So she reconsidered. Why fight the inevitable? If the world was out to get her, maybe she’d help it out…

In the end, she re-encoded the peptide motif in a region of the virus’s genome that relied on a specific transcription factor highly expressed in her own cells. The virus would replicate fastest in her — like a match head struck in the dark next to dry kindling.

She didn’t need immunity. She needed ignition.

The next day, she called Steven and asked to meet for coffee in a little cafe they’d often visited. A public meeting place where he would feel safe, relaxed.

Nora got there early. She always did.

The café was small — familiar. Quiet enough for conversation but public enough to keep things civil. She chose a seat by the window, where the afternoon sun slanted in and lit the table like a spotlight. Appropriate.

She ordered Steven’s favorite: a large Americano, black. Hers sat untouched, already cold.

He was two minutes late. Typical. Hair tousled like he wanted it to look like he hadn’t tried. Khakis. Button-down. That same overconfident smile he used when he wanted something.

“Hey,” he said, sliding into the seat across from her. “You look… good.”

She offered a faint smile. “So do you. Here…” She pushed the coffee toward him. “Still like these?”

He chuckled. “Yeah. Thanks.” He took a sip without hesitation. Of course he did.

They made small talk for a few minutes. He asked how she was holding up. She lied. He asked if she was still living in the same place. She said she might move soon. He said he was glad they could talk. She said she was too.

And then she lowered her voice, like she was about to confess something vulnerable.

“I just wanted to say…” She paused, eyes fixed on his. “I’m sorry. For how I reacted. For yelling. For the lawsuit. I was in pain, but I know that doesn’t excuse everything.”

Steven’s expression softened. Relieved. “Nora, you don’t have to —”

“I do,” she interrupted gently. “I don’t want to carry it anymore. I want to let it go.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand. She let him.

“That means a lot,” he said. “Really.”

She looked down at their hands. “I’ll always love you,” she said, and the lie tasted almost sweet. Almost… true.

A beat passed. She withdrew her hand.

“I just want you to be happy, Steven.”

He smiled, and for the first time since everything began, it looked genuine. He stood. “Can I give you a hug?”

She stood, too.

He embraced her, warm and solid, and she breathed in the scent of his skin, his cologne, the stale betrayal of it all. She let herself rest her head against his shoulder for one long second. Then she pulled back, cupped his cheek, and kissed him once — chaste, restrained, just enough.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too.”

And then he walked out, coffee in hand, completely unaware that the rest of his life had already changed.

She wondered, briefly, if this counted as love — to choose him as the first to carry her new music. Then she dismissed the thought.

Love was a story she no longer told.

And so it began.

Steven made it home to Angela before the headache started, but soon it was a needle pricking the back of his right eye. Maddening.

He snapped at Angela during dinner. Then he got rough during sex. When she complained, he slapped her so hard her left eye swelled shut and her lips bled. He ranted about her ingratitude and inferiority.

Angela was pissed, but a little afraid, so she stayed quiet. For a while.

The next morning, when she left for work, she was just as pissed as Steven. So she decided to seduce his new lab partner, Brent.

Brent went home to his family, kissed the children good night, and shared a drink with his wife, Emily.

The next day the kids went to school and Emily met with her gardening club.

And so it spread.

And for each person the effects were slightly different. Some were driven mad with rage like Steven. Others were quieter and simply lost all inhibitions like Angela. Some became unable to keep secrets and shared publicly every thought that came into their minds.

Some became promiscuous. Some became asexual. Some ate everything they could find — whether actually edible or not. Others refused to eat because they believed everything was poison.

And so Nora’s music passed from mouth to mouth. Again and again, her tune found another throat.

The madness spread…

And Nora swayed as she watched it, even as it burned her up from the inside. She was the first to die — consumed by her own fire, with no room left for food or sleep.

She wandered through Atlanta, spreading her music until the last note left her lips.