The plague had touched everywhere. It had fallen hardest in urban areas, where natural human congestion allowed easy transmission from host to host. A scant five percent of the population was completely immune to the virus. Those with strong resistance would show only minor, flu-like symptoms for several days until they entered the final stage of the disease. Those who were especially susceptible would, upon infection, immediately begin flatulating wildly and then explode in a shower of internal organs.

The nation's leaders, speaking from a bunker some 2,000 feet below Colorado, decried the plague as the greatest human disaster of all time, and an affront to dignity in general. The president's final words broadcast by radio to the panicked population were, "With courage, we will -- uh oh," followed by a machine-gun rattle of flatulance and a loud popping sound.

Within a week, the frequent, gruesome-yet-satisfying person-explosion noises had died down to a reasonable level, and the survivors declared the world just about as messy and smelly as it was ever likely to get. How wrong they were!

Only one night into the operation the survivors had dubbed "The Grand Pooper-Scooping," the scattered, not-at-all-tidy human remains began undergoing a strange metamorphosis, as the viruses inside the cells -- still kicking, it turns out -- started mutating their liberated internal organs into terrible, acid-spewing monsters which, granted, still looked a lot like the internal organs from which they evolved.

As the survivors fell into an uneasy sleep, the organ creatures crept forth (more of a hop, actually) into the survivors' camp, which had been somewhat hygenic until that point. A young man taking a midnight stroll was the first to spot them, shortly before being absorbed and subsequently dissolved by an animated stomach.

His dying screams alerted the populace, who fought a terrible, and thoroughly grossed-out battle against the advancing organs. Men fell to rampaging pancreas and women were torn to pieces by rabid appendixes (appendices, possibly). In a horrific turn of events, the wise leader of the survivors was himself strangled by a liberated human intestine (doubly ironic, as the leader had only a month before undergone a colostomy).

Faced with the very real possibility of human extinction, the survivors formulated a desperate plan -- they would weaken and kill the homicidal internal organs through the only surefire method thereof -- fast living.

In short order, wild parties were planned and thrown. The organs, irresistably drawn thereto, found themselves suddenly assaulted with tobacco smoke, alcohol, saturated fats, illicit substances, and the seductive wiles of women of ill-repute. The partying was relentless, the bass pumping dangerously, and the DJ threatening more than once to tear the roof off the place. The organs began to fall ill, unable to resist their natural urges to have just one more slice of pizza, to take part in fraternity drinking games.

Within a fortnight, the organs began to die. A small number, sensing their imminent doom, made a break for the exit but were successfully rerouted into a college dormitory room, where they died muttering something about "yellow cats," "moving patterns," and a great idea for a band. By the end of the week, the organs were all dead. The earth was narrowly spared extinction, to be fashioned anew in the image of the brave, partied-out survivors, all of whom called in sick the next morning.

The End.

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