A rich socialite named Yossarian had invited many of his friends to a dinner party at his enormous lakeside house in California. The walls of his house were plastered with posters detailing the function of several hundred kinds of forks and knives (curly forks and shrimp knives being just a few) and pictures of his gentrificated homeland.

    An hour before the arrival of his guests, Yossarian was brushing his teeth for the fifteenth time that day when he realised that in his rush to sort all the knives, he forgot the main course! If he didn’t find something soon, he would become the laughing stock of his gentleman’s club. He could not possibly bear the burden of occasionally getting looks from his fellow socialites in between sips of thirty-year-old wine!

    In his fridge he did not have any meat or eggs, as he had posed as a vegan during his previous party for the sole purpose of acting smug in front of his carnivorous houseguests. The nearest cash and carry was thirty miles away, and even then he couldn’t serve his guests anything short of the Eucharist! A gentleman weaker than he would have given up right there and now, but Yossarian was determined. He would find meat in his own house.

Yossarian had just descended into his dank, decrepit cellar when, suddenly, a sliver of grey passed the corner of his eye.

    He picked up a cocktail skewer that had been lying on the floor.
    The sliver of grey returned. He quickly stabbed at it with his cocktail stick to no avail.

    It was then that Yossarian noticed wet animal footprints on the ground. He followed their tracks and found that they went in a circle. He squatted in a dark corner near the circle and waited.

    The sliver returned, and he took another stab at it. The skewer was covered in blood. Yossarian had brained an enormous rat.

    Now all I have to do, he figured, was prepare the rat.

    He preheated the oven to 400 degrees and inserted the headless rat corpse. After half an hour, its fur had fallen off and the skin had turned golden-brown. The savoury, succulent rat had been turned into a delectable cooked morsel the likes of which had never been seen before.

    Now was the time for seasoning. Yossarian opened up his cabinet to find an array of spices. The smells of savory, saffron, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and countless salts and peppers flew through the air. He put just enough spice on the rat to mask its smell.

    15 minutes later, his guests arrived. He greeted them properly, then served to them a hors d’oeuvres that nobody else knew was made of rat feet. When the main course arrived, he told them that it was an awfully fat chicken. It certainly tasted like chicken.

And so started the greatest Plague outbreak in four hundred years.
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END OF CDC CASE FILE #142684