Yellow rain fever

Dear Survivor- If you're reading this, I'm probably dead. It's for the best. You see, about four or five days ago, a storm rolled in. Now, this in and of itself isn't anything strange. The clouds and the rain though, they had a yellow tint to them. It smelled weird and tasted funny too, none of us could really nail down what it tasted like, and all we knew is that it was some sort of chemical or other. Now, the important thing to know is that we're a small Hoosier farming community, maybe 1,500 or so people, so unless some radical has a grudge against corn and soybeans, I doubt it was a terrorist attack. Anyway, a few hours after that weird rainstorm started, people started getting violently sick. The ones affected couldn't stop throwing up, there were reports of extreme nausea and even an onset of what they thought was tuberculosis, because the ones diagnosed had a bloody and agonizing cough. Authorities noticed a trend almost immediately after people started getting sick, in that it seemed only fairly weak people got ill. The sick, old, and young were the only ones who got sick with those violent symptoms. It retrospect though, they got the easy way out. People that were diagnosed with the illness, dubbed the Yellow Rain Fever, died just hours after getting sick. Some of the victims' immune systems who were already sick just couldn't handle the increased fever and vomiting, some were simply too weak to handle much of a sickness in the first place, like the old and the very young, and some actually died of blood loss due to the consumption like cough. But they all died shortly after getting ill. When people were nearing death, they started hallucinating, or what we thought were hallucinations at the time. They all saw these, dark, shadowy humanoid figures with glowing yellow eyes, lurking in dark corners or just inside unlit rooms. There were only three or four accounts of these figures, due to the fact that almost no one could speak in their final moments of the sickness. It was enough though, people with the same disease sharing the same hallucinations, it made almost everyone extremely paranoid, as common or shared hallucinations, they reasoned, meant a type of drug or chemical. After the reports came in of these shared hallucinations, the most paranoid of our population started barricading themselves in their homes. Said they were going to wait out the storm, literally and figuratively. When most of the initial victims had passed, we started seeing fairly normal people getting extremely sick. Healthy, middle aged people getting the same symptoms, and worse, some of the victims actually faced necrosis before their deaths. The second wave of people who were sick didn't even make two hours. Same as before, there were several reports of people seeing those black, shadowy figures with the glowing yellow eyes, waiting in corners or dark rooms. Our small town was devastated at this point; we had lost two or three hundred people by now. And I was absolutely stricken with grief when my dear wife Muriel, may God rest her soul, was diagnosed with the Fever. By the time we had lost another 100 people, and the disease was announced to be contagious, we were quarantined by the CDC, and government agents were coming in to check out the town decked out in air-tight radiation suits, said they were trying to find the cause of the storm. Not even an hour after the agents came in, they evacuated. The thing is though; there was no story about this on the news. I don't know what those CDC guys did, but apparently no one was able to contact the media. There was a mention of a flu epidemic in our town, and that's it. My friend, Mark, came over to my house almost immediately after the report on the news aired. 'A flu epidemic?' He yelled, absolutely enraged. 'We've lost almost five-hundred people to this bastardized mix of symptoms from tuberculosis and food poisoning, and they say it's the damn flu?' I tried to get him to calm down, but he wouldn't have it. He said he was going to go get out of town, to try and contact the news, something,