No matter what they did, it didn’t stop. Throughout the fall of 2014 and into the winter, it set upon the village. The children launched the biggest wave of sickness both the town and the village had ever seen. According to Dr. Prytyka, more than 60 people fell ill over the next two months. Though the initial drunk-like symptoms were always the same, the illness affected everyone differently.

There was the truck driver who got sick while fishing and nearly fell into the once-pristine Ishim River. He crawled to his car and drove home, and his granddaughter watched as he slammed into the driveway and broke his headlight in the process. There was the school gym teacher who got sick at her neighbor’s house and sprained her neck. There was the village veterinarian, who finished castrating 40 pigs before people realized he had been sick the whole time. One man got sick on his motorcycle. No one understood how he managed to get back in one piece. There was the town dance instructor, the former ballerina who tried to dance Swan Lake and The Nutcracker while sick. There was the former engineer, an amputee, who had been inside all winter, but came out to the balcony to birdwatch in the spring and was sick in minutes. There were two pregnant women. There was the mechanic who had been walking to work when he got the illness, slipped on ice, and broke his back. There was the man who came to visit his mother-in-law, who’d been in town only a few hours when he got sick.

Then there was the cat, who everyone thought was sick, until the owner admitted she had fed it vodka. That didn’t bother people as much as when the cow died. Everyone was so panicked about their livestock, Acting Mayor Asel Sadvakasova commissioned a public autopsy by experts imported from Esil and publicized the results to prove the cow had died of natural causes.

The sickness didn’t discriminate. The richest man in Kalachi fell asleep in his bed and woke up in the hospital in Astana — he’d been flown there by a charter plane and didn’t remember it. There was Mayor Savakasova, who, right before she fell sick, thought, This can’t be happening to me. The villagers called each other in the mornings to see if everyone had woken up. Doctors and nurses worked extra shifts around public holiday celebrations, when the sickness seemed to erupt in full force. The government held meetings about voluntary resettlement. They reached out to nearby businesses and mayors to find the villagers jobs and housing by using a corporate responsibility schema. The government promised to prioritize families with children. In November, Governor Kulagin announced the government would provide 2 billion tenge ($10.6 million) for the resettlement of Kalachi, but no definitive answer of what was happening came.

When the sickness struck in late December, an additional symptom was added: People who got sick started hiccuping while in the drunk-like phase. Was the sickness changing? Was it morphing into something else? What would happen next?