The cold pain exuded by the unfortunate presences that surrounded me extinguished the warmth of a white-lit room. Unlike everyone else, my purpose in this nest of laments was abnormal, an island of calm in the midst of a sea of suffering. Because while I was watching the patients of the busy hospital waiting room, that were yearning to end their afflictions as quickly as possible, I was just waiting for my turn to have a blood exam for the third and final time. However, unlike the two previous occasions whose appointment hour had been the same, yesterday I received a message that specified that the appointment hour had been modified. Therefore, my exam would start at 9:00 a.m. instead of the usual 8:00 a.m.
I watched the marked hour in my cellphone. It was 09:04 a.m. and I still was not been attended.
A near voice captured my attention.
“Excuse me sir, would you let me pass, please?”
“…”
“Sir?”
At some meters of distance, a man was trying to pass through a seating row, but another man that was stretching his feet on the ground from his seat had interrupted his path. It looked like the sitting man was sleeping, but sounds were not able to wake him up.
Perhaps he was deaf. Sensing this, the man that was trying to advance decided to shake the sleeping man with the purpose of wake him up.
“… Hnn? ¡Ah! Excuse me,” said the sleeping man when he woke up while clearing the path.
“It’s okay, thanks,” politely answered the man that was trying to advance.
“[Alan Aubel…]”
When the man was able to pass through de row of seats, I turned my attention to the intercom that was calling my name, and signaling my turn to be attended. Standing up from my seat, I walked through the seats aligned to my left. I had to go to a standing nurse at some meters of distance. That nurse would guide me to the room in which I would be attended.
At half way, before I finished passing through the seat row, the strong steps of a person suffocated the idle talks and laments that filled the waiting room. They came from the men’s toilets.
I looked curiously towards the men’s toilets as I finished passing through the last seat. A medic ran away with fear from the men’s toilets. We crossed ways at a couple meters away while I was walking through the waiting room. When the man looked me, came to a complete stop. His panic expression deepened, my face reflected in his eyes wide open.
“How?” screamed the man, terrified.
His trembling hand slightly pointed me. His face showed a terror that only a demon that abandon the underworld to claim his soul would cause. I looked at him confused. I turned my gaze towards the men’s toilets, but there were nothing strange. Not at the entrance at least. The inside was not visible.
Before I could turn my attention back to the man again, he passed me quickly and left the hospital. I stopped a second looking the hospital exit through which the medic had disappeared.
My gaze shifted to a couple of people waiting for their turn in their seats. Witnessing the situation, they shared my confusion. Thinking that I shouldn’t make this people wait more, I resumed my path and went to the nurse that was waiting me. She was also confused.
“Good morning, I’m Alan Aubel.” I greeted the nurse while I was approaching her.
“… Ah, good morning. Follow me.”
Leaving her daze back, she greeted me back and led me to a little room located at some steps of distance, near the waiting room. The new room was a little office with a desk at the background and some shelves on the sides. When I entered, I sat down in front of the desk and leaned my backpack on the back of the seat as the nurse sat at the other side of the desk, in front of me.
Before the nurse could talk, another nurse entered the room, looking at a folder she was holding in her hands.
“Sarah, René needs you in his office,” the new nurse said.
“But…” The nurse Sarah, who was sitting in front of me, was interrupted.
“It’s okay. You have to do a blood extraction, right? I can take care of this.”
“Okay. I leave it in your hands.”
The new nurse took the place of the nurse called Sarah and left the folder on the desk as she sat down. She had a surgical mask, tied her hair in a ponytail, and for some reason, she was wearing sunglasses over her forehead.
“…!”
When I saw the eyes of the girl sitting in front of me, I gasped. She had brown eyes, but a pale blue light was being emitted from within her pupils. It was as if that light emanating from within her eyes was a physical manifestation of her own soul.
The otherworldly nature of those eyes and the intensity of that light made me understand that before my eyes were deployed the existential remnants of the origin of the universe. An unknowable event that could be recorded in human history only through those eyes.
Seeing my reaction, the girl lowered her sunglasses that she had over her forehead and covered her eyes with them. I felt that I had seen those eyes before, but since her surgical mask covered the face of the nurse, I couldn’t recognize her.
While I was paralyzed by this strange situation, the nurse talked.
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“Can you extend your arm, please?”
“… Yes.” In an almost shock state, I did what she asked out of reflex.
When I rested my left forearm on the table, the nurse took a rubber band from one of the drawers of her desk. She got up from her seat, approached me, and used it as a tourniquet on my upper left arm to accumulate as much blood amount as possible in the vein she would use for the extraction.
Then, she sat down in front of me and disinfected the area of my left elbow joint with alcohol to prevent an infection of the extracted blood and the wound resulting from the subsequent puncture. After that, she inserted a needle into the disinfected area and extracted a small amount of blood. Finally, she removed the needle and covered the wound with a piece of gauze.
Knowing the procedure, I applied pressure to the wound with my right hand as the nurse approached me again, removed the tourniquet, and transferred the extracted blood into a sample tube with red cap.
When she finished, the nurse sat down and, raising her right hand, placed her index and middle fingers on her right ear before speaking.
“Okay. We’re done.” She removed her hand from her ear. “The results of the exam should be available at the end of the day at the latest.” After saying that, she stood up and watched the exit of the room.
I stood up from my seat and grabbed my backpack, preparing to go back home. While I was doing that, I could hear people talking in shock outside the room and, when I looked towards the exit, my heart skipped a beat in surprise.
A man in a military uniform stood there, looking at the people in the waiting room. At first glance, he looked like a normal man, but when I looked at his face, my eyes caught an impossible image. The soldier’s face… was a silver skull. It wasn’t a mask, but rather, it was as if all the skin on his face had been consumed to the point of leaving his skull bare and then coated in a thin, polished layer of mercury. Protection military glasses covered his eyes, so it was impossible to tell if his entire face had been bereft of every fiber of skin and flesh.
The moment the soldier focused his attention on me, he stopped moving. After a few seconds, he raised a gun he had in his hand and fired three times to the ceiling, pausing for two seconds between each shot. When he fired a second time, a few terrified people ran out of the room, and after a few moments, dozens more followed them, leaving the waiting room empty in less than a minute.
When I tried to leave the room, I felt a hand resting on my right shoulder.
“Calm down. Don’t move,” the nurse said before calmly leaving the room and heading towards the soldier.
I sat back down in my seat with an almost imperceptible tremor running through my body, caused by fear.
"We're out of time," said quickly the soldier as the nurse stopped beside him.
"It doesn't matter, concentrate on what you have to do," replied the nurse, dismissing his protest.
The soldier's voice was unnaturally deep. An unusual sound that, regardless of the length of the vocal cords, no human would be able to emit.
The words he said were not coming out from his mouth, since he had no lips or cheeks to pronounce them through, but were emitted from somewhere else. I knew this from the sound that accompanied his voice, which gave the illusion that he was speaking through something similar to a gas mask, even though he wasn't wearing none.
I could understand that what I was hearing was the artificial voice of a monster.
A demonic appearance. A monstrous voice. Those data were processed by my brain as surreal information, which was materialized into a suffocating terror capable of draining the life from braves, causing that the resulting nausea, which tried to expel it, would convince me that I was not actually in the presence of a real human.
“Here. You need to load this blood before starting the process…,” the nurse said as she handed the soldier the tube containing the blood she had extracted from my arm. She took another tube of blood from her pocket and handed it to the soldier. “Also, remember to combine this other blood with yours. You only have 10 seconds.”
The soldier received both blood samples and placed the container containing my blood into a small slot extending down to his left forearm, which was coupled to a circular crystalline blue device tied to his wrist, which emitted a bright blue, misty light. The device had other two slots extending on either sides of his wrist, forming a cross with the first slot in which he placed my blood. From those two slots, he used one more to place the other vial of blood that the nurse handed him. After a few seconds, the soldier pulled a syringe out of one of his equipment pockets and held it in his right hand.
"I'm ready," the soldier said as he turned his head toward the nurse.
“Skull Paladin Zero, execute the Extinction Protocol,” the nurse responded.
“Accept,” the soldier said, looking away from the nurse and turning his head to look at me. However, just a heartbeat after he had answered, he froze and looked back at the nurse. Something unexpected had apparently happened, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
"Hurry," the nurse said after seeing that the soldier didn’t move.
The soldier reacted and stabbed his left shoulder with the syringe he was holding in his right hand to extract some of his own blood. He then injected the blood he had just extracted into the second tube sample, which he placed in the second slot of the circular device that was tied to his left wrist.
A few seconds later, a black smoke wrapped in red sparks was expelled from a device located on the soldier's back and spread throughout the room rapidly.
The smoke spread to the room where I was, just a few meters away from the soldier and the nurse. I covered my nose and mouth with my hands, but I ended up inhaling the black smoke anyway.
“Cough… cough.”
“Aaaaaargh!"
While my body tried to cough out the strange smoke, I heard a heart-wrenching scream coming from the waiting room. It was a man writhing in pain in his seat as his body expelled small fragments of burning embers. It was the same man I saw before entering the room.
It’s possible that the deaf man might have been sleeping while all this was happening, I thought.
“No… Why?... Shoot him.”
When the nurse said that, the world lost its sound due to the ringing in my ears, which was generated by the shock of the situation that unfolded before my eyes.
Hearing the nurse, the soldier drew his gun, pointed it at the screaming man and shot him in the head. The severity of the situation created a single thought in my mind.
I have to get out of here.
Without even processing the thought, I ran out of the room with all my might while trying to cover my body, considering the possibility that the soldier might shoot me at some point. Due to panic, I headed inside the hospital instead of running towards the exit that was near the waiting room. Realizing that I was getting deeper and deeper into the hospital, I decided to find a place to hide.
While the scene of the man being executed played repeatedly in my mind, my perception of time was ripped away from the world. Seconds seemed to be consumed at such a fast rate, that the original duration of each one became a blink. But at the same time at such a slow rate, that the entire history of humanity could very well have been told in just one of them.
I could feel my labored breathing and my erratic heartbeat as external factors to my body, traitors seeking to escape my control, only to take the form of macabre prayers directed to fate, that were fervently imploring to hasten the arrival of my death.
Even though my consciousness had been cut off from reality, all I could understand was that the longing for salvation was slowly being consumed by the immutable certainty of a premature end.
image [https://i.imgur.com/I4byNUw.jpeg]