He didn’t know what to do. The specimen had somehow escaped. But how was this so? It had no body, so someone had to have grabbed it, but who? As Simon pondered this, he slowly backed up before he fled the observation room, a room he had come to know these past few weeks, that place he spent his days, the place where his fondness for Bailey grew before it was cruelly pulled away from him. Dashing down the dreary hall, the same hall he often walked along, towards where he knew a late night guard was standing on duty. He had to get help before the person who had taken the hand returned. He couldn’t hear anything around him, not even his own footsteps, just the roar of blood to his ears, a constant thumping sound in his head. Before he could get to the guard’s post, he felt the cold fingers of a burly man’s hand clasp around his neck. Feeling his airflow being cut off, he stopped short and tried to knock back his assailant with a mighty kick to make them let his windpipe go. But his foot met no mass, just the empty air behind him. To his horror, it was then he realized, there was no person, but the hand itself! As his foot fell to the ground once more, he made a terrible realization: they had underestimated how the specimen had worked, that’s why Bailey had been killed, and why he was now too. By the very same hand he had been observing these past few weeks, the same one that had killed his dear friend, was now killing him the same way. Reaching for the fingers, he pulled with all his might, trying to break free from its otherworldly grip. He tried to shout, but all that came out were strangled cries that would be heard by no one. With each tug, the hand increased its grip, its cold grasp cutting off his air more and more. Before he could do anything else, he felt his body fall to the floor, the outskirts of his vision blurring and fading to black, the black of unconsciousness, the black of death. His head resting on the white tile floor he often walked on, his gaze set to the forest green of the walls he’d come to know. The only light was the light above where his body lay, where his grip on the hand’s bulky fingers loosened and loosened as his world narrowed, narrowing more and more each second as it left him. With his grip fading, along with his world, he knew this was the end. This was where he dies, in this small corridor, alone, just like his coworkers before him had, like his friends had, just like Bailey had. Alone, and powerless to change their fate. In this moment, he couldn’t help but wonder, what would have happened if he wasn’t framed that day? Would he have met his end like this? Or, perhaps, he would’ve met his end in a different way? With his conscious fading, he uttered his final words;