I wondered if I was still inside the machine and this was all a hallucination induced by the process. The purplish hue coloring every surface was a point for that theory. Then again, the bone pile at my feet looked startlingly real.

  There was also the smell of ozone and chemical solutions coming from the overturned revitalization machine leaking who knows what. I didn't have a lot of family history of mental illness, if you don't count an aunt who was a hippie, so I wasn't sure if it was possible to hallucinate smell. I was leaning towards no.

  The sounds felt pretty real too. Now that the initial shock of what just happened was wearing off, I was realizing that the din in my ears was actually a cacophony of car horns streaming through the window.

  I looked out again. The distant vortex was still there, swirling. And on the roads below, the traffic came to an abrupt stop. There were multiple collisions and pile-ups. All that produced a lot of smoke that added another acrid smell to my "not-hallucination" column.

  In a situation like this, you'd expect to see people running around, screaming, documenting the events with their phones. There weren't any, at least none that I could see.

  A loud, guttural rumble turned my head to the left. At first I wasn't certain what I was looking at, like my brain refused to process that particular assemblage of photons. Then I saw it.

  A giant beast waddled down the street on all fours, powerful claws leaving deep furrows in the asphalt. It vaguely resembled a colossal ape encased in a hard carapace. The creature was brownish in color and had a leonine head. Yet the most notable thing about it was the fact that even on all fours, the top of its shaggy head reached the fifth floor.

  This was too weird. I stepped away from the window and decided to try my luck in the rest of the clinic. With my hand frozen on the doorknob, I felt a new sense of kinship with many a Lovecraftian protagonist who, upon discovering some cosmic horror, went mad or straight-up French-kissed a revolver.

  I was afraid to find out what lurked beyond the deceptive safety of a closed door. And then it hit me. My old philosophy I so nearly abandoned by coming to this clinic. Eternal life was for suckers.

  The bitter part of me growled in agreement. I've always blamed the Sensates for not arriving in time to save Mary. And while I had no idea how or why, I had a feeling they were to blame for what was happening now. I was going to make them pay. To do that, I needed to forge ahead.

  I left the room with renewed vigor and brandishing my cane, I left the room. The hallway was deserted.

  "Anyone here?" I called out to no response.

  I wasn't sure what I expected would happen. A part of me wanted to pass through the doorframe and step back into normalcy, a place without animated skeletons, giant beasts, or a purple tint on every surface. The rest of me was readied for an assault from unspeakable horrors. Getting nothing was not on the list.

  The sudden sound of a door slamming shut determined where I headed next. It took me two or three steps to realize I was going towards the noise, not running away from it. Guess no wizzard hat for me.

  Turning a corner, I was back in the waiting area. I immediately saw Quint there. The lawyer was pressing his back to the door of the administrative wing and holding onto the jamb on both sides with whitened fingers. His face was contorted into a mad grimace and pale as a sheet.

  He jerked his head in my direction and met me with an unblinking gaze.

  "Are you real?" he stammered. Whatever ordeal he'd gone through drowned out his Southern accent.

  "I can't be sure of anything right now, amigo." I took a few measured steps in Quint's direction. "What got you so spooked?"

  "Call me a darn fool, but as I live and breathe, I've gone and seen myself a demon," Quint said, falling back to his drawl.

  "Consider your Mensa status safe. I had a skeleton. Rattling bones and all."

  "The dead are walking the Earth too?" Quint whispered. His pupils, previously dilated beyond those of a crack user who'd just won the lottery, were returning to a more reasonable size. "How'd you manage to survive, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "I had to bash it good. It was a close one. Don't blame you one bit for getting out of dodge."

  "Bash it? Well ain't you casual about the end of times."

  "I know, right?" I nodded at Quint. "Caught me off guard too. Must be a hidden benefit of revitalization. Like it fortified my mind together with my body." I thought it best to sidestep my recent revelation that made me more determined than apprehensive about the madness going on around us.

  Quint cocked his head at me. "Do tell if I'm being presumptuous, but you don't look revitalized to me."

  "Whatever this is," I tried indicating the purple mist with my eyes, "it happened during my procedure. It was cut short before we got to the cosmetic part. One moment I'm peeking down the cleavage of a hot nurse, the next she's all bone, trying to eviscerate me with her bare knuckles."

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "Hold your horses, you done gone and killed her?"

  "Are we about to have a debate on whether you can kill something that's already dead? Because trust me, counselor, she was no nurse anymore by the time I cracked her skull."

  "I guess you have a point," Quint said without too much conviction.

  "What about your demon? How'd that go?"

  "How could it go? I booked it. It was a similar start to yours. I was presenting my case for why this place had to be shut down. The director was telling me how that wasn't happening. Then all of a sudden he was all wrapped up in this here pink fog. When the fog cleared, instead of the man there was a demon."

  "You sure it was a demon?"

  "Tall, big horns, cloven hooves, stinks so much they'd turn the sonovabitch away at an outhouse. That's about as clear as a demon could be. There was no bashing that hellspawn."

  "And it let you go?" I asked, thinking back to that huge monstrosity I saw outside.

  "Far as I can tell," Quint said, turning to look at the door he was still clinging to.

  Right as he did, the door, preceded by Quint, flew off its hinges with a loud crack. Splintered wood mixed with a cloud of dust and a pained moan from Quint, of whom only his arms were now sticking out from under the broken door.

  Standing in the busted doorframe was Quint's demon. Right away I could tell it was no demon, but that didn't make the encounter any less disturbing.

  Looming at about seven feet tall, the humanoid monster was bulky and muscular. His wooly legs did end in hooves, and he did have horns. Only those were bull horns on a bull's head.

  "Dios mio, a minotaur," I swore as the beast charged with a furious roar.

  I tried to avoid the charge with a sideways leap. It saved me from being gored by the beast's horns, but in that narrow hallway, there wasn't enough room to then not get clotheslined by his outstretched arm.

  The limb hit me like an oversized baseball bat. The impact combined with my own momentum to splat me against the nearest wall, then send me into an uncontrollable tumble.

  When I regained my sense of direction, I was on the floor. Everything hurt. And in the lower left part of my field of vision there now was a partially-depleted red bar. The numbers 9/12 were overlaid on top of it. Seeing a lone white number was one thing. A fluke of an afflicted mind. This bar was clear and persistent. I was never one to disregard the evidence of my own eyes. And that meant accepting there were now damage indicators and health bars in the world.

  As I was processing that, I got to thinking how hard I must've clobbered the skeletal nurse to hit her for what I could only surmise was 9 damage. Getting hit for 3 felt like a truck had run over me.

  That thought was closely followed by another. If I could deal 9 damage in one hit, that thing that was now turning around and preparing for another charge from the far end of the hallway was clearly stronger. A direct hit could easily finish me off.

  I jumped up, a move that earlier that day would've been inconceivable. And even if I pulled it off, it would be guaranteed to tweak or pull something or other.

  My hurried attempts to find anything to help me fight the minotaur only revealed promotional diagrams and benches by the walls. Had I been Jackie Chan, the undisputed environmental martial arts master, the minotaur wouldn't have stood a chance with all those benches around. Since I wasn't, I was getting progressively more fucked with every floor-cracking step the beast took.

  I wondered how much vigor the minotaur had in him. As I did, a red bar, similar to the one now sitting in my peripheral vision but surrounded by an ornate frame of vines, appeared over the minotaur's head. It was full and had 48/48 in it.

  I backpedaled to the very end of the hallway. My back was pressed to a wall and the minotaur was fast approaching.

  These clinics, a thought occurred to me, were constructed on a rush order. Aliens or not, human contractors were never known not to cut corners, especially when working on a tight schedule. I tapped the wall behind me with my knuckles, getting back the hollow sound no proper load-bearing wall should produce.

  In what I felt was a colossally stupid move even as I was making it, I took a page out of every frustrated teenager's book and punched the wall. My hand responded to such mistreatment with a piercing jolt of pain. It was reflected on my health bar with a slight move to the left and an update to the number indicator, now showing 8/12.

  Unlike when teenagers did it, the wall spiderwebbed in tiny little cracks. I didn't have much time to appreciate my handiwork. The minotaur was upon me. All I could do was duck under the horns and send myself further down the hallway. Inertia took care of the rest.

  My punch weakened the wall enough so that when the beast collided with it at full speed, the shoddy mortar work crumbled around him. I could swear no one had actually said it, but in my head I still heard the, "Oh yeah," as the minotaur burst through the wall, falling out of the clinic and onto the street below.

  Picking myself up, I approached the fresh hole in the wall. The minotaur was there, dazed and twitching among a pile of rubble. Focusing on the man-bull figure, I made that viney health bar appeared again. It was almost depleted, currently showing 7/48.

  I went to help Quint. Remembering how easy it was for the minotaur to crash through the door was what gave me the idea to give the beast the Kool-Aid Man treatment. So in a way, Quint suffered for science.

  And suffer he did. The lawyer's clothes were dirty and torn in several places. He stood unsteadily, using me for support. His face was all caked in dust, with a single streak of blood streaming down from his brow.

  For whatever reason, nothing I did brought up Quint's health bar. During my attempts I figured out how to make mine appear and disappear. His wouldn't show up no matter what.

  "Well slap my ass and call me pretty," Quint said after peeking through the broken wall. "I take back my earlier assessment. Whatever these hellish creatures are, we can beat them."

  "Thanks, but we're not safe yet," I said.

  "How do you figure?"

  "That demon of yours is not out for the count."

  "Looks pretty out of it to me."

  "He still has seven HP. And injured or not, I don't want to be gored by those horns."

  I caught Quint squinting at me. The lawyer even moved away a step to resume standing on his own two feet.

  "Seven heych-pee," Quint enunciated the words. "Guess you've gotten an even bigger bump on the noggin than I did, partner. You're talking nonsense."

  Now was my turn to squint. "Wait," I said. "You don't see it? When you got hit, you didn't get a health bar?" I looked down at the minotaur again, confirming his health status. "And when you focus on Buffalo Bill there, you don't see his numbers?"

  Quint's raised eyebrows were the only answer I needed.

  "Well, shit."

  "I guess we ought to go find you some help," Quint said. "And while we're at it, I wouldn't mind getting looked at by a sawbones myself," he added, carefully touching his temple.

  "Help? Far as I can tell, the two of us are the only people here."

  Quint swiveled his head, listening to any signs of human activity. "Know what, you're right. In that case, what do you say we skedaddle? Whichever of us is right about that feller over yonder," he pointed his chin at the minotaur, "I'll feel much safer without him around."

  Billy Joel Facts - Chapter 3: