Lunar Virus ✔️

Chapter Nine: Elie

Elie's POV:
Hands. Shaking. Shaking hands that weren’t mine at all. Blue corded veins snaked between burly knuckles. Fingers, short and strong, were twitching over the slim, glowing keys of a keyboard in a room shrouded in blackness. Staring back at me on the smudged computer screen was the face of a man. A desperate man. The light from the keyboard glinted off his glasses and off of tiny beads of sweat forming at the man’s graying hairline. It takes a moment for me to realize, but when I do, it hits hard. This is the man that had laid dead on the floor of the bathroom. This is Mr. Robin Kowalski. And I, Eliezer Galper, am currently sporting this man’s face.

    The hands. The hands which belonged to Mr. Robin Kowalski, reach shakily towards the computer’s mouse, and after some hesitation, moves it side to side. Kowalski startles as light from the screen suddenly floods the room and he quickly turns the brightness on the screen down to the lowest setting. The password is typed in rapidly and the enter key hit with a little too much force. As he waits for the computer to log in, his left hand nervously reaches towards the right and starts to twist an all-too-tight ring off and onto his ring finger. With growing horror, I realize that while I can feel this happening, as if it were my own hands, I can’t control the movements. It was like I was trapped in Kowalski’s body. A body, might I add, that should have been long dead.

Quentin: He is dead, moron.

Me: What’s happening?

Quentin: Going to that morgue was a bad idea, kid. I’d told you that Kowalski was infected, right? Well, what I forgot to tell you, is that whenever you get near one of the infected, it gets harder for me to keep the virus you’ve been infected with, in control. Which means that while I’m focused on keeping you safe from the virus, I can’t focus on keeping visions at bay.

Me: So . . . that’s why I was feeling odd in the morgue?

Quentin: Well, duh. And that’s why this is happening. It’s the virus’ way of communicating that their host is dead. What you’re seeing now is everything this man did in the hours after he was infected. You’re seeing this man’s last hours.

    Quentin's presence fades away, until all I’m left with is a crushing sense of fear. Not me fear, but Kowalski’s. I refocus my attention to the screen and see that Kowalski has gotten into the database that records each group’s performance on the simulators. He clicks on the first one; one that has my name, along with Elodie’s and Sheila’s on the top. The screen immediately displays every simulation the each of us had participated in, including one simulation that we hadn’t completed yet. It was the one we were supposed to do next. He clicks on it and hits a few keys making long lines of code take over the screen. He frantically skims over all of it and starts changing it. He goes back and forth between other flies quickly copy and pasting bits of code in, and it take me a moment to figure out just what exactly he’s doing. He’s changing the simulation that Elodie, Sheila and I are supposed to take soon. It was a hint. He was changing the simulation, altering it to help give us a clue on as to what was happening. At least I hope that’s what he was doing.

    With each passing minute, the pulsing in his chest gets faster, more frenzied, and his breathing gets more labored, his hands start shaking to the point where he’s having trouble typing in the right thing. All the while, a clock is ticking in the background. Tick, tick, tick. Each second a second closer to his death. Fear strangles him in the worst ways possible. He knows he’s doing something wrong, and each time he hears footsteps coming close to the door, his stomach drops as if lined with a thousand strands of rock-hard ice.

    The tension in his body dissipates as he enters the last letter into the code. After saving the program and logging out, he wipes the beads of sweat off from his forehead with a already-soiled handkerchief and exits out of the room. He rushes down the halls, very clearly in a hurry, but otherwise, rather calm looking. As he strides down the hall, he notices a rather confused looking girl walking towards him. He’s almost passed her, when she stops him. The girl is naturally tan, with dark hair, hazel eyes, and a couple freckles dotting the bridge on her nose. It’s Elodie. Seeing her here, even if it was not real, was comforting. Something familiar to grasp onto in the setting of the last hours of a man’s life. I wanted to reach out and grab her hand. Not with Kowalski’s hand, but mine.

    “Hey, what’s going on here? We got a call saying there was trouble,” she inquires.

    In a surprisingly smooth voice, that shows not one bit of nerves, Kowalski answers, “What are you doing here? Training doesn’t usually start this early.”

    Elodie blinks and squints her eyes in confusion, “What do you mean ‘this early’?”

    “It’s three in the effing morning.” Kowalski answers. He’s twisting his ring around his finger almost obsessively, to the point where the skin underneath starts itching in discomfort. The farther into the exchange Kowalski goes, the more fidgety he seems to get. Elodie ask a woman passing by for the time, and Kowalski takes the opportunity to make his escape. The more he walks the more blank he seems to get. He’s stopped fiddling with his ring and in that moment I feel a wave, a symphony of pure emotion rush through me, like the notes on a piano painted with colors of the rainbow. It lands on the explosively light feeling of pure ecstasy and the feeling on Kowalski’s heart beating is suddenly mine. The ruggedness of his fingers, the strength in it’s tips, is all mine. I’m in control and I am going to kill him. He was my host, my step into the future. And so, he would die.

    Walking with the power given to me by this human’s legs I go towards a cavity in the wall identified as empty. The feeling of control is bliss, is euphoria, is rapture, is suffocating to no end. And end it I would. End it I had to. For the end justifies the means and in the end it would be all worth it. Positioning the head so that it would hit the porcelain jutting out of the wall I let the human fall. I let it fall and die.

Victim 1: terminated.

***

Author's Note:

Yes, I know, quite confusing. Don' worry, it will make sense in time 😉

Also, I have a question to ask all you lovely readers: should I add a romantic subplot? I wasn't sure at first, but now I'm warming up to the idea.

Let me know what you think! Be sure to comment and vote!

❤️❤️ Bye!