I Can See the Expiry Date of Everything

Chapter 3

The silence in the alleyway was absolute, a void that seemed to swallow the ambient roar of the city. Kevin stood frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The man in the charcoal coat—the man with no numbers, no future, no expiration—remained perfectly still, his presence an anomaly that defied the new, terrifying laws of Kevin’s reality.

"I asked you a question," Kevin shouted, his voice cracking with a mixture of terror and defiance. "Who are you?"

The stranger offered a thin, enigmatic smile that didn't reach his eyes. Before he could answer, the distant, rhythmic wail of sirens grew louder. The spell of the alleyway shattered. Kevin didn't wait for a confrontation. He snatched Megan’s wrist, pulling her toward the opposite end of the passage.

"Run," he hissed.

"Kevin, wait!" Megan cried out, stumbling over a discarded pallet. "That guy—he didn't have anything on his head. What is going on?"

"I don't know!" Kevin yelled, his feet pounding against the slick concrete. "I don't know, but we have to get to Daniel. Now!"

They burst out onto the main boulevard, weaving through the thick, panicked crowd. Kevin didn't stop until they reached the emergency entrance of the hospital. He shoved through the glass doors, the sterile, chemical scent of antiseptic hitting him like a wall. He bypassed the triage desk, his eyes darting frantically until he spotted the familiar frame of Daniel Cooper near the nursing station.

Daniel looked up, startled, as Kevin and a breathless, disheveled Megan skidded to a halt in front of him.

"Kevin? My god, what happened to you two? You’re covered in soot." Daniel’s gaze darted from the frantic, sweat-streaked Kevin to Megan, who looked like she’d been dragged through a war zone.

"Daniel, you have to listen to me," Kevin said, grabbing the doctor by the shoulders. His grip was frantic, desperate. "I’m not crazy. I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t care. I need you to run tests. Scans. Anything. I’m seeing... I’m seeing things."

Daniel frowned, his expression shifting from concern to clinical detachment. "Take it easy, Kevin. You’re hyperventilating. Megan, sit down." He gestured toward a nearby bench, his movements calm and rhythmic—a sharp contrast to the chaotic, flickering numbers that now danced above the heads of the nurses and patients moving through the hall.

"No, I’m not sitting," Kevin snapped, his eyes darting around the room. The numbers were everywhere—blue, green, yellow, white—a kaleidoscope of impending endings. "Look at them, Daniel! Look at the guy in the blue scrubs! The patient in the wheelchair! They’re all tagged! And it’s not a hallucination, because when I interfered, the universe collected a debt. People are dying because of me."

Daniel sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Kevin, we’ve talked about your stress levels. You’ve been working yourself to the bone at the agency. Sensory overload, potentially a manic episode triggered by extreme sleep deprivation—"

"I am not having an episode!" Kevin roared. The hospital lobby went deathly quiet. A nurse dropped a clipboard, the clatter echoing like a gunshot. "Megan was supposed to die today. She should be dead. I saw the timer go to zero. I saved her, and the clock jumped. It’s a closed system, Daniel. The math doesn't lie."

Megan, pale and shaking, grabbed Kevin’s arm. "Kevin, stop. Everyone is looking at us."

"Let them look!" Kevin turned back to Daniel. "Prove me wrong. Take me to the diagnostics wing. Put me in an MRI. Or better yet, look at your own patients. Tell me, do you have anyone here who is... terminal? Someone whose time is up tonight?"

Daniel looked at Megan, who offered a small, pleading nod. He hesitated, his professional skepticism warring with the genuine terror in his friend's eyes. "Fine. If it’ll get you to breathe, we’ll do a basic assessment. But you’re staying under observation, Kevin."

"I don't care about me," Kevin hissed. "Just show me someone. Please."

Daniel led them into the quieter, fluorescent-lit halls of the acute care unit. The air here was heavy with the weight of fading lives. Kevin walked slowly, his eyes scanning the monitors, the charts, and the patients. Above an elderly man in Bed 4, he saw a flickering, pale yellow ticker: 00y : 00m : 00d : 00h : 05m : 12s.

"That one," Kevin whispered, pointing a trembling finger. "He has five minutes. Tell me what his charts say."

Daniel frowned, stepping up to the monitor. He pulled up the patient’s digital file. "Mr. Henderson. He’s ninety-two. Congestive heart failure. He’s stable, Kevin. His vitals have been consistent for the last three hours."

"Five minutes," Kevin repeated, his voice barely a breath.

They stood in the cramped room in agonizing silence. The minutes dragged by, each one a physical weight on Kevin’s chest. He felt as though he were counting down his own soul. He watched the ticker above the sleeping man’s head. 00:03:00... 00:02:00...

"Kevin, he’s fine," Daniel said, though his voice lacked its usual confidence. "Look, his oxygen saturation is—"

The monitor let out a sudden, sharp, discordant chirp. Then another. The line on the screen, which had been a steady, pulsing wave, suddenly flattened into a long, screeching tone.

Daniel froze. His face drained of color as he scrambled to the bedside, pressing his fingers to the man’s neck. "Pulse is gone. He’s crashing."

The room exploded into activity. Code Blue was called. Nurses flooded in, the crash cart was rolled to the side, and the chaos of resuscitation took over. Kevin stood pinned against the wall, watching the numbers above the man’s head reach 00:00:00 and simply vanish.

The man was gone.

Daniel stepped back from the bed, his hands slightly trembling, his eyes wide as he looked toward the corner where Kevin was standing. The clinical, rational doctor was gone, replaced by a man looking into an abyss he hadn't known existed.

"How," Daniel whispered, the word barely audible over the commotion of the staff, "did you know?"

"I told you," Kevin said, his voice cold and hollow. "It’s not an episode. It’s a sentence."

Daniel walked over to his workstation, his movements robotic. He didn't say a word as he pulled up the patient’s file, then navigated away from it, clicking through restricted hospital databases he usually wouldn't touch. He was searching for something—a pattern, a record, a ghost in the machine.

"I’ve spent years in medicine, Kevin," Daniel muttered, his fingers flying across the keys. "I’ve seen miraculous recoveries and inexplicable declines, but this... this is different."

He stopped scrolling. His cursor landed on a digitized archival file from the 1980s, a report from an internal psychiatric investigation at a different hospital, years before Daniel had even finished medical school. He opened the file. It contained handwritten notes and scanned interviews.

"What is that?" Kevin asked, leaning over the desk.

Daniel looked up, his expression one of profound unease. "There was a case, back in '84. A patient who claimed he could see 'the end.' They committed him, labeled it a delusional disorder, and then... he disappeared from the facility. Every staff member who worked on his case died within a month."

Daniel pushed the monitor toward Kevin. "He wasn't the first, Kevin. And if this file is accurate, you’re not the first to notice the clock."

Kevin stared at the grainy, black-and-white photograph in the file. It was a man, thin and gaunt, sitting in a chair with his head bowed. And in the background, written on the wall in what looked like scratching, was a series of numbers that looked identical to the ones now floating over the city.

The hospital lights flickered, a sudden drop in power that plunged the hallway into a momentary, terrifying dark. In that sliver of shadow, Kevin saw them. Not just the timers over the living, but a swarm of them, thousands of glowing, red, blue, and yellow digits, all ticking toward zero in a rhythmic, terrifying chorus of inevitable endings.

The game wasn't just rigged. It had been playing for a long, long time. And now, Kevin was finally being invited to see the score.