“Hadera, you okay?” A stocky man asked one of his longtime colleagues. Hadera jolted from her spot at her workstation as she looked up at the gentleman that startled her.

“Oh um…yea, I’m fine. Just…I’m just really tired,” Hadera lied as she tried to adjust herself in her seat.

Truth be told, she wasn’t feeling all that great. Her nightmares keep recurring every night for the past four nights. She watches a woman dying in front of her, but not just dying in any old-fashioned way. Hadera watches her soul being sucked out by some demonic creature.

Without trying to alert her colleague, she gave him a forged reassuring smile.

“Don’t worry, Braden. I’ll be alright,” Hadera said. 

Braden gave her a small smile as he tapped her on the shoulder. “Just checking up on ya,” he admitted as he starts to walk off.

“You should be leaving soon. Go home and get some rest!” Braden bellowed as he started to walk off out of the room and into the employee’s elevator.

It was almost nine in the evening, and Hadera was supposed to be home an hour ago.

But she couldn’t head home now; she had so much work to be done. She rubbed her drained face with her aching hands. ‘Thirty more minutes and you can head home,’ she said to herself. Hadera pulled her long black hair back into a ponytail and started on typing up that long-overdue report.

The project was nearly done. All she had to do was type up the last experiment report and hand it in to her boss by 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. She started to think about her experience working on the last project. How it affected her and the outcome of the results was something that Hadera would never expect.

Branden and Hadera never expected that their patient would die under their care. The woman that Branden and Hadera were experimenting on was healthy and young. She had no medical history that would be alarming to their testing. But the moment Hadera put the testing drug into the woman’s system through her IV, everything had changed.

The young woman had convulsed and died on the operating table. Ever since that dreadful evening, Hadera couldn’t sleep at night. Her dreams would be hinted with that flashback, vivid flashes of the young girl’s face and body thrashing, violently moving about.

But in her dreams, she would see visions of a demon taking the young woman’s life. Taking the woman’s soul in a dark and cold room. Hadera would wake up in a deep sweat each time.

‘It’s just a dream,’ she would say to herself each time she would have her vivid nightmare. These bad nights have caused Hadera to fall behind on her work. She needed to write up this report on what went wrong with her patient. She really needed to figure out how her team could to fix the compounds of the medication that would be given to the next test subjects. But this report was two months old and Hadera’s boss was getting impatient to read her findings.