Anastasia smiled back and added, “Remember, you can’t get unvaxxed if it doesn’t go well.”
People stood in the queue, still maintaining a safe distance from one another as they filled out the documents handed to them in preparation for their vaccination shot.
“It’s all fine,” says a mother, trying to keep her daughter calm as they move from their seat next in line.
“Just a second,” the nurse remarked as she rose to her feet to retrieve additional syringes and immunization bottles from the vaccine storages.
One of the nurses came out the door, holding a rack of vials in her hands. She quickly placed the rack of vials on top of an empty shelf before rushing to the nearest lavatory. A woman in all-black clothing was sneaking up behind the nurse and followed her all the way to where the nurse had placed the rack.
A second shelf was being used to store the other trays of immunizations directly next to it when one of the nurses spotted the woman acting skeptically near the vials. It took the woman by surprise when she felt a tap on the back of the shoulders.
As soon as the nurse came across a familiar face, she showed her respect by lowering her head to acknowledge her presence. The nurse came across Alicia, the daughter of the hospital’s director, and struck up a quick conversation with her.
Alicia smiled and raised the item in her hands, handing it over to the nurse. It was a rack containing vials. “I assume this is what you need?” Alicia expressed herself in a really kind manner. “Ah, yes. Thank you!” The nurse took the tray and gave Alicia another bow when she left.
The rack has eight leftover containers. The nurse inserted the bevel and shaft into each vial while simultaneously lifting the container to her eye level with her other hand.
Before leaving the hospital, Alicia twisted in her heels to look back at the nurse, who was tossing one of the vial containers she had recently handed over. She returned the nurse’s smile with a wave of her fingers before putting her shades back on and heading out of the facility.
As the nurse steadily pressed down on the plunger to transfer the liquid into the barrel of the syringe, tiny black bubbles emerged and vanished in a fraction of a second, which were not visible in the naked sight. After she had completed transferring all of the liquids into the syringe, she discarded the empty vials in the trash bag to dispose of and returned to her workstation desk to accommodate the people waiting in line.
“Mommy…” wept the child when the nurse cleansed her shoulder with a cotton ball dampened with alcohol.
While the nurse was administering the vaccine, the fluid steadily flowed and traveled through the child’s blood vessels, creating vasoconstriction in the process due to the fluid’s transit through the vessels.
“See? It’s all done,” the mother stated as soon as the nurse finished injecting the shot.
Before the nurse applies a cotton ball and a piece of tape to cover the hole left by the needle after it has been withdrawn, an inconspicuous black spot remained on the child’s skin where the needle was inserted.
People panicked when the child tweaked her body, but they laughed after a few seconds of seeing the child back in her normal state, thinking she was only fooling around.
The other random seven people next in line have all received the same shot as the child. But none of the people took their actions seriously, believing they were pulling a prank on them when they tweaked their bodies since the rest were acting fine. Even those seven random people had no idea what just happened and laughed it off in the end.
Some of the persons next to them even mimicked their actions, trying to fool around, leading everyone to believe it was all a joke.
Following the nurse’s disposal of the syringe and cotton balls, a cleaner removed the garbage bag from her desk, followed by the garbage bags from the desks of the other two nurses.
The nurse who went rushing to the lavatory was humming. The moment she stepped out of the door, she made her way to the shelves where she had previously placed and left the tray of vials. After noticing the tray was no longer there from where she left it, she began to freak out in her head. She searched for the tray of vials on one of the cupboards, becoming a little agitated since she received the order directly from the director himself, in which he mentioned it was an important task.
The nurse rummaged through all of the vials found on the other shelves, even though she was certain she had placed them on the empty shelf in the first place. Unfortunately, she was unable to find any that had black stickers on them.
Her eyes were drawn to the rubbish bag containing vials beside the counter right in front of her as the cleaner passed by holding other small rubbish bags retrieved from nurses’ workstations.
“I’ll take this.” When the nurse snatched one bag full of vials from the cleaner’s hand and left the bag full of syringes and cotton balls in the cleaner’s grasps, she forced a modest smile on her face before walking away.
She hurriedly went into the stockroom and shut the door as soon as she entered. She frantically emptied the bag, looking for the vials with black stickers on them.
She searched for a few minutes and was still unable to spot one. She sighed and stuffed all the remaining bottles back in the trash bag, knowing that it would take her the entire day to finish searching for a black sticker on one of the empty containers.
When she rose from her seat with a sulky expression on her face, her heart rate was racing the moment she noticed that one vial had rolled underneath the table.
She reluctantly picked the vial up as she edged closer to the table, wishing not to see a black sticker attached to it as she had expected.
She kept repeating the word “please” while slowly turning the container, hoping not to find one.
When the nurse noticed a black sticker on it, she went completely frozen.
“I’m doomed,” she admitted and dropped the empty vial to the ground.
The nurse lightly shook her head, looking miserable as she added, “Really doomed,” before letting out a long sigh and dropping on both of her knees. She is at a loss, having no idea what she should do next.
Pondering what she needed to do, the nurse paced back and forth, her hair tangled in her fingers.
“Should I hide?” the nurse muttered under her breath. “No, no,” she sobbed. “It’s probably best if I just tell him I lost it,” she reasoned. “He’d murder me,” she countered. “I should just act as if I didn’t know,” she thought of it as a brilliant idea and grinned boldly at first, but her confidence waned as soon as she caught sight of the empty bottle that had dropped on the floor below her. “‘I did the task’ is it really that difficult to say?” the nurse wailed.
Someone came and knocked at the door a few moments later. The nurse flinched, and her hands trembled as she opened the door to the room.
“What’s up? Why did you lock?” asked another nurse looking perplexed.
“What would you do if a superior had delegated an important task to you but had failed to do so?” She made a blunder by asking.
“Uhh... You’re a nurse,” the other nurse responded, her voice tinged with a hint of bemusement.
“I know,” she exclaimed. “Guess I have to submit my resignation letter after,” she whispered to herself as she walked past the other nurse, chewing her fingernails in an attempt to conjure up her courage while her feet dragged her to her superior.
Without her being aware of it, she was already standing outside the director’s office, pacing back and forth as she worked on building her confidence and trying to compose a script for how she would reason her way out of the situation.
While the nurse was taking her time gathering her courage, the scientist was already having a serious chat with the physician inside the director’s office.
They were discussing something about the vaccination that the scientist had invented.
After six months of testing the drug on a rat, the scientist was able to share his findings with the physician. It was only after discovering that the rat was the source of the foul odor he had smelled in his workplace. He claimed that it began to smell like a dead rat, despite being still alive.
Besides that, he also mentioned that there was something strange with the rat’s behavior and looks. He claims that the rat had grown much bigger for the past few months, and it kept staring at him, mouth open and drooling, during the entire time he was in his working room.
He also added that it was able to maintain its strength even though it had not touched any of the food that he had been feeding it for the past few days.
The scientist became aware of these peculiar findings after eighteen weeks of administering the shot but ignored them up to this day.
After a few minutes of pacing back and forth, the nurse finally summoned the guts to open the door with determination. It was then that the courage she had long been trying to summon was instantly replaced with cowardice. She suddenly felt the butterflies in her stomach the second she saw the director and the scientist having a serious conversation, as evidenced by their expressions.
There was an odd pause in the conversation. They were discussing in a hushed tone as if no one else was supposed to hear what they were talking about between themselves.
The nurse was about to walk away when the director stopped her and asked what business does she have with him.
In response, the nurse offered them an uncomfortably light smile before presenting them with the empty bottle she was holding in her palm.
Neither the director nor the scientist could conceal a dismayed expression on their faces.
As the scientist cautiously grabbed the bottle from the nurse’s grasp, he stared at it even more intently. His jaw dropped when he saw the black sticker on an empty vial.
“I was on my way to the basement to complete the task when my stomach began to churn, so I hurriedly passed by the restroom on my way out, but when I came back, they were all gone,” the nurse explained, her voice sounding as if she was rapping. “The vials,” she added at the end of her statement, letting out an awkward chuckle.
Other than “the vials,” neither the physician nor the scientist could catch a single thing she was saying. They were preoccupied with irrational ideas about what they had just spoken about.
The nurse was on the verge of going nuts waiting for a word, but all she received was a gloomy grimace on both the director’s and the scientist’s faces.
She was left with a mix of feelings about what had just happened. A part of her was confused yet relieved at the same time when the director instructed her to leave and not to say a word to anybody about the vial without receiving any punishment or lecture.