It was a body, that much could be determined by the vague shape of it, and it had been a person, presumably; the clothes it wore were the exact same that hung off of Gav. Everything else about it was alien.

  The skin of the thing was dark green, like the leaves of old spinach that had gone slimy. Like old spinach, it appeared at once shriveled and drowned in water, as if there had been some degradation on the cellular level. The shriveled appearance, combined with the clothes, and a thin film of water beneath the body, suggested that it had once been bigger, at least the size of Gav. Now the proportions were about average, on par with someone you could pull off the street.

  Despite my body’s desire to pull away, I knelt down to examine it more closely.

  I heard Gav shuffle behind me, and a second later the lights turned on. I turned around to see that Gav had found a light switch, and that he was looking sick again, understandably so.

  “You’re looking a little green around the gills.”

  “I’m fine bro, really.”

  “It’s cool Gav, you don’t have to stick around while I examine the body.”

  I was able to see him argue with himself internally as that argument played out on his face. He looked at me, then at the door, and finally he took a breath that nearly made him wretch, and he decided to leave me to it.

  His eyes said sorry, and I gave him a nod that hopefully signaled “it’s okay”.

  After Gav left the kitchen, I returned my attention to the body.

  It looked like whoever this used to be, presumably Michael, had expired mid crawl. The trajectory of the crawl told me that he had been aiming for a water cooler, presumably to fill the protein shaker that his dead hands were gripping.

  Naturally– that is to say unsurprisingly –the protein shaker was filled with a neon green powder. I pried the shaker from the corpse's hands, and turned it over, watching particles in the green powder catch the light and shimmer.

  I stared with pity at the corpse, it seemed that, like Gav, the corpse had realized too soon that they had needed a new dose. Perhaps it had happened suddenly, without warning, just as it had happened to Gav. It was a troubling thought.

  The man back at the gym, Keith, had described withdrawal from the supplement as a kind of hangover, or fever. He said he had experienced dehydration, sweating. He hadn’t mentioned sudden loss of consciousness, or a sudden anything. His recollection of the withdrawal gave me the impression of something that had happened much more slowly, something that had happened in a long enough time frame that he could have waited for Michael to come in with an emergency resupply.

  I continued examining the body.

  I went to touch the skin but not before finding protection. I’d left the majority of my periphery supplies in my own car, carrying only my lockpicks, flashlight, and pistol. Luckily Michael had kept a hardly used pack of plastic gloves– meant for cleaning –underneath the sink.

  Since it had the appearance of spoiled spinach I expected it to be soft, and mushy, and for it to tear away in strips or chunks. Instead the skin had a rubbery consistency, and much more disturbingly, a pulse.

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  I checked the corpse’s veins, but the pulse wasn’t localized there. It was faint, and present throughout the entirety of the skin. Placing a hand on the back of the chest also didn’t reveal the beating of a heart, the only rhythm to be found being the pulsing that was present on the rest of the body.

  ?

  If this was Michael, then was very dead, but somehow his body was very alive. His head was lying on its side so I removed one of the gloves to put a wet finger near his nose and mouth to feel for breath, but nothing.

  Still, where there’s a pulse and heat, there may be the electroconductivity required to open a biometric lock; as long as this was in fact Michael, and as long as whatever process his body went through didn’t change his finger print overly much.

  I took out Michael’s phone, and pressed one of the fingers to it. It seemed to register, which was a good sign, but it didn’t open. A tried a few more, and eventually one did the trick.

  .

  Dismissing the notifications from my own, and Gav’s, phone, there was only one that looked to be of importance. Messages from the contact named . The relevant history, starting from a little over a week ago, read as follows:

  Michael:

  EPV:

  Michael:

  For the rest of the week after, the messages between Michael and this “Putito Verde” are either him begging for more supply or notifying them that he’s sending someone over. The next set of relevant messages were recent, very recent.

  EPV:

  EPV:

  EPV:

  EPV:

  .

  Those messages were only minutes old. If I was alone it would be a different story, but I had Gav with me, and I didn’t want to put his life at risk. I needed to grab him and get out before whoever was going to show up showed up.

  I bolted to the front where I found Gav slumped against the front door.

  The first thought that came to me was that I was too late, those men were here, and they’d done something to Gav, but I was wrong. A closer look revealed that his skin had gone green again. He had entered that catatonic state from before.

  I ran back to the kitchen, and filled the protein shaker with water to mix up another dose of the green stuff, running back to the front to dribble it into Gav’s mouth.

  He was quicker on the comeback this time, his eyes fluttering to life the moment the shaker touched his lips. He grabbed it from me and began to scarf down the green stuff, drinking the contents to the last drop and then letting the empty shaker roll away from on the floor as he tried gasping for air.

  “Gav,” I said, trying to get his attention. “Someone’s coming to check on Michael.”

  “I think they’re here,” he said, pointing at a white van that had just parked in front of Michael’s house.

  Two men emerged from the white van.

  “Hey, that's them!” yelled one of the men.

  There was something strange about their voices, but I didn’t have time to process that. They were carrying assault rifles, and they were already being raised.

  “Nando!” yelled Gav, grabbing me and throwing us both behind cover.

  The lead started flying, and the walls of the house provided no meaningful resistance at all. The bullets turned the walls to swiss cheese. Splinters from the wall started flying over us. It was only a matter of time before the shooters would find their targets.

  Then I heard a loud as something hit Gav on the side of his temple. That little something fell to the floor and rolled around before settling near my head. It was a bullet that had flattened itself on Gav’s head.