Author: Ken Saunders
Another coughing spasm tore through him, sending waves of pain to every corner of his being. He wiped his mouth with the hospital blanket they’d draped over him, and when he lowered it, he saw that it was wet with his blood.
His eyes went to the dark little tablet sitting on the tray in front of him. It was perfectly black. Not even light seemed to affect it. He’d never seen a pill so completely devoid of color before. Was it intentional? Maybe to remind people of its potentially deadly nature, or perhaps just the natural result of the miraculous compound within.
As he stared at it, it was as if the pill was staring back, beckoning him.
No more stalling, he told himself. Heads I win, tails I lose.
He’d already said his goodbyes to Maya and the kids before being moved into this isolated wing. The “Final Treatment Center,” they called it, though the sterile name couldn’t mask what everyone knew.
This was where desperate people came to gamble with death.
There was a fifty percent chance that this little pill would not only cure his lung, bone, and brain cancer, but everything else wrong in his body. High cholesterol? Gone. High blood pressure? Gone. Eyesight? Perfect. Hearing? So long, tinnitus.
The other fifty percent of the time, it resulted in instant death.
Time to roll the dice. He steeled himself as his fingers wrapped around the little black speck.
“Good luck,” came the wet and raspy voice from the bed next to him.
He glanced over at his roommate, a Senator whose decades of heavy smoking had finally caught up with her.
Without responding, he popped the pill in his mouth and took a sip of water.
The moment he swallowed, the door opened. The nurse returned, this time walking to his companion’s bed. Just as before, she didn’t speak. She placed the water and pill in front of the Senator and exited as swiftly as she had entered.
Thoughts raced through his head as he waited for whatever effects the pill was about to have. Most people thought this discovery was proof of God’s existence. How else could such a thing come to be? The Pope himself had officially deemed it a miracle.
Others, himself included, thought it more likely proved the opposite. Once again, the universe had revealed its true nature of pure chaos. How else could the power of both life and death be found in such a small vessel?
He glanced back at his roommate’s bedside table, wondering if she would have the same hesitation, but there was none. Her hand instantly shot out toward the life-or-death substance.
As he watched the Senator quickly place the pill on her tongue and swallow it, his heart seized up.
As he clutched his chest and fought to breathe, he kept staring at the Senator in horror. His subconscious mind was screaming at him, but it wasn’t concerned about his fast-approaching end. It was desperately trying to tell him something far more important. Something that he denied with all his being because it was almost too terrible to consider.
When the notion finally forced its way into his conscious mind, he opened his mouth in one final effort to speak. He wanted to deny out loud the frightening thought, but he had already drawn his last breath.
As the blackness fell over him and he slowly slipped into oblivion, one horrifying question kept repeating over and over in his mind…
Why was her pill white?