HALF: Dead nor Alive

“It won’t hurt, we just need your blood sample.” As the Professor stabbed Archie’s finger with a needle and took a tiny amount of his blood.

Archie stared at the Professor walked toward a machine and dropped his blood into a test tube. The Professor reached the drawer above him and grabbed a small steel chest with a digital lock and fingerprint scanner on it.

The Professor grabbed a tube and Archie could see a black liquid that seemed to be alive tried to climb up the tube but as soon as the Professor put the tube and got exposed to some kind of ultraviolet light it stopped moving and seemed to be weakened by it.

“Is that a parasite, Professor?” Archie looked at the tube while he was pressing his finger with cotton.

“That’s right, this is an ExTP-1 type parasite which is very rare nowadays because it’s very hard to preserve them.” The Professor slowly extracted a tiny bit of the parasite from the tube.

Archie looked at the Professor putting the parasite into the tube where his blood was. The Professor immediately sealed the tube so the parasite couldn’t get out of the tube since it would be dangerous for both of them.

The Professor put the test tube into the machinery, removed his latex gloves, and threw it in a trash bin.

“Now, we need to wait for 5 minutes until we can get the result.” The professor stared at the data on the screen of the machine while he crossed his arms.

Archie looked at the Professor then threw the cotton into the trash bin, “Is this necessary, Professor?” Archie jumped down from the nursing bed and approached him.

The Professor ignored him because he was too focused on reading the data on the screen. Archie decided to not bother and looked around the lab room he was in, there were so many skeletons that used to be mutated parasites. Archie approached one of them and looked at it, it was written on the bottom that the skeleton belonged to an ExTP-2 Variation-3.

“Don’t touch that, or at least until I get the data from your blood test.” The Professor knew that Archie was about to touch it even though he kept his eyes on the data on the screen.

Archie walked away from the skeleton and stayed put.

Archie was bored of waiting but there was nothing he could do but wait, he walked around the lab once more and saw all the tests on the walls and some kind of formulas that had been overwritten over and over on a whiteboard. Archie decided to sit on the chair and rest his head on his fist, he tapped his fingers on the table and kept staring at the Professor.

The machine stopped and made a beeping sound, the Professor kept staring at the data with his eyebrows furrowed, “This is weird…” He muttered to himself.

Archie jolted from his seat and walked toward the Professor because he was curious about the result, “How was it, Professor? Did I pass the test?”

The Professor printed the result and grabbed the test tube from the machine, he looked at Archie with his index finger pointed at him, “Don’t move anywhere, and wait here for a moment. I will be back shortly.” The professor rushedly left the lab and Archie could tell that the professor was running in the hallway.

Out of curiosity, Archie walked to the skeleton again and decided to touch it but then he retract his hand immediately because he felt a sting on the tip of his fingers. Blood came out from all four of his fingers, he looked around and grabbed cotton to stop the bleeding. He realized that the bones were different from any bones that he knew, he leaned his head closer so he could see the bone clearly and he noticed that all the surfaces of the bones were sharp and it was impossible for anyone to touch them with their bare hands.

“Sorry, it took so long.” The Professor barged into the lab and Archie immediately hid his hands because he didn’t want the Professor to notice what he was doing.

The Professor sat on his desk and stared at nothing, then Archie sat on the chair in front of him and raised his eyebrows, “So? Did I pass the test, or…” Before he could finish his sentence, the Professor interrupted him, “There’s something I would like to tell you about the result.” The Professor tossed the result on the desk and gently slid it toward Archie.

Archie looked at the result and everything seemed fine, it was written there that his immune system could handle the parasite and the environment beyond the wall. What he didn’t understand was why the Professor acted like that as if something went wrong with the result.

“Everything seems fine, is there something wrong with it?” Archie put the result back on the desk and looked so confused at the Professor.

“Everything is great, in fact, your result is more than qualified to go beyond the wall. The problem is right here, Archie…” The Professor pointed and tapped at the result.

Archie tilted his head and read the result once more and specifically at what the Professor was pointing. It said in the result that it was a negative and when he read what it was all about, he realized that his immune system couldn’t resist the parasite and making it hard for him to survive once a parasite hosted his body.

“I have sent the result to the Marshall because I need his opinion about this.” The Professor stared at the result while he was crossing his arms.

“But that’s fine, right? I mean, I aced VST all the time and there won’t be a problem since I can survive on my own and will be able to get myself out of trouble.” Archie furrowed his forehead as if he wanted to convince the Professor to let him pass.

The Professor sighed and rubbed his eyebrow, “You do know the protocol when you made a mistake, right?”

“Yeah, I do know that, Professor…” Archie gulped and the atmosphere suddenly went heavy.

They both were staring at each other without saying a word, then the Professor’s phone vibrated. He looked at his phone and immediately left the room to pick up the phone.

Archie stared at the wall and his heart started to pound really fast because he knew what kind of mistake the Professor meant. The mistake that he mentioned earlier was about once a human or Axis Humans were surrounded by parasites or mutated ones and there was zero chance of surviving, they had to kill themselves by blowing their bodies using a bomb.

Once Axis Humans and those who went out of the wall made a mistake and didn’t blow themselves up, they would become Ex-Axis Humans. They had to blow themselves up and made sure there was nothing left behind or those parasites could do anything to the rest of the body if they just killed themselves by stopping their hearts or blowing their heads off. If the parasite that hosted their body was type 3 or above, then there would be no humans or anything that could stop them from destroying the wall and humans that are living behind it.

Archie looked at the skeleton that he touched, that skeleton belonged to an ExTP-2 Variation-3 and that thing was hard to kill. They sacrificed dozens of Axis Humans to defeat that thing and that thing was the scariest and hardest mutated parasite to kill back then. The latest intel they received was that there was a sighting of an ExTP-4 Variation-1 that roamed in FalCon-2, so it made Archie a bit nervous and scared.

“This is madness.” The Professor came back as he put his phone in his pocket, Archie could tell that the Professor looked worried.

“What’s wrong, Professor?” Archie leaned his body forward out of curiosity.

“Ah, it’s nothing that you should be worried about… or at least not yet…” The Professor rubbed his chin and stared at the result.

Archie furrowed his forehead but before he could ask him what happened, the Professor’s phone vibrated again. This time, the Professor’s eyes were wide open, he hurriedly left the room again and picked up the phone.

A few minutes later, the Professor came back inside but this time he didn’t walk back to his desk, instead, he stood at the door and stared at Archie, “So, do you have a lot of stuff in your room?”

“What? No, I don’t have a lot of things in my room, why, Professor?” Archie tilted his head and looked at him.

“Well, it seems that the Marshall wants to see you” The Professor crossed his arms and leaned on the wall.

Archie jolted from his seat with his eyes and mouth wide opened, “What?! The Marshall wants to see me?!”

The Professor nodded and stood straight, “That’s right, the Marshall wants to see you in person. Now you have to pack your things and we both will be going down to earth.”

Archie hurriedly went back to his room and pack as many clothes as he could because he knew that it was time for him to become useful to humanity and of course, it was his dream to be one of them.

Archie and the Professor stood in front of a huge door with four guards stood in front of it. The moment the door slid open, Archie could see everything from up there because he was surrounded by windows. It was a lift so people who lived in the station could go back down to earth but there were no reasons for them to go back down and only the Axis Humans would go back and forth from the station to the earth.

“When was the last time you go down there, Archie?” The Professor stared at Archie.

Archie leaned on the window and stared at the whole nation getting closer and closer to him, “I don’t remember, Professor, maybe more than a decade…”