She’d seen the ad online. “Social experiment, all ages, genders, races welcome, please come to 74 E. Carson St. on Saturday 14. Will make it worth your while. .”

Kathleen had been running low on cash. For starters, she lost her job when the café closed. She’d been working as a clerk at the local clothing store since, but the pay wasn’t even close to what she needed. She’d been taking odd jobs since, checking the bulletin boards around the dorms and searching the classifieds online. She’d even posed for an art class a couple times, trying to hide her discomfort at showing her body to complete strangers. Next week it was egg donation. And there was that other thing she did when the jobs became available…but they were so hard to find.

But this one seemed intriguing. No phone number, no email. But she needed the money.

It was about a ten block walk, but Kathleen was used to walking everywhere because she didn’t have a car. She reached the building. 74 E. Carson was a rundown heap, something looking like it might have been apartments as recently as the Great War, never mind the futuristic times when said Great War become World War I because its sequel had occurred. Kathleen’s skin crawled as she imagined all variety of insects and rodents scampering about in the walls of the building. She tried the door. It was open so she entered.

“Hello?”

No response.

“Hello!”

“Yes!” It was a man’s voice, just ahead of her in the doorway. A few seconds later and a lanky guy about Kathleen’s age appeared. He had moderately short, shaggy hair and a pair of glasses with small, rectangular lenses. “Oh good, you must be here for the experiment. Didn’t think we’d be getting any more today.”

Kathleen glanced at her wrist watch. It was a little after eight in the morning.

“Well, don’t dawdle. Come on now, the doctor is waiting!”

Kathleen crept forward. The room behind the man was dimly lit. It contained no furniture save for a single dentist’s chair. The walls were bare.

“Go ahead,” the man said. “Please have a seat in the chair. I’ll go get the doctor.” Kathleen approached the chair, setting her purse down, and climbed up into it.

After a few moments, the same man appeared and entered the room. He was holding a clipboard. “So, family history of illnesses, mental and physical? Age, date of birth, height, weight, allergies, and so on if you don’t mind too. And we’ll need your full name and autograph here when we’re done.”

Kathleen was taken aback for a second, but managed to murmur out her responses. The man wrote quickly, but he was still scribbling for a few minutes after Kathleen was done talking. Every now and then, he would glance over the top of the clipboard at her briefly before looking back down to continue his writing.

Finally, he finished. “Okay, now we’re about ready to begin I think.”

Kathleen looked around, confused. “Oh, is the doctor going to be here soon?”

The man chuckled. “I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself! Doctor Fiedler, pleased to meet you.” He extended his hand.

Kathleen blinked, then slowly took it and shook. “I’m sorry…you said the doctor was coming? You have a partner, right?”

The man squinted, appearing not to understand. “No…just me.”

Kathleen shook her head and replied, “But you were just in here telling me the doctor would be in soon.”

“Ma’am, I’m afraid that this is the first time I’ve ever seen you. My assistant, Carl, was in here before me. Are you sure you have no mental afflictions I should be aware of?” He looked at her as he rested the tip of his pen on the clipboard, seemingly prepared to make additional notation.

Kathleen looked around, expecting to see a camera crew ready to surprise her. There was none. “Uh, never mind. So what kind of test is this?”

The man, Fiedler, smiled, seemingly forgetting about their little conversation instantly. “Oh, it’s a very fascinating social experiment! You see, what I’m studying is life!”

“Life,” Kathleen replied.

“That’s correct. Specifically, the barriers of life. I’m actively seeking participants for experimentation in studying the defining barrier of life and the absence of life, what we call death. For my experiments, my subjects will transition from one state to the other for me and I will carefully study both the physical and psychological changes as they do so to the best of my ability. It’s a crude experiment, really, as I don’t have any instruments besides the ones I use to induce the transition, so my observations are done with the naked eye. I have nothing to rely on but my notation, which I thankfully take with great care.” As he finished, he turned the clipboard around so Kathleen could see. There was no paper on it. On the wood, there were violent, dark scribbles and stains of ink meaninglessly smeared countless times.

Kathleen grasped the arms of her chair tightly, her knuckles going white. She felt her heart race. “I’d like to opt out of this experiment now if you don’t mind, doctor. I don’t think I’d be an adequate candidate for your research,” she said.

“Oh, on the contrary. I think you’ll do nicely.”

There was a flash of light reflecting off of something metal. Kathleen felt of sting of pain followed by a pulsing ache in arm. She turned to jump out of the chair but stumbled and fell, kicking her purse as she went down. It slid on the ground coming to a stop next to her head as she hit the ground. She looked at her left arm and saw that it was bleeding heavily. She instinctively grasped the wound, squeezing. Tears welled in her eyes, and she began to whimper. “Please…I don’t want to be part of this experiment…please…”

Fiedler raised his blade, a scalpel, and prepared to make another slice. “Tell me, what makes someone answer such an inviting ad? You know you’re actually my first? I thought I had been too vague, too ominous to attract anyone with this ad. I was kicking myself! But you came. Why?”

“Please,” she said, reaching for her purse, “I don’t want to die…” She reached her bag, digging in it for something. Fiedler was poised over her, readying his fatal strike.

“Now, don’t expire on me too fast! I’ll need to pick up my clipboard and make my observations before you do! What is that?”

There was a loud pop accompanied by smoke that stung Fiedler’s nostrils. He felt suddenly lightheaded and stumbled back, collapsing to a sitting position.

“What did you do?” His words came slowly and numbly, like he was tired.

“I shot you, you sick fuck,” Kathleen replied, without the slightest hint of fear in her voice, wiping away tears that were no longer flowing.

“You had a gun?” Fiedler was bleeding from his chest. He seemed to be fighting to remain awake.

“Of course I have a gun, dick. I kill people for money sometimes. Who the fuck else would walk into a dark building all alone just because someone posted an ad for it? I need money bad enough that I’m not afraid to try anything to get it, but I’m not unprepared either.” Kathleen rose to her feet and stood above Fiedler. She examined her gun, and then tended to her arm, tearing a piece of her skirt off to tie a knot above the wound. “Damn, you really cut me deep.”

“You fucking killed me…” Fiedler teetered to one side and then overcompensated, falling the other way onto his side.

“Don’t forget to take notes, ass.” Kathleen picked his clipboard up off the floor and through it like a Frisbee hard into the bridge of Fiedler’s nose, breaking it on impact. He grunted in response and then stopped moving altogether. His chest went still.

Kathleen gathered her things and then checked Fiedler’s body. She found his wallet in his back pocket and emptied it of four hundred dollars plus a couple credit cards. “Shit, not good considering I’m going to need stitches. At least I only needed one bullet.”

Kathleen exited the building, pausing for a second to absorb a little sunlight. She glanced around to see if her bloodied arm was drawing attention, but no one seemed to notice, nor was there any indication that her gunshot had been heard. “Lucky me,” she said aloud. She hiked the few blocks to the emergency room and got stitched up, claiming a drunken fall onto a broken bottle as the culprit for her wound. Then she headed back to her dorm, trying to remember whether or not she had seen an ad for a new medication test needing subjects when she had looked that morning.