Snake Milker

Alarms rang in the milking room.

As he lay on the floor, Chao Duyi began thinking through his rather monotonous life, counting all the things he'd never had the chance to do.

'...One: never traveled out of the country. Two: never got laser eye surgery. Three: never jumped from a sea cliff into water. Four: never got to use my degrees. Five..."

Of course, he wouldn't say it out loud.

He'd already texted his sister to tell her where the extra key to his apartment was, and instructed her to delete his internet history on his home computer.

He'd left messages to all the people he wanted to talk to.

The veins on his hand became a striking purple as they slowly crawled up his arm; the bite mark ached less and less.

He lab was 10 minutes away, and it was very unlikely that they would get to the room on time with any viable antidotes.

He was bitten by the veneniobus snake anyway, and he was very unlikely to survive unless they put him on life support and continuously injected him with several different antidotes.

Duyi simply didn't have enough money for that, and the research fund for their group was minuscule.

The most his family could get out of it was a settlement.

Just as he spotted the snake and decided he better put it away before help arrived and found his dead body, the door slammed open.

A girl wearing a short white dress with kitten heels stood there holding a key card.

She looked like she'd just walked into a hotel room instead of a room filled with poisonous snakes.

"Why are y— WATCH OUT!"

The snake that he was just about to collect had bitten her calf and was now making a beeline for the door.

"Shit!"

Duyi began to scramble after it and managed to grab its tail before it bit his other hand.

He shoved the snake in the nearest cage, not caring what other species was in there with it.

He slammed to door shut and picked the girl up over his shoulder before putting her on the couch.

"YOU IDIOT! DID YOU NOT SEE THE 'DANGEROUS AREA' SIGNS AND THE ALARMS RINGING!? WHY ARE YOU HERE!? WHO ARE YOU!?"

He quickly undid his belt and wrapped it around her thigh to restrict the blood flow and slow the spread of poison.

"Sit here and don't move."

He then called Lulu, his friend in the lab, "...Yeah some idiot just walked into the milking room and got bit too...Well it's not like they paid for any protective gear for us either...it was someone's teenage daughter or something, they just walked in here while the alarms were ringing and shit—you know what? just bring the fucking cart over and hurry up!"

All the while, he was pacing, and the girl watched as the purple veins on his arms spread, crawling up his neck.

She began to cry.

"...Shut up. If your heart rate increases, the poison will spread faster. It goes from your heart, straight to your brain, and then travels through the nervous system and shuts off all your senses, bodily functions, and then you stop breathing."

When she started crying even harder, he realized that what he said wasn't necessarily calming...

"...What I'm trying to say is, if you die you won't feel it."

When she wouldn't stop crying, he looked at her as if he remembered something...

He took out his cellphone and took a video, snatching the key card(that obviously didn't belong to her) from her hand and capturing everything on video.

"Hello, my name is Chao Duyi, a researcher with Z pharmaceutical."

"This girl has been poisoned by the veneniobus snake and now has 8 minutes left to live. I have also been poisoned and have around 2 minutes before my senses begin to leave me."

"The company is not liable if she dies. She walked into a restricted area with someone else's key card when the danger alarms were ringing and got bit by the escaped snake."

As he said this, he snatched the key card from her hands and then filmed her face in comparison to the face on the card.

"She broke the law by trespassing onto private property. For all we know this could be an attempted theft gone wrong."

"However, because Z pharmaceutical cares about human life, I will now attempt to save this thief before help arrives and hopefully she has the chance to recover with other antidotes."

"I will now simulate unconsciousness to stop her crying—I mean, to slow her heart rate. This is an emergency measure, and I take full responsibility for what I am about to do."

The girl didn't even have time to process what he said before he hit her on the back of the neck, knocking her out.

"I simply can't stand by and watch as someone dies, as it goes against my religious value system."

"Sorry amateur thief, I've done all I can to slow the process of poisoning. But if you can't survive?...tsk."

Duyi sent to video to all the people in the lab and uploaded it to the cloud before laying back down on the floor.

He figured he'd left enough legal loopholes for the company.

He took off his glasses when he found that he couldn't see.

When the feeling in his limbs began to numb, he stopped moving altogether.

The last thing that left him was his hearing.

The team had made it to the room on time.

Then he heard his heart stop beating.