October- Zach

Zach was able to, within an error range of five minutes, make himself wake up on a desired time provided he thought about it the day before. This morning as he opened his eyes to groggily check his clock, and was momentarily taken aback to find that the clock wasn’t where it was suppose to be. For a moment he sat very still and thought about the fact that he was sitting on the floor with a cramp in his neck muscles. Then the memories of the previous da—few hours— returned and Zach looked around to see Nick sprawled on his roommate’s bed and Mike slumped over across the desk, both still fast asleep. It was then that he glanced over his shoulder and, ignoring the pain in his neck, checked on the patient.

Except there was the slight problem of there not being a patient.

At that moment tiny electrical signals zoomed down the axons, met somewhere in Zach’s head, and had a minor explosion. He glanced at the door, which appeared to be locked, then at the window, which was the sliding sort, covered with a screen on the side that opens and therefore not the sort that admitted the passage of humans without releasing a substantial amount of noise. For the heck of it Zach also checked under the bed and checked the ceiling, even though he knew with a sinking certainty that the girl was gone.

Except he hadn’t a clue HOW she managed to leave.

“MIKE!” yelled Zach, grabbing the pillow from the now-unoccupied bed and throwing it at Mike because his legs, having been endowed with a less accurate sense of the circadian rhythm than he, were still asleep. He missed Mike and the pillow hit Nick instead.

“What?” Mike groaned, then yawned. His hair looked like it was giving a standing ovation for something, possibly (if it had inherited any characteristics at all from its owner) Zach’s aim.

“Mmrph?” Managed Nick, peering at them with a pair of very bleary blue eyes.

“Jail break,” said Zach with a dry laugh. “The mystery patient’s gone.”