The room is plain and blinding. The walls and the floors are the same clean white with artificial light making it all the worse. Folding chairs are put in many neat rows, only a few of them taken up by people in heavy coats and dripping umbrellas at their sides. A plain brown desk is at the very front of the room with two heavy set ladies seated behind it with computers in front of them. The speedy typing of their fingers is only thing that keeps the occupants of the room from losing their minds to the deafening silence.

He stands in the back of the room, leaning and slouched against a wall like an average teenage punk. He is dressed like one too, with a unlit cigarette hanging unlawfully from his mouth. The only indication of his name was written in white marker all over his dirty boots: Luc. His eyes looked closed but whenever the blond woman(Brenda) behind the desk glanced up at him, at the moments her and her co-worker whispered about him, dark, smirking eyes stared back at her, a taunt on his face and a knowing in his gaze. It terrified her, and he knew it. He loved it. He always did.

He had no reason to be there. Nothing in the building would concern something that looked to be his age; he stood there anyway, without giving away a clue as to how he entered the building in the first place. And there he stood for hours, watching and waiting. People came and left the room, all with umbrellas and puffy coats. They all noticed him. They all pretended not to. His presence was too ominous to take too much interest in. He carried that air about him, suggesting that something dangerous would happen to them if their thoughts lingered on him too long.

The day got later. Time passed quickly for him. It meant nothing beyond something to taunt his victims with. They hated it when their time started running out; and Brenda, her time has been running out for a month. She didn’t do anything to deserve it, he knew. That didn’t matter. He had a schedule to stick to.

Everyone cleared out of the room eventually. Even Brenda’s coworker, Amie, left in the end (her time is coming too). He knew she was scared. He could feel it. He could see it as he stalked forward to the edge of her desk. The whiteness of the room was dimming. Those terrible overhead lights burst as he passed each row of them; the ceiling disappeared. The walls were suddenly consumed in flames. Everything but them was sucked into the fire. Brenda shook, no words coming out of her mouth. Her eyes were wide and blue, a dull blue. She was nothing special, he concluded when he stopped in front of her.

He reached out and twirled a yellow lock of hair around his dirty finger. He laughed as she flinched. He stepped closer to her and saw how he towered over her. She was a short, plump woman. Probably a mother in another life. If he ever granted her that second chance.

‘Luc’ put his arms around Brenda and laughed. And he laughed even more as she screamed and screamed. Her time had run out and Death doesn’t wait for anyone.