Eric Forman pulled an old wrist watch from his the pocket of his khakis. He checked the position of the hands against the display on the digital clock of the high school's biology classroom.
"Looks like I should be going, Bob," he said, walking up the short aisle of tables.
A few of the students looked up from their fish dissections for a moment before returning to work.
"It was nice to see you again, Eric. Feel free to ring me up sometime. We'll have lunch," the teacher told the other man.
Both men grinned as they shook hands. Mr. Forman took a last glance at the ancient fish sitting in front of his friend on the desk. The creature was covered in a white bacterium, its shape barely distinguishable. Eric gave a nod to those students that had looked up to watch him leave before walking through the doorway.
He placed the watch back in his pocket. It was a special device to him; an artifact his father had worn every day to work for a year and a half, the last few weeks of which seemed strange to Eric as he looked back on them. His father had never known he had the watch. He'd dug it out of the trash one day, buried in all sorts of plastic, air-tight containers.
The man reached up to brush a loose bang back into its place when he noticed his hand was covered in small patched of a white substance. An image of the bacterium-covered fish floated through his mind as well as the face of his gloveless old friend. Eric made a detour to the restroom.
He activated the faucet. The water was cold. He passed his palm under an automatic soap dispenser. Empty. He pumped pink goop out of an old square container hanging on the wall and proceeded to scrub his hands.
Before turning to dry his hands, he stole a glance at himself in the mirror. Right above where the reverse of his head reflected back at him, there was a large dark smudge. He rolled his eyes. The smudge moved. He stared. It shifted and seemed to roll over itself. It made its way down the mirror and disappeared behind him. His eyes widened.
"Wait a minute…"
He turned and was greeted by a cloud of black particles that surged toward him. Only now did he notice the noise he ignored as some berserk malfunction of the air system.
He couldn't breath. He could barely see. His throat stung. His eyes felt horribly dried out. There were little, painful pin-pricks everywhere along his body.
What light still filtered into his pupils disappeared forever.