Countdown

With time almost up, will she be able to save herself by completing the mission given by an unknown voice.

I cast a glance to my watch for the twelfth time in the past three minutes. There were only a few seconds left. I only had a few seconds to find the suitcase. If I didn't find it, the voice had said, then we were all done for.

I didn't know what would happen, exactly, as I waded through the piles of people's unwanted items. I thought it might have been a bomb. Maybe the voice from the ceiling had been lying. I was the only person that seemed to have heard it, so perhaps it wasn't important. No one else seemed to care.

"Back to the task at hand," I scolded myself, turning my focus to the last pile that needed sorting through. There were only ninety-five seconds left until my deadline.

Sixty-four seconds left, and a handful of breath mints darted down the mountain of clothes.

Forty-three seconds. All my searching hands found was a the waistband of a pair of jeans.

Twenty-two seconds. "Maybe I won't find it," I thought, frantically throwing things left and right.

One second. My scrabbling fingers closed around the handle of something. My time was up. Desperately, I jerked up on the handle, freeing the suitcase from the pile of lost and never reclaimed items. 

I'd done it. Whatever the consequences would have been if I didn't find it, I had averted them. Triumphantly, I raised the suitcase over my head, smiling at my reflection in the darkened window. Now, I felt invincible.
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Behind the one-way window, the two doctors watched the patient scramble through the examination room.

"Remarkable focus for a schizophrenic," the older of the two commented, as he watched the girl's single-minded pursuit of her goal.

The younger and, ironically, the superior, doctor, smiled proudly. "You see what they can do given the proper stimulation." He noted the victorious smile on the patient's face. "This is progress, after all, giving them a purpose. Even if the purpose is rather fantastical in its inception and execution."

Author's Note

This was an exercise in unreliable narrator for me. Please leave feedback.