I am the last – everybody else is gone. They went badly, bleeding from their eyes and frothing at the mouth. Those horrible, gurgling screams will be with me for the rest of my life. I don’t think I have long to wait.

It all started when that guy from upper management came down and put that stuff in the water cooler. It fizzed like alka-seltzer, but when the bubbles reached the surface they turned into black smoke. When we asked him what he was doing, he just muttered something about “workforce restructuring” and shuffled off.

In retrospect, drinking that water was probably a bad idea.