Cobus calculated that he had ten minutes at most from the time he drank the strychnine until his muscles would start convulsing. Two minutes had already passed. Respiratory paralysis and death wouldn’t follow for another couple of hours, but once he collapsed, he would be powerless to treat himself, and the journey toward death would be irreversible.

Cobus seized the chef by his stained apron. “Bathroom! Where’s your bathroom!”

The bewildered chef shrugged and shook his head, having no idea what the crazy foreigner was jabbering about.

Seconds later, Cobus located the grubby little bathroom. Shoving aside a mop bucket, he knelt before the toilet. He pushed his second and third fingers down his throat and retched.

Cobus vomited everything in his guts until he had nothing left. He staggered to the sink, checking himself in the mirror. His face was clammy, and he was sweating profusely. He checked his watch. It had been five minutes. Too long. Some of the poison was already racing through his bloodstream, hunting for neurons to hijack.

“Fuck . . . Fuck!”

Cobus rushed out of the bathroom. Looking like some crazed addict, he tore through the cobblestone streets of the old town, hunting for a drugstore. His life was being measured in seconds, and it took thirty-seven more of them before he was rifling through the shelves of Watson’s Pharmacy. An employee looked on, probably wondering whether she should call the police about the agitated ghost-white foreigner ransacking her store.

“Charcoal! I need charcoal!”

The woman nervously directed him to a bottle of activated charcoal. He snatched it and shoved a wad of cash into her hands, then sprinted off, grabbing a bottle of water on his way out the door.

Cobus sat on a bench in the Waterfront Park at the end of the block. The metronome of his breathing began to lose its calibration as the poison in his brain caused his diaphragm to misfire. Shit. Was he too late already? His trembling fingers frantically struggled to open the bottle of charcoal. His extremities felt as cold as ice, and the freezing sensation was migrating toward his core.

Panicking wouldn’t help. Cobus paused to gather himself, remembering the mantra from his marksmanship training: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. He took a long breath, then opened the bottle with shaking hands and dumped the black charcoal powder into his water bottle, spilling much of it on the ground. Covering the mouth of the bottle with his palm, he shook it vigorously until the charcoal was suspended in a black cloud.

Cobus brought the bottle to his lips, and drank down the chalky black mixture in one long, painful go. He resisted the sudden urge to vomit again, knowing that if he expelled the medicine, it meant certain death.