Chapter 23
Shannon found the entrance of the hospital, which was now shattered and broken, blood dried along the glass. Bodies littered the entry way, torn and battered during their flight. A stench began to rise from them, mixing with the air of decay and the faint smell of something sweet and rancid burning somewhere distant. Shannon decided that somewhere close by were the very gates of Hell.
The remains of a young nurse, no more than twenty, lay across the pressure switch of the large automatic doors, holding them open. The girl was clearly raped much like Shannon, but beyond that, she was dismembered and laid open across her mid-section, lengths of her intestines draped across her naked body like some ornament. Shannon shuddered and gritted her teeth, fighting back the sudden urge to wretch the nothing she had eaten. It had become clear to her that last night could have seen herself much like this young nurse, and she wondered if she were going insane.
Shannon worked her way around the nurse and entered the lobby of the upscale hospital, which now was a scene of soulless violence. Many corpses lay scattered about, all cut neatly into pieces, each piece placed in a pattern around the host corpse. The entrails of most draped along the walls like some hellish semblance of art, and dried blood sat frozen in mid drip, forming patterns of gore on the walls and the reception desk.
Shannon came to a short stop, shocked with the brutality and violence, the utter disregard for life or even the sanctity of a corpse. Every fiber of her being urged her to leave, to run from this place, this abomination of a hospital, and get as far away as she could. Deep inside her, in the hollow places not hidden by the thick velvety blanket, she knew that leaving Ethan up there, locked in his room, was just as much killing him as she had the nerd in the street.
The power had not been lost, so the unbroken florescent lamps illuminated the horror around her as she picked her footing slowly. After some time, she finally navigated the fleshy gambit and entered the darkened hall just beyond reception. It was as though the scene displayed out there was intent on keeping people out of the hospital, like a warding of some sort, a gruesome standard that warned against trespass. Nevertheless, she was through and quickly left it behind.
The hospital had suffered the same aging dilapidation as the streets, landscaping, and façade outside. The tiled floor was filthy and debris-strewn, the walls stained and mold-grown, and the drop ceiling threatening to come down in more places than it already had. Through the center of the passage traveled many long and bloody streaks, as though someone dragged corpses through to the reception area. Shannon took the Glock from her pocket and let it hang at her side.
Ethan was on the second floor, and Shannon hoped it was just above her. She found a single utilitarian elevator in a small recess, the kind large enough to accommodate a wheeled gurney. She pushed the call button and felt the floor tremble slightly as the car went into motion. From deep inside the large building, she could hear the aged cables and pulleys screeching their protest. The sound was ominous and painfully loud. If the decorator of the lobby was still in the building, then now it certainly knew she was here as well.
The elevator car came to rest with a long, sighing hiss, and the doors parted. On the far side of the car, doors came open as well, revealing not only another passage but also an apparition of a hellish nightmare her mind was incapable of inventing. A large, overweight woman was standing some yards down the passage but staring right at Shannon. It was mostly nude, its nurse’s uniform torn almost completely away. What made it so horrible to see was that its skin had gone an ashy gray, and all over its body in random places, it had stitched severed limbs to herself, as if to add many arms and hands and other more revolting things to the nurse’s ample frame. Not even these displaced parts were the same sickly gray of the host, simply the bluish tinge of anatomy gone empty of blood.
In each of its real hands, it held tightly large surgical knives—not scalpels but long toothy bone saws. Its face was a twisted semblance of rage, each crevice or crease stitched into place with black nylon by a sloppy hand. Its mouth, the lips pulled back with rows of wide stitches, opened horribly, and it screamed rage at Shannon, a deep-seeded rage and blind contempt for the living.
Shannon screamed back.
The thing began to shamble towards her, the limbs stitched about bouncing and slapping lifelessly along her ruined body. Shannon screamed again, raised the gun, and started firing. If she had thought better of it, she would have run, but the heart-squeezing terror had been impossible to think through, and her inner voice shouted at her to destroy this wrongness, to rid the world of such a bald evil.
Her aim was sloppy and confused by the powerful bucking of the handgun. Her arm flailed up with each shot, jolting the bones in her hand, arm, shoulder, and neck. Nevertheless, she gave no ground to the thing’s advance nor did she stop firing. Soon the creature was too close to miss, and its body began to tear as each round passed through it. The flesh pierced in the front and then exploded out the back, but it did not slow the monstrosity.
When it entered the elevator, Shannon realized her thinking was flawed, that the thing had her now and there was no fleeing it. Before the thing swung the wicked serrated knife, there was a twang, and the elevator suddenly dropped, fell rapidly, and crashed into the basement floor. From far below, Shannon heard the thing scream, the rage now impossible to believe. She did not wait, but leapt over the now vacant elevator shaft and went to the stairwell to the right.
Her breath was rushing in and out at an unreasonable pace, and her heart hammered against the inside of her chest; it is one thing to see people gone mad, but something entirely different to see them brutally changed into an insidious monster. There was no chemical in the air, no infection like airborne rabies; it was an evil thing happening here, a biblically evil thing that she did not understand or know how to handle. She had to get to Ethan and find out what was going on.
She ran up the gritty stairs and ripped open the door to the second floor. The passage was much like the one below but for the bodies instead of just streaks of blood. They were clearly dead but not ravaged like those downstairs. It scared Shannon to realize how wholesome it seemed that these corpses were still complete. Shannon began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad and was just spending some time here in a mental ward.
She turned right and realized this was in fact a mental ward. The small windowed doors to almost every room stood open and were now broken or hanging crooked, all smeared with blood and bits of flesh. In some of the doors were what appeared to be patients, half in, half out of their cells, all lying lifeless and brutalized in bloody orange coveralls.
Shannon replaced the clip in her gun, unsure how many shots she had left and not wanting to run dry. She then began to walk slowly down the passage, leading with the gun, peering into each room before passing. The hall was long and as dark as the one below, the stench of blood and warm meat hanging thick in the air. A soft humming and occasional crack came from the florescent lights above as they fought to come on completely, forcing the passage into a maddening flicker from gore and human refuse to almost complete darkness.
At the far end of the passage, toward the outside wall, there stood a single door among many. This door, however, did not seem infected with the blight of the rest of the building. It was still clean and sterile, the light above the threshold still burned steadily, and the floor and ceiling were clean and without the stain of fungi. It seemed as if the Holy Grail was contained within, and the evil consuming the town could not approach. This seemed so completely odd to Shannon, enough to make her loath to approach it and see what the room actually held. That was until a face filled the small window and looked down the hall towards her.