“I’ll show you nice—” John fired another volley at them, blasting holes in the walls and doors. “Lauren?” he whispered to her, but she was still out.
Cozine and David fired back; riddling and rattling the desk that John and Lauren were behind, particleboard and drawer metal framing shattering from multiple impacts.
“Lauren?” John said louder to no avail and then he slapped her. “Lauren!”
She woke up in a flash. “What the fuck!” she blurted out and sat up, exposing her head over the desk, John quickly pulled her down as more gunfire from Cozine blasted the desk.
“You okay?” John asked.
She felt the lump on the back of her head and winced. “Yeah. What the hell is going on?” More gunfire hit the desk.
“It’s Cozine and Donnie.”
“Donnie?” Lauren was confused.
“Yeah, he must be a patient too. After they ambushed you, fucker tried to stick me with some kind of drug.”
“You okay?”
“A little disoriented, but I’m good.”
David fired his rifle, his rounds punching through the desk within inches of John and Lauren, actually shooting through between the two, but not hitting them.
“How you two lovers doing?” Cozine taunted.
Lauren swung her weapon over the desk and sprayed a dozen rounds at them. Cozine and David hit the deck for cover as her powerful bullets sliced through everything. “Just fine, you psychopathic fuck!”
“Man, I love a girl with a machine gun!” Cozine said as he reloaded.
Cozine got David’s attention and signaled him that they were retreating quietly. David understood.
“Cozine only has a handgun, Donnie’s the one with the rifle,” John whispered to Lauren, “but if we both attack at once, we can take’em.”
“Hell yeah.”
They prepared to attack. They listened, but didn’t hear any movement.
John looked at Lauren and mouthed his words. “One, two, three.”
They stood up and both fired at the offices, dozens of bullets tore everything to shreds. They ceased fire and searched ahead with their flashlights, they saw no one. The offices were gutted; filled with holes like Swiss cheese. They cautiously approached, ready to kill, but the offices were empty.
They were gone.
“Fuck!” John mumbled.
They scanned their lights all over, but there was no sign of them.
Footsteps quickly approached behind them and they turned with their guns at the ready, but relaxed when their lights shone on Ardent and Bear.
“Whoa! It’s us!” Bear said.
“You found him?” Ardent asked.
“Yeah,” John answered.
“But they got away,” Lauren added.
“’They?’” Bear said.
“Donnie’s with him, he must me a nut case, too,” John said.
“Are you sure?” Ardent asked.
“Oh yeah, both of them ambushed us,” John confirmed.
“Now there’s two of them? Great,” Bear noted.
“Which way did they go?” Ardent asked.
“That way,” John pointed to the back of the hospital.
“They might be going for the boat,” Bear said.
“We’ll go check on the boat while you two go down the stairs, maybe you can cut them off if they went in another direction,” Ardent reasoned.
“Alright. If you don’t find them, we’ll meet back in the reception area,” John instructed.
“Okay,” Ardent said and left with Bear.
“Let’s go,” John said to Lauren.
He led the way to the staircase that was right there, but John’s steps were wobbly, at best, and he almost tripped over himself.
“You okay?” she asked.
John braced himself on a hand railing. “Yeah, my legs are a little shaky, but I’m fine. Go on, I’ll be right behind you.”
Lauren quickly descended the stairs and John trailed behind her in a disoriented hobble.
Cozine locked the doors to the north wing and sealed himself and David inside, and then he walked with purpose toward the staircase and ascended up toward the high-risk cellblock, with David trailing behind him like a faithful canine.
Once at the security offices before the mental cellblock, Cozine stopped and paced around in thought. He was highly agitated since losing his opportunity to kill John. “I’m still very upset with you, Donnie,” he said in a stammer. “I doubt that I’ll have another chance at John like that.”
“I’m sorry, I was just trying to help.”
Cozine pointed his handgun at him. “You’ve said that before!”
David lowed his head and raised his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry.”
Cozine yelled. “Stop saying you’re sorry!”
“Please, don’t kill me!”
“I’m not going to kill you!” Cozine spat out like a teasing bully and then had a serious idea: “I should feed you to my children, though.”
“Please, don’t. They scare me!”
“Shut up! I’m trying to think!” Cozine ordered.
“Okay, okay,” David whispered.
Cozine continued to pace about; he walked by the locked entry of the mental cellblock, turned, and walked by it again.
“They’re gonna come here soon looking for us,” Cozine said to himself. “What to do? What to do?”
He continued to think as he marched by a closed window.
“I need a sign,” Cozine mumbled. “I need a sign so I know what to do.”
David heard him and saw a sign on the wall across from him that said:
NO FIREARMS BEYOND THIS POINT.
David pointed at the sign and was about to tell Cozine, but decided against it.
Cozine stopped at the closed window and thought hard. “They’re not taking me alive,” he whispered to himself.
He peeled the curtains to look out the grimy window and saw the front courtyard below; the sun had just emerged over the horizon. Warming rays cascaded over the land and a golden glow began to overtake the gloom.
Something in the courtyard caught Cozine’s attention—something in the ground by the front wall—
The earth by the wall moved, a small section sank and gave way to something just below the surface—
A hand.
The decayed hand rose straight up and stopped at the elbow as it clawed at the air. It cast a long shadow on the perimeter wall that was a couple feet behind it and then another hand sprung from the ground not too far away. Another hand cut through the dirt and reached for the sky—another and then another, until numerous hands were bunched together in Lucifer’s garden of blooming flowers.
All the foundation dirt under the wall was betrayed as it fell away and, a moment later—
The wall cracked.
Cozine smiled as if he were a teenager who just lost his virginity. This was the sign he had asked for. “Thank you.” He walked to the gates of the mental cellblock and used his keys to unlock the gates. He swung them wide open, the noise stirring the rabid patients in their cells. Cozine came back out and concentrated his attention on a large locked panel in the wall next to the cellblock entryway. He unlocked it and ripped the panel door open, it slammed against the wall; the impact threw dust in the air. Inside was a set of mechanical levers covered in rust.
“What’re you doing?” David asked softly.
“Our little game of dress up is over, David.”
“Why? What do those levers do?” he asked in fear.
“You know what they do.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I have to give my children their freedom.”
“They’ll kill us!” David said in a panic.
“Perhaps,” Cozine said as he placed his hand on a lever, “but they deserve to have their chance at glory, as we did.”
He pulled the taut lever down in a broad stroke.
“No!” David said in a spray of spittle from his trembling lips.
Cozine pulled down a second lever and gears began to turn with stretched squeaks and moaning rumbles from decades of non-use. He reached for a third, larger lever. At first he couldn’t pull it down with one hand, so he put his pistol in his pocket and grabbed the lever with both. All his strength went into it, but the old lever wouldn’t budge until—the coat of rust snapped free from the hinges—the lever surrendering with a slow fall.
“Oh…God.” David mumbled.
The lever came down and Cozine pushed it into the
OPEN
position. He stepped back and listened as a series of
click-a-dee clank, clank
noises reported from inside the cellblock. All the growling patients dropped to complete silence when they heard the sounds they hadn’t heard in forever—each one of the cell doors unlocking automatically in succession—empty or not, they all unlocked, right down to the last set of cell doors. For another moment, silence reigned again.
“They’re free,” Cozine whispered in satisfaction. “My children are free,” he said as he backed away from the cellblock.
David began to tremble in fear. He had a rifle, but he was at a loss of what to do. He dropped to his knees and slid under a large desk to hide. Cozine got to the desk and lowered his head under it to look at David. He resembled a serpent as he cocked his head left and right until he saw David’s face pushed in the far corner of the desk, so scared it seemed he wanted to meld with the wood and disappear. Cozine’s wide eyes bathed David in psychopathic light. “My children are coming,” he whispered with a forked tongue. “Do you have any candy?”
“Wha…what?” David was deathly confused.
“Yes, you do,” Cozine hissed. “Yes, you do and my children are coming for it. They’re coming for your sweet meat.”
Cozine withdrew and slowly walked away toward the entrance of the north wing.
The cellblock was still quiet, until one of the cell doors moved, slightly. It moved another couple of inches and testified to the fact with a long stretching creak. A nose appeared at the crack of the door. It was caked in filth and was a small appendage, maybe belonging to a child. The nose sampled the air outside the cell in a quick breath and then retracted back into the blackness of the cell.
No movement.
Until the cell door sprung open like a trapdoor and the occupant dashed out as if a charging silverback gorilla. It slammed against the opposite cell and then went on a shuffled run in circles in the cellblock, dragging its hands along the caked tile floor, it scooped up and ate some of the filth, unbothered that it was excrement—possibly some of her own. It was a woman, maybe in her twenties.
It
was
a woman.
The person parading in a dance of frenzied madness was a
thing
. Its hospital clothes were a shredded shadow of what they once were. She was bare-chested and her pants were torn strings that looked like a blood and shit-soaked hula skirt. It stopped its gallop of insanity and hunched in the middle of the cellblock. It was breathing hard and was quiet up to this point. It filled its lungs and let out a scream that ascended into a roar of sheer and utter evil.
It permeated the walls and floors…
“What the fuck was that?” Alan barked as he froze in place from the bloodcurdling scream.
Bear and Ardent listened to the echoes that flew all around them. “Sounds like an infected,” Ardent said.
“Did they get in?” Bear added.
“It only sounds like one,” Ardent guessed.
“That’s one too many,” Bear said nervously.
“Let’s get back to the reception area,” Ardent said and they followed him down.
“What in God’s name is that?” Joe said.
“I don’t care,” Maggie said as she continued to search.
“We should go back and find the others.”
“Go on,” she said callously.
“Goddamnit! What if that was Corina?”
“It wasn’t,” she answered.
“How do you know?”
She thought about it…
John had stopped in the staircase and looked up, listening to the distant roar of the patient and trying to decipher it. “Sounds like it came from the north wing.”
“Really? I can’t tell, it’s echoing everywhere,” Lauren said from the flight below him.
“Keep going—we have to find the others.”
Lauren continued down as John followed with labored steps.
“Oh God…oh please…sweet Jesus…help me!” David whispered so hard that the crow’s feet around his closed eyes were almost real. His mouth was such a tight, bloodless line, that his words had to dig their way out.
The scream of the woman thing horrified him—
It roared until the air in its lungs diminished and even then, it pushed more air out—unable to scream anymore—only hiss as its vocal cords broke, but it was more than enough…
Another cell door burst open and banged against the wall.
And then another.
And another.
Forty or more doors later and they were all out.
Forty-seven of the most sadistic looking creatures that can be imagined, many of them scarier than the undead, spilled into the cellblock. Instead of attacking one another, they became a current of rage that flowed around the woman who had come out first; an inexorable tide. They surged back and forth until one of them came upon the cellblock exit—the door was ajar—the thing hunched over and swung its head back toward the group, howling madly until ending in a forlorn, distorted screech.