Hey, Y'all! It's Soaring here with an extremely short story that popped into my head about the Avengers. Please rate! I love criticism and praise alike! Thank you and please enjoy!
Lancaster Asylum, South Dakota, the year is 2119, the month is January. It's an unusually snowy January; two feet sat on the ground currently. The evergreen forest is quiet and still, every tiny sound is dampened and ultimately silenced by the snow. Even the wolves were silent for the time being.
An isolated and overgrown road wound its way into the heart of the forest where an ominous, cement building stood. Its façade was blighted by dead vines, crawling toward the sky and branching out. Parts of the concrete had weakened over the years and were beginning to crumble way, reviling portions of the underlying rebar.
Mildew and mold covered most of the sides, coming from years of neglect. The windows are smashed, leaving jagged window frames in their wakes; only the steel bars which covered the holes remained.
The heavy, thick, steel doors hung crooked on their hinges, dented and beaten. The jams to which they attached are beginning to peel away from the walls, bowing under the great weight of the doors. There are deep gouges in the steel, in sets of three going any which way.
The small roof over the entrance is severely damaged as only one of the two legs holding it upright remained. The shingles were rotten and falling apart, many already lined the ground beneath.
Inside is cold and damp and dark. Chairs and desks are destroyed and lying in pieces, half disintegrated paper covered the floor, soggy and molding. Blood which is brown and black and flaking spots the floor and remains of the furniture. Snow had blown in through the broken windows, covering much of the floor. Plants grew up through cracks in the floor and even from the cushions of the furniture.
The sign that hung above the wooden counter, boasted Welcome Desk even as it hung from only one hinge and its words are barely legible anymore. The ceiling is falling in at some places, dropping rotten and saturated compressed cardboard.
Behind the desk sit several computers with black and broken monitors. The computers hadn't illuminated in a hundred years. Cups with writing utensils were spilled; pens and pencils covered the floor and desk top. More blood was splashed, like black paint that was cracking and chipping.
On both sides of the desk are dark hallways, paint peeling away from the cement of the walls. Mold thickly covered the walls, turning the white paint green and brown, even the black of the blood was being covered. Sheets of paper, full of typed notes lined the hall; the clipboards that once held them together are cracked and rotten.
Rooms on the right and left are in shambles. Mattress stuffing, chair padding and the wood of the chairs themselves littered the rooms and even overflowed into the halls. Broken glass glinted from the floor. More blood was shed in the rooms, thickest on what remained of the mattresses or in the corners or even on some of the window sills. Many plants grew, able to survive through the stuffing and dirt that blew in through the shattered windows.
Eventually, the dark, wet, stinking halls, opened to a large Mess Hall. The tables and benches were carelessly shoved apart, several lay broken. The floor was slippery here, wet and frozen.
Along the right wall was the kitchen, separated only by a half wall and glass light cases overhanging metal trays of the rotting remains of what used to be food. Several trays were flipped onto the ground, food long since spread across the floor and mixed with splashes of blood.
Through a broken door at the back of the Mess Hall, are more rooms, these, however are more intact that the others. The clipboard that hung on the door read, Tony Stark, Schizophrenic, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Anxiety and Panic Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. The rest of the chart is illegible due to water damage.
The room is orderly, or was at one time. It is now covered in a thick layer of mold; nothing appeared to be broken, it was the same as the next room.
Its chart read, Bruce Banner, Schizophrenic, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Night Terror Disorder. Once again, the chart was damaged, giving up no more information than that.
Room after room, charts listed names and disorders. Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Steve Rogers, Thor Odinson. All had a form of Schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder's among other mental illnesses. All the rooms are almost untouched, just the same as the first and clean of blood.
After the rooms for housing ended once more, operation rooms, treatment rooms, and even an experimental room appeared. Unlike the rooms just before them, they were not untouched. Various instruments littered the floor, along with soggy paper and mold. Any furniture was greatly damaged and broken down. Blood was abundant in these rooms and the halls that connected them.
Papers that managed to survive in desks and in shelving units held detailed accounts of what happened in the asylum. The most numerous accounts where of the people whose charts were still mostly intact and on their doors.
Though, none of the patients knew each other outside of the asylum, they all seemed to think that they worked on a team called The Avengers in which they had powers and skills that made them inhuman. Their accounts only slightly differed on what happened on the team, but they were all basically the same accounts.
The psychiatrists had never seen anything like this before, so they called it Linked Schizophrenia and Identity Disorder. The psychiatrists' notes gave detailed accounts of the experiments and sessions that they performed on the people, mercilessly trying to figure out the causes of their disorders.
The last door of the hallway lead into the Morgue where six decayed bodies laid underneath stained, mold covered sheets. Each metal table had a chart on the foot end, listing who the patient was and cause of death.
Tony Stark, failed heart surgery. Bruce Banner, suicide by gun. Natasha Romanoff, suicide by poison. Clint Barton, suicide by jumping from the roof. Steve Rogers, failed surgery. Thor Odinson, organs shut down by overdose of adrenaline.
Their bodies are heavily decomposed; their brown rib cages had crusted chunks of flesh still clinging to them, while the organs and skin had slowly settled down onto the tables, one continuous lump of rotting, crushed flesh. Mold and spores grew from the rotted, wrinkled bodies, almost completely covering them.
Their eye sockets are sunken in and their mouths hung agape in a silent scream. Flesh on the cheeks and foreheads are stretched tightly, dried and cracking away from their skulls.
Very little disturbance was in that room, only a few smaller patches of blood, none from the bodies on the tables, and a relatively small amount of paper was scattered around. The bodies on the tables are the only human remains in the entire asylum.
It is clear that the other humans died, violently at that, but there are no bones, no bits of flesh to speak of apart from the bodies in the morgue. Something had killed and eaten, though not necessarily in that order, the other humans and not left any remains behind.
The only evidence that something at killed them was on the steel doors, the front doors to the asylum; the long, deep, gashes that are in sets of three. The something had clawed its way in and had feasted on the humans that were trapped inside, like fish in a net. The building was so successful at keeping patients in that even the workers couldn't leave when they were attacked.
The number of the something's is unknown, though there had to have been many to kill all those people in a single movement. The something's swept through the asylum quickly, able to kill most inhabitants and workers before they could even react.
Some humans feebly fought back, but were easily overpowered, and outmuscled by the something's. The humans were simply no match for them.
Over the years, the asylum has fallen into ruins, completely forgotten by what little remained of mankind after the something's spread to the rest of the county and eventually to the rest of the world. The humans now only live in a few large strongholds around the world which have managed to fend off the something's. If a human was to leave the hold without heavy protection, they would be slaughtered within a few moments, as the something's continually roam around and near these holdings, just waiting for an opportunity to attack.
The asylum has withstood a hundred winters, thousands of storms, and nature slowly coming back without the presence of humans. It has slowly deteriorated over the years. Slowly crumbling, and within the next hundred years, it will collapse. Within the hundred years after that, nature will have overcome the ruins entirely, reclaiming the land as the forests'. All evidence will be wiped away once the forest takes its rightful place once again.