It had all gone to shit a lot more quickly than Stephenson wanted to admit. He'd been suspicious of his orders from the get-go. Stephenson had seen some serious shit since he'd started working for the Murkoff corporation ten years ago. He was only forty but he looked like he was creeping up on fifty. Stephenson didn't complain. To those who could stomach it, the pay was incredible. So long as you didn't dwell on how much of it was hazard pay, it was an easy job most of the time. Escort mysterious vehicles. Guard mysterious locations. Work security at a run-down asylum filled with unarmed crazy people.
He'd passed up an offer to be head of security when the asylum had opened. It had been tempting, but he liked being in motion. Being stuck in a building full of crazy people didn't seem like the sort of position he could be happy doing for the rest of his career. God, had it been tempting. The pay, the benefits, free lodgings. It'd be shitty to be so far from civilization, but he could get plenty of civilization when he retired on a respectable mountain of cash.
Stephenson knew now that he would've been dead a lot sooner if he'd gone for it. He was still probably going to die, but they had a chance. He'd had a bad feeling about the mission the second they'd had to make their way past an abandoned security booth. The power had been on, everything had ostensibly been working, but the place was just fucking coated in blood. Harris – who was currently clutching a picture of her fiancée and muttering to herself – had called up the security footage from hours ago. Someone had cracked a nervous joke about needing to call the Ghostbusters. Stephenson hadn't laughed.
He should've bailed out the second he saw some kind of SyFy Original Movie bullshit going on, but he hadn't wanted to lose his job. His employers didn't take people disobeying orders well, and he'd been ordered to 'contain the situation by any means necessary'. They'd even specified he not blow it up, and had denied all his attempts to requisition C4. Whatever science project that had been let loose, they wanted intact.
Admin was clear, and Stephenson had relaxed. Like a fucking idiot, he'd relaxed. Maybe the Murder Ghost (so coined by Mitchell, the young man gripping his pistol so hard it would be a miracle if he could even fire it) was stuck down in the subbasement. Stephenson wasn't an expert on what a Murder Ghost could and couldn't do, but there was a lot of earth and rock between them and the basement. Maybe it was still... eating brains or drinking blood down there.
Harris had joked, as they entered the Prison Block, that she was bailing out if she saw any little girls with long hair crawling around on the ceiling. It was the last joke any of them had heard, and it had been a shitty one.
Stephenson was honestly still kinda pissed about that.
The Prison Block had turned into a bloodbath so fast he still wasn't entirely sure what had happened. They'd gone in with the goal of clearing it out, block by block, and they hadn't gotten past the first before it went to shit. First a mob of inmates came out of nowhere, and while they seemed like they'd be a joke with their crude weapons, they wounded three guys, forcing them to start a retreat.
Right when they were winning, the inmates scattered, and Stephenson got an eyeful of the Murder Ghost in person. Looking at it made his vision wobble, made him feel like someone was scraping an iron file all over his bones, and he started shouting orders. Stephenson didn't even know if they were coherent. He didn't know how many rounds they tried to put into the thing before Mitchell, like the complete tit he was, threw his entire rifle at it instead of reloading. Like the footage they'd seen, the Murder Ghost started to tear them apart like they were made of wet paper.
He'd gone into Mount Massive with two dozen men, and in the ensuing carnage, he'd only been able to extract two. It hadn't really caught up with them until they'd wrapped back around to the admin block. Mitchell had put down a few inmates who'd tried to skitter away. Harris had hissed at him to conserve bullets. They'd almost headed up when someone on an intercom suggested they come upstairs for some first aid, but Stephenson had declined. There was no way anyone here was sane. No fucking way. So of course, the crazy fucker had started shouting shit all over the PA. Where he was that he had access to it, Stephenson didn't know, but they were beset by the roving pack of lunatics from the Prison Block. It was like they didn't feel pain. They just soaked up bullets and kept coming, screaming their heads off. Now all they had left between them was maybe six rounds, total. Pistol only. Getting back to admin had been a fucking nightmare. The front door was just around the corner. All they had to do was run for it.
But it had seen them. That huge fucking thing had seen them, and now it was hunting them. The three of them were wedged in a utility closet. It smelled strongly of Lysol and it burned his nostrils, but he didn't care. They had a plan, and that plan was: once the monster walked past the closet, they were running for it. They would haul their asses out and they would get in one of the MRAPs and never look back. Stephenson was going to retire immediately. Harris could marry her girlfriend and go on that shitty Yosemite camping honeymoon she wouldn't shut up about. Mitchell could... he didn't know. Jerk off to porn more, because he was a dork. Stephenson didn't really know the kid.
He'd be alive. That's what counted.
They held their breath as a unit when the heavy footsteps approached. Then they stopped, right by the closet.
It made an awful sniffing noise, like a dog, and ground out, "We have to contain it."
Stephenson had heard it say some other fucked up things. He'd thought it was one of his men for a second, the way it had been talking, but if this guy was on his side, that Murder Ghost would've been fucked. Just when he was sure it would open the door, it moved on, muttering to itself, having what sounded like a one-sided radio conversation with no one at all. When he couldn't hear it anymore, he nudged Harris. She kissed the picture of her fiancée and tucked it away. Harris was first. She had the shortest legs, and Stephenson wanted her in front in case he needed to pick her up by her collar and drag her. He was getting these kids out, no matter what.
Mitchell threw the door open and Stephenson frowned when it bounced off of something. Before he could stop Harris, though, she was out. She was quick, but less quick with riot gear on, and she made it two steps out of the closet before a monstrous hand swiped at her. Stephenson felt like he grabbed for her in slow motion, he and Mitchell tumbling out of the closet as well, but too late. The monster was able to grab her entire head, helmet and all, in it's fist. Once it had a hold of her it smashed her into – smashed her through – the opposite wall.
"Harris!" Mitchell shrieked.
"Run! She's down, run!" Stephenson started to run, but Mitchell was making weird noises and pointing his pistol at the thing.
"Filth," it grunted. It grabbed Mitchell's hands, pistol and all, and didn't even flinch when he managed to discharge a bullet through its flesh. Slowly, it closed its fist, and the sound of Mitchell's hands being crushed was one that would haunt Stephenson forever. And that wasn't looking that long. Mitchell was screaming, and he didn't stop until the thing let go of his hands, grabbed his neck, and ripped his head off like it had only been attached with Velcro. Subverting Stephenson's wildest expectations, the monster kept the head, and threw the body at Stephenson.
He could hate himself later for leaving Harris. She was probably dead. If not dead, then dying. Stephenson had to get out. He had to get back into radio range. They had to know how fucked it was here. They had to know to bring more than three fucking trucks!
Mitchell's body missed him because he was no longer where he'd been standing, and the monster was in hot pursuit. It'd seemed slow before, but it was closing on Stephenson now. He passed security. He slipped and scrambled around the corner, but somehow stayed upright. Stephenson could hear it breathing now, labored and harsh, like he had a chest cold. Boy, it had to be hell to blow your nose when you didn't have one.
The desk. Stephenson vaulted over the back desk, and then the front, and he slammed into the door. Someone had lined it with corpses, heavy, hard to move corpses, and the stupid door opened inwards. Headless, heavy corpses that would take him too long to move with the thing right up his ass. It had laid a trap, it had laid a fucking trap for him oh motherfucker-
"Can't breach the perimeter," it rumbled, practically in his ear. Stephenson whirled on it, not firing his pistol, but beating it's big, lumpy head with it. He managed to sock it a few good ones before it made a grab, but Stephenson rolled away, throwing the useless pistol away from him and drawing a knife from his boot. He didn't know if he was pissed or terrified when it laughed at him. It even waited for him, crouched slightly.
Stephenson charged with a yell that was more high pitched than he would've liked and tried to gut the fat fuck. It was too fast, and even if it didget a hit, the knife barely scratched him. Almost none of the cuts bled. It stopped fighting suddenly, and Stephenson didn't question it – maybe the Murder Ghost was back, that would just be the icing on the cake – and sank his knife deep into the thing's belly. It grunted, but when Stephenson tried to saw across, to disembowel the thing, it grabbed his throat with one hand, and both his wrists with the other. So calm. So measured. It pulled the knife out with another, quieter grunt. A thin trickle of blood seeped out, but the bleeding stopped more quickly than was normal.
Well, maybe it was normal for murderous tubs of guts with dead men's eyes. Stephenson couldn't swear to be the expert on that subject.
"Come on you piece of shit, come on!" Stephenson hollered at him, "I came here to contain you, you dogfucker!"
It didn't kill him. Instead, it just listened, holding him very still. The pressure of its grip was uncomfortable, but it wasn't crushing bone like it had done with Mitchell.
"You got them all killed," it said. Stephenson didn't like how aware this thing was. It looked like some roving pile of malevolent, rotten bacon. That it could think and plan and make him feel guilty was just... unfair, "They're all dead because you're a piece of shit C.O. You led them in there and they believed in you and now they're dead."
This fucking thing was just as nuts as everyone else.
"They're dead because of you," Stephenson said, "You and that fucking... shitty ghost!"
"I'll contain it," it said, "Only I can contain it."
In one smooth motion it bounced Stephenson's head against the counter of the front desk, and things got a little murky. The helmet had absorbed some of the blow, but they were moving. Away from the door, away from the headless corpses of the people who had trusted him to get them through this. God, he'd failed. Stephenson had failed before, there wasn't a human being on the planet who hadn't, but never on this level. Never this badly.
He'd been invited to Harris's wedding. He had joked about if he was sitting on the groom's side or the brides and she'd affectionately called him an asshole. Stephenson knew it had been a shitty thing to say before he'd said it, but he'd thought it would be funny. It would make everyone else laugh. It had. She'd been cool about it, but he had seen in her eyes how he had managed to cut her down in front of the others. He'd been intending to apologize at the reception. He had a whole speech.
She was halfway through a wall now. Dead. Would some sick freak loot her corpse and find the picture of her fiancée and jerk off to it? Jesus, what would they do to hercorpse here?
Dark. It was dark. Stephenson didn't know why. The power was on, but not in this room. Was he dead? Maybe he was dead. If he saw Harris, he'd apologise. Hell, he'd apologise to Mitchell for not ever bothering to know anything about him. Light blazed on and Stephenson winced. Not dead, then, just disoriented. An overwhelming stench washed over him, and when things came back into focus, Stephenson sincerely wished it would just kill him. It was some fucked up... effigy. Some monument to being a sentient, homicidal ham. Stephenson didn't know why, but he started to laugh. This was fucking ridiculous. This entire place was a waking nightmare, and they'd sent in three MRAPs, one squad. Nothing else. Did they even know how badly they'd fucked up? They hadn't even made it past one block!
There was a long, jagged metal strut coming up out of a pile of bodies. The heads were all turned to look at it, and Stephenson recognized some of them. Too many of them.
"It's going to hurt," it said. Stephenson didn't know what was going to happen until it did, and that he didn't black out immediately was just one more unfathomable cruelty on the pile. Someone was screaming – probably him, since he'd just been impaled on a length of metal taller than the thing that had skewered him on it – and the monster turned off the light, "Hush."
In the dark, in agony, Stephenson could feel the accusing stares of his fallen men. He'd hold on for as long as he could. After what he'd led them into? He deserved to suffer.