4

"Hyde…" Donna spoke up. "Are we lost?"

"Probably…" Hyde confessed. "I think we raced past our turn running from those noises. Give me a minute to think."

"Great…" Eric peeked through a gate into another room. "Not only are we somewhere we don't know but we are also lost in said place. I don't know if I should be scared or angry."

"Choose angry." Hyde marched forward testing doorknobs and kicking open examination rooms. "Because when I find out who dumped us here, I'm going to dump them somewhere… in five different sacks!"

"Who do you think it was?' Donna exhaled tiredly.

"I think it was the football team…" Hyde stopped and looked down two hallways. "The stuff I gave them was really oregano."

"Jesus Christ, Hyde!" Eric looked at him. "What have I told you before? Never tick off the football team!"

"I got more advice for you." Hyde looked at him. "Never tick me off!" He turned and started off down through another long chamber with pipes and a lost wheelchair. Eric looked at Donna then poked his gaze into the one open door here. He saw a room with two narrow tables and a wall lined with small doors. Each door was only about two feet wide and one foot high. There was nine of them grouped in a square like a series of small cabinets grouped in one wall. Eric picked up an odd looking tool and scowled confused at it. The wall to his right had a large gate sealing off the rest of the room. He listened carefully Donna and Hyde wandered into the room behind him. Hyde peeked into an office through the one other door as Donna checked out her reflection in a dirty mirror.

"What kind of kitchen is this?" She looked round, noticed a sink and turned on a tap over a sink. There was no water coming from it.

"It's not a kitchen." Hyde started looking for decent medicine to steal from the cabinet. "It's a morgue. Those are body slots." He pointed to the small doors.

"Oh god!" Donna wanted out.

"Hey guys!" Eric had discovered something else. "We got a hot tub!"

"A what?" Hyde turned and came round the examination tables. Entering into the other half of the room, he noticed Eric looking into a large metal vat on another platform across from them. Five steps down and then five steps up the other side, Hyde jaunted over the space of seven feet and looked into the large vat Eric was looking into. It was filled almost to the rim of a thick red and brown muddy almost oily substance.

"Looks like they haven't cleaned it in a while." Eric replied.

"I don't think that's a hot tub." Hyde dabbed the stuff in it on a few of his fingers and smelled it. It had a coppery odor to it and a rotten decayed after-scent beyond that. He scowled disgustedly from the stink and looked up to an assembly of hooks, lines and pipes over it hanging from the ceiling. He gritted his teeth in disgust.

"Dude, it's a pit of blood! That's where they bled the bodies after death!"

"Oh yuck!" Eric was first to bolt from the discovery. This adventure was just getting more disgusting and more bizarre. Here he was in a large underground sanctum of a deserted hospital without any knowledge of how he got here and now he was almost climbing into a vat of blood. Even Hyde was trying to keep from vomiting. They bolted one after another from the morgue's preparatory chamber and raced back into the hallway.

"Oh god… oh god… oh god…." Eric braced on the wall outside the morgue. "That was just the…. The most disgusting…"

"If I hadn't been here, you would have dived into it, man." Hyde looked at him.

"Who would save something like that?!" Eric once again tried shaking off the perception of that sight. "You don't think there's a vampire down here, do you?" He started looking round.

"If there's a vampire down here with me," Hyde started leading the way once more. "He's going to be the one in trouble. Come on, let's find our way back."

"Where's Donna?"

"Donna?" Hyde stopped and looked round. Where was she? He doubted she would have wondered off by herself more than a few feet. She had only stepped out of the morgue a few minutes ago! "Donna!" He called out for her.

"Where'd she go?!" Eric yelled distraughtly at his best friend. "She was just here!"

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Hyde paced several feet in one direction then down another direction looking for the errant redhead.

"Oh man." Eric looked back the way they had come. "Ben Kenobi said the exact same thing when he and Luke Skywalker were on the Millennium Falcon and they discovered the Death Star." He flashed back on his favorite movie for guidance.

"Eric…" Hyde stood speaking to Eric without looking at him. "Donna wouldn't have wandered off by herself. I think someone's down here with us."