Chapter 2: Fear of blood, fear for the flesh
Part 1: Hospitalization
"Oh SHIT!" Beth blurted out, stumbled back and knocked against a small table, which promptly toppled and spilled its metallic occupants onto the floor. The various surgical instruments clanked against the linoleum.
One of them seemed more than a little appealing to the woman. She instinctively crouched down and snatched the scalpel, so that she could defend herself against whatever was responsible for colouring that bed crimson. The scalpel's blade reflected her brown eyes as she stood and pondered recent events.
"There's probably an explanation for this. There has to be a totally reasonable explanation for this. Think. That door opened because someone in the bed pulled the string. Think. There was no one there to pull the string. Think. Ergo, no one pulled the string. The door therefore opened because ... oh shit. Think."
The dark, thin serpent curled up on the bed glared at Beth, not willing to give her any clues as to what in the name of logic could have pulled it.
"A draught! Course, a draught opened the door," she concluded, vehemently ignoring her senses' telling her that there wasn't the slightest breeze in here.
"But if some draught blew the door open, that still doesn't explain why the bed is soaked in fresh, warm blood ..." The whole situation soon filled her with frustration. Her voice bounced off the walls and ceiling like a ping pong ball flying out of control: "None of this-"
Her right foot left the floor ...
"-would have happened-"
... sailed through the air ...
"-if that stupid taxi-"
... and kicked the overturned table.
"-hadn't fucking hit me!"
The table collided loudly with the wall. Beth winced at the noise. She swiftly checked the table to see if the hospital could sue her for vandalising their property. Fortunately, there weren't any noticeable damages. She carefully put the table back up and laid the instruments on the top. "Whew..."
Beth was about to replace the scalpel when she realized something slightly alarming: Despite the noise she had made (yelling "oh shit", knocking over and kicking that table), no one had come into the room to find out what was going on. This wasn't the most crowded building in the world, but the disquieted patient figured someone had to have heard her under normal circumstances.
"Then again, these circumstances aren't quite normal," her mind mumbled. Beth was so shocked at thinking that thought, she nearly jumped. Naturally, it spawned the question "Well, what the hell kind of circumstances are they?"
Clutching the scalpel, she made a beeline for the metal door and peeked into the hallway. It was deserted except for a grey cat sitting to her left. Its bright green eyes were fixed on the woman in the doorway.
Beth recalled an odd proverb her grandfather used to quote: In the night all cats are grey. She gave a wry smile and asked the animal: "What're you doing in here?"
In lieu of answering this question, the cat got up and wandered down the middle of the corridor. As if hypnotized, Beth followed it past sterile, milky white walls and yellow metal doors. It was almost like a dream, but felt way too real.
"Hello? Anyone here?" she asked. Fluorescent lamps hummed in reply. The dark blue tiles felt icy against her bare feet.
After half a minute of trudging through this apotheosis of all desolate buildings, the cat disappeared from sight by slipping past a half-open door, into a room in the right side of the hallway. G17 – Comatose Patients Only, white letters on a black doorplate declared.
Beth stepped into G17 to discover that it was void of both cats and other human beings. The ceiling lamps were broken and blinds covered the windows in the wall at the back, making the room even darker than all the other parts of the hospital she had seen so far. Six beds were lined up against the left and right walls with the long sides facing the entrance wall, each bed equipped with an IV stand and electrocardiograph for showing a patient's pulse. There were no patients around now, though.
A perfect explanation for the situation finally crossed Beth's mind: "When I got hospitalized, they might have given me some drug that's made me have this funny little dream ... Yeah, that must be it."
As if voicing its disapproval of the theory about an analgesic-induced hallucination, the electrocardiograph in the far right corner beeped loudly, startling the hell out of Beth in the process.
Part 2: Rainy weather and blind passengers
Kyle Coppola easily drove his cab through the foggy streets of Hooper Lake City. The 45-year-old taxi driver had worked here for nine years, liked his vehicle and knew all the shortcuts. His job was easy and well-paid, albeit not the most varied and exciting occupation in the world.
Contrary to one hidden-camera TV show that had always amused him, his customers rarely talked to him and if they did, they certainly wouldn't reveal any juicy secrets. The conversation topics never got less trivial than sports or the weather.
Apropos of the weather, Kyle felt puzzled by it today. In all the years he had lived in Hooper Lake City, he had never seen it shrouded in this white mist. It was a somewhat surreal sight.
The young couple on the back seat didn't seem too fascinated, though. The wealthy youths were too busy kissing and talking about their forthcoming wedding. In fact, they were on their way to a travel agency to decide on a honeymoon. Kyle envied the couple; it had been a while since he had experienced the same feelings of devotion and love.
He stopped in front of a crossroads, waiting for the green light to replace the red, and looked out the window at a three-storey building with some kind of twining plant growing on the brick walls. An old brass sign above the entrance read St. Gilliam School - Et Facta Est Lux. "And there was light," he translated under his breath.
The sound of rain falling on asphalt reached his ears, but he couldn't see any rain outside. "Maybe I should go to the doctor after hours and get my ears checked ..."
That's when the blood appeared on the car windows. Crimson streaks simply started sliding across the outside of the panes, but instead of respecting Newton's laws, they appeared from the bottoms of the panes and clambered upwards.
"What the FUCK?!" Kyle yelled. His next reaction was quite instinctive, but may seem slightly comical to anyone following his tale: He tried turning on the windshield wipers.
Which didn't work. The wipers merely lay there like black snakes that were too lazy to gobble up the red lizards crawling into their territory. "Come on, goddammit!" Kyle furiously pulled down on the handle behind the steering wheel. The wipers continued to disobey.
The driver attempted to get out of his taxi, but the doors were shut tight and didn't budge. He couldn't even roll down the blood-covered windows.
Then the epiphany hit him: Something had happened to that couple he was driving; he heard nothing but silence from the backseat. His head turned slowly until his widening eyes could scan the corpses behind him.
They were leaned against the windows as if sleeping. Their torsos had numerous stab wounds, but the worst part was their faces. Someone had attached the ends of four thin wires to the eyelids and the other ends to the bottom lips, stretching the eyelids down, blinding the passengers. Nausea invaded Kyle's body.
The man opposite the driver's seat suddenly opened his mouth, sputtered blood and hissed like a hostile animal: "False. It's ... false." His eyelids stretched up and down with his lips as he spoke. "This ... falsehood, this deceit ... so loathsome"
As the corpse whispered its last syllable, all the panes of the car shattered and glass fragments clinked against the road. Content with this opportunity to escape from his taxi, Kyle twisted himself head first through the nearest window.
Part 3: The Bedridden
Beth stared intently at the electrocardiograph in the far right corner of the room, wondering if the machine would follow up on the single beep she had just heard. The area was flooded by a silence as vast and deep as the ocean itself, a silence in which undercurrents of nervousness and suspense could effortlessly drown anyone in fear.
The ECG finally cleaved this silence by letting out a long, continuous beeping sound, declaring that the absent patient's heart wasn't beating. A bright green line slid vertically across the middle of the black screen like a gross worm slithering through the soil, from left to right.
"But ... what the hell?" Beth aptly remarked.
The worm soon began to wobble towards its left, signifying how the non-existent patient's equally non-existent heart miraculously started to beat again.
Beep ...
Beep ...
Beep ...
The tubes on the ceiling flickered violently. Beth's fingers tightened their grip on the scalpel.
Beep ... beep ... beep ...
The vertical green line on the ECG regularly rose upwards from the middle of the screen, conveying the pulse of a normal, relaxed human being.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Rising, diving, rising, diving, faster, faster ...
beepbeepbeep
As if tired and exhausted by all that flickering, the tubes fell from the ceiling and crashed down on soft beds and linoleum floor. Beth let out a high-pitched scream and the ECG responded at a ludicrous pace:
BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP
The screen turned into a blurry mess of green and black. "That can't possible be a human pulse, not with that speed ..."
And then, in the faint light coming from the screen and through the blinds covering the windows, Beth noticed how the sheet on the noisy ECG's bed was bulging up, moving slightly back and forth over the mattress. The sound of fabric ripping apart was audible behind the ECG beeps. The shapes of human fingers moved around under the sheet, soon followed by the outlines of two thin arms.
"But there couldn't be anyone lying under that sheet – where would the rest of their body be? Unless ..." Beth gasped as she realized the disturbing truth.
Someone was crawling out of the mattress.
A sickening hand ventured out from the edge of the sheet. Its index and ring fingers had been lopped off, leaving only three fingers on the grey, bony left hand as it reached out, grabbing the air with quick, spasmodic movements. A right hand joined it, then the wrinkled, bruised arms came in view.
The sheet suddenly flew off the bed as the creature's torso lunged upwards, its head lolling back while it moaned at the ceiling like a wolf howling at the moon. Beth could clearly see the gap in the middle of the mattress where the Bedridden had ripped its way out of its claustrophobic confinement. Its naked and skinny upper body protruded from there, the skin oily and grey. Pieces of mattress stuffing still clung to the monster like some kind of boils or mould.
When the thing let itself dive over the edge of the bed, dragging the rest of the body out with it, Beth immediately whirled around, only to discover that the door she had entered through was now closed. She gripped the knob and struggled to get out, but the door wouldn't move one millimetre.
"HELP!"
The ECG and the demon retorted with their incessant beeping and moaning. Beth turned around and her hand flew up to her mouth when she saw how the Bedridden's disturbingly humanlike legs were bent backwards at the knees like a bird's legs. In addition to this downright wrong anatomic feature, a leathery, almost comic model of a bird's beak was strapped to the Bedridden's head like a bizarre modern sex toy. The mouth was concealed behind this long triangular beak, but the eyes were visible above it – haunting, snow-white orbs rolling around in their pitchblack slits. The unusual colours made it look like the photo negative of a normal person with dark eyes.
Beth felt that dry, rotten flavour in her throat, the same taste she always experienced when she was about to retch. Her head felt as light as a feather in an area with much air resistance and her breath quickened. "G-g-go away! Stay away from m-m-me, I've g-got a scalpel!" she ordered the creature, trying to sound as awe-inspiring as a school principle telling a pupil to obey the rules unless they wanted to get expelled.
But Beth wasn't a principle and the Bedridden wasn't some scared little brat getting scolded in her office. Hell, the Bedridden wasn't even human for all she knew.
The thing abruptly jumped up at her, its hands gripping her shoulders and its leathery feet settling on her thighs. Its head lolled back once more, giving shrill birdlike screeches, and Beth observed that the artificial beak above her was hollow. In the midst of the confusion and panic, she caught a disgusting glimpse of something unspeakably deformed glinting in the part of the thing's face where a mouth should be located.
Beth uttered an inarticulate scream of repulsion and panic. Then, before that abomination she had glimpsed could connect with her flesh, she drove the scalpel up through the Bedridden's stomach. The cold blade easily plunged into the tainted flesh and the bony hands loosened their grip on Beth's shoulders. She sprinted away from the freak of nature and headed for the windows in the back of the room.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The vertical lines on the ECG were traversing the screen a little slower now, while Beth made energetic, yet vain attempts to open the windows. "I'm on the fourth floor, anyway, so it doesn't matter ..." She turned around to see that her enemy had collapsed at the door where she'd stabbed it. The thing held its right hand to its stomach, as if to prevent any intestines from falling out.
Beth decided to try hiding instead of running. She slid herself under the bed in the far left corner across from the door and prayed silently that the Bedridden would just disappear.
However, these prayers were hardly heard by any compassionate gods, since the Bedridden soon got up and made its way towards her bed. She could see the decaying hands and feet as it crawled closer like a monkey. Putrid bowels slipped out of the stomach wound and splattered against the floor.
The feet and hands came to a halt in front of the woman's not-so-secret hiding place. For a few seconds, nothing happened and Beth nearly allowed herself to hope the thing would just drop dead there and then. Alas, that wish was not granted and when the grotesque head started squeezing into the space below the bed, Beth's reflexes kicked in and she repeatedly swung the scalpel out in fatal horizontal curves.
Beep ... beep ... beep ...
Finally, the freak collapsed and the ECG emitted one continuous beep, a single straight line going across the screen, before turning off. The Bedridden was dead.
Laying under the bed, taking breath, Beth eyed her new best friend: the scalpel. It seemed hard to believe that it had ever been a sterile object.
The moment of rest was ruined by the sudden beeps of the bed's ECG as the bottom of the mattress above Beth bulged out until the material ripped and the familiar grey fingers severed below the nails slipped out like worms from an apple.
Beth shrieked, wriggled out from her former hiding place and stood. Behind her, she could hear the sound of the Bedridden smacking onto the floor below the bed. More of the monsters were emerging from the remaining four beds, numerous ECG beeps assaulting Beth's ears. She tore past the beds and threw herself at the door.
Either someone had unlocked it or she had just hit it with enough force; Beth didn't know the explanation and she didn't care. The important thing was that the door opened and she got out of that hellish room, landing painfully on the hallway tiles, but immediately scrambling to her feet and slamming the door to G17 shut.
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A/N: Tune in next week ... -E.P.O.
