A/N - Just needed to change a little something to do with the hospitals. Nothing major.
I ached all over as I woke up, opened my eyes groggily. My face ached where it'd been pressed against the gravel road. How long had I been out? How the hell had I gotten here, anyway?
As I raised myself up on my arms, I saw something very familiar. Too damn familiar. Those damn black boots again, standing right by my side. Right by my hand again! I snatched my arm away and sat back on my feet, my new Uzi held up protective-like. I looked up to see what the hell he was gonna do now, if he was gonna unsling that sword off his back and skewer me, or... But he wasn't even looking at me. He looked further on down the... down the road. I saw then, as I looked to see what he was looking to, that we were on a long stretch of road going... somewhere. In that fog and without knowing how I got to it, the place coulda been anywhere. So I watched him stare, seemin' anxious, out into the fog. He musta seen what he was looking for, cause he nodded to himself quickly, glanced at me, and turned suddenly, the ground fog hiding his feet as he walked further up the road. He stopped and dropped to his knees, busied himself with something on the ground. Whatever it was, it was hidden by the fog at that distance, and his arms vanished from the elbow down, completely obscured.
I pulled myself to my feet, walked up to him and he snapped his head up to face me. Eyes narrowing, he leant over his task protectively as he watched me approach, but did nothing to stop me. Now close enough, I could see what he was doing, what had taken his attention. Angela!
Stretched out there on the cold gravel, arms held over her head by Damian, she lay barely conscious. Moaning quietly and shaking her head slowly, she struggled feebly against Damian's hand on her crossed wrists. He tightened his grip and reached down with his free hand to her belt, shot me a furious glance when I began to protest, and pulled her top up slowly. The fabric stopped short, though, pinned to the girl's body by the long black knife, and I realised what he was trying to do.
"What can I do?" I asked. "Lemme help."
"Hold her wrists," he answered, not looking up from the knife, "She keeps wriggling! Dammit, Angela, you're really not making this any easier, you know that?"
"Don'… Donwanna… No hospi….." she muttered, her eyes closing themselves as she spoke.
"I know, I know," he answered. "I hate the place, too, but it can't be helped."
"Jus' lemme - "
"Shhhh…" he interrupted. "It'll be ok. All will be well. And all will be well. And all manner of thing will be well, remember?"
"Yeah," she murmured sleepily, her mouth curling into what might have been a smile, mighta been a snarl, "I didn't believe you the first time, remember?"
He snorted a chuckle and picked up a first-aid kit half-masked by the rolling ground fog. "This is going to hurt, Angela. But it'll be worth it, I promise. Nathan, hold on to her." He opened the kit and took out a gauze pad, licking his lips nervously as he saw the hot ruby blood streaming fresh down her side.
"That's it?" I asked, amazed he could think just that would help. He shook his head irritably.
"It's enough, old man. Here and now, it's enough. Now shut up and hold her tight."
The girl on the ground moaned again, struggled weakly. Her slender wrists moved and ground against my hands, feeling so frail and weak in my grip. I kept her held tight, though. What else could I do? She'd die if he didn't do something…
And then he did it. In one quick movement, he pulled out the knife, lifted her cream jumper and, dropping the knife, pressed the gauze fast against the bloody, streaming wound in her belly. She shrieked as he pulled the knife out, her deep dark eyes slamming wide open, and screamed as the gauze met her flesh. Then… I dunno… The gauze fastened itself into the flesh somehow, the bleeding from under it dried up, and the blood flow somehow stopped up entirely. It began to dissolve, melting into her skin and I looked at Damian in amazement.
"H- How did you…?" He shook his head at the question as he smoothed her clothes back down, carefully avoiding touching the faint pink scar, all that was left of the wound, her bare pale toned skin. My thoughts on seeing her first were worlds away, how could I have thought that about this kid, this wounded angel?
Damian shook his head again. "Me? No, I didn't do that. Silent Hill rules, Crawley. Don't tell me you didn't notice this place is different to the world outside?" He wiped the blade clean on his hands, sheathed it, and knelt to Angela again.
"How're you feeling, kid?" he asked gently. She shook her head at him much more vigorously than before and screwed up her face in pain. Tears began to roll down her face and she thumped at his chest as he took her in his arms and lifted her up, but it didn't seem to register with him. He turned away from me as though I'd suddenly ceased to exist, and started walking up the road.
I went to follow, yelling after them as he strode away with his burden. That turned out to be a mistake. He turned his head, narrowed his eyes and muttered something at me. My skin... suddenly it felt like I was burning alive. My head suddenly filled with pain, such pain, you got no idea. I screamed and grabbed my head, and as I staggered back, my feet slipped out from under me. The ground reached up, slapped the wind out of me and knocked me a good one on the back of the head. My vision blurred and blackened, and I just lay there for a spell, not able to move until I could feel my arms and legs again.
I sat up slowly, my head throbbing, skin tingling, to inspect the damage. None at all! My skin wasn't even reddened. The fire feeling had been some kind of fake? Scary shit, I tell ya… My strength was coming back now, so I got up again, slowly, and hobbled after them. Whatever power or spell or whatever the hell he'd used back at the chapel, it was obvious that had been just a taste of what he could do. Even the burning just there had been a warning. I followed them carefully, his dark appearance a beacon in the blinding white fog.
After a while we seemed to be coming into a town of some sort. Silent Hill, I guessed. After all, Silent Hill rules applied here... Broken-down signposts, knocked over garbage cans, and a good number of stores and restaurants. I remembered the pizza place again, that place was really beginning to haunt my thoughts. But why? They'd just been talking. No... I remember, they were arguing. And she had tried to... I dunno, there's something more there. But what?
Anyway, I followed them, at a damn good distance, along streets and past stores. I got close enough to hear him talking to her. Well, murmuring would be the better word, I guess, like you'd talk to a scared kid or something. She didn't say much back, but I could hear her whimpering. After a while until he stopped talking, stopped in his tracks and turned slowly to a mannequin store on his right. 'Storefront Poseables', the name on the facade read. His face twisted in absolute fury at a symbol scrawled on the glass. He set Angela down slowly, and brought something out of his pocket. A white disc with a red design. The Seal of Metatron! He musta stolen it after Cheryl found it useless. Somehow he musta taken it… or something.
Anyway, he held the Seal in front of him and approached the glass, slowly, as though being held back. He got the Seal to the symbol, though, and at that moment I heard a scream. Turning to look for it, I saw a black cat across from me screeching at us as it bled onto the ground below. A sudden crash behind me made me start, and as I began to turn back to the window, I saw the cat fall down, the blood beginning to pool beneath its body. Turning to see what had made the crash, I saw Damian putting the white disc away again and pick Angela up. The window glass in front of them had shattered, leaving a circular hole within the symbol scrawl area. Of the symbol itself only the outer ring remained, and that had somehow turned… blue? A red symbol that turned blue and shattered the glass it was on? Before I could think on this, though, Damian stepped through the hole, lifting Angela carefully past the glass, and... and vanished. That broke up my thoughts on the symbol some, I tell ya.
I approached the window slowly, my new semi-auto at the ready just in case it was a trap of his. The headless mannequins stood silently, almost as though they were watching me. The one with a head was worst, its dead plaster eyes staring right through me. At my feet lay some papers. A tourist map of Silent Hill, a scrap of red paper which made my vision blur and blacken for a split second (musta been that knock I got when I hit the ground, I figured), and a page that looked torn from a small book, a journal by the size and the date printed on the top of each page. Some day-per-page diary planner thing, I figured. Not much on it, though, a grubby red-brown thumbprint and something scrawled in black ink. Jan 10th, I read, Stay away from the old hospital! The nurses... Oh God, the nurses...
Puzzled, I tucked the thing into my pocket, and leant forward to the window, hating the fact that it was bringing me closer to those damn dummies. The air tingled and felt sticky closer to the hole, I felt the edges carefully and felt nothing weird about the glass itself.
So now I had a choice, I could go out into the town and face… whatever I could find there with no-one to tell me what was going on, or take my chances with the Bastard in Black. I hated him, no doubts, but at least the fucker was straight with me, and could tell me what I needed to know to stay alive. I thought then, though I may have been wrong, goin' on what happened since, that he might be willing to help me. Certainly that I'd be safer if I could get some idea from him of what was what around here, so following him sounded like a good idea. I braced myself and stepped into the hole.
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I fell through a tunnel, gray and flickering light, Alice down the rabbit-hole, and landed on a linoleum floor. The place smelt like a hospital, though it looked deserted, and seemed to have had the power cut. I flipped my flashlight on and rose, it musta been my imagination that I heard a door click shut further up the hallway, but I thought maybe I'd check it out, I sure as hell couldn't see Damian or Angela anywhere. As I stood up, I saw a map on the wall beside me, a gaping hole in the plaster beside that, just above the floor I'd landed on. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the map off the wall and shone my light on it. Brookhaven Hospital, it read at the top. Three floors, one with all rooms marked M and then the number. M? M for... what? The map showed a 'Special Treatment Area' on a separate floor, rooms no smaller than cells. Padded rooms, maybe? M for Mental Health?
In a flash of imagination (or was it premonition?) I saw a small room, one wall lined with doors to even smaller cells. Padding within them lined with dirt, caked with blood, a muffled screaming from within one. I saw in my mind's eye, approaching the door to that cell, trying to look through the view hole, the door would swing open, something would fall out, a nurse, face bound in her own skin screaming muffled through the flesh, stench of puke and shit and blood and the sickly sweetness of a woman's sex and...
I blinked, opened my eyes as the smell hit me, a panting, whimpering approaching behind me. I turned slowly, not wanting to see what I might see... and the flashlight picked out the room number of the door next to me, M3. I turned, the flashlight shining across the number of the door beside me, M3, further around until finally it lit the blonde nurse not two feet from me. The same nurse I'd imagined? One I'd foreseen? Didn't matter, here she was, and… Oh God…
She clawed horribly at the air as she staggered to me, the stench rolling off her, making me gag. My flashlight picked out the shine of the fresh blood running down her face, her arms, the inside of her leg. The shine of the knife in her hand.
Her face was there. Her face was not there. The whimpers of pain were muffled by her own flesh, and the knife in her hand said she wanted mine. I turned and dove into the hole, back to that gray tunnel and wherever it would take me. I closed my eyes as I fell, kept them closed as I landed, not wanting to see anything worse. I half-hoped that if I was really really lucky I'd wake up back in the burger bar with my face in my lunch. Bit of a stretch, but I guess we all have our dreams.
"Anywhere but there. Anywhere but there. Please, anywhere but there. 'Stay away from the hospital.' Anywhere but there," I muttered fervently as I opened my eyes. Thank God! I was back outside the mannequin store. I left in a hurry, didn't so much as look back. Anywhere but there.
I wandered the streets for a while, not really knowing where to go. I had the map, but no ideas about where I wanted to get to, some streets I just turned back from the moment I set foot in them, the growls and noises I heard from inside the fog put me off. Just a bit. Some streets had just up and gone, only a great pit dropped away where the asphalt shoulda been.
So I wandered and wandered, until eventually I just gave up and stood there at a crossroads wonderin' what to do next. That's when I saw the scrap of paper on the ground. I bent to pick it up and saw it was another diary scrap. As I closed my hands on it, pain in my head drove me to my knees, my eyes shut tight, and when I opened them again, I was someplace else. Again. This was getting to be a pretty fucked-up town, I'd known that, but at least until now I'd always known how I'd gotten to where I was. This shifting back and forth, though… that spooked me. I tried not to panic, tried to get a grip on where I was, and… where was I?
Going by the parked ambulance and the nurse on a smoke break, I had to guess the back of a hospital. The sign above the door read Alchemilla Emergency Room, but this was a different kind of hospital to the one I'd just seen; powered, lit, and everything working as it should, a small-town hospital on a quiet night. The redheaded nurse turned and smiled at me. "Hi there. I haven't seen you around here before."
"No, I'm new in town," came the voice behind me, and I felt a shiver as something seemed to… to pass through me. I yelled out with the shock of it, but there was no response from the nurse flirting with me, nor from… from the guy who'd walked through me? I was in some kind of dream, then! Or a vision? Somethin' like that… I remembered my wife, Lisa, tellin' me once that sometimes people got, like, flashes of the past, or the future, or visions of things. She'd read that places known as 'famous suicide spots' or 'high-accident areas' often caused possessions and hauntings. And I'd just been in some kinda… fucked-up hospital, so maybe the same kinda psychic-type stuff was goin' on here, too. Was I being shown something that'd happened? Warned? I watched carefully.
The guy who'd walked through me, a tall guy with blond hair and a denim jacket, walked up to the nurse. Confidently, almost swaggering, he knew she was flirting with him, knew how to play the game. I had to admire his style, I couldn't have done any better myself. He held up a lighter to her unlit cigarette, cupping the flame with one hand, her face with the other, stroked her hair as he spoke. She smiled at him, pretending shyness. I could see a woman's cunning under that shyness, that slyness they all bring up when they're playing the game. He smiled back, a small grin as his hand brushed against her face, against her body as he returned the lighter to his pocket.
"I'm Damian," he said, "What's your name, beautiful?"