Harry was tired and bloody. Horror had descended on him once again, without explanation. The phantom fourth floor had been a grotesque copy of the first. Walls crumbled and corroded, linoleum yellowed and cracking. Descending through the floors of the Alchemilla had been a descent through madness. The entire building was decaying…so much like his memory of the school.
The third floor, his intended destination, had been a chilling experience. There certainly hadn't been any lab staff up there. Anyone that survived the earthquake seemed to have suffered the same fate as Dr. Phillips. Patients, nurses and doctors alike, all suffering from the parasite that had infected the chairman of the board. Harry had been lucky to escape this far, pursued by these bloodthirsty creatures. Armed with only a found scalpel he had sustained two gashes, one significant enough to require an improvised dressing on his arm. Searching what felt like the entire hospital, he found none of his fellow survivors. Rachel and Lydia had vanished from ICU and Kaufmann and Briggs were long gone from the mortuary. There he had encountered two more of these puppets that pursued him. He had run, into the basement storeroom, closely followed by the creatures. Squeezing through an opening behind a filing cabinet. Kicking through a grate. Down into a service tunnel underneath the basement and out of sight.
Hearing the moans of the infected, he switched off his flashlight and sneaked through the nearest door. Now, certain that he was alone, Harry illuminated his surroundings. Water ran down damp wooden walls, through the rusted grating on which he stood. Under the grate shadow stretched beyond the reach of his light. The darkness that descended on Midwhich elementary had returned to haunt him. Moving slowly through these unsettlingly familiar surroundings, he came across two large steel doors. Trying the door on the left he found it unlocked. It seemed that this room, under the basement of the hospital, was being used as a treatment room. A bed sat in the middle of this dirty space. It was a little stained with blood and looked terribly uncomfortable. A drip sent plasma to an unused needle that sat next to a restraining strap. Harry recognized, rather sadly, that next to the bed sat a life support machine. On the machine, a photograph. A photograph of his daughter. Here, hundreds of miles from home, a tired photograph of Cheryl…
No, not Cheryl…he picked it up…it bore the name 'Alessa'. She was wearing a blue dress very similar to the girl that he nearly hit with his jeep.
The photograph was a little old. He wondered if this was the girl that Kay Gordon had been referring to at the school. The resemblance was uncanny. Miss Gordon had mentioned that the girl had died in a fire. Perhaps this had been her treatment room. Why they kept the poor girl down here, he had no idea. In any case, the treatment had not been successful. The whole thing was rather sinister.
Next to the photograph lay a key. According to the label it was for the 'examination room'. That was one room that he had found locked upstairs. Though there was no response to his calls, he had thought he heard something. Perhaps Lydia and the others had locked themselves in there.
Arming himself with the scalpel, he left Alessa to rest in peace.