A creature stumbled out. It had been a woman, a nurse judging from the flower-print scrubs that she wore. The Annie sported a fresh bullet wound in its shoulder, and a syringe hung from its desiccated arm. Rudy stuck his leg out. Gregg pushed. Masterson brought his hatchet down.
Rudy kicked the woman over. He had noticed something in the dim light of the elevator lobby. Pinned to the Annie's chest was a note. He bent down to examine it.
In shaky writing, the note read: Forgive me for what I've done. No one came. No one was here, and we started running out of medication. I couldn't watch them suffer. I wasn't strong enough. But, we had a large supply of morphine, so I did it. I killed them all. Forgive me. I deserve to rot in this elevator, but please, give my patients the rest that they deserve.
The note sent chills up Rudy's spine.
"What's it say?" Gregg asked.
Rudy shook his head and crumpled up the note. "It doesn't matter. Let's check downstairs."
****
Allen and Epps were the only two on the third floor. Underneath the smell of rot, there was another smell that brought back a flood of memories, memories of Allen's grandmother, memories of when she had lived in a place like this. They weren't happy memories, and he remembered thinking that his grandmother seemed like a caged bird in the retirement home where his parents had placed her.
When she lived on her own, she was a vivacious woman, always gardening in her backyard. She grew the biggest watermelons he had ever seen, and they tasted the best too. She went on walks, ran a book club, ate healthy. She did everything right. But when her memory started going, none of that really mattered, so they had put her in a place like this.
Allen recalled visiting her once, this was near the end when she barely remembered who he was. To be fair, he had been a teenager then and had changed quite a bit over the last few years, growing taller, leaner, more introspective. His mother had left him alone for a few minutes while she went to find a nurse.
He sat next to her bed, trying not to notice the smell of death. It hung like a pall over the entire place, and the smell had grown stronger over the last few months of his grandma's life. She reached out to him and grabbed him by the wrist, squeezing it with more strength than he thought she could possess.
"Whatever you do," she said to him, "do it with love."
There was no more. She let his wrist go, and he rubbed at it, sitting in place, terrified that she was going to attack him. The moment stuck with him, one of those terrifying moments that one recalled every now and then, its memory brought on by a sound, a smell, a taste. The smell of the assisted living facility brought the memory back, not the rotten smell, but the smell underneath, that of pure death.
But now, he had that fear again, like something was going to reach out of thin air and grab him by the wrist. He gripped his hatchet tighter against such an attack, though he knew he was being foolish. A man can fight a lot of things, but he can't fight his feelings. They are what they are, and with that understanding planted firmly in his brain, Izzy crept into the hallway. It was lit only by the cold, gray light that streamed in from a window at the end of the hallway.
"You ready to do this?" Epps asked.
"No, but let's do it anyway."
They went up to the first door. Allen reached out and put his hand on the doorknob. He didn't want to turn it, and he must have paused a moment too long because Epps said, "Well, are you gonna open it or not?"
With that, he turned the knob and pushed the door open. Immediately, a cold hand grabbed his wrist, squeezing with a terrible strength.
He screamed, sure that the corpse of his long-dead grandmother had come back from the grave to tell him again, "Whatever you do, do it with love."
He backed into the hallway, the creature latched onto him. Allen's eyes were as wide as manhole covers. A part of his brain saw Epps moving out of the corner of his eye. Then he heard the thunk of Epps' hatchet, and the grip of the dead thing loosened.
It fell to the ground, old, toothless. It couldn't have bitten him if it wanted to. It wasn't even a woman. It was an old man. Allen took a closer look at its face, just to be sure, and then he swallowed his fear, bending over and breathing heavily. He flexed his wrist, grimacing in pain. He didn't think anything was broken, and the pain was already starting to go away.
He jumped as Epps slapped him on the shoulder. "You alright, man? You look like you've seen a ghost. Shit, I didn't think you could get any whiter."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Allen said, though visions of his dead grandmother still danced in his head. It was then, with the vision fading, that he realized what he had done. He had screamed and woke the whole damn hallway up.
"Come on. We gotta shut them Annies up before they draw more," Epps said.
Already many of the doors rattled in their frames. A fist punched through the flimsy wood, and Epps and Allen rushed towards the door.
"You open it this time," Allen said.
Epps looked like he was going to argue for a second, and then he shrugged his shoulders. He stepped up to the door, an arm still sticking through it, and he threw the door open as hard as
