through it. The flesh pierced in the front and then exploded out the back, but it did not slow the monstrosity.
When it entered the elevator, Shannon realized her thinking was flawed, that the thing had her now and there was no fleeing it. Before the thing swung the wicked serrated knife, there was a twang, and the elevator suddenly dropped, fell rapidly, and crashed into the basement floor. From far below, Shannon heard the thing scream, the rage now impossible to believe. She did not wait, but leapt over the now vacant elevator shaft and went to the stairwell to the right.
Her breath was rushing in and out at an unreasonable pace, and her heart hammered against the inside of her chest; it is one thing to see people gone mad, but something entirely different to see them brutally changed into an insidious monster. There was no chemical in the air, no infection like airborne rabies; it was an evil thing happening here, a biblically evil thing that she did not understand or know how to handle. She had to get to Ethan and find out what was going on.
She ran up the gritty stairs and ripped open the door to the second floor. The passage was much like the one below but for the bodies instead of just streaks of blood. They were clearly dead but not ravaged like those downstairs. It scared Shannon to realize how wholesome it seemed that these corpses were still complete. Shannon began to wonder if perhaps she had gone mad and was just spending some time here in a mental ward.
She turned right and realized this was in fact a mental ward. The small windowed doors to almost every room stood open and were now broken or hanging crooked, all smeared with blood and bits of flesh. In some of the doors were what appeared to be patients, half in, half out of their cells, all lying lifeless and brutalized in bloody orange coveralls.
Shannon replaced the clip in her gun, unsure how many shots she had left and not wanting to run dry. She then began to walk slowly down the passage, leading with the gun, peering into each room before passing. The hall was long and as dark as the one below, the stench of blood and warm meat hanging thick in the air. A soft humming and occasional crack came from the florescent lights above as they fought to come on completely, forcing the passage into a maddening flicker from gore and human refuse to almost complete darkness.
At the far end of the passage, toward the outside wall, there stood a single door among many. This door, however, did not seem infected with the blight of the rest of the building. It was still clean and sterile, the light above the threshold still burned steadily, and the floor and ceiling were clean and without the stain of fungi. It seemed as if the Holy Grail was contained within, and the evil consuming the town could not approach. This seemed so completely odd to Shannon, enough to make her loath to approach it and see what the room actually held. That was until a face filled the small window and looked down the hall towards her.
She knew at once it was Ethan and she rushed to the door.
“Shannon! Thank God! I heard shooting; was that you?”
“Yeah. Back away from the door!”
“Can’t you just open it? What happened to your eye?”
She raised the gun and pointed it at him through the wire-filled glass. “Back up!” she screamed.
“Alright, don’t shoot!” Ethan hollered as he stumbled quickly back from the door.
Shannon inched the door open slowly until she could see the young man completely. She kept the gun trained on him, “Why aren’t you dead like the others?”
“I don’t know. Whatever happened out there stopped at my door. Can you lower the gun? I won’t hurt you,” he assured her, his hands held empty before him.
Shannon looked all around the small room, looking for any sign he may have an improvised weapon or something stranger. “Take off the coveralls,” she said flatly, seriously.
“Excuse me?”
“Take off your clothes!” Shannon screamed. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on around here, but I need to know you don’t have a weapon.”
“I don’t have anything under these…” Ethan began.
“Take them off now or I am leaving!” she threatened.
“Alright, relax. Here.” He unzipped the front and let them drop to his hips. “See? Nothing!”
“Drop them all the way!”
“I don’t… Fine.” He dropped them to the floor and shrugged his shoulders at her.
“Turn around.”
Ethan did as he was told, if not a bit quickly. “Okay?”
“Yeah, fine. You can get dressed. Nice birth mark by the way.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he replied dryly as he zipped the front of his coveralls. “Did you bring food?”
Shannon let the gun drop to her side. “No, and you’ll be glad I didn’t when we get out of here.”
“Oh, why? Never mind, let’s just go. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Come on,” Shannon started back down the passage.
Ethan rushed to catch up with her, and suddenly saw the nightmare around him. “Oh my God…”
“It gets a lot worse,” Shannon quipped back as she continued.
“Why are we going so fast?” Ethan asked, still a bit sore from his trek to the Brighton house and the nightmare below.
“There are things in here I don’t want to meet again.”
“Like what?” Ethan enquired as they entered the stairwell.
“When we are outside, we can talk. We have to get out of here.”
“Yeah, alright.”
Ethan followed her over the empty elevator shaft, through the hallway, and into the reception area. Here he cursed under his breath wetly then dry heaved nothing onto the floor. Shannon took his arm forcibly and led him over the remains of the nurse and into the cold grayness of the outside. Ethan heaved again, this time bringing up some liquid from his empty stomach, which he spat to the ground.
“How do we get out of this town?” Shannon asked while keeping her eyes locked on the now aged hospital.
“I thought you would know,” Ethan replied around a mouth too full of spit.
“Don’t you live here?”
“No, I don’t, actually. I thought you did.”
“I might,” Shannon said under her breath.
“You don’t know?”
“I can’t remember much of anything, past last night.”
“Great. Now what do we do?” Ethan sounded exasperated.
“Find a map, a car, and get the fuck out of here.”
“So you don’t even know if you live in this town? How do you know your name?”
“I found my wallet.”
“Oh.”
“Can we go now?”
“Are you hurt? There is blood in your hair and on your face. What happened?” He sounded genuinely concerned for her.
Shannon turned on him angrily. “They tried to rape me to death, alright? I don’t remember a fucking thing before that!”
“Are you hurt?” Ethan asked again, trying not to show shock at what this girl had just shouted at him.
“No, just sore.”
“Let’s get to a drug store and get you cleaned up. I need some shoes, also.”
“So you started all this?”
Ethan looked up and down the street, looking for some sign of a grocery or drugstore. “I’m not sure. We can talk about it over a Twinkie; I’m starved.”
Without another word, Shannon started down the street with Ethan in tow.
In a cave at the base of the Black Water Mountain, a large pool of water stirred and then eased a thin tendril of itself from the confines of its shore, gently out of the cave’s opening, infesting the forest with its wicked nature. For the first time in centuries, Black Water Mountain began to run with black water, like blood from some ancient
