Ward 32 – Episode 7

The first thought that crosses your mind is “Damn… my leg is starting to hurt!”

Knowing that, you scan the shelves looking for something that could help. With the aid of your shiv, you tear a couple of strips off an extra uniform from a pile in one of the corners and bind up your leg. Still in a hurry, you bash the lock off the cabinet with the cinder block and grab a couple of bottles of over-the-counter painkillers and anti-infection medicines. You open them up and throw down a couple of each, just for good measure.

You also find a glass bottle of clear liquid that you think (with your limited medical knowledge) is a sedative, and stash a bottle in your pocket, just in case.

You take a quick look around the shelves to see if they contain anything else of interest. Most of the stuff on the shelves is too bulky or large for you to conceal on yourself or in your room, but you do snag a flat-head screwdriver just in case you need to do through any more vents. It’s fairly large, but you figure you can ditch it somewhere if you need to.

You’re about to leave the room and head to the right when all the lights suddenly go out. Standing in the pitch black of the hallway, you feel a brief surge of leftover panic from your encounter with the tentacle thing. You were never afraid of the dark before… but then again, you tell yourself, you never had a reason to be afraid before.

After a few moments of standing frozen in the darkness, you are relieved when the emergency lights flicker on at the base of the walls. There’s one red light approximately every 10 feet, and one over every doorway. The red lights cast a fiendish glow on the areas immediately surrounding them, creating a small pool of red light and then dying off a few feet away and leaving large stretches of dark corridor between them.

You pluck up your courage and head to the right, towards the lobby. The hallway is familiar to you — you came down it only this afternoon when you came to this foul place. According to your mental map, then, there must be a security door up ahead that lets out into the lobby. You don’t have a security card to get through the door, but you figure you can handle that when it comes up.

You round a corner and reach the security door a short time later. Almost immediately, you wish you hadn’t.On the other side of the door, bathed in the faint red light of the emergency bulb is something out of a horror movie. A man you assume to be a patient lies face-up on the floor, a dark pool of blood expanding outward from underneath his head. You can’t tell if he’s dead or not, but you almost hope he is.

Almost invisible in the darkness, a smoky grey humanoid that vaguely resembles a human being stands next to the patient’s prone form. Before you break down and retreat back around the corner (as silently as you can) you see the figure move one of its “arms” to gently caress the patient’s leg. Where the arm touches, terrible boils form and burst, the skin breaks open and spews clear liquid, briefly sizzles, and then disappears, leaving only clean bone behind. The patient moans softly… seems like he’s alive, after all.

You get a sense that the creature is feeding.

[poll id=10]

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Notes:

It was a really close choice between the three destinations. Going to the lobby narrowly beat out the others with 5 votes. The runner up, going back into the vent, had 4 votes. Going to the ward had 3 votes.