Silent Hill fic: Outbreak - Chapter 10: Nick

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 10: Nick wakes up in a seemingly abandoned version of Alchemilla Hospital.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Nick did not feel well.

He hadn’t been feeling well for days. Shit, weeks. It had gotten bad enough on Labor Day that he’d called off from work at Lakeside, even knowing he could have been blacklisted from future seasons for calling out on closing day. Then he’d gone to the hospital on the 10th when everyone else seemed to get the same idea. And he’d been there ever since.

So he didn’t feel well, but waking up in a room that seemed dark and abandoned didn’t make him feel any fucking better.

Parts didn’t seem too different. He was still dressed in bandages and the awful, thin hospital gown. There was still an IV needle in the crook of his arm, though its usual dull ache had been replaced with a burning sensation, which may have been what woke him up. The thin so-called “mattress” of the hospital bed certainly hadn’t gotten any more comfortable. The only consolation was that the pain of sleeping on it was so minor compared to everything else.

But looking around, everything was far too dim. Even at night, when the lights were down, there was light from the hallway, never kept out all the way by the flimsy curtain they pulled shut for “privacy.” And he was alone. He’d had a roommate or two for the last several days, as more people got sick than the hospital had room for. Now the two cots across the room were empty.

Nick forced himself to sit up, wincing at the pressure on his arms as he did so. Even through the bandages, the sores burned. At first he resisted the urge to check the bandages to see if even that much pressure had caused them to bleed through. Finally he spared a glance, but nothing had seeped through yet.

He groped for the call button he’d been given. Pushing it yielded nothing; usually it gave a deceptively pleasant ding, but there was no indication that he’d pressed it at all. He tried a few more times before giving up and dropping the plastic contraption off the side of the bed. It was tethered to the rail, so it didn’t go far.

The burning from his IV was still noticeable, but fading. It felt a little like when he’d had new drug cocktails injected into the port, where the extra fluid burned for a moment. But was alone in the room, so it seemed unlikely he’d gotten an injection. Looking to the counter along the wall, he did see an empty vial. His eyes resisted focusing in the dim room, but he made out a few of the words on the bottle; 10ml as the size, and written in pen on the label “White C”. Probably the name of the patient the drug had been for. Charles White or something.

He struggled up the rest of the way, careful not to dislodge the IV, and wheeled the stand with him. Even walking hurt, every slight motion of and against the bandages feeling like his skin was being pulled away, and his bones themselves aching all the way down to the marrow.

Nick paused at the doorway, leaning against the wall as he tried unsuccessfully to stave off a coughing fit. The metallic, cloying flavor of blood rose in his throat and mouth, and he spat reflexively, before he could stop to think about how unhygienic that was, considering he was probably contagious. With whatever this was.

He frowned as he stared at the floor. He’d expected the red-streaked crud from his lungs to stand out against the sterile white floor, but strangely it… didn’t. The floor itself wasn’t red, but it wasn’t the antiseptic white he’d grown used to. Instead it was a dingy off-white color, edging to a dark grey-brown where it met the walls, like layers of dirt had accumulated there. Even the wall he was leaning on looked unclean, and like it certainly needed a fresh coat of paint.

Fevers could mess with your head. Nick blinked a few times, but nothing seemed to change. Even touching the wall with his fingertips revealed it felt the way it looked—faintly tacky and grimy.

Finally catching his breath, he pushed the curtain aside—the fabric felt soiled, too—and continued into the hall. It nearly triggered another coughing fit when he breathed in too sharply. The hall looked even worse than his room. It was like the place had been abandoned for years, the paint peeling, the linoleum tiles chipped at the corners, and everything coated with that same grimy residue, like grease buildup on a dirty stove.

“What the fuck…” There was no one to hear him.

He pulled the IV stand along with him, wincing as one wheel squeaked. That seemed to be the only sound in the damn hospital, though when he really strained his ears he could hear some kind of faint hum. It didn’t sound like the usual buzz of machinery or distant voices. It was something deeper than that.

He turned toward the bathroom, which he knew was just a few doors farther down the hall. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting; maybe for that door to open and return everything to the fluorescent-on-white brightness that he’d thought was so obnoxious.

Somehow, the bathroom was even worse than the hall had been compared to his room. The mirror was broken; a huge spider web crack like something had been smashed into it. The sink basin was intact, but the porcelain was badly chipped, the rough broken parts stained black by who-knew-what. The drain was entirely blocked by some substance that looked like an unholy melding of mildew and bile. Nick had to suppress his own gag reflex just looking at it.

The rest of the single-occupancy bathroom was no better, the floor’s linoleum no longer even recognizably once white. The brown crust in the corners had a disturbingly reddish cast, reminding him of dried blood, which he’d seen more than enough of in the last couple weeks.

Oddly, this was the first time it occurred to him that he was clearly dreaming. Except… it felt viscerally real, in a way his dreams never did. Everything seemed far too real to be a hallucination, fever or no.

So what then? A prank? As if anyone would waste special effects of this caliber on that, to say nothing of the ethics of doing something like this to a hospitalized patient.

Had he woken from a coma, and something catastrophic had happened while he was asleep? No, that was even stupider than the prank idea; his bandages were clean, and he was hooked to an IV. If he’d been in a coma in an abandoned facility, he’d be dead.

“So what the fuck,” he said again, staring into the cracked, distorting mirror. “So I have to find someone, right?”

He nodded to himself. That seemed like the best plan he could come up with. Waiting around alone in a place like this didn’t seem like it would do much for him.

He touched the door handle through the edge of his hospital gown rather than with his bandaged hand. Touching it directly seemed like an infection risk.

“Hello?” Nick called into the hallway. It was almost embarrassing how thin his voice sounded, even as the only discernible noise in the hall.

He waited for a moment, just in case, but it was clear no answer was going to come. He turned toward the third-floor nurses’ center; it seemed as good a place as any to start, if he had to pick a place. Of course, the nurses’ center had to be between the other two wings on this floor, leaving him with more of a walk than he was looking forward to.

The rest of the floor was just as deserted as everything else he’d seen. The light hardly illuminated the hall in front of him beyond a few feet. He wasn’t sure how that even worked, though the overhead lights put out barely any murky yellow light.

He came to the swinging door that divided the floor in half and pressed his hand against it, expecting it to swing open at the touch as it usually did, but instead it moved maybe a couple millimeters before clicking against a lock holding it in place.

Glancing around, Nick didn’t see any knob or button to unlock it. There was, however, a folded piece of paper taped toward the side of the door. It was so incongruously white compared to the grungy color of everything else, he wasn’t sure how he’d missed seeing it before. It must have been because he was so focused on just reaching the door.

He pulled the paper down and unfolded it. It was regular printer paper, with one word written across it in what he deeply hoped was dark red-brown paint.

CHOSEN

“Chosen?” he said aloud, not sure why he seemed to need to hear himself. Maybe because it was otherwise so quiet aside from the obnoxious squeaky wheel on the IV stand, and that deep hum just at the edge of his hearing, which was making him feel somehow sick. As if he hadn’t been sick enough already. “What is this bullshit?”

He crumpled the paper up and threw it to the ground, then pounded on the door, ignoring the shooting pain that sent through the skin of his bandaged hand. This time he actually felt one of the blisters rupture, followed by the hot, disgusting sensation of liquid soaking into the bandage.

“Hey!” he yelled, aiming it at the crack in the door. “This is malpractice on a level I don’t think they’ve invented a term for!”

He waited, then shouted again, “Trust me when I say that every bit of this crap is just making it worse! You are going to wind up sued so badly you’ll have to sell the whole fucking hospital!”

He actually thought he heard something on the other side of the door. Leaning in toward that crevice between the halves of the door, he strained to hear without having to actually touch his face to the door itself. He definitely heard a rustling noise, like someone was standing on the other side.

“Hey! I hear you in there!”

Still no reaction.

“Fine! Trust me when I say that if this is some fucking hidden camera prank, you’re going to be so damn sorry!”

If he couldn’t get through the door, and into the nurses’ center on the other side of it, then he’d just have to go down the stairs. With the power out, he doubted the elevator would be running, so the stairs it would have to be. The stairs, which were, naturally, all the fucking way back where he’d come from. It didn’t help to realize that ordinarily that would be a thirty-second walk at most. This was not ordinary—every step was its own special agony, and it took him five times as long as it should, not to mention having to drag the IV stand with him.

He was half tempted to just return to his room, and his cot of a bed, but at this point he was angry. He was going to make it down those stairs somehow, and figure out what the fuck was going on, and who the fuck was to blame for it.

The door to the stairs opened the way it was supposed to at least, and somehow he managed to get down the stairs to the second floor. He started to hope this wasn’t a hidden camera thing, just to spare himself the embarrassment of anyone seeing him struggle to make it down a flight of stairs with an IV stand that weighed what, 10 pounds? Less?

He’d been planning to head straight down to ground level so he could get the fuck out of this place entirely, but just below the landing at the second floor a pile of rubble completely blocked the stairs. He wasn’t sure where the wreckage had come from, considering the stairs directly above were fine—they were the ones he’d just walked down—but there was no getting around or over it. Which just left the second floor itself.

The bandages near all of his joints were starting to get that horrible warm-wet-cold blend of sensation meaning they were soaked through, and the burning in the sores below it all definitely meant it wasn’t something as innocuous as sweat. This time he was more successful at resisting the urge to look. Sometimes it was gratifying to see how bad something looked when it hurt this much, but he knew that seeing it now would just make everything worse.

With a deep breath, he opened the door to the second floor patient wing. Like with the bathroom, he wasn’t sure what he expected. More of the same, maybe, or maybe that it would all be perfectly normal somehow.

No such luck. It was like someone had taken the third floor’s dirty, abandoned state and decided to add a decade of water damage. Rust streaked down the walls from the ceiling, like the entire building had been reinforced with iron that had been exposed to the elements for too long.

It was as deserted as the floor above had been. Most of the patient room doors were open, some hanging off their hinges, some missing altogether. They were all empty, with nothing notable inside them that he could see. Most of the beds didn’t even have their miserable thin mattresses anymore, leaving just rusted metal support bars, looking like they belonged in an antique store or something. Except no antique store would keep shit like that around.

He aimed for the nurses’ center on this floor instead, and at least the door between the sides of the floor opened this time, but the nurses’ center was as empty as the rest of the floor had been. He tried idly to get one of the computers to turn on, but was unsurprised when it didn’t react to anything he did. He tried the phone too, but it just spit a faint static at him no matter what buttons he pressed.

Heading back into the hall, Nick heard a faint sound. Normally it would have been below his threshold of notice, but as the only sound that he hadn’t made, it drew his attention. It came from behind the closed door right across from the nurses’ center. Nick held his breath, and the sound repeated: a metal-on-metal clink.

The plaque next to the door was barely readable: “2F Operating Room 1”. That seemed to bode well. Or not.

The idea of walking into an operating room—maybe especially in a place like this—was offputting enough to make him hesitate, but the desire to discover what had made that sound eventually won out.

Nick opened the door, and almost vomited, reeling back through the door and into the filthy wall on the other side of the hall. The motion set off another coughing fit. This time when he spat out the blood it brought up, he couldn’t even see it against the dark, stained floor. The coughing refused to subside for long enough that it made him gag again, eventually throwing up a thin mix of bloody mucus and bile. Finally he got a lungful of the stale hospital air.

Using the IV stand to help support himself, he tried to steel himself to look into the room again, half certain he must have imagined it. Then he let out a humorless cough of a laugh. As if any of this was more impossible than any other part.

Finally he forced himself to nudge the half-open door the rest of the way. The inside of the room looked the same as the first time he’d looked. There was an operating table in the center of the room, draped in a sheet that was soaked almost completely in blood. The blood had saturated the cloth to the point that it was dripping from the dangling corners and beginning to pool on the floor. There was an arc of blood on the far wall as well, making him think “arterial spray,” a term he’d probably heard on some forensics show marathoned on late night TV.

Next to the gory table was a cart where one would expect to see medical supplies, but the actual contents of the tray looked more like tools for torture than surgery. A syringe and scalpel, but also a small drill, a handheld saw with a broken blade, pliers… A thin pad of absorbent material under these tools was also bloodied, with more dried in a thin crust on the implements themselves.

The quiet metallic clank he’d heard a couple times could have come from something being set on that cart, but there was no one in the room now. Not even a victim, and there was no way that anything had lost that much blood and survived. So how the hell had whatever he’d heard gotten out? The blood was still dripping; whatever brutality had taken place must have happened very recently. Just before he’d reached the second floor, probably.

As repulsive as it was, he forced himself to pick up the scalpel from the tray. He tried to wipe the blood off the handle, even though that meant getting it on his hospital gown. He held it carefully, so he wouldn’t cut himself. But if something was in here with him, something that had done this to someone else… he wanted something to protect himself.

“So what now?” he asked aloud, waiting to see if the sound prompted anything. It didn’t. Not really a surprise: if his coughing and throwing up hadn’t alerted anything, his voice probably wouldn’t.

“Fuck,” he said then, just to hear something more. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as he’d hoped.

He could go to the stairs on this side of the floor, try to get to the ground floor that way. Or he could try and go back up to the third floor, where he’d heard somebody moving on the other side of the locked hallway door.

Though what if the sound had been made by the same thing responsible for… whatever had happened in this room.

Down the stairs, then, if possible.

It wasn’t. The stairs on the west end of the floor ended in rubble below the second floor, the same way the east stairs did. It made no more sense on this side; everything above the rubble was structurally intact, despite the decayed appearance.

Left with no other choice, Nick climbed up the flight of stairs. If he hadn’t been angry as well as having the rush of fear-adrenaline after what he’d seen in the operating room, he might not have made it. Even more of the sores had ruptured, turning his bandages a sickly yellow and red where fluid had leaked through. At some point his nose had started to bleed, and he had to keep wiping it away with his gown. His hands on the IV stand and around the handle of the scalpel were clammy.

It took far too long to make it up the stairs, but he reached the door to the third floor. There was another piece of paper, too-bright in the dingy stairwell, taped to the door.

Like the other one, this page had a single word scrawled across it in what seemed far too likely to actually be blood.

BLESSED

Nick tore the paper off the door and threw it to the floor. The paper and the careful placement was wrong for whatever was going on here, combining with the word to feel like something was mocking him.

He stopped and listened at the door for a few long minutes. He wanted to hear if there was something waiting for him on the other side of the door, something he had to be prepared to face. He also had to recover from the climb. He’d played sports since he was in elementary school, and this fucking illness had him moving like a senior citizen.

Once his breathing had returned to as close to normal as he could expect, he reached for the handle. For one moment he was terrified the door would be locked, that he’d be forced to turn around… but no, it opened when he pushed.

The hallway looked the same as he’d remembered from the east side. The nurses’ center on this floor was very close, directly within sight.

Nick tightened his grip on the scalpel, and stepped fully into the hall, letting the stairwell door shut all the way behind him. He tried to walk purposefully, though it was hard when he was limited to basically a shuffle, but he pushed toward the nurses’ center. The light was so dim, he couldn’t see especially clearly, but he just narrowed his focus to getting there, and to whatever noise he’d heard to this side of the dividing door.

Even over the squeaking wheel of the IV stand, he heard it before he saw anything: the rustling noise of fabric in motion. Continuing forward slowly, Nick didn’t call out this time. He wanted to see who it was. There was someone standing past the nurses’ station, close to the locked door.

It wasn’t until he’d drawn close, only a few paces away, that he realized something was wrong. He could see the figure, and it looked like another patient at first. Maybe someone wrapped in dirtier bandages or a torn gown, hunched over in pain, perhaps. He actually almost reached out toward the other figure when it suddenly straightened up.

It wasn’t a patient, or at least not one like he was. The figure was vaguely feminine, but clearly twisted in some way. The knees seemed to be bent inward, the shoulders hunched low, a mass rising along the thing’s spine. And in the brief moment before either he or the thing moved, he saw that what he’d taken for bandages were in fact some sort of vintage nursing uniform, and the figure seemed to be wearing a bloody surgical mask.

At almost the same moment, the thing lunged at him, letting out a wordless shriek as it did so, sending Nick stumbling backward, backpedaling in a way that almost sent him crashing to the ground.

The nurse creature’s swiping hand caught the cord of his IV, and he cried out as the needle was torn out of his arm, He shoved the now untethered IV stand at the monster and turned to flee.

The shriek came again from behind him, the nurse recovering faster than he’d hoped. He turned to his right as soon as he hit the far hallway, realizing his mistake too late. He should have run straight to the door to the stairs; this hallway was a dead end.

Frantically, he pushed at the doors lining the west wall, but all of them were locked. Nick reached the end of the hallway and turned, planting his back to the narrow, filthy wall. He held the scalpel up in front of him, as if that could ever be enough to defend himself with.

The monster was at the other end of the hall, no longer rushing at him now that he was trapped.

It—she, if the monster could be called that—paused, before starting her lurching gait down the hall toward him. A few steps took her to the halfway point. Then one more staggering step toward him, and…

Nick made a lunge of his own, shoving the scalpel as hard as he could, right at her throat. His momentum combined with her own sent the blade several inches into her neck. Using both hands to brace it, he pushed the blade even farther forward and to the side, slitting the monster’s throat. She gave a last, strangled cry around the wound before she collapsed to the ground.

Nick nearly dropped the scalpel, shock and horror and terror all hitting him at once, robbing his limbs of every remaining scrap of strength.

Just then, something else rushed at him from the far end of the hall. He raised the scalpel, but it was too late, as two more of the creatures ran at him, each grabbing one of his arms, forcing him to the ground. Nick closed his eyes and went limp, sure that he was about to be torn apart.

Instead, he felt the sharp sting of an injection in the meat of his trapezius muscle, and heard a voice murmur softly, “Do you feel blessed? To have been chosen for this?”

Before he could answer anything, he’d lost consciousness.

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