Rude Awakening
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The once-decent room opened up as Jeanette stepped through the golden gates which parted off the basement from the wards. A little table could be seen in the middle of this cramped circular space which featured as many other exits as there were avenues to be cornered off in.
She attempted to recall a map she had seen… weeks, days, months, or years ago? It was hard to be sure, she merely tapped her temple, and even scratched it, with the barrel of her gun. A sound could be heard, was it a scream or a siren? Uncertain, it was so hard to know what was even sensible anymore. Should she see any more hulking masses of flesh, might she be every bit as demented as they had claimed?
Well, she recalled her upbringing if nothing else. In a violent city it was, perhaps it was not much of a surprise then. To see the dead walk and cackle with human depravity as they raped and tore their way through a hotel for the wicked.
Yes, her family might’ve been proud of the inevitable end of her path, they had picked it out after all.
A gunshot soon howled across the little room, reverberating into itself much like the shards and fragments all danced like twinkling lights inside the body of they who so foolishly had startled Jeanette.
She wasn’t sure of who they were either, why should she be? She simply shot the fool that rushed into the space with that panicked look upon their soul.
They landed behind the empty table, blood sprayed as she could hear them choking on it. And so, with a steady hand on her trigger, she aimed at the floor before walking around the circular area, eventually coming to find the gruesome display she had just created, splattered over the carpet and walls.
It was… an orderly? Yes, where had they run off to? A certain someone hadn’t even seen them since about the time when…
“Please… Please…” the poor man sputtered as he lay there, torn and blown asunder.
“Yeah?” Jeanette mocked before stepping closer and kneeling down beside the latest unfortunate being to simply and quite suddenly suffer horribly around her. An omen of death they’d call her.
“Yeah?” she taunted again before pressing the barrel into the man’s mouth, silencing him as the blood continued to pour. If she wasn’t careful, she might be getting the gunpowder wet.
She laughed, though it was dry, soft, and utterly without rhyme or sense. Perhaps it was merely the low-effort mimicking of amusement from behalf of a sociopath who was very clearly without reason to care or pretend otherwise.
“Yeah…” she mumbled, her eyes steady as ever. Perhaps earlier, with the woman downstairs, it was something to find joy in. A rival, trying to break free as well, yet failing.
But this and him? Well, the orderlies were only trying to help, where’s the humour in that? Honourable, if anything.
She fired the gun, damn near startling even her own empty soul. The blood and soot and shards and devil knows what else all jumped in fright as they stained her and the table.
“Well then.” she eventually sighed before pulling her gun out of the globs of meat and standing back up. She might’ve sighed, often feeling just a bit tired. As if she could never stop falling into that daze of hers, life is certainly much harder to navigate when the world won’t stop swaying.
A woman then shouted, another orderly, as she caught up with her now dead companion, once again giving the violent woman with the gun a reason to be bothered from her stupor.
Jeanette turned, pieces of the man’s flesh stuck between her teeth, scars, and bandages as she merely raised a brow along with her gun.
“Hello.” she said before firing again, knocking the woman out of the room and into the hallway outside. Not much blood this time, she could even hear the screams, and a few moments later…
Shuffling? Crawling, begging? Had the last round been filled up with sprinkles and dust from a star?
Jeanette walked towards the edge of the room, only to peer out to find a single hallway which connected to both of the entrances of the little bloody space she was in. A curved path surrounded a circular entrance to the basements downstairs. The whole of the establishment was like a nightmare, all cramped, everything doubled back on itself, and it seemed to have been designed by a Victorian murderer with a fetish for scalpels, rotten wallpaper, and pipes.
Nothing out of the ordinary for England then, yet that is not where these poor souls resided, was it?
And yes, the windows, they all shone yellow, one could not see into the space beyond. Was this truly hell? At least the light shone down on the poor orderly who still attempted to cry and crawl her way towards salvation as Jeanette once again pondered whatever had gone wrong with her previous shot.
“Bulletproof, this one. Thick clothes?” she mumbled before shrugging and reaching into her pocket for a few more rounds. She soon almost comically followed after the damned victim as she casually and slowly reloaded her weapon at her own leisure, towering above her prey as the grim envy to demons she truly was.
And then another shot, eventually, crushing the skull into the carpet as well as the inside of the dead woman’s own face. Jeanette just about fired off the second round, if only to be sure they truly had met their demise, though she was promptly stopped as the hall stopped screeching and the nearby door started… rattling.
There was a small window on it, as well as a sign which stated both the name and rank of the person who likely worked in the next room over. An office perhaps?
A being with a disturbed smile stood there, watching through the pane, almost expectantly as the mad killer could barely raise more than a brow once again. Certainly not a care.
“Am I interrupting?” they asked, their face cut beyond belief in a purposeful grid-like pattern. Their eye sockets were blackened, a common sight around these parts. Once could wonder if they were the most cursed of all, or rather, blessed… in their newfound emptiness.
“Do you mind?” Jeanette almost mocked, keeping her gun steady as the blood began to stain the soles of her shoes. The orderly was now most surely beginning to rot, not that one should waste these moments of petty violence, lashing out against all the ones that surrounded.
Perhaps that, the killer sometimes thought… Perhaps it’s why they mutilate themselves, turning hate into their own beings. Convenient, but it won’t save them. Not if I get the chance to hurt them.
“I don’t but some will. They were only trying to help us, you know. Not responsible for these torments.” the grid-faced being stated, almost taunting back with its knowledge and wisdom. Truth in the words? What did it matter now?
“Trying. Failing. Am I supposed to reward weakness because it’s… the moral kind?” Jeanette muttered before raising up her weapon, now aiming it at they who talked back to her… yet again.
“Well then.” it laughed at her. “Perhaps you are seeking to reward strength then, if only it was yours which mattered. Rather, you are a victim yourself, a foul beast in second place is worth little more than the raped, naturally.”
Jeanette scowled…
And as with all the others, the shrapnel damn near tore her own face as the windowed door appeared to be every bit as strong as the woman who ended up dead anyway. The room shook, the glass didn’t even shatter as the being behind it merely smiled and cocked its head.
They spoke again, the ringing prevented Jeanette from hearing, she might be forced to hope it was nothing important. This went on for a few moments until the blaring died down, the grid-faced person was gone, and Jeanette simply found herself standing there…
Confused, vindictive, soulless, and in need of another reload.
She’d find them all, she assured herself as she reached into her pocket for a couple more shells. Her eyesight was a bit off here, gunpowder everywhere, stinging, as even the wall began to groan and contort in the presence of this wicked violence.
There were screams, soft still, but coming from up ahead and down all these winding halls, it would be a true fright to see which horror they themselves might lead to.
So much death…
Jeanette pitied the still-living as she stepped over the headless corpse and continued her trek deeper into the heart of the asylum.
The basements were a distant memory, one would hope, but the wards were still left to be fully explored. And as for all the rest, it too would need to be punished in due time.
She walked, on and on, down the hall, finger on a most ready trigger, waiting for any surprises.
There was a presence about, she always suspected as much. Whatever that thing she had just seen in that little blocked off office was doubtlessly one of its many pawns. Jeanette pondered just how they might move about in this odd game, not that she felt they were anything but an inconvenience to her true ambitions.
She eventually found herself at a dead end, with yet another door before her as this one kindly did not speak to her. It had a sign as well though, reading ‘cafeteria’, somewhere she vaguely remembered as she hoped the path to the next wing would be past it.
She, at least being certain of her own judgement, deigned to reach out to grasp the handle, readying herself for whatever may lay beyond as she did so.
There were screams, yes. Perhaps the cannibals had not been fed recently…