Chapter 3: The Prophet of Flesh
The screwdriver felt like a lie in Jeremy’s hand. A pathetic, weightless lie. The shapes kept coming, resolving into people under the hellish red glow. Six of them. Men and women, their scrubs torn and stained, their eyes wide with a hungry, feral intelligence. They fanned out, blocking the path to the window, a silent, coordinated maneuver that spoke of a terrible understanding.
Elliot was mumbling, a stream of frantic code. “Non-linear threat assessment. No clear aggression triggers. They’re herding. Classic corralling behavior. We’re data points being moved to a—”
“Shut up, Elliot,” Jeremy whispered, not taking his eyes off the nearest patient—a woman with a shaved head and intricate scars mapping her forearms. She was smiling, her head tilted like a curious bird.
The circle tightened. The only sounds were the scuff of their feet on grit and the slow, persistent drip of water from a pipe high above.
Then the door to the main tunnel, the one they’d come through, shook on its hinges. Not from someone trying to get in. From someone on this side, slamming into it from the shadows. A huge figure detatched itself from behind a support column.
Frank.
Jeremy had only seen him in the high-security wing, always restrained. Frank Manera was a mountain of muscle gone soft in confinement, but the power was still there. His most famous feature wasn’t his size, but his mouth. In the red light, his lips peeled back, revealing teeth he’d patiently filed to pointed tips. A low, wet growl rumbled in his chest. The other patients glanced at him, their movements pausing. He was an outlier. A variable even in this madness.
Jeremy tightened his grip on the screwdriver, his mind going blank and cold. This was it. This was the ending he’d turned over in his head a thousand times, just in a different, rustier room.
Frank charged.
But not at them.
He moved with shocking speed, crashing into two of the patients who were blocking the most direct route to the window. He didn’t punch or bite. He used his bulk like a battering ram, shoving them aside with a raw, snarling expulsion of breath. They yelped, stumbling into a snarl of pipes.
The circle broke. Confusion flashed across the scarred woman’s face.
Frank skidded to a halt between Jeremy and the others. He turned, his broad back to them, facing his own kind. He was breathing heavily, his shoulders heaving. Then, slowly, he sank to his knees on the filthy concrete. He didn’t look back at them.
“Run to the light,” Frank rasped, his voice shredded and guttural. “The little door. Behind the control panel. Go down.”
Elliot was statue-still. “It’s a trap. It’s always a trap. He’s redirecting the data stream.”
Frank’s head hung low. “They’re coming up from the feast,” he whispered, the words meant for the floor. “The Doctor always feeds them first when the lights go wrong. They’ll be full for a little while. Not for long.”
A new sound seeped into the room. Not the drip, not the distant clank. A screaming, yes, but this was different. It wasn’t the rage of a patient or the terror of an orderly. This was a high, thin, utterly hopeless sound, woven from multiple voices, muffled by layers of concrete and earth. It was coming up through the metal grates in the floor.
The feast below.
The scarred woman heard it too. Her smiled vanished. She looked from Frank to the grate, then back to her companions. A silent communication passed between them. Their interest in Jeremy and Elliot visibly evaporated, replaced by a primal, older fear. They began to back away, melting into the shadows on the far side of the boiler, away from the grates.
Frank remained on his knees, a shattered gargoyle.
“The control panel,” Jeremy said, grabbing Elliot’s arm. He pulled him, running not for the high window, but along the perimeter of the room toward a bank of dead levers and dials coated in dust. Behind it, nearly invisible in the gloom, was a small, rusted metal door—the size of a laundry chute.
The screaming from below rose in pitch.
Elliot snapped out of his paralysis. He yanked his arm free and dove for the door, his fingers scrabbling at the latch. “It’s a maintenance hatch for the primary steam valves. It should connect to the sub-basement utility runs. Pre-1970 architecture. No digital security. Physical only.” The latch was seized with rust. He swore, a sharp, technical curse, and bashed it with the heel of his hand. It didn’t budge.
Jeremy shoved him aside. He placed the tip of the screwdriver against the rusted joint of the latch, took a breath, and slammed his palm down on the handle with all the weight of his exhausted body. A jolt of pain shot up his arm. The latch screamed metal-on-metal and popped open.
He wrenched the door open. Stale, colder air sighed out, carrying a smell that made his stomach turn—a sweet, meaty odor under the sharp tang of chemical cleaners. A vertical ladder descended into pure blackness. The distant screaming was clearer now.
“Down,” Jeremy said. It wasn’t a question.
Elliot peered into the void, his dilated eyes wide. “The probability of survival decreases by approximately sixty percent with every sub-level we descend.”
“The probability of survival up here just hit zero.” Jeremy looked back across the room. Frank was still kneeling. The other patients were gone. But from a large grate in the center of the floor, something was emerging. Not a person. A long, pale, jointed thing, feeling its way up through the slots like a blind worm. A finger. Then a hand, slick with something that wasn’t water.
“Go!” Jeremy barked.
Elliot went, scrambling onto the ladder with the frantic grace of a spider. Jeremy followed, pulling the small metal door shut above him. The last thing he saw was Frank Manera, still on his knees, turning his head slowly toward the thing crawling from the grate. He didn’t make a sound.
The darkness was absolute. The only light was the faint red glow seeping through the cracks around the hatch above. Jeremy descended blindly, the rungs cold and slimy under his hands. Elliot’s frantic breathing echoed just below him. The screaming was closer now, no longer muffled. It echoed up the shaft, layered with wet, tearing sounds and a low, contented humming that was worse than any scream.
His foot hit solid ground. Elliot grabbed his arm in the dark.
“We’re in a pipe chase,” Elliot whispered, his voice barely audible over the hellish choir. “Conduit for the old steam lines. It runs parallel to the sub-basement access corridor.”
A dim, flickering fluorescent light was visible through a crack in the crumbling brick wall to their left. Jeremy put his eye to it.
The corridor outside was tiled, like an old operating theater. The lights were intermittent, strobing. In the broken glow, he saw shapes moving. Orderlies, or things that had once been orderlies, dressed in stained plastic aprons. They were dragging something heavy and limp along the tiles, leaving a dark, smeared trail. They weren’t hurrying. They were methodical, efficient.
One of them paused, tilting its head as if listening. It turned, and its face was a bland, professional mask, save for the eyes. They were empty, doll-like. It looked directly at the crack in the wall, right at Jeremy’s eye.
It smiled.
Jeremy jerked back from the wall, his heart hammering against his ribs. He fumbled for Elliot’s hand in the dark, finding a wrist clammy with sweat. “They know,” he breathed.
Elliot was already moving, feeling his way down the narrow pipe chase, away from the light. “This way. It has to connect to the old incinerator feed. There will be an exterior access chute. For ash removal.”
“Is that a guess?”
“It’s an architectural inevitability,” Elliot said, and in the absolute black, Jeremy could hear the manic, unhinged smile in his voice. “They built the feast hall. But they always forget to take out the trash.”