Chapter Text
The harder I try to escape, the further I get into this god awful place. Like fighting a tar pit. They’ve been torturing people in the basement, and by method. Written on the wall - “FINGERS FIRST. THEN BALLS. THEN TONGUE.” Somebody’s managing the torture, instructing them.
The main entrance to the male ward is a mess of overturned bed frames, shelves, and steel IV poles twisted like bones snapped under pressure. Miles doesn’t waste his breath complaining—he knows better by now—but she lets out a low groan beside him, scanning the barricade like she’s trying to will it into shifting into an opening for them.
“Hold on,” she mutters, eyes flicking to a half-obscured hole in the wall just to their right. A rusted metal cabinet blocks the opening, but beyond it, light flickers dimly. “We can crawl through that. Maybe.”
She looks back at Miles and jerks her head toward the cabinet. He nods, and together they brace their hands against it. It squeals against the floor, revealing a jagged square just big enough to crawl through. The light inside strobes on and off, bathing the blood smeared floor in a sickly rhythm.
They hesitate—just for a breath—before climbing through.
The blood trail leads to a room that’s quiet and clinical in the worst way possible. A variant sits slumped in a chair in the center of the room, unmoving. Blood pools beneath him, thick and congealed, but it’s impossible to tell whose it is. The variant doesn’t acknowledge them.
“Don’t engage,” she whispers. “Just go.”
He does. They leave the room in silence, the only sound the soft whir of his camcorder switching to night vision.
The male ward is suffocating. Every corner looks the same—tight hallways, old brick mortared into uneven walls, a haze of grime and iron. Writing smears the stone in someone’s dried blood:
FINGERS FIRST. THEN BALLS. THEN TONGUE.
Miles feels his breath catch. She notices—of course she does—and takes his hand in hers, tugging him gently toward a hallway lit in low amber.
“Don’t look at that,” she says. “We’re gonna get out. I’ll get us out.”
They move like ghosts through the corridors, avoiding the occasional twitching silhouette. The silence is deceptive. It carries something.
A noise starts, faint at first. Rhythmic. Pounding.
They freeze. It’s coming from a heavy door, half-covered by another rusted cabinet. Neither of them says it, but they’re both thinking the same thing: Walker. The twins. Or worse—whatever unseen entity was following them through the sewers.
She glances at him, and—without another word—drops his hand, plants her feet, and shoves the cabinet aside. It grates loudly. She gives him a small, tense smile and a thumbs up before opening the door and slowly stepping through.
Nothing jumps out. No bloodcurdling screams. Just another hallway, empty. Haunted.
They move forward, eventually tumbling into a wide, clinical space that stinks of old blood and antiseptic. Blood stains drag across the floor. Cots stand at crooked angles. Wheelchairs are overturned. Curtain partitions flutter slightly, even with no wind.
Her hand finds his again. She grips it tightly.
“Don’t look at anything too long,” she warns him. “You’ll lose your mind trying to make sense of it.”
He nods mutely, camcorder raised, every nerve on fire.
A low voice murmurs just beyond a curtain.
“Can’t sleep,” it says. “Wernicke is waiting for me there.”
Miles inches closer, capturing the footage. The variant doesn’t emerge. Doesn’t scream. Just rocks in place, repeating his quiet terror to no one.
She hops onto a nearby cot, ignoring the noise. Eventually, Miles glances over at her and she points upward, toward an exposed vent.
“There. That’s our way through.”
Miles moves to help her up, boosting her until she can grip the edge and scramble in. Then she turns, reaching down for him. Her grip is firm. Warm.
He takes it, letting her anchor him. His body is sore and shaking as he hauls himself up into the thin sheet metal of the vent. It’s narrow and hot, their knees scraping metal. She leads, moving with practiced efficiency, though even she’s slowly than usual—fatigue clings to her like a second skin.
They drop into the next room one by one, landing softly on the blood-specked linoleum. Miles’s night vision flickers—the battery is low, so he lowers it for the moment, deciding to save it. When he does, he lifts his gaze, finding a silhouette in the middle of the room.
It’s a variant. Slumped in a chair like the last one. Silent.
At first.
Then—crack.
Her shoe hits a stray IV pole. The metal clang bounces off the walls like a gunshot, Miles’s eyes widen.
The variant’s head jerks up.
“Meat!” he shrieks, straining against leather straps pinning his wrists to the armrests. His voice scrapes against Miles’s skull like nails. “Wants meat! Wants meat! Meat!”
“Shit,” she hisses, already backing away, posture low and tense.
Miles glances around. No windows. Two exits. One is barricaded. The other—the one they dropped in front of—is double-doored, and beginning to rattle. Silhouettes loom on the other side, slamming their shoulders into the wood that won’t hold for long.
“Get that open,” she snaps, pointing to the blocked door.
Miles scrambles to the cabinet wedged against it, pushing hard with his shoulder. It groans slowly, like it doesn’t want to move. Like it knows.
She moves to help—but freezes. The wood creaks in protest beneath the weight of the variants on the other side.
“Shit. Shit—!”
She bolts for the doors and jams a nearby two-by-four through the handles, adding a very fragile buffer for them. But it’s enough.
“Go!” she yells at Miles.
He slams his shoulder against the cabinet. It lurches. Gives.
The door creaks open just enough. He shoves through. She follows. Within seconds, the two-by-four splinters behind them. She slams the door shut behind them.
“We’ll flank them! Pieces of shit!” one of the variant roars. “Take the other hall.”
She and Miles don’t wait to see if they mean it. They run.
Hallways blur past in broken light. Miles’s camera bobbles in his hands, vision grainy and warped, but he doesn’t stop recording now. She knocks over furniture as they go to slow their pursuers—a gurney, a metal cart of bloodied tools, a tipped-over IV stand that crashes hard against the floor.
The noise doesn’t matter anymore. The male ward is awake.
They don’t look back. Don’t need to. The screech of rage behind them is all the confirmation they need that they’re being hunted.
They skid into a surgical room, empty but still reeking of antiseptic and old meat. She slams the door behind them again, glancing wildly around.
“Vent,” she says breathlessly, spotting the grate above.
Miles doesn’t wait—he crouches and cups his hands. She plants a foot, climbs, pulls herself halfway in.
“Come on,” she grits.
He leaps. She catches his forearm, grunts with effort, and hauls him up and through. They scramble, metal clanging beneath their palms, and drop into the adjacent hallway with a thud.
They sprint down another hallway, lungs burning, shoes slapping the slick tile. Miles doesn’t know where he’s going anymore—he’s just following her, her grip tight around his wrist, anchoring him to his mad spiral.
Then the floor vanishes.
It’s a sudden yawning drop—open space where solid ground should be. The hallway ends in a shattered ruin, and across the gap, another hallway continues like nothing’s wrong, but it causes them both to slam on the brakes or risk falling into the inky dark below.
“Jump!” she gasps, voice strained and desperate. “Miles, jump!”
There’s no time to think. He runs. Leaps.
Impact. His hands scrape tile. He barely catches the lip of the opposite side, scrambling forward just as she launches after him.
She lands—badly. Her foot slips on the edge and she slides, a flash of panic crossing her face as her hands fail to find purchase. She tips backward.
“Shit—!” Miles lunges, catching her wrist in a vice grip, the same way she caught his in the vent. His other hand grabs at the fabric of her sleeve as her shoes dangle over the abyss.
She doesn’t scream—but the sharp inhale she makes is worse. Fear held tight behind her teeth.
With a grunt, he hauls her up, both of them collapsing against the wall, breathing like they’ve been underwater.
Across the gap, voices echo.
“Slippery little whores!”
“Get back here!”
One of the variants lets out a bestial screech that turns Miles’s stomach. But the fall has bought them a second, maybe two.
Just enough to hear another variant shout from somewhere nearby: “There’s another door over here! This way!”
“Damn it,” she curses, already standing. “Come on.”
She yanks him onto his feet and forward, running again, vaulting over a busted gurney, ducking beneath a low beam, kicking aside a plastic bin soaked in blood. They tear through the remnants of a classroom—chalkboard, desks, papers scattered about the room. The floor is sticky with god knows what.
They don’t stop.
Not until they’re in a hallway that leads into an adjacent classroom. That’s when she falters.
“They’re too close,” she breathes, eyes flicking behind them.
Miles hears it now too—the slapping of bare feet against the tile, the snarling breath, and a voice he doesn’t recognize, but she clearly does. Low and raspy, familiar in a sickening her.
“There you are. . .”
She stops, grabs the handle of a door halfway open and shoves it shut, bracing herself against it. She looks at Miles, wide-eyed.
“Go,” she practically pleads. “Go, I’ll hold them back.”
Miles hesitates, stumbling a step closer. “No, we stay together—”
“Go!” she shouts, voice sharp enough to cut. Her hands are slipping on the knob already. “It’s him. Just go, Miles. I’ll find you—I always do. You know that.”
There’s movement beyond the door. The knob jerks in her hand.
“Miles!” she begs, terrified.
He nods. Just once.
Then runs.
He tears through a side door, shoulder-first, into a laundry room—linoleum tiles, slop sinks, hanging uniforms. He barrels forward, shoving a laundry bin aside, but when he glances back—
Someone’s followed him. Not all of them chased her.
One variant is still on his tail
“Shit—fuck—shit—”
A voice draws his attention. “Who’s down there?”
It comes from a speaker beside a dumbwaiter set into the wall. It’s calm. Smooth. Male.
“You’re not one of them, are you? Quick! Get in the dumbwaiter if you want to live!”
Miles doesn’t have time to hesitate.
The variant bursts through the door behind him just as Miles throws open the dumbwaiter gate and dives in, dragging it shut with a loud metallic clang.
The lift jerks violently. Rises.
Miles presses himself against the corner, breath ragged, hands trembling, blood pounding in his ears.
But as the dumbwaiter is lifted, Miles realizes something.
There was no fear in the voice. No breathless panic like her’s the first time she called to him through the intercoms. No frantic edge.
Just composure. Control.
His gut twists, but he can’t place why. It was too convenient. Too easy. The rescue feels wrong.
He swallows hard, eyes darting around the cramped dumbwaiter and wonders bitterly if he should have taken his chances with the variant.
You — Male Ward
You watch him go, your eyes blurring with unshed tears that you quickly blink away. Miles disappears from your sight, and then you turn back, shoving all your weight against the door.
Something slams into the other side a second later.
You nearly lose your footing.
A snarl echoes through the crack. “Open the fucking door!”
You bite down on a scream, pressing harder, shoulder digging into the wood. They’re so close you can hear them breathing. One of them—the one who’s been following you from the start—calls your name. He shouldn’t know it. But he does.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he croons with that same, animalistic, bullish snort. “It’s me. You remember me, don’t you?”
You grit your teeth, panic clawing at your throat.
One. Two—wait.
Three.
There are three variants. You can hear it now—their feet hitting the tile, rerouting to the direction Miles ran.
Your breath catches, but there’s no time to think.
You let go of the door and bolt.
You book it in the opposite direction, past a wall of overturned desks and broken chairs. You leap over a toppled gurney, skidding around a corner, nearly wiping out. Every beat of your heart is a thunderclap. Every step they gain behind you is a promise of pain
A wrong turn. A dead end. Your stomach lurches.
But then—a narrow gap, a rusted supply closet door hanging off its hinges. You dive in and yank the door shut.
You clamp a hand over your mouth, heart slamming wildly against your ribs, trying not to breathe too loud as their footsteps stagger past. One slows near the closet, and you hear breathing—his breathing—right on the other side.
Your variant.
He stands there for a moment, muttering something to himself, something low and hungry, before moving on.
You wait. Thirty seconds. A minute. Two.
Only when the silence grows unbearable do you dare to exhale.
You don’t know how long you run after you escape the closet.
You don’t know how you find a staff bathroom, either—only that it’s dark, damp, and the flickering fluorescent lights above buzz like flies trapped in amber. The walls are coated in grime and blood. The sinks are cracked. A puddle of something pools beneath one of the stalls.
You stumble inside, breath hitching, chest aching, legs burning—but moving.
You’re halfway across the floor when your foot snaps down into something.
Snap. Clank.
Pain.
Pain.
It is immediate as something springs shut around your ankle with a sick, metallic crunch, barbed teeth digging through skin and bone.
A scream rips out of your throat before you even know you’re making it.
It echoes against the tile. Down the halls.
Too loud. You know it’s too loud.
You look down—freezing. It’s a trap, crude and homemade.
A rusted bear trap, but crude. Homemade. Wires torn from old bed frames serve as springs. The teeth are jagged shards of metal hammered into shape, bolted into a half-metal frame that might have once been part of a wheelchair. Bits of barbed wire are wrapped around the jaws—there’s no function. It’s for fun. As if hurting you wasn’t bad enough. Whoever made it wanted to maim you.
Your ankle is caught between the jaws, punctured deep on either side. Blood pours into your shoe, soaking through the laces.
And it hurts. God, it hurts.
You drop, clawing at the rusted trap with blood-slicked fingers, trying to pry it open, your heart racing so hard you can’t think. Your breath comes in ragged, panicked gasps. The pain is white-hot, blinding. Your blood begins to smear across the filthy floor.
“I knew you’d come this way.”
Your heart drops into your stomach, your hands stilling against the trap.
Footsteps enter the bathroom. Slow, deliberate, and heavy.
“I watched you drag him around like a little lost dog. Thought I’d never get my turn with you again.”
He steps into view from the shadows—grinning, wild-eyed. One hand bandaged, the other clutching a sharpened pipe like it’s a gift meant just for you.
“I missed you, sweetness.” He says before swinging the pipe down onto your head.
It connects with your skull—a hearty crack. It’s not hard enough to knock you out, but hard enough to hurt, to make you cry out, vision bursting with stars.
You crumple back against the tile, dazed, and then he’s on you. Straddling you. Knees placed on either side of your body.
You immediately feel hands around your throat.
“You don’t get to leave me again,” he growls, tightening his grip.
You paw at the tile, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing around empty gasps. The pressure on your throat builds. You kick—useless, your ankle is still caught in the trap You can feel your consciousness start to slip, vision tunneling.
Then your hands feel it. Cold, sharp, and jagged.
Your fingertips brush against something just out of reach—a shard of ceramic, broken from a sink. It gives you second wind as you grab it.
Without thinking, you swing it blindly.
CRACK.
It catches him in the temple. Blood splatters across your face.
He snarls. Falters. Tries to get the upper hand and lean back in, so you swing again, this time knocking him onto his back beside you.
You don’t know where you find the strength to do it, but you push yourself up and straddle him now before driving the ceramic down onto his face, ignoring his groans.
You let out a scream before driving it down again. And again. And again. And again.
You don’t stop. Not until his chest stops rising and falling. Until your hands are coated in your blood in his. Until the gurgling stops. Until there’s no face left to scream with.
Your hands tremble. Your arms go numb.
The shard clatters to the floor and you follow it.
You let out a breathless sob—shaking, ragged, breaking.
You don’t stop crying. You can’t.
With your ankle still in the trap, you curl sideways onto the cold tile, cheek pressed to blood and filth, gasping like you’ve just surfaced from drowning.
Your crying turns into sobbing. Raw and unfiltered.
You hadn’t cried when the doors locked behind you. Not when you realized you were trapped. Not when you saw what they did to the patients. But the weight of it all caught up to you and you break.
And somewhere, above or beyond the walls, Miles Upshur is alone.
Miles — Location Unknown
The dumbwaiter clunks to a stop after a few seconds. The door slides open, and Miles is immediately face-to-face with a man who looks like a walking nightmare.
He should have taken his chances in the laundry room.
The man’s skin is stretched tight, wrinkled and scarred—not naturally ages, but like the remnants of some experiment. The man’s balding scalp reveals patchy, brittle strands of coarse hair, and his thing, wiry frame is covered only by a stained apron, hanging loosely, barely concealing his lower half.
He wears bifocals—or some sort of clinical eyewear—except one lens is shattered, jagged edges reflecting the warm, dim light. A torn, tattered mask hangs loosely over the bottom half of his face, barely revealing a cruel smile underneath.
“You made the right choice here, buddy,” the man says, voice smooth and unsettling.
Before Miles can react, the man punches hm square in the face with startling strength for someone so lean.
The world spins wildly. Miles stumbles out of the dumbwaiter, only to be struck again.
He lands on his back, blinking through the haze, his vision swimming beneath the warm lights. The man leans over him, eyes cold.
“Hey, you’re that little shit priest’s guy, aren’t you? His. . .witness, or whatever. Must be exhausted. Let’s take a break, huh, buddy? The old two-martini lunch, have a little confab.”
Too well-spoken, too calm to be a variant, but every bit as terrifying—if not more.
Miles feels limp and helpless as the man hoists him onto his shoulder, unceremoniously dumping him into a wheelchair.
“Heavier than you look,” the man grunts. “A little cardio wouldn’t kill you.”
Leather belt-like restraints wind tight around his wrists first, then his ankles. “Okay. Here we go—arms and legs inside the car at all times.”
The man rolls the wheelchair forward, ferrying Miles down the twisted corridors of the male ward. His thoughts are a jumbled mess of pain, fear, and one desperate question: Is she okay? And is it stupid to hope she’ll be his Hail Mary yet again.
They stop in front of an elevator. Across the hall, the doors stand open, a red exit sign glowing faintly. Outside, thunder rumbles and rain lashes the darkened world.
“I love the mountain air up here at night,” the man says, amusement flickering in his eyes. “You want to head out? Take a stroll? Go ahead, I’ll wait here.”
Miles swallows bile. The exit is right there. Escape is so close he can taste it—but it’s impossible. Not like this.
And not without her.
When Miles doesn’t move—not because he doesn’t want to, because he can’t—the man laughs, low and menacing. Taunting.
“Go on, run free. I’m in no hurry.”
Still no response.
“No? Alright. Nose to the grindstone, I like that. Okay, then. Right this way.”
He pulls Miles backwards into the elevator, pressing the button to ascend. The exit slips further from reach, swallowed by the walls of Mount Massive. The man stands in front of him, arms behind his back, not looking at him.
The elevator hums as it ascends, the weight of Miles’s own silence pressing on his chest.
The man speaks again. “Where’s your little friend?” he asks, too casual, too smooth. “I’ve been dying to get my hands on her for a while.”
Miles doesn’t dignify it with a response.
The man shrugs, unfazed. “She’ll get what’s coming to her soon, anyway.”
Miles’s stomach twists. The rest of the ride is silent.
When the elevator doors finally open, they spill out into another section of the ward—clinical, cold. Too clean in a way that makes the blood on the floor stand out sharper. A trail. A direction.
The wheels squeak as Miles is pushed forward, following the trail.
They pass a variant sitting hunched on the floor, rocking back and forth with wide, glassy eyes. He’s muttering something unintelligible under his breath over and over—until, clear as day, he begs, “Please kill me. Please just kill me.”
Miles clenches his eyes shut.
When he opens them again, they’re gliding past another door. Inside, a variant thrashes violently against his restraints, strapped down to a rusted bed. He snarls and spits, feral.
The man shushes him like a child.
“You weren’t putting that tongue to use anyway,” he says cheerfully. A beat. “Truth be told, I was just tired of licking my own stamps.”
Miles flinches against the bindings, bile rising in his throat again. Burning.
Still, the man wheels him forward, the corridor tilting into deeper shadow until they reach a pitch-black room.
“Here we are then,” the man says pleasantly, letting go of the chair. “Thanks so much for coming by. We’ll begin your consultation in a moment. I’ll just need a second to wash up, and. . .”
The lights flicker on with a sickly buzz.
The room is tiled, the kind of tile that used to gleam in a public shower or decontamination zone. Now it’s cracked and stained. The sink in front of Miles is white ceramic, making the blood splattering its basin even more stark. The air smells of bleach, rot, and something metallic.
This was never meant to be a lab. But someone turned it into one.
The man walks back into view, his voice trailing off as his gaze lands on Miles’s camera.
“Oh. . .home movies!” he grins, reaching forward and plucking it from Miles’s body. “And it’ll give us a chance to talk.”
He props it on the edge of the sink with cinematic flair, adjusting the angle with care—like a director setting up a shot. Miles grimaces, his heart hammering as his eyes scan the room: the instruments, the blood-soaked floor, a dismembered hand on the floor, its fingers curled.
He shakes the wheelchair violently, trying to get free. Leather straps dig into his wrists.
The man watches him for a moment, then turns away, casually strolling to a nearby medical cart. His fingers glide over scalpels, bone saws, pliers. Choosing.
“You know,” he says conversationally, “I’m a bit worried how much time you’ve been spending with Father Martin. I know—” he pauses, hands skimming over the instruments with reverence, “. . .I hope—you haven’t been letting him confuse you with all his holier-than-thou Bible thumping.”
Miles twists against the leather, teeth grit.
“No offense to the man,” the man continues, finally settling on a knife from the tray, “but I sometimes worry he might just be a little. . .crazy.”
He returns to Miles, dragging the blade along his jawline—not deep enough to draw blood, but enough that Miles feels every jagged notch of the edge. A warning. A prelude.
Miles’s breathing hitches as the man pulls the knife away without using it. It was a test, just a taste—like he was checking the weight of it in his hand. Seeing how it felt.
He goes back to the cart, fingers brushing along tools that gleam under the fluorescent lights. “It’s understandable,” the man muses as if they’re having a casual discussion over coffee. “People get scared. They’re as likely to turn to God as anything else.”
He picks up something new. A scalpel. Puts it back.
“God died with the gold standard,” he continues, plucking up a pair of scissors and holding them like he’s about to cut wrapping paper. “We’re on to more concrete faiths now.”
Miles tugs at the restraints, heart in his throat.
“You have to rob Peter to pay Paul. There’s no other way. Murder in its simplest form.” He sets the scissors down, picks up a hacksaw next. “But what happens when the money is gone?”
Miles swallows, tasting bile. The air is thick, humid with blood and antiseptic.
The man holds the saw up to Miles’s fingers like he’s sizing a wedding band. Like he’s dressing him for an occasion.
“Well money becomes a matter of faith,” the man whispers, smiling. “And that’s what I’m here for. To make you believe.”
Miles begins to hyperventilate, chest heaving, the bindings tight and unrelenting as the man turns back to the tray. He picks up the bone shears—huge, rusted, and horrifying. A single glance at them and Miles knows what’s coming.
Fingers first.
“No,” he gasps, voice trembling. “Please—don’t. Don’t—”
But it doesn’t matter. His cries fall on deaf ears.
The man grabs Miles’s right hand with clinical confidence, positioning it on the arm rest.
The shears close in around his index finger.
Miles thrashes uselessly, head shaking desperately. “Please, no, don’t—”
The man doesn’t stop. The shears come down.
Miles screams.
White-hot pain detonates up his arm, flaring through his skull until his vision flashes out at the edges. The room spins, his scream tearing from his throat in a hoarse burst of agony. The pain is unlike anything—blinding, pure, suffocating.
“You paying attention?” the man snarls, his tone suddenly sharp. Angry.
Miles can’t even respond. He’s going to pass out. He feels it rising—thick, heavy darkness curling in.
A slap across the face drag him back.
“Don’t pass out on me. There’s still a lot for you to absorb.”
A headache dances along his skull, but Miles barely notices it over the feeling of the shears again.
The man grabs his left hand. The shears close in.
He takes the ring finger.
Miles screams again, the sound more like a sob, choked and dying as it rips from his throat. His stomach heaves and empties, sour bile sliding over his tongue. He can’t breathe as the world tilts and wavers.
Blood splatters the cuffs of his sleeves. His hands shake in their bindings, slick and mangled. His vision swims again, watery and unfocused.
When he dares to spare a glance down, he sees the damage. Two fingers—gone. A mangled mess of flesh and bone.
The man lets out a satisfied sigh, standing tall like he’s finished a good day’s work.
“There. Better now, right?” he says cheerfully. “Do you understand what we achieved here? We made the consumer into the means of production.”
He grins.
“This thing is going to sell itself.”
He grabs the cart, metal clattering. Miles can barely hold his head up.
The man walks to the door and opens it with a squeal of rusted hinges. His voice drifts back as he leaves.
The door clicks shut.
Miles is left alone withe sound of his breathing and the blood still dripping from his hands.
But Miles can’t waste time.
As soon as the door clicks shut behind the man, he thrashes violently in the wheelchair. The pain makes him want to scream, or cry, or vomit, but he bites it all down, jaw clenched so tight it might crack. He rocks left and right, yanking against the wrist restraints. Blood makes his hands slick, but maybe that helps—after a few grueling seconds, one of the bindings gives with a snap of tension.
He rips his other hand free, grunting, and works at the ankle straps next. His fingers—what’s left of them—tremble with effort, coated in blood. Finally the last restraint gives.
He stands.
Immediately, the world tilts. His legs buckle, and he catches himself on the edge of the sink—just barely. The nausea that follows hits him like a truck.
Miles doubles over and vomits violently, the sound of retching echoing through the sterile, gore-streaked room. He coughs, bile burning in his throat, dry-heaving long after there’s nothing left.
When he’s done, he wipes his mouth with his sleeve and grabs his camera. He mutters a string of curses—spitting them through his teeth like venom—and raises it to record the room.
He stumbles to the door, legs unsteady and every movement dragging pain up his arms. Blood drips from his mangled hands.
He follows the blood trail the man had followed to lead them into the makeshift lab, dragging one foot after the other.
Somewhere ahead, a hoarse voice calls:
“Who’s there? Is somebody there? Come closer.”
Miles hesitates, but tracks the voice to a man on a bed.
The man is bare, battered, and strapped to the bloodstained mattress. At first, Miles thinks he’s just another variant. But then, the man continues.
“I’m not a patient. I’m an executive,” he insists, words slurred and half-wild. “Like him. Like Trager. But he got the treatment. He’s too alive. Filled with Wernicke’s nightmares.”
Miles brings his camera up, recording.
The man is cut open in several places, eyes glassy. Naked, skin stretched and waxy, he trembles against the mattress.
“It worked too well,” he whispers. “They couldn’t control it. . .”
Miles inches back a step.
“. . .and you can’t control it. Nobody. Nobody! NOBODY!”
The man’s voice rises to a fever pitch.
Miles’s stomach plummets.
Trager.
Panic floods his limbs. He turns to move, but the man’s shouts continue: “He’ll find you! He’ll kill you! He’s coming now! Trager!”
Miles dives beneath the nearest bed, camera still in hand. Through the narrow slit between floor and frame, he can still see the man—the light catching his wild eyes, his mouth stretched in manic warning.
Footsteps echo. Then Trager appears.
He’s still holding the shears.
He hums—an amused, condescending little sound—as he approaches the restrains man. “I see what’s happening here,” he says lightly, “you’re bored. You want a little attention. Perfectly understandable.”
He pauses beside the bed.
“Well I’m here for you. I’ll give you very special attention.”
And then he plunges the shears into the man’s side.
The man screams—an awful, warbling, dying sound. Trager twists the blades like he’s cranking open a bottle of wine.
Miles stares, recording.
Blood splatters the mattress, and the man goes limp.
Trager pulls the shears free, wipes them casually on the sheets, and strolls off, his back to the carnage.
The room falls silent again—except for the buzz of the lights and the sound of Miles’s heart pounding in his ears.
He slides out from under the bed, not even glancing at the mangled body as he stumbles forward.
Miles moves as fast as he can without making too much noise, following the blood trail. His breath catches when a voice bellows from the makeshift lab behind him:
“FUCK. FUCK, REALLY?!”
Trager.
“You’re gonna walk on me?”
Miles’s heartbeat spikes. He glances around frantically—he needs a way out, now. But he doesn’t have her. She always knew where to go. Without her, he’s as good as blind—stumbling around in the dark with no direction.
Behind him, Trager crashes around the hall, like a child mid-tantrum, screaming. “If there is one thing I cannot GOD DAMN stand—it’s a quitter!”
Mile does the only thing he can: he runs. Fast as he can manage.
He passes the tongueless man again, who immediately begins screaming and thrashing, limbs jerking violently as if to cry out without a warning.
The blood trail leads him back to the elevator. Miles presses the button with frantic hands—but nothing happens.
His heart sinks.
A key.
He needs a goddamn key.
For a split second, he wants to scream. But instead, he exits the elevator and glances around. Finally, he looks up. The above—she would have told him that’s the safest shot.
Teeth clenched, ignoring the agony in his hands, he jumps up. The metal scrapes under his weight as he pulls himself up, crawling as quietly as he can through the shaft. His breth is ragged. Blood smears the metal below him.
He drops out into another hallway: locked doors. Gates. No clear path.
And then, from the far end of the corridor, Trager’s voice, sing-song and cold:
“Aww, buddy. What are you trying to do?”
Miles drops low and crawls behind an overturned bed, switching on the night vision. The green glow catches Trager’s silhouette as he patrols the hallway, dragging the shears along the walls with a screeching rasp. Opening and closing them like he’s testing him.
Snip. Snip.
Miles doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe.
Eventually, Trager’s footsteps fade.
Miles seizes the chance. Still crouched, he crawls slow, measured—but the moment he touches a gate that will lead him back to the elevator, it creaks. Loudly.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me—” Miles hisses.
Footsteps pound after him. He dives through the door, slams it shut, and scrambles back into the same vent as before, this time staying hidden.
Trager storms through the room, past him.
Miles waits. Waits longer than he needs to. Then he drops down, breath hitching in his throat. He moves quick, ducking and weaving through the male ward aimlessly, hiding wherever he can, dodging Trager’s looming presence.
He finds a new vent—one he hadn’t noticed before. It spits him out into what looks like executive offices. Fancy carpet. Mahogany desks. Miles stumbles in, eyes scanning everything.
And there, like salvation, is a body slumped in a chair. A uniform. Dead.
But the keys he needs are still on the man’s belt.
Miles almost sobs. He bends, fingers trembling, and snatches them.
He turns to leave—
CLANG. Shears stab through the wooden door like a monster in a nightmare. Miles yelps, doubles back, hurling himself through a nearby window before making a beeline for the elevator.
Footsteps chase, a blur behind him, but he doesn’t dare look back.
He makes it.
Hands shaking, he fumbles with the keys, trying each one until—click—the panel lights up. He slams down the button and collapses against the wall as the elevator groans to life and descends.
But he doesn’t even make it down a full floor.
Metal screeches.
Trager is there, prying open the gate. “I’m not giving up on you!”
Trager pries open the elevator gate, lunging at Miles with the same damn shears in his hand. Miles lunges as Trager does. The two struggle in the cramped space.
Trager swings with the shears, but Miles pushes—shoves—until Trager loses his grip. His torso catches on the edge of the floor.
And the elevator had never stoped moving.
Crunch.
Trager thrashes wildly, screaming, the pressure building until—
He goes limp; caught between the floor and the top of the elevator doorframe. The shears slip from his hand and clatter into the shaft, swallowed by the dark.
Miles doesn’t move. He just sits there, staring, blinking.
And then—
He laughs.
A quiet, broken, exhausted little sound.
He lifts his camera. Records the mangled corpse. Then scribbles into his notebook:
“How to make Trager juice. Step 1: Squeeze.”
Through the small grate in the elevator door, he can see it again—the storm, the rain. The promise of escape on the precipice that is the glowing red exit sign.
But the elevator’s jammed. Trager’s corpse blocks its descent.
Miles stares through the gate before looking at the hatch above him.
He wasn’t leaving anyway. Hadn’t even considered it.
Not without her.
So he climbs. Out through the hatch. Back into the shadows of Mount Massive.
Intent on finding her.