Chapter Text
Inmate 196… or— well, Gluskin, waltzed you through a maze of corridors and escaped patients on your journey for supplies.
Despite his continual efforts to make lighthearted conversation, you’d remained just as uneasy as you’d been when he’d found you, especially after all of those other inmates had scared you shitless with their own mutilated faces and erratic behavior. You’d suffered a few close calls, but thankfully, once they caught a proper glimpse of the towering giant before you, they simply threw themselves aside, cowering back into the very shadows they had crawled out of.
Ironically, you felt grateful for Gluskins presence, even though you were still horribly afraid of him yourself. You assumed that the reason other patients kept their distance was due to his inhuman size and similarly marred appearance. Though after the last man had thrown himself down a flight of stairs after only catching an earshot of his lisped voice, you began to fear that it was something else entirely.
Something much worse.
But before your mind was able to wander too far into the unknown, you found yourself standing in front of a steel, windowed door at the hallway's end. Gluskin obviously hadn’t taken notice of your reservations, instead continuing to hum that same wordless tune under his breath that he’d started in between the gaps of your unrequited conversation.
Without warning, he raised his fist and punched straight through the glass, shattering it to pieces.
Smash!
You jumped away at once, shielding yourself with your hands, while he— after a subtle brush of his shoulders, deftly extended his arm through the web of shards to undo the lock.
As he reached for the handle, you couldn't help but imagine what kind of damage he would be capable of inflicting on a living being.
“Do tread carefully, these shards are quite sharp.”
You only managed a half-hearted nod in response.
Inside, the room was a chaotic treasure trove, filled to the brim with crates and miscellaneous supplies. You moved as quickly as you could, hauling a rusted first-aid tin into your pack before sinking down on your knees to scoop up alcohol wipes from a cluttered box on the floor.
Behind you, Gluskin's eyes had flickered to a nearby shelf, to where a few dusty MRE tins and water bottles sat undisturbed.
“Food and water,” he murmured, before reaching up and grabbing all that he could carry. "Here."
You were just getting your pack closed around the mound of his additional supplies when you spotted a silver glint in your peripheral vision.
The source?
A loaded flashlight, and to its left, a case of double-A batteries.
You heaved a sigh of relief before scooping them in amongst the medical supplies. After fumbling with your zipper for the second damn time, you diverted your attention to the back of the room, to where a line of tools hung against the wall:
A crowbar, a wrench, and a long metal pipe.
After a single second of contemplation, you decided on the crowbar. You had been hoping for something with a little more firepower, but figured that the likelihood of finding that in some random-ass asylum storage room was next to impossible.
While you were beginning to inspect the weight of the metal against your palms, the sound of footsteps pulled you from your revelry. You turned back just as Gluskin had begun to reach around your shoulder, plucking the iron rod right out from under your nose.
The absolute nerve!
“Hey!" you gasped, irritation heavy in your tone. "I was gonna hold on to that—”
“Nonsense!” Gluskin interrupted, chuckling darkly. “A lady has no use for carrying such heavy tools. Allow me…”
No use? You were more than capable of handling yourself. You’d driven an entire eighteen-wheeler up a mountain alone for fucks sake! Even still, it wasn’t worth the argument. So you relented, with much indignation, before turning on your heel to march back toward the exit.
You reached for the door and—
Clang
Drag
You froze, yanking your head toward the source of the sound.
Gluskin’s grip tightened on the edge of the closest shelf, his expression hardening for the first time since you’d met.
Clang
Drag
It was at that moment you realized that you really shouldn't have drank that shitty coffee back in the break room after all. It certainly wasn't doing your cardiovascular system any favors now.
Your heart was just about ready to explode.
Fucking Maxwell House!
Clang!
Drag!
“Move!” Gluskin hissed, his voice biting into your ear. "Now!"
You hurried out of the storage room and back into the shadows without argument. You weren't quite sure of who or what you were currently running from, but your adopted protectors sudden change in personality spoke more than any uttered word.
After a brief dash back through the hallway and down a flight of stairs, the sound that followed you faded. It may have been swallowed up by the asylum’s stomach of corridors, but the adrenaline you felt racing through your veins hadn’t.
You weren't able to stop yourself from shaking.
So you slowed your pace, instinctively pressing closer to the man in front of you as you passed under the next set of emergency lights. Some of them flickered intermittently, while others simply hung dead, their glass tubes blackened like old veins.
As your hellish adventure dragged on, it was clear to you that the asylum had fallen further into disrepair. And, with how things were looking currently, there had to have been years of neglect prior to the shutdown. The sight of the front entryway when you’d arrived may have hinted to that fact, but this?
This?
It was far worse than anything you could have ever imagined.
Doors hung crooked on their hinges, their windows spider-webbed with cracks. Desks lay overturned, some completely buried beneath papers that had dissolved into pulpy masses. Mysterious substances were spread on the walls, glistening beneath the intermittent flashing of the bulbs overhead. As you turned the next corner, a pungent smell pierced through your senses, causing you to gag and pinch at your nose.
It was then that a drop of liquid hit your shoulder. When you brushed it away, your hand came back crimson.
The next stutter of light revealed them.
Rows of hanging corpses, swaying from the ceiling, their mangled shapes spinning gently like butcher meat left out to decay.
Fuck!
Your stomach lurched, sour bile surging hot up your throat. You slapped a trembling hand over your mouth in a bid to force it back down, stumbling as your vision blurred under the weight of sudden nausea.
The dripping sound filled the silence, each systematic splatter echoing against the tile like a ticking clock. Gluskin had shoved you forward in an attempt to rid you of the sight, but it was already far too late. One of the bodies twisted as you passed it by, the waxy sole of its bare foot brushing cold against your shoulder. You stumbled away with a strangled gasp, fighting hard to keep yourself from vomiting all over your own arm.
A purge, a goddamn massacre!
You swallowed hard, forcing your voice to steady itself even as your throat still burned with dread and sickness.
"What the hell happened here?”
Gluskin's eyes had begun to wander the corridor, tracing the drag marks and the bodies hanging like grotesque ornaments from the rafters.
“They thought they could clean it,” he murmured back, his gaze unfocused. “Scrub it all away, add more stains and cover the old ones up...”
You said nothing.
He continued on regardless, his eyes still flitting between the corpses and the floor. “They never stop trying to make it perfect. All that blood, and they still believe a fresh coat of paint will fix it.”
“Hey,” you said, your voice unsteady. “I… I don't understand.“
The glaze in his expression suddenly dissipated. He blinked rapidly, glancing around as though he was seeing the corridor with a fresh set of eyes.
"What? What don’t you understand?”
You stared at him. “Uh. What you were saying? Just now?”
Gluskin frowned faintly, confusion knitting his brow.
“About cleaning— covering the stains?”
There was a long pause.
“I didn’t say anything of the sort,” he mused, turning back toward the empty hallway. “Come, we shouldn’t linger.”
You opened your mouth to protest, but the words dissolved as soon as his silhouette vanished into the flickering lights ahead of you. When you finally managed to catch up, he was staring down at the floor with his expression pulled taut in contemplation.
“It is peculiar, isn’t it?” He gestured faintly to the chaos of the corridor with a sweep of his hand. “All of this… destruction. There’s a pattern to it.”
You followed his gaze, noting the deep gouges raked through the plaster, the clean arcs of blood, and, unfortunately, the way the bodies still hung in perfect symmetry above you.
“A pattern?" you blathered, eyeing him cautiously. "What, have you seen something like this here before?”
He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.
“It’s as though something passed through and… tidied up, in its own dreadful way,” he continued, running a hand absently along the wall’s cracked surface. “Whoever did this, it wasn’t done blindly. It was purposeful. Methodical…”
You saw a shift behind his gaze. A pause… And then, his hand fell away.
“Methodical…” he repeated under his breath, his refined cadence faltering.
He glanced around again, his eyes darting to the ceiling, to the dirtied corners, back to the bodies, and then to you again, wide and unblinking.
“It’s not far. It wouldn’t leave work like this unfinished."
He tore his attention away from you to stare down the hallway again, the flicker of light from the bulb above him catching in his blood-drowned eyes.
“It?”
He ignored your question for several seconds.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was hollow.
“Just keep moving.”
Confusion and panic bled through your expression, but he didn't return the sentiment. He had continued down the hallway, leaving you there for a second time, alone and bewildered in the dark.
After a few seconds, you reeled yourself from your shock and trailed after him.
As you continued beneath the dead, you lifted a hand to your nose in a weak attempt to bid back the smell.
Eventually, the maze of corridors funneled both you and Gluskin into a new stretch of the asylum.
The walls on either side of this particular hallway appeared reinforced, lined with heavy steel plating. Glass observation windows ran along the left-hand wall, their panes dirtied, but still intact and free of cracks. However, despite the lack of destruction, it almost smelled worse here than the corridor with the bodies somehow, as if blood had been scrubbed clean halfway through and then left to fester for years.
You went back to trying to hold your breath, but it was almost impossible with how fast Gluskin was walking. You considered asking him to slow the hell down, but as you were about to, a sudden sound cut through the thought.
Snap!
The lights flitted once before going out completely.
Annoyed, your brain moved on autopilot as you released your hand from your shoulder strap and heaved the pack to the floor. You rummaged through its contents, the metal flashlight pressing cold against your questing fingers.
“Fuck… This isn’t good,” you heaved, turning in all directions to pull its beam across the walls. “We gotta get out of here and—”
Clang
Drag
You spun toward the sound, your pulse hammering in your ears.
Clang
Drag
There it was again— a sledgehammer meeting concrete, the fallout from the collision sending dust raining from the ceiling.
“I'll find you.”
The words echoed distantly down the corridor, followed still by that disturbing thud and jangle of metal.
Clang!
Drag!
“Scout the perimeter, isolate the target…”
Gluskin went rock solid beside you, his eyes fixing themselves to where the light turned to shadow outside of the flashlights beam.
“No…” he whispered, almost to himself. “Anyone but him…”
“Who—?”
“Run!”
Before you could even think of how to respond, the scream of twisting hinges and the sound of a massive force slamming against a solid surface met your ears. Not wanting to discover the source, you made yourself move, the flashlight jerking wildly in your grip as you bolted in the opposite direction with Gluskin hot on your heels.
Somewhere down the corridor, the voice bellowed again, this time with words that you couldn’t make out under the sound of your combined footsteps pounding against the floor.
“Faster!” Gluskin yelped, his voice raw with panic as he darted ahead of you. "Run any slower, and you'll doom us both!"
Easy for him to say, his legs had to be three times as long!
You cursed at him under your breath and tried picking up the pace, briefly overtaking him again as you turned the corner and then—
You hit a heavy steel door, latched shut.
God damn it!
“No, no!" you gasped, rattling the handle hopelessly. "I-it's locked!”
You could still hear it— the distant, thunderous rhythm of the thing still moving closer with each passing second.
Clang
Drag
“Get out of the way!” Gluskin growled, pushing you aside. He produced the crowbar and jammed it into the seam, metal screeching against metal. “Come on!”
“Now who the hell is that?” you demanded, your voice trembling.
The crowbar slipped, a spray of sparks sent scattering against the frame.
“Walker.”
You frowned, raking a hand along your scalp. “What? I don't know what that—”
“Chris Walker.”
Clang
Drag
The bar bit deeper into the latch.
“That man had a reputation here—” Gluskin continued, still struggling against the force of the iron. “—Snapped one day and killed a few people. They locked him away in some sort of confinement cell after that, or tried to anyway… it didn’t hold him well enough.”
Obviously not! The sound of his enormous ass stomping down the hallway was proof enough of that!
The metal bent with a sharp crack, and you flinched at the sound, terrified it would draw Walker in faster.
“He’ll kill us if he finds us?”
What a stupid ass question.
You had regretted it as soon as you said it.
In response Gluskin lifted his head, his frightened gaze snapping to yours. Somehow, he didn’t scorn you.
“Worse than that...”
Clang!
Drag!
Thankfully, it was then that the latch gave out with an earsplitting snap. Gluskin shoved the door open, dragging you over the threshold before slamming it shut, the crowbar clattering to the ground as you both threw your weight against the handle.
Then he leaned in, close enough for his breath to brush your ear.
“Hide and don’t make a sound.”
You threw yourself away, tumbling behind a fallen desk. Gluskin retrieved the crowbar and then strode over immediately to kneel down beside you, bracing one hand against the wall and the other hovering near your arm, close enough that you could feel the heat radiating from his skin through his jumpsuit sleeve.
For what felt like forever, you both sat there, heaving, sweaty, and terrified.
Then the door slammed.
Once.
Twice.
Blam!
The third impact sent it flying inward.
If you’d thought Gluskin was massive, the size of Chris Walker rivaled him in almost every direction. He stood a mountain of flesh and muscle, sculpted into a mottled shape barely resembling a man. His face and body were horribly disfigured, complimented only by his smile— which was stretched wide from the assistance of a tight metal mouthguard. And even from where you sat, peeking at him from behind that flimsy-ass desk, you could still make out the unnatural breadth of his shoulders and the thickness of his arms fighting against the failed metal restraints embedded into his skin.
You bit the inside of your cheek hard enough to taste iron, willing yourself not to breathe.
Walker’s head had tilted slightly, his cracked molars glinting from the depths of his mangled maw.
His voice tore through the silence in a bubbling rasp.
“Can't let contamination reach local town...”
You pressed a trembling hand over your mouth.
Please god, just let him leave. Let him think the room is empty…
The floor creaked under his massive strides, each vibration growing louder until he stopped, his bulking shadow shrouding the entire surface of the desk. You dared a glance through the slats, just enough to see his boots halted mere inches away. His massive hand hung limp at his side, the fingers twitching in an unconscious rhythm.
As your gaze dropped further, you froze.
The toe of your boot, slick with dirt and blood, was protruding out in the open like a damn paper weight.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
“Little pig…”
Gluskin didn’t hesitate, his reaction catching you completely by surprise as he shoved you toward an overturned filing cabinet. The force of the impact rattled the floor and sent its papers scattering like snow.
“Go!” he barked, grabbing a rusted chair and hurling it into Walker’s face with ease. “Get out of here!”
It cracked clean against his forehead, exploding into a fury of rust and splinters.
You didn't need to be told twice.
In a frenzy, you crashed through the open entryway and down the next hallway with tears stinging at the corners of your eyes. As you ran you craned your neck sideways. Much to your relief, your scarred savior eventually materialized through the darkness behind you, his hair askew and face alight with fresh terror.
The flood lights began to flicker violently, every flash catching glimpses of this man— Walker, barreling after you, way too fast for his enormous size.
You and Gluskin sprinted past a nurses’ station, skittering over the slippery floor and papers scattered there. Before you could clear the next junction, a body rolled under your foot and you nearly went down. Thankfully Gluskins hand caught your collar and yanked you upright before you were able to hit the ground.
After straightening yourself, the corridor ahead split into two directions. You were forcefully pushed toward the right passage with a firm elbow between the shoulder blades.
“The stairs! Quickly now!”
You took them two at a time, your heart slamming hard against the cavity of your chest. Behind you, Walker’s boots mirrored the sound, colliding with the steps like gunfire.
Halfway down the stairwell, the landing gave way. The floorboards screamed and the man at your heels was sent falling into its depths.
Crack— thud!
“Shit!” you cried, whipping around just as his beige jumpsuit disappeared beneath the mass of splintered wood. "Hey! Are you okay?"
“I’m fine!” Gluskin shouted back, pushing himself upward. “Keep going!”
You obeyed, hitting the landing with a thud and then bursting through the closest metal door. By some miracle, it was unlocked, leading you into a high-fenced outdoor courtyard. All around you, barbed wire glinted from the tops of the fence in the dappled moonlight, just as it had at the entrance gate earlier.
You were trapped.
Again.
Fuck!
Gluskin stumbled out behind you, slammed the door, and shoved a cement trashcan against its fastened surface. The barricade sure as hell wouldn’t hold, but it would likely buy you both a fleeting second at least.
With a look of mutual despair, the two of you sprinted across the courtyard just as the door behind you began to shudder under the force of Walker’s fists.
To your left you spotted it— your salvation, a slivered opening with a dim glow of light pooling from beyond the gap. You dove through it without hesitation, cursing as the jagged edges sliced your exposed skin. Gluskin followed close behind, his shoulders catching on the frame as he tried to force his much larger body through after you. As he struggled, you kicked against the brickwork, sending a sizeable chunk of the material tumbling away in the wake of the strike.
It was then, just as he was able to pull his leg out of view, that the sound of the door crashing open echoed through the courtyard.
You pulled your shaking knees close, the sting of fresh cuts mixing themselves with the throb of your heartbeat still ringing loud in your ears.
It hurt— fuck, it hurt so bad… but your brain wouldn’t let you dwell on that fact, not when the threat of imminent disaster still lingered on the other side of the wall. Through your panic, you could still sense the man in the jumpsuit sitting a few feet away in your peripheral vision, motionless apart from the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
But you couldn’t even bear to look at him.
Staring ahead with unfocused eyes, you instead fought your own pulse to slow, praying for the sound of Walker’s rage to fade out completely.