The 0714 Files: File #1 Inferno (Remake 2)

Chapter 16

I realize upon returning to the main courtyard to enter the main hall that the doors were left wide open. Whether they let air out of the hall or allowed the stench from the city to enter instead. I suppose I really don't care as I step back inside. Where I sit on the steps, sobbing amidst the empty room. I'll help Elliot escape too through the tunnel mentioned when he's awake again, but regarding myself...

I've lost the will to live to the point I told my only chance to escape this city to leave me behind. It seems stupid, why cry when I've resigned to my fate? I suppose you can't reason with emotions though when you know you're definitely going to die now.

It's when I calm down that I scan the room for the first time in days. Really look and absorb its state beyond glimpsing around as we went off to whatever task needed. It's uncanny how a room can be the same one you'd enter every day for weeks on end, but somehow not be the same anymore. There are no bodies in here, any that somehow got through were carried out and wrapped in the sheets outside. Bloody footprints now stain the carpet in front of the main desk, leading up the ramps to who knows where. Some of the cots were tipped over in the rush to get out of the hall and to safety.

I sniffle and finally stare at the closed entryway to the west wing, then I stand as an idea comes to mind. I'm rooted there for a second, debating what I'm about to do, but... My feet carry me in that direction then, opening the shutter and walking through the clean reception room, through the door to that same hallway before I can stop myself.

I have to... I have to see what it did to John. A part of me wants to punish myself, I realize. Wants to know the misery I caused him in that short time before he finally died. I'm sorry John... I suppose it's time for me to go through this hallway and witness what that thing did to you.

I'm unsure of what I will see, but as I approach the corner. I brace for what's on the other side—

Stumbling around it and gawking in horror, because no preparing could've had me ready for the sight of the hallway. "Oh my god," I cry out, eyes wide as I gape down the hallway.

It's like somebody took a gallon of red paint and splashed it around. The boarded windows are covered in splatters of crimson and flesh. The floor has random pools scattered throughout the tile, a trail of blood leads from the door out the loan window without boards beside me. In front of me I witness the legs of a dangling body. When I look up, I see that even the ceiling has been coated in the gore too: nothing in this hallway was safe from the spray. And the body. Stephan... he's the one hanging from the ceiling. A broken pipe is stuck through the stump of his neck and his abdomen is torn out. His intestines and other organs hang, or lay on the floor.

In the split second, I saw it... before that thing killed John. I caught that it was crimson head to toe and covered in a glisten of some kind of fluid. Its entire body looked like it was stripped of skin, save for the possible white and pink brain matter that seemed to be growing around the outside of the head. Its face was flat, flaps of brain tissue obliterated the part of the skull where eyes should be and with no noticeable nose, all that made up the face was a mouth. A mouth lined with sharp, unforgiving teeth to match its massive body size.

The worst thing wasn't any of that though. It was the claws jutting from its hands. The hands and claws together were monstrous, out of proportion with the rest of its body... And I let him die to it; his body, the scattered pieces of flesh, and clothing are all that is left of him now while I stand here breathing in the tang of metal.

Stephan's body is just hanging there like he's the animal's trophy. Waiting for someone like me to stumble across it. I close my eyes and breathe, try to distract my stomach from throwing up at the smell of their blood with the knowledge that I chose to come in here and see what I caused him.