** A young woman sees a walking dead in the open streets of Whitby. A train full of corpses crashes into Kings Cross. In an Asylum, a gruesome nightmare becomes horrible reality.
All this should have been a warning to Kyle and his partner Benjamin...
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Screaming, shouting, hissing, and shrill neighing of horses. There was cracking and crashing all around them. Wood splintered, and the frame burst apart. The steering bar and the carriage frame broke. It rolled over several times and slid down the slope of the ditch, leaving deep furrows in the grass until it slowed down and finally came to a stop.
Everything was a blur of colours and sounds. Kaylee's world spun, hit the carriage, then she fell to the ground and... rolled. Or slid? Kaylee couldn't tell; everything was happening too fast. There was no time to piece together the puzzle or even realise that she had been thrown a good distance from the carriage house.
The impact, on the other hand, she felt quite clearly. Her whole body groaned and groaned as it hit the grass and earth until it finally came to rest. The world, just a moment ago spinning and blurred, came to a jerky halt, as if a carousel had been stopped too abruptly.
Her head was pounding terribly. It felt like it was a beehive that had been taken down from a tree and tapped a few times with a stick. Although she was now lying down, everything continued to spin around her and dark veils blurred the contours of her surroundings into ghostly shapes. Nausea pressed on her stomach, mixing with the pressing and biting pain where her body complained about the accident in flesh and bone. It felt like an eternity as Kaylee fought the aftereffects of the impact again, and her body made it clear that it didn't want to play such games anymore today.
Only slowly did Kaylee's blurred vision clear. The metallic taste of her own blood lingered on her tongue, her lip was split, and Kaylee didn't need to see the numerous places that were undoubtedly scraped – she could feel the telltale moisture combined with burning pain. Her heart was beating so hard against her chest that it felt like fists were pounding against one of the locked doors in the madhouse from the inside.
Everything was wet. Her hair, her clothes. There was dirt everywhere, and beneath her... grass? Her first breaths were shaky, her lungs seemed unwilling to fill properly. Then she finally began to realise what had happened.
"Ben! The carriage!" Kaylee's mind raced.
Mud squeezed through Kaylee's fingers and oozed coldly over her gloves as she rolled to the side with a groan and tried to sit up.
"You have to get up. Those beasts will kill you all!" she urged herself.
Kaylee squinted and blinked a few times against the wind and rain. Her arm was heavy and her body ached as she lifted it and wiped the wet hair, dirt, and water from her face, directing her gaze across some scattered debris toward the carriage.
At that moment, the suffering whinnying and snorting of the horses mingled with a short, shrill cry. There was a sickening crack of bones, a smacking and rattling of flesh and muscle – then silence.
In the pouring rain, she could make out the slender bodies of the terrible creatures at the carriage... or what was left of it. One of the side walls was torn open like a gash in a rock face. The blonde vampire Milana was just stepping around the twisted remains of the pitiful horses. Her bare feet made a smacking sound as she walked calmly along the side of the carriage. Long, sharp fingernails left a shrill sound, like a slate, as she ran them over the wood and paint of the carriage.
