Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
JEX
The lobby smells like a butcher shop in a pine forest.
I step over the security desk, my boots sliding on a slick of gore that used to be a man named Peterson.
His tie is caught in the shredder, his neck twisted at an angle that says he tried to run while the machine was still chewing.
I don’t stop to help. I just like the way the red looks against the white linoleum. It’s clean. It’s honest.
“Check the guest list, Pip,” I bark, flicking a glob of brain matter off my purple sleeve.
The green gas is a thick, swirling soup now.
It’s beautiful. Through the haze, I see three guards in the corner.
They aren’t shooting. One is trying to scrub his own skin off with a piece of broken glass, sobbing about spiders.
The other two are locked in a lover’s embrace, except they’re trying to bite each other’s throats out because they think they’re fighting wolves.
I walk past them, whistling Pop Goes the Weasel through my teeth.
A guard—one who must have been holding his breath—stumbles out of the elevator. He levels a shotgun at my chest, his hands shaking so hard the barrel is drawing circles in the air.
“D-don’t move! I’ll blow you to hell!”
I don’t slow down. I don’t even reach for my blade. I just tilt my head and give him the grin—the one that shows all my teeth, the one that makes people realise there’s nobody home behind the eyes.
“Hell’s full, sweetheart,” I rasp. “I just came back for my luggage.”
He pulls the trigger. The click is hollow. Dry. I already had Pip swap the shells for confetti two hours ago when she crawled through the vents.
The look on his face is the best punchline of the night.
I reach out, grab the barrel of the gun, and yank him forward.
My head meets his nose with a wet crunch.
Cartilage explodes. He drops to his knees, clutching his face, and I don’t waste the momentum.
I grab a heavy brass “Employee of the Month” trophy from the desk and bring it down on the back of his skull.
Thud.
The sound is thick. Like a hammer hitting a ripe watermelon. He slumps, his fingers twitching in the red puddle growing around his ears. I leave a Joker card in his open mouth.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” I mutter.
I head for the stairs. Elevators are for people with destinations; I’m a man with a destiny.
The stairwell is a vertical slaughterhouse.
My ‘Choir’ has been busy. Knuckles has been using a length of rebar to pin orderlies to the walls like butterflies in a collection.
One guy is still kicking, his white coat soaked through, his eyes rolling back as he tries to breathe through a collapsed chest.
I ignore him. I’m climbing.
Third floor. The “Recovery” wing. It’s a riot of shadows and screaming.
A nurse is running toward me, her face a mask of green-tinted terror.
She trips on her own hem and slides toward my feet.
I don’t look at her. I just step on her hand as I pass, the bones in her fingers snapping like dry twigs under my heel.
I reach the fourth-floor landing.
The air here is different. It’s colder. It’s quieter. This is where Aris keeps his secrets. This is where the world stopped for two hundred and fifteen days.
I see a shape at the end of the hall. It’s crawling.
It’s Aris. He’s missing a shoe. His expensive suit is shredded at the knees, and there’s a long, jagged tear across his cheek where a piece of glass must have found him. He’s dragging a heavy metal briefcase, his breath coming in wet, rattling gasps.
“The… the data…” he wheezes, not seeing me in the fog. “I have to… the project…”
I walk up behind him, my footsteps silent on the blood-slicked tiles. I reach down and grab him by the hair, yanking his head back until his spine groans.
“The project is canceled, Doc,” I whisper into his ear.
I take my serrated blade and drive it through his shoulder, pinning him to the floor. He screams—a high, thin sound that vibrates in my teeth. I twist the metal, feeling the teeth of the knife chew through the muscle.
“Where is she?”
“Cell… 402…” he gurgles, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t… she’s broken… I made her… I made her perfect…”
I pull the knife out with a wet shloop and kick him in the ribs, sending him skittering across the hall like a broken toy. I don’t kill him yet. I want him to hear what happens next.
I stand in front of the door marked 402.
My hand is shaking. Not from fear. From the hunger. I can feel her on the other side. The ghost. The Queen. The girl who’s been waiting for the punchline.
I lean my forehead against the cold steel of the door.
“Knock, knock,” I whisper.
I don’t look at the door yet. If I look at the door, I’ll lose my focus, and Aris deserves every bit of my undivided attention.
I grab the Doctor by his silk tie and drag him toward the centre of the hallway, right under the flickering emergency light.
He’s heavy, a dead weight of cowardice and expensive cologne.
I heave him up and slam him against the wall, driving a heavy upholstery needle through the webbing of his left hand and deep into the drywall.
“Stay put, Doc. We’re going for a walk down memory lane,” I snarl.
I reach into my coat and pull out a small, leather-wrapped kit. My hands are steady. I’m a craftsman tonight. I peel back his sleeve, revealing the soft, pale skin of his forearm.
“You remember the basement, don’t you? Sub-level four? The room with the drain in the centre?” I lean in, the green gas swirling between us. “I remember the smell of the ozone. I remember the way you hummed Mozart while you hooked the electrodes to my temples.”
I take a scalpel—his own, snatched from his pocket—and make a shallow, precise incision from his wrist to his elbow. Not deep enough to hit the artery. Just deep enough to watch the fat part like a zipper.
“You told me you were ‘remapping’ me,” I whisper, my voice a jagged rasp.
“You said my brain was a messy draft and you were the editor. You spent three weeks trying to fry the ‘Jex’ out of me. Every time I screamed, you’d adjust the dial and say, ‘Now, now, Jex. Resistance is just an electrical byproduct.’”
Aris lets out a choked, wet sob, his head lolling against the wall. “I was… helping… you were a sociopath…”
“I was a clerk, Aris! I was a man who saw too much!” I bark, a sudden, sharp laugh escaping me. I grab his thumb, the one he used to flip the switches. I don’t use the blade for this. I use a pair of rusted pliers I found in the maintenance closet.
Crunch.
The sound of the bone snapping is like dry kindling. Aris howls, his body convulsing against the needle in the wall. I don’t stop. I twist the pliers, peeling the nail back, then the skin, then the meat, until I’ve got the digit free.
I drop the pliers and slide the severed finger into my breast pocket, right next to my heart.
“I’ll keep that. For the biometric scanner. And for the memories.”
I turn back to his arm. I’m not just cutting now; I’m composing. I use the scalpel to peel back two flaps of skin, pinning them outward with smaller needles until his forearm looks like a pair of red, weeping wings.
“You see that? That’s my first installation. I call it The Physician’s Ascension.”
I move to his chest. I rip open his shirt, the buttons scattering like plastic teeth on the tiles. I start carving—slow, deliberate strokes. I’m not writing words. I’m drawing a map. The same map he burned into my retinas during the ‘sessions.’
“You used sex as a weapon with them, didn’t you?
” I ask, my voice turning cold and flat.
I drive the blade into his thigh, a deep, punishing thrust. “You liked the power. You liked the way they looked at you when they realised you were the only thing between them and the ‘treatments.’ You aren’t a doctor. You’re just a parasite in a lab coat.”
Aris is gurgling now, his lungs filling with fluid. He’s trying to beg, his mouth forming the word please over and over like a broken record.
“Don’t spoil the ending, Doc. We’re just getting to the good part.”
I take a handful of the Queen of Hearts cards and start sliding them into the incisions I’ve made in his chest. I tuck them under the skin, the white cardstock quickly soaking through with dark, venous blood. I arrange them in a fan across his ribs.
“Look at you,” I murmur, stepping back to admire the work. He’s pinned to the wall, his arms flayed into wings, his chest a bloody deck of cards, his hand a mangled wreck of bone and drywall. “You’re a masterpiece. You’re the most honest thing in this entire building.”
I lean in and lick a drop of blood off his chin. It tastes like copper and failure.
“You tried to turn me into a ghost, Aris. But you forgot one thing.” I lean toward the door of Cell 402, my eyes burning with a terrifying, ecstatic light. “Ghosts don’t just haunt. They eat.”
I turn away from him, leaving him to bleed out in his own ‘art gallery.’ I pull the severed finger from my pocket and hold it up to the scanner on Hallow’s door.
The light turns from red to green. Click.
“Ready for your close-up, Hallow?”