FICTION BY JASON FREDERICK MYERS

Jason Frederick Myers lives and works in the upstate of South Carolina. A lifelong horror fan, he grew up reading Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz and draws inspiration from the ‘70s and ‘80s horror movie classics that terrified him as a child.

Jason is currently working on his first collection in the horror/thriller genre. When not reading or writing, he can be found seeking adventure and inspiration outdoors. You can reach him at JFMwriter@gmail.com.

SOMETHING SO VICIOUS
by Jason Frederick Myers

The two boys stepped into the elevator, and the smooth metal doors rattled shut, swallowing them like the mouth of a giant robot.

“Where are we going?” ten-year-old Luke asked.

“Basement. That’s where my friend saw it.” Dylan answered, pressing the elevator down button. At twelve, he considered himself the leader of the two.

Luke watched the doors nervously. Over the years, he had been tormented by many of Dylan’s monster tales and urban legends, yet he secretly admired his older brother and always followed his lead.

Luke felt he had more than his fair share of hospitals since their father died. His mother, a traveling nurse, had refused to leave her sons home alone ever since, confining them for hours in hospital waiting rooms and cafeterias. There was something about hospitals that made him feel helpless. It was a place where even the bravest were reduced to witnesses of the inevitable. 

They watched in silence as the floor indicator light displayed their descent.

“Where did it come from?” Luke asked finally. 

Dylan shrugged, “Maybe it was here before the hospital, or maybe it came to prey on the sick. Some people think it comes from the dead patients.”

The elevator jerked suddenly and then stopped.

“So, it stays here?”

“I guess.” Dylan turned to face Luke with a sinister smile as the doors opened behind him. “Unless it sees something it wants. Like a young boy.”

“Stop it,” Luke said.

The basement of the hospital might have been a whole different world. The bright lights and sounds of the upper floors were long gone, the anemic light from dated fixtures doing little to quell the darkness of the long hallway ahead. Shadows crept from all corners, age slowly overtaking the faded tile floors and walls like rot on fruit. The boys stepped off the elevator like a duo of unlikely time travelers surveying a new world.

“Jesus,” Dylan muttered, eyeing the dilapidated walls. They moved down the hall slowly, unsure of their destination.

“Let’s turn back,” Luke said. “We could get in trouble!”

Dylan rolled his eyes. His little brother had never been known for his bravery. Their mom wouldn’t even let him watch R-rated movies. “You’re being a baby. There’s nobody down here.”

They came to a door on the right side of the hall.

“Look,” Dylan continued, pointing to a gray sign. “Morgue,” it read in small white letters. He tried the door’s knob. It turned freely. “Follow me.”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Isn’t the morgue full of dead people?”

“You won’t see them. They’re tucked away in drawers. Besides, they’re dead, so they can’t hurt you. Think of them as sleeping.”

Inside the room, the lighting was much better. A long stainless-steel table sat in the center of the room, flanked by an industrial sink and drain. A steel cart nearby held a large basket scale and other medical supplies.

“That’s where they weigh the body parts,” Dylan said, pointing to the scale. He lay on the autopsy table and pulled out his phone, snapping a selfie.

“Dude, that’s morbid,” Luke blurted, realizing how much his brother resembled his father. An uneasy feeling came over him. He shook away the thought.   

Dylan laughed, admiring the picture. “No service down here, so I can’t send it to anyone.”

Luke surveyed the room. Medical signs and diagrams lined the walls. “All bodies and body parts must be signed out” one sign read.

“Look!” Dylan cried, sitting up.

Across from the table stood an industrial refrigerator door. A small sign near the door’s handle read, “Please place bodies in cooler feet first. Thank you” Dylan walked toward it.

“Dylan, wait!” Luke cried uneasily. He backed toward the door.

“You’re being a wimp.”

“I’m not,” though the hesitancy in his voice was evident.

Dylan grabbed the door’s lever handle. The cold metal sent a chill up his arm. Slowly, he pulled it open.

A loud noise rang out behind them; metal hitting the floor in the hallway.

“Someone’s coming!” Dylan whispered.

They moved quickly through a second interior door into a small office, passing a rusted metal desk and cabinet and back out into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

The hall was empty.

A second indecipherable noise came from inside the office. They moved down the hall, searching for a place to hide. Dylan found an unlocked door marked “Utility” and they stumbled inside, locking the door behind them. They listened intently, catching their breath.

Silence.

Dylan flipped on a light switch. A dumpster sat against the far wall of the utility room next to a padlocked bay door. Two rows of large red trash bins sat nearby in the center of the room. The side of them read “Biohazard Waste” in bold letters above some sort of symbol.

“You should see your face.” Dylan laughed, leaning against the wooden door. “Looks like you crapped your pants.”

“Don’t be an asshole.” Luke shot back.

As they continued to argue, the waste bin closest to Luke began to move, its lid lifting slightly. It moved again, sliding a few inches on the smooth floor.

A second bin began to move, followed by a third. As they watched in disbelief, all eight bins began to shake, then stopped abruptly.

“What the…” Dylan started, his voice trailing off. Luke began to cry silently, the tears trickling down his smooth cheeks.

The bin closest to them started to move again, shaking violently as if possessed. Without warning, the container pitched forward, landing on its side. Red plastic bags of medical waste poured out onto the smooth concrete floor.

Luke screamed and cried harder.

“Knock off the water works. It’s rats or something,” Dylan offered, not believing his words. “Listen, I lied. There’s no monster down here.

“I want to go home,” Luke said as he watched an unknown liquid leak onto the floor.

Suddenly, the bags on the floor began to move, stacking improbably on each other like a grotesque snowman. A second bin fell over, its contents joining the first. The red bags bonded together, turning into one large bag. Something inside began to tear its way out, shredding the bag like a tiger in a paper cage.

Luke screamed again and pressed his body against the wall. Dylan fumbled frantically with the door.

“Get us out of here!” Luke yelled, still pressed against the wall in fear.

“It’s stuck!”

Behind them, something came into view. Luke’s eyes widened in horror.

The giant creature standing before them had the form of a bear, but its anatomy was much different. It stood on two hind legs, the toes of its large feet adorned with razor-sharp medical scalpels and shears. Blood-soaked sheets and clothing lined its entire body, staples and stitches holding them to ragged bits of human flesh and bone. 

Long IV tubes wrapped around its four limbs like visible arteries pumping old blood from an exposed rotting heart on the exterior of its chest like liquid through a straw. Human nails and teeth hung together where joints should have been, clustered together like shields of armor. The entire face on the creature’s massive head was painted in blood, and the top of its skull was fractured open, exposing small sections of oozing gray matter.

It watched them through a pair of bulging eyes, then reached its two upper limbs toward them with claws made of curved and hypodermic needles.

“Open it!” Luke sobbed as Dylan beat on the thick wooden door.

The lock came free.

Dylan and Luke staggered into the hallway running into a second figure. The door slammed shut behind them.

A man’s voice demanded, “What are you doing here?”

The man looked like sleep had long eluded him, dark puffy bags hanging beneath his beady blue eyes. His skin looked as pale as the surrounding walls, and his blue scrubs were at least three times too big. He stared down at them over a long protruding nose like an angry buzzard.

But at least he was human.

The boys both began to speak, a cacophony of panic and mayhem.

“Whoa,” the man said, raising his hands. “Calm down. How did you get down here?”

They fell silent.

Luke spoke up. “There’s a monster in there,” he stammered, realizing how stupid he sounded. He pointed to the door.

“No!” Dylan interrupted “We just got lost, Mister. Our mother works in this hospital. Don’t mind Luke; he’s always imagining monsters.”

“I do not!”

The man rolled his eyes. “Enough games. I’m calling security.” He reached for the door of the utility room. “This room is to remain locked—”

The door flew open with great force. The creature rumbled out of the room on all fours like a charging bull, knocking the man to the floor.

Both Luke and Dylan screamed, their bodies frozen in fear.

The thing trampled the man without mercy, stomping him repeatedly with its scalpel-covered feet and paws. His scrubs began to darken, fresh blood from clean punctures and lacerations soaking into the tattered garments. The man lay motionless as the creature’s bloody mouth opened unnaturally wide, revealing several rows of mismatched rotten human teeth.

A loud, high-pitched noise blared from its mouth; a sound Luke instantly recognized from too many nights in hospitals and from the last time he saw his father alive and told him goodbye. A moment replayed in his mind a thousand times a day like a sad song stuck on repeat. A chill ran down his spine as cold as the corpses in the morgue fridge. The sound the creature emitted was not the growl of a dog nor the roar of a lion. It was the haunting high-pitched drone of a heart monitor flatline.

 The sound of death.

The smell of iron hung heavy in the hallway like a dizzying noxious fume. Luke felt hands on his shoulders.

“Run!” Dylan yelled, pushing him further down the hall.

They broke their trance and fled. They moved quickly, fueled by adrenaline. After forty feet, the first hallway dead-ended into a second. They stumbled to the right, looking for another exit. As they turned, Luke looked back.

The creature towered above the dead man on its two back legs, eyes glowing like two small computer monitors. It watched Luke intently as he ran, the eerie blue lights unblinking.

They tried several doors, all locked. Somewhere behind them, Luke could hear the monster moving rapidly, its sharp metal digits raking along the cracked tile floor.

“Here,” Dylan whispered, finding an unlocked room. He quickly pushed Luke inside and followed him in, locking the door behind them.

The room was dark except for the hall light coming in through a waist-high observation window that ran the length of the nearby wall. In the gloom, an autopsy table sat in the middle of the room. An assortment of surgical tools lay neatly in rows on a large metal tray next to it.

They hid in the shadows beneath the large window, shock setting in. Dylan checked on Luke. He looked pale. Tears streamed down his face, his body trembling uncontrollably. Dylan tried comforting his brother but found his hands shaking in horrified harmony.

Dylan pulled out his phone. The screen lit up, reminding Luke of the creature’s hideous eyes. He shuddered.

“No service!” Dylan said, dismayed.

A noise arose from outside the window.

Dylan locked the phone’s screen, extinguishing its light. The shrill screech of metal on glass raised the hair on Luke’s neck. A large, needled paw raked along the window just inches overhead.

Suddenly, a human face appeared, smacking forcefully against the glass. The unmistakable nose of a woman pressed hard against the window, deformed grotesquely to one side. The woman’s body was gone. All that remained was her head, which appeared to grow out of the side of the creature’s massive skull like a fungal spore. The monster stood outside the window on two legs, the dead woman’s deformed face clinging to the glass.

After a moment, the woman’s mouth opened. It screamed, the haunting sound of a flatline ringing behind its bloody tongue. The boys cowered beneath the window covering their ears as the sound infiltrated the tiny room.

After a moment, the dead woman’s face retreated from the glass, slowly absorbing into the monster’s large head like blood soaking into a bandage.

The room fell silent. They waited, too terrified to move.

Finally, Dylan spoke. “I think it’s gone,” he whispered unevenly. Slowly, he leaned up and peered cautiously out the window.

A faint noise came from somewhere across the dark room.

“What was that?” Luke stammered.

The sound continued.

Dylan used his phone’s flashlight to scan the room. The stainless steel reflected the tiny beam of light, assaulting their eyes and making it difficult to see.

The light came to rest on a medical Sharps container hanging on the far wall. As they watched, the container began to shake, its contents rattling inside like an aerosol can. Without warning, the top of the container popped off, and a hand appeared.

A hand of needles and syringes. The Sharps container was full of body parts.

The severed hand gripped the top of the container and began to pull itself out, strange liquid oozing from its needles like hot wax from a candle. As they watched in shock, an arm emerged from the container, followed by a head and torso as the creature from the hallway again took shape before their eyes.

Luke choked back a scream. He felt lightheaded and put out his hands, desperately seeking some sort of stability.

Dylan grabbed him and shoved him toward the door. The surgical tools nearby started to shake, dancing on the metal tray like haunted bones in a coffin. They scrambled into the hall as it crashed to the floor.

The elevator stood at the far end of the main hallway; its large metal doors closed. They ran toward it, desperately seeking escape.

As they passed the open utility room, Luke saw another bin overturn inside, its contents again taking the creature’s form. His immense shock only made him run faster.

The elevator drew closer. They could hear the unmistakable sound of the monster’s claws behind them. Dylan was the first to the doors. He pressed the up arrow frantically.

“Come on!” he pleaded.

The metallic iron stench returned; the odor heavy, palpable. Luke glanced instinctively over his shoulder. Shadows appeared from the utility room, slithering into the dimly lit hall.

The elevator arrived, startling them with its bell. The doors slowly opened, and they scrambled inside.

“Close it!” Luke yelled as Dylan frantically pressed an entire row of floor buttons. The doors began to move in slow motion, shuddering in their tracks.

Terrified, Luke looked out into the hall as the elevator doors moved together in an excruciatingly unhurried manner.

The creature had halved the distance between them with startling rapidity. It stood twenty feet away on two legs, its eyes again glowing blue like two small screens. It watched them with an unwavering gaze until the doors obscured its view, closing like a large metal curtain.

The elevator groaned and began to move. Breathless, the boys collapsed to the floor, their minds struggling to comprehend what they’d just encountered, something so evil, so vicious.

The elevators of Piedmont Hills Hospital didn’t play music; no smooth jazz or easy listening.  If they did, the boys might not have heard the haunting sound echoing beneath their feet: the chilling sound of a constant flat line.

*****

Luke lay awake in the darkness of his upstairs bedroom that night, thinking about the monster. It wasn’t just its origin that weighed on his mind but all the victims that gave it life: every tooth, nail, bloody IV tube, and failed organ, each from a different tale of sorrow and loss.

He thought about his own organs. He felt his still-beating heart and hoped that the blue lights he saw glowing outside his window were from the neighbor’s Christmas decorations or his mother coming home from work.

He hoped the shrill, scratching noise on the nearby window was just the wind blowing branches against the glass. But he knew that there were no trees outside his window.