I was working at the police station when I checked the local newspaper. The headline immediately caught my attention. “Patients went missing from the hospital.”
The article mentioned that a few patients who were close to dying went missing, and nobody knows what happened to them. The first case was recorded two months ago, and the most recent one happened yesterday. The nurses can’t find them. All of them were dying, so they couldn’t escape the hospital. My wife also worked there, so I called her.
“Yeah, we have no idea what happened to them,” she said. “We’ve checked every corner of the buildings.”
I got home around 7 pm. My wife was already home; she usually got home a few hours before me. As I was looking for lunch, she came upstairs from the basement.
“What were you doing down there?” I asked.
“I put some old broken chairs there,” she responded. “I’ll probably renovate the whole basement soon.”
“Why?” I raised my eyebrows. Since we moved there, we hadn’t used the basement; it was strange. There was nothing interesting down there, just a few spiders.
“Why not? I have no better thing to do.”
I finally agreed. The following day I went to work again. We’ve got a call from the hospital to go there and investigate the missing persons because their families want answers to what happened to them. I drove there with Mark, another police officer.
Dr. Martin, one of the doctors, told us every information about the missing patients; he even showed us where we could find their beds. It was in the same room my wife worked in. She was home at the time; she didn’t work on Fridays.
“It seems like all of the patients were really close to the hospital’s back door,” Mark said to Dr. Martin and me. “What if they escaped there?”
“Impossible,” Dr. Martin shook his head. “All of them were on their final days. They couldn’t walk, and we hadn’t found any strange footprints leading out of the backdoor. There is also the whole parking lot; somebody would’ve seen it if they escaped there.”
“What if someone smuggled them out?” I theorized. “It seems like all the missing patients were close to the back door. Someone could drag them to the parking lot and drop them in the car.”
“But who?” Dr. Martin asked. It was a fair question. Who could’ve done that, and why?
“I have no idea,” I responded. “My wife also works here, and hadn’t noticed anything strange.”
“We will speak to the staff here next week,” Mark said. “Make sure that everyone will be here.”
After that, we went back to the police station to write some reports, then spoke about it to our boss. I arrived home at the usual time but didn’t find my wife. I heard strange noises from the basement and wanted to go down there, but then she came upstairs.
“Hi,” she greeted me.
“So, are you working on that basement?” I asked. She looked strange; I thought I saw a small amount of blood on her face. “Do you need any help?”
“No, I can do it alone.”
“Are you sure? I can help; I’ll be home the whole weekend anyway.”
“Thanks, but I’ll handle it.”
“What are you doing anyway there? We don’t need that basement that much.”
“Stop asking me so many questions!” she shouted at me frustrated. I was surprised.
“Sorry, I’m tired. Look, just don’t go down there, please!” she said in a calmer tone, then went to sleep.
The following day quickly went by; she was in the basement almost all the time, and I was reading some books. She then told me she was going to the market to buy some food. After she left the house, I came out of my room and went to the basement door. It was strange, as I still heard some noises coming from below. I was curious.
I opened the door and looked down the stairs. I only saw darkness, so I used my phone to illuminate the narrow walls. I slowly walked down the stairs. The noises were getting louder.
After about 20 steps, I arrived there. I immediately regretted it. There were some steel cages inside, and in every cage, there was something… something I can’t even name. Old, rotten bodies. Some of them looked like the missing persons from the hospital. I froze, as I couldn’t know what to do. And the worst wasn’t the fact that the bodies were there. They were moving. Their eyes were white. One of them grabbed the cell’s door with his rotten hand.
I finally ran back to the stairs trying to get out of there as soon as possible. At the top of the stairs, there was my wife standing with angry eyes.
“I told you not to go there,” she said slowly.
“What the hell are you doing down there?” I shouted at her. “What are those things? These are the patients that went missing!”
“I’m going to be the greatest scientist ever known,” she responded. Her voice was confident. I felt like I didn’t know her. “I stopped death itself. I saved those patients from death.”
I had no idea what to do, so I just tried to run out of there, pushing her aside, but as I was trying to push her, she bit my finger. I screamed because of the pain but tried to run out anyway. I looked down at my hand, and one of my fingers was missing.
I ran up to the bathroom, then locked the door behind me.
“Don’t hide from me!” she shouted from outside. “You should be proud of me! I’ll save humanity!
As she was shouting, I found some bandages to stop the bleeding from my finger. She kicked the door multiple times, then stabbed it with a kitchen knife. My only chance was to escape out of the window.
I opened it, then crawled outside. The only problem was that the bathroom was on the floor. I had to jump.
The pain in my legs was horrible as I fell to the ground. I immediately called Mark to get to my house in his car. He then took me to the hospital to patch me up. The following day, I told them and the police what happened.
“Yeah, we figured there was something wrong,” Mark said. “Your house burned down last night, just after I bought you to the hospital. The firefighters found the bodies you were talking about, but your wife is missing. We have no idea where she is.”