We broke into an abandoned coroners office in the town next to ours and found a journal. The place was wiped out. It seemed like no one had been there in a decade. The entries appear to be from the partner of the guy he’s writing about, here. I hope this is just fiction…
Dr. kinneson’s lab, [Location Redacted] —The aftermath of the massacre.
Ted stood over the sink in the lab, scrubbing vigorously at his hands under the rush of hot, soapy water.
Some freak accident, with a new satellite weapon the government let loose by mistake? A natural phenomenon that conventional science hasn’t yet come to reasonable terms with? Surely it wasn’t anything sinister, by design.… It couldn’t be. The implications of that were catastrophic, and gut wrenching—to say the least.
But Ted wasn’t naive, either. Of course there was the possibility of terrorism. He tried not to feed that gorilla of a thought, deciding that wrestling with it would hamper his ability to say cool and stay away from the television. The media was doing a good enough job of creating hysteria for him, as it was. Anything to drive up viewership and sell toothpaste, he thought.
But, unable to refrain from playing devil’s advocate any longer, he wondered, “What if it wasn’t an outside threat, after all?” He shuddered at the thought, scrubbing thoroughly at each fingernail with a bristled sponge.
“…Wouldn’t be the first time the government used its muscle to deceive its own people. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, The MK-Ultra mind control projects, The Gulf of Tonkin incident… ” He cut himself off, realizing that feeding into the paranoia was a rabbit hole he definitely didn’t want to go down right now. It wasn’t good for his sobriety. Or for his current duties, for that matter.
He felt his hands stinging and realized he was scrubbing them raw.
“Shit” He said out loud, shutting off the sink and shaking himself dry.
Ted sighed hard, checking his watch, and dug into his pockets, feeling for the small cardboard box of coffin nails. He made a start for the staircase, but was stopped in his tracks, noticing something that struck him like a brick to the head.
The body bag he had left sealed on the table was sitting straight up.
Then, it slid open, peeling away from its contents like a rotten banana.
He staggered, attempting to catch himself against a wall, gripping at his chest as his heart began to fly off into insatiable panic. He was begging his eyeballs to detect some trick in the light; an explanation for how living being was brought into one of those bags. A surely laughable explanation for which he would tell his wife about later, in a bout of relieved humility. But that simply was not possible.
He had already worked on that body.
He could only reel back into growing horror as a mangled, reassembled human head spun toward him, making a wet, fleshy, bone crunching sound as it rolled over its own shoulder to face him, impossibly.
“Hello, Doctor Kinneson,” a voice announced from inside of the battered half of a human face. It sounded like several voices speaking in unison.
The body belonged 19 year old girl, named Barbara Jenkins. She had died just hours before, torn to pieces mysteriously, just like all the rest. To her friends, she was Barbie; cute and petite, with a purple and blonde Chelsea hair cut, and a passion for tattoos and piercings. She had just been given a thorough autopsy, complete with incisions and samples removed (specks of brain and lung tissue, as well as fragments of foreign substances like debris, wood splinters and other tiny shards of wreckage); and now she was talking to him.
What’s worse, was that she didn’t appear to have any lips. “Burning the candle at both ends again, are we, Doctor K?” The voices whirled in hideous laughter, even after the corpses Jaw stopped chattering. Like a badly timed dub from a gruesome puppet.
He didn’t speak. Ted was in full fight or flight. There was only the door, and his brain calculating ways to get on the other side of it. There was a panel of medical instruments to his left, on a silver table, blocking the only exit in his path, away from that thing in the corner. A clear path was possible to his right, but he would have to essentially side step past the creature to get to it.
“Teddyyyyy…” the voice shuddered, the head turning slightly on an angle, in an unnatural, mechanical way, like the muscles were pulling at it all wrong. One pale blue eye ball rolled its gaze off of Ted, toward the floor. The other, unblinkingly dead locked in his direction.
“What is this” he wailed. He didn’t recognize his own voice, shrill and filled with fear. He wasn’t sure what he even said; he was buying his time.
“Thisss is your job, Teddyyy. You’re… the cor-on-er. Don’t you want to get insideeeee of usSss” One fish-netted leg jerked free from the bag and swung off of the table, a blood soaked Chuck Taylor dangling beneath it, like a swinging pendulum. The corpses knees slid open wide before Ted, and it broke out into more horrible laughter.
Ted jumped backward and crashed hard into the sink. He let out a gasp so terrified, that he didn’t know his own mouth was capable of making it.
“Teddyyyy… She’s in here with us, you know. And she’s afraidddd.”
Ted glanced at the surgical tools, beside his hip. He considered scooping up one of the metal trays and using it as a shield-weapon to thrust himself past the table.
“Oh Teddyyy. She’s crying. She’s crying, Teddddyyy.”
He swallowed hard. “I’m just going to leave, now. I’m not going to hurt you. Don’t come near me.” He tried to sound unthreatening yet authoritative, but his voice was broken into fragments; a soft tremble.
“Oh, Teddyyyy…” It moaned, tilting its head back, the bottom half of the jaw staying perfectly in place, like a PEZ-dispenser, made of human flesh.
Then, a single voice spoke, from the space between the mangled jaws of the corpse. It was the voice of a woman.
“Hello… Ted?”
His eyes bulged, heart pounding in his chest and his legs filling with pumping blood. He was ready to spring, but he felt like his legs weighed 1000 pounds each.
“Ted, is that you?” the woman’s voice cried. Then, more conjoined, insidious laughter escaped from the neck hole, little spurts of blood and black liquid shooting up with it into the ceiling and raining down all around it. Patches of frayed, purple hair shook all about, as the skull vibrated, disturbingly.
Ted dug his heels into the floor, took a breath, and made a break for the door. He snatched up the steel tray and dumped its contents, but in all of his shaky adrenaline, nicked his thumb badly, on a scalpel. He ignored this, and continued to charge the table —swinging violently at the corpse; whacking it hard in the chest on the first try. The body exploded backward and bounced off of the table twice, before rolling off and crashing hard onto the floor. Barbie was a small girl to begin with, and the body was now missing so much of its mass, that the thuds were swift and nearly weightless.
Without stopping to investigate the collision, Ted continued to sprint for the door, bounding over the other body bags scattered throughout the lab. Just as he wrapped his grip around the door handle, he heard the many voices shouting out behind the table.
“We have your Mother in here with us, Ted Kinneson!”
The small, frail sounding voice returned.
“Teddy, please don’t leave me! I’m sorry Teddy! Please! I’m in so much pain.” The word ‘pain’ dragged like nails on a chalk board in his ears.
He was a statue, save for his hands, which trembled like mad. His heart hammered against his sternum chest felt like a heavyweight punching his ribs from the inside.
“What… What do you want with me? What are you doing to her!?” He shrieked, giving in fully to the wave of terror.
There was a silence in the room that you could feel, like pain.
Then, the corpse’s head sprung up from behind the table, revealing that one of its eyeballs had been knocked out. Following the mess of a head were its two broken arms, sliding along the tables edge, oozing fluid from them.
Ted shuddered at the sight.
The creature stood on two legs, gathering its balance; swaying momentarily before freezing like some kind of horrible claymation.
Under the glare of the harsh table lights, the reflective gleam from a single nipple ring hung freely out of the beasts shredded, leather jacket.
Ted heard the sound of the door lock from behind him.
He spun around to see that another corpse, with the same wretched, reconstructed features, was standing behind the plate window of the exit, staring back at him. This one had a Mohawk and a missing jawbone. It winked at him, from behind the glass.
“Goddamn it!” Ted screeched. “What the hell do you want with me!?”
The creatures howled with more horrible laughter, and the one with the purple hair replied… “Oh, Teddyyy… We’re here to hurt you very badly.”
Suddenly all of the body bags in the lab began shaking violently at once around him, flinging themselves around on the floor; kicking desperately for freedom from a black, rubber chrysalis. The lights flickered like a strobe, the breakers buzzing loudly as the surged.
Ted screamed and gripped at his own face, pulling at the skin and moaning in unrelenting terror. Praying to just wake up from this nightmare. Blood was pouring from the sliced skin of his thumb, gushing down his cheek, soaking into his collar.
The creature by the table raised its fist, smashing out the light bulb above the operating table.
The room went completely black.