For all that he'd packed an entire arsenal in the trunk of his car, he only planned on bringing a minute fraction of it with him into the hospital. (Mainly, he packed heavy in case he either met with a large group in need to ordnance, or had something following after him on the way out.) Ultimately, what he took with him was his usual pair of pistols, one of the Tommy guns, and several magazines for each in suit coat and trenchcoat, along with a knife and a flashlight. A good load of firepower without weighing him down.
Fat lot of good it does, though, when the world lurches around him just inside the door, unconsciousness slipping away for just long enough to put him Somewhere Else... with nothing besides the clothes on his back.
Smith groans as he wakes back up, feeling for weapons and not finding them. For a moment, he panics, a memory from long ago surfacing... McCool looking down at his beaten body, unsurprising contempt evident in his voice as he tells someone else, "He's nothing without a gun."... But he forces it down for now. They were trained as gunslingers, but the Army trains to fight with other weapons besides, or even none if needs be. He can get through this.
When he sits up, Locke also feels a conspicuous lack of weight where there were weapons before. No knife, no handgun... and yet neither his hands nor his feet are bound, he feels no wound pain, and rubbing a hand over the back of his head just yields mildew and sticky gunk from the floor. "How....?" An incredibly incompetent mugging? But that still doesn't answer how an unknown assailant not only snuck up on a seasoned tracker, but also cleanly rendered him unconscious, to say nothing of how his well-trained, maybe even better-trained, companion fared no better. John Smith appears similarly taken aback, though at least he also looks similarly unhurt upon cursory inspection.
Dammit, this can't be how it was supposed to go. His stomach sinks at the thought. Locke quickly pulls himself up to one knee, surveying their dim surroundings with wide eyes struggling to adjust to the light. He can't even pinpoint where that hideous stink might be coming from; the whole room reeks right up to high heaven. "What's your status?" he whispers.
Awake now, Smith rolls to his feet, not quite in one motion but pretty close. (He hadn't lost much in the years between the Great War and Jericho, and even less since then, thanks to his slowed aging.) He looks about quickly, to see if maybe his gear had just fallen out and landed nearby, but is disappointed.
"Unarmed, but unhurt. You?"
His eyesight adapts pretty well as he looks about. Being already fully on his feet, he sees the dangling corpse. No matter his acclimation to death, the stench of it gives even his stomach the tiniest of flips.
He pats his waist and the small of his back just to be sure. Yep, no weapons. Empty holster and empty sheath. "Same. Did you see anyth...?" But then Locke looks up. Mother of God... Luckily, given the lady's unfortunate circumstances, he doesn't air that curse aloud. He's instantly on his feet, but that's the end of springing into action. It's quite plain quite quickly that there's going to be no helping this poor soul; the woman suspended from the ceiling is already a corpse.
Bloodsoaked hair covers her face, and she hangs motionless from what looks like a giant fishhook lodged in her lower back. Even more hideous, she was extremely pregnant at the time of her death, nearly to term by the looks of it. Muted light and slow-oozing droplets of blood issue from a gash across her stomach, out of which a few scraps of flesh and some internal organs are bloated and bulging.
Locke's seen dead animals strung out every which way, but this... this is desecration. His stomach roils and shock flows into controlled anger as his eyes settle on a dangling hand, slender in life but swollen and purple by now. "So who would leave this for us to find..." Cautiously, he takes another, closer glance around the room. He can make more of it out now, cabinets, a folded exam table, a torn chart displaying fetal anatomy, but there's no sign of anyone watching. "She's not one of ours. Is she?" Locke hasn't seen anyone desperately pregnant around town nor heard about any impending babies, but neither has he been the most social of animals.
Having gotten over the moment of physical revulsion, Smith becomes fairly calm about the body. He's seen corpses, some mishandled in some truly gruesome ways, and has no religious illusions. Instead, he reaches up and brushes the hair back, getting a look at the face.
"No. At least, I don't think so. No one I've met, anyway." He looks behind her, eyeing the hook. "As for the whos and the whats, I've no idea. Presumably, who or whatever has been calling us here... well, that's not exactly what even I would call 'normal,' so I don't expect this'll be, either."
Speaking of which, he seems to notice something. Standing facing one side of the body, he tilts back and for a few times, looking first at the back and then the front.
Locke sets his jaw and, much though he'd rather not, grimly concurs. "Yes. It is." If that door turns out to be locked, they may need the light to find another way out of here. Even if it's not locked, the hospital - like the rest of the world - isn't going to have any power. And honestly, she's strung up to be undignified enough already. They're not going to be able to manage the kind of leverage necessary to get her down off that thing, but leaving a damn flashlight in her belly and walking away would just seem... odd, somehow.
So he steps up to the task, reaching his hand in with a sick squelching noise and a waft of "fresh" disgusting scent of rot as her internals shift and slither around his fingers. A rope of some severed small intestine unwinds upon being disturbed and slips down to dangle from the wound, trailing red over his reaching shoulder, but otherwise Locke manages to pull out the foreign object uneventfully and without getting a sloppy faceful of organs.
That being accomplished, he gives the flashlight a flick to send some droplets of blood and a string of flesh flopping to the floor. "...not what it said it'd be like..." he mutters under his breath, disgruntled.
While Mr. Locke is busy with digging out the light, Smith's busying himself by looking around the rest of the room. No guns, no knives, but he'd feel better if he at least had something resembling a weapon to work with. Everything's too unwieldy to do anything with, though. He'd settle for the fishhook, except that he, like Locke, has to conclude that it's not really practical to pull the dead woman off of it.
He's pretty well resigned himself to having to wait until they get out somewhere else to find weapons, when he catches the sound of Locke's grumbling.
The switch is a little gummy, but operable, and Locke switches the flashlight off as he goes over to the door. If there's someone armed and waiting outside, no point making targeting practice easier for them. "Not sure yet. That's what I'd hoped Antinora would tell me-dammit!" He jerks his hand back with a hiss after making contact with the doorknob, looking at their exit with renewed alarm. "It's hot..." Fire out there? There's no light coming in through the cracks, and no smell of smoke... though admittedly, the smell of the corpse could be doing a fair job of covering that up.
Locke carefully taps the pads of his fingers against the flat of the door itself, but just comes away from that exercise confused. "Door's not, though." Couldn't be fire, then... a soldering iron hanging from the knob on the other side? It wouldn't be a very efficient alarm system, but it would work. Strange. Opening this door doesn't seem like a good option, but there are no others. Locke gives Smith a look largely masked by the darkness of their surroundings - here goes... - and slowly, cautiously opens their exit for them, keeping the hem of his shirt between his hand and the metal, and the rest of his body behind the door jam in case of some kind of trap or ambush.
Okay, so the guy thinks the place will tell him things. Okay, a little weird, but that's increasingly common these days... Like, apparently, the doorknob. Smith waits a couple of moments for an immediate reaction o the door opening, then sticks his head out, cautiously looking around. He can't really see far into the darkness, so he shrugs, shaking his head to say, Well, here we go... before stepping through.
The other side of the door is not a hallway, contrary to what an ordinary hospital's layout would be. No traps, but what is there is no welcome sight. Fog covers the cafeteria floor, and spills out around their ankles as the door opens to give it passage. The counter where food is usually served is now an enormous, rusty grate stretching from floor to ceiling. Behind it, long hooks of various shapes and size hold rotting chunks of meat, which just might be decorated by scraps of what could have been sleeves or pantlegs. The long tables at the edges of the room have been covered by blood spattered sheets, under which vaguely human shapes are visible. On and around the semi-human forms, something - somethings - seem to be moving.
Locke immediately turns the flashlight on them, and finds long, thin black snakes slithering over the sheets. What's more, in the beam of light, it's clear that the peeling sweaty walls are slowly, disorientingly rippling. Locke looks darkly fascinated, but no less focused. He aims the flashlight down towards the mist at their feet, to make sure they're not about to tread on any of the local wildlife, and starts treading carefully. "Tell me something... how were you called?" If this is not what it was supposed to be, then obviously either he did something wrong, or he got the wrong message. Time for a second opinion. "How did you know... to come here tonight?"
The last room had been merely a bit disgusting. The cafeteria was downright unreal, enough so to chip even at Smith's calm, albeit only a little. The counter area and its stock of possibly human deli meat, in particularly, causes a bit of tenseness in his jaw.
"Well, so much for my appetite."
Actually, if anything, it's that he's maybe starting to feel a little hungry that disturbs him the most. He does his best to shake it off, focusing instead on spotting the door out and on Locke's question.
"Combination of things. Vague whispers, gut instinct, an image of... well, my father's face. Whatever it took to get me here, I guess. I'll take an omen as well as the next guy, but I'm not exactly the sort to go seeking them out unless I have to, y'know? C'mon. Looks like that's the way out."
The direction he points in is, of course, towards the opposite end of the room. It's not far, but it does involve walking past one of the snake-covered tables and through the thickest of the fog... where things are moving.
From here, it sounds like rats' claws scraping over the floor. Locke advances warily, but up until one of them shows itself, he's more worried about the walls than about the vermin. His head is starting to pound, and he's not sure whether he has a moment of being unusually slow, or whether the little thing's advance and attack was bizarrely fast.
It's unfortunate that the reflexive response to something slicing the skin just above your ankle is not to kick the little son of a bitch into a wall, but to sidestep and jerk your leg away. Locke does exactly this, with a grunt of surprise, swinging the light around to find something skittering in the fog, abandoning any hope of stealth now that the surprise attack has launched. In the flurry of motion and the layer of mist, details are hard to come by, but this is definitely not a rat. It's black, angular, and gleams sometimes like oil. Vaguely like an oversized, overly complicated spider, some of whose scraping little legs end in nasty little blades.
It's faster than he, and when it heads for Locke to attempt a second strike, his reaction is improved. He's not going to be able to outrun it for the door and it doesn't seem to warrant that extreme of a reaction, but the soles of his boots are nice and thick. He gives it a whack, and it goes rolling under one of the dripping covered tables like an angrily clicking tumbleweed.
Smith, on the other hand, having seen the first of them go for Locke, opts to squash them underfoot like scorpions. He's a bit surprised, as he raises his foot to admire his handiwork, to see the fog roll over the corpse and seemingly cause it to disappear.
"Well, don't that beat all."
He'd rather go at a run, but he's not going to leave Locke behind, either. So, instead he keeps pace, kicking and stomping the bugs on the ground as they go. Watch out for the snakes too, guys.
This place has proved unenlightening, and the smell? Really starting to get to him. He gags a little as they pass by a particularly overpoweringly wretched pile of rotting remains en route. That, that's just not natural. Not even a big bloated dead buck would smell this bad without some serious mistreatment.
There's a sound coming from back the way that they came, faint, like a muffled groan. Maybe even from the direction of one of those covered lumpy tables. Locke, for one, has no interest in investigating that. "Now what do you think are the odds..." Squish. "...that the walking corpses..." Splat. "...and the kids... given to biting..." And here's a lovely gore-splattered door. The gore-splattered part is forgivable in light of the door part. "...have something to do with this place?"
The hunger's starting to get a bit nauseating in and of itself, even besides the contrast with what could be considered available in the cafeteria for eating. It slows him down for a moment... almost long enough for one of the snakes on that table to get the better of him. Those few years he spent living in desert locales, however, still offer up good instincts even now, and while one foot's squished a bug, his hands come up and catch it in his vise-like grip, one just behind the head and the other at the tail.
"On the whole," he replies, "better than I'd like."
He pitches the snake across a couple of tables and puts his shoulder to the door, preferring to get through it all at once. The door slams open, and he has to catch himself up as he finds himself... in the lobby?! The lights flicker brightly to life and then dim, almost as though making note of their presence. The elevators, across the room, chime open and blood gushes out, soaking into the carpeting... which doesn't seem to affect it much.
There are murmurs and footsteps -- dragging footsteps, but quick. The hallways look less than inviting, but at least-- at least they mostly look empty. For now.
Oddly enough, the doors that one would expect to find, leading outside -- the doors through which the Johns had entered the building in the first place -- aren't there. Only blank wall fills the space.
"...Yeah." Smith looks back at Locke. "I'm willing to file zombies, vampires, and this place all in a nice big bin labeled, 'Weird Stuff We Didn't Have, Once Upon a Time.' Looks like we'll have to find another way out."
"It is interesting that the Once Upon A Time shelf should be so empty..." It isn't a quest for a door out that first draws Locke's attention; it's the tiny gift shop, an alcove stuffed with dead flowers and little teddy bears. "...and there just seems to be... no end of things to put in your bin. And interesting that the point when it stopped being Once Upon A Time, and turned into now..." One of the bears is not like the others. Its face is longer, more like the original Theodore Bears than like the current generation of beanie babies, and its fur is woolen curls rather than synthetic fuzz. Locke holds it up for closer inspection. "...would be so clearly marked for us."
He gives the bear a gentle squeeze, and a primitive songbox pings out a simple tune of just three notes, prompting a more troubled look from its bearer than a toy ought to elicit, particularly when blood-soaked carpets and a missing exit are arguably more worthy of his concern. Sounding distracted, he continues, "So we wonder now which it was: the beginning bringing with it a plague, or a plague bringing about the beginning." He lets the flashlight beam wander around their new surroundings, and chucks out a non-sequitur for good measure. "No air ducts, either."
Fat lot of good it does, though, when the world lurches around him just inside the door, unconsciousness slipping away for just long enough to put him Somewhere Else... with nothing besides the clothes on his back.
Smith groans as he wakes back up, feeling for weapons and not finding them. For a moment, he panics, a memory from long ago surfacing... McCool looking down at his beaten body, unsurprising contempt evident in his voice as he tells someone else, "He's nothing without a gun."... But he forces it down for now. They were trained as gunslingers, but the Army trains to fight with other weapons besides, or even none if needs be. He can get through this.
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Dammit, this can't be how it was supposed to go. His stomach sinks at the thought. Locke quickly pulls himself up to one knee, surveying their dim surroundings with wide eyes struggling to adjust to the light. He can't even pinpoint where that hideous stink might be coming from; the whole room reeks right up to high heaven. "What's your status?" he whispers.
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"Unarmed, but unhurt. You?"
His eyesight adapts pretty well as he looks about. Being already fully on his feet, he sees the dangling corpse. No matter his acclimation to death, the stench of it gives even his stomach the tiniest of flips.
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Bloodsoaked hair covers her face, and she hangs motionless from what looks like a giant fishhook lodged in her lower back. Even more hideous, she was extremely pregnant at the time of her death, nearly to term by the looks of it. Muted light and slow-oozing droplets of blood issue from a gash across her stomach, out of which a few scraps of flesh and some internal organs are bloated and bulging.
Locke's seen dead animals strung out every which way, but this... this is desecration. His stomach roils and shock flows into controlled anger as his eyes settle on a dangling hand, slender in life but swollen and purple by now. "So who would leave this for us to find..." Cautiously, he takes another, closer glance around the room. He can make more of it out now, cabinets, a folded exam table, a torn chart displaying fetal anatomy, but there's no sign of anyone watching. "She's not one of ours. Is she?" Locke hasn't seen anyone desperately pregnant around town nor heard about any impending babies, but neither has he been the most social of animals.
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"No. At least, I don't think so. No one I've met, anyway." He looks behind her, eyeing the hook. "As for the whos and the whats, I've no idea. Presumably, who or whatever has been calling us here... well, that's not exactly what even I would call 'normal,' so I don't expect this'll be, either."
Speaking of which, he seems to notice something. Standing facing one side of the body, he tilts back and for a few times, looking first at the back and then the front.
"Is that light coming from where I think it is?"
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So he steps up to the task, reaching his hand in with a sick squelching noise and a waft of "fresh" disgusting scent of rot as her internals shift and slither around his fingers. A rope of some severed small intestine unwinds upon being disturbed and slips down to dangle from the wound, trailing red over his reaching shoulder, but otherwise Locke manages to pull out the foreign object uneventfully and without getting a sloppy faceful of organs.
That being accomplished, he gives the flashlight a flick to send some droplets of blood and a string of flesh flopping to the floor. "...not what it said it'd be like..." he mutters under his breath, disgruntled.
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He's pretty well resigned himself to having to wait until they get out somewhere else to find weapons, when he catches the sound of Locke's grumbling.
"Not like who said?"
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Locke carefully taps the pads of his fingers against the flat of the door itself, but just comes away from that exercise confused. "Door's not, though." Couldn't be fire, then... a soldering iron hanging from the knob on the other side? It wouldn't be a very efficient alarm system, but it would work. Strange. Opening this door doesn't seem like a good option, but there are no others. Locke gives Smith a look largely masked by the darkness of their surroundings - here goes... - and slowly, cautiously opens their exit for them, keeping the hem of his shirt between his hand and the metal, and the rest of his body behind the door jam in case of some kind of trap or ambush.
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Locke immediately turns the flashlight on them, and finds long, thin black snakes slithering over the sheets. What's more, in the beam of light, it's clear that the peeling sweaty walls are slowly, disorientingly rippling. Locke looks darkly fascinated, but no less focused. He aims the flashlight down towards the mist at their feet, to make sure they're not about to tread on any of the local wildlife, and starts treading carefully. "Tell me something... how were you called?" If this is not what it was supposed to be, then obviously either he did something wrong, or he got the wrong message. Time for a second opinion. "How did you know... to come here tonight?"
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"Well, so much for my appetite."
Actually, if anything, it's that he's maybe starting to feel a little hungry that disturbs him the most. He does his best to shake it off, focusing instead on spotting the door out and on Locke's question.
"Combination of things. Vague whispers, gut instinct, an image of... well, my father's face. Whatever it took to get me here, I guess. I'll take an omen as well as the next guy, but I'm not exactly the sort to go seeking them out unless I have to, y'know? C'mon. Looks like that's the way out."
The direction he points in is, of course, towards the opposite end of the room. It's not far, but it does involve walking past one of the snake-covered tables and through the thickest of the fog... where things are moving.
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It's unfortunate that the reflexive response to something slicing the skin just above your ankle is not to kick the little son of a bitch into a wall, but to sidestep and jerk your leg away. Locke does exactly this, with a grunt of surprise, swinging the light around to find something skittering in the fog, abandoning any hope of stealth now that the surprise attack has launched. In the flurry of motion and the layer of mist, details are hard to come by, but this is definitely not a rat. It's black, angular, and gleams sometimes like oil. Vaguely like an oversized, overly complicated spider, some of whose scraping little legs end in nasty little blades.
It's faster than he, and when it heads for Locke to attempt a second strike, his reaction is improved. He's not going to be able to outrun it for the door and it doesn't seem to warrant that extreme of a reaction, but the soles of his boots are nice and thick. He gives it a whack, and it goes rolling under one of the dripping covered tables like an angrily clicking tumbleweed.
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"Well, don't that beat all."
He'd rather go at a run, but he's not going to leave Locke behind, either. So, instead he keeps pace, kicking and stomping the bugs on the ground as they go. Watch out for the snakes too, guys.
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There's a sound coming from back the way that they came, faint, like a muffled groan. Maybe even from the direction of one of those covered lumpy tables. Locke, for one, has no interest in investigating that. "Now what do you think are the odds..." Squish. "...that the walking corpses..." Splat. "...and the kids... given to biting..." And here's a lovely gore-splattered door. The gore-splattered part is forgivable in light of the door part. "...have something to do with this place?"
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"On the whole," he replies, "better than I'd like."
He pitches the snake across a couple of tables and puts his shoulder to the door, preferring to get through it all at once. The door slams open, and he has to catch himself up as he finds himself... in the lobby?! The lights flicker brightly to life and then dim, almost as though making note of their presence. The elevators, across the room, chime open and blood gushes out, soaking into the carpeting... which doesn't seem to affect it much.
There are murmurs and footsteps -- dragging footsteps, but quick. The hallways look less than inviting, but at least-- at least they mostly look empty. For now.
Oddly enough, the doors that one would expect to find, leading outside -- the doors through which the Johns had entered the building in the first place -- aren't there. Only blank wall fills the space.
"...Yeah." Smith looks back at Locke. "I'm willing to file zombies, vampires, and this place all in a nice big bin labeled, 'Weird Stuff We Didn't Have, Once Upon a Time.' Looks like we'll have to find another way out."
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He gives the bear a gentle squeeze, and a primitive songbox pings out a simple tune of just three notes, prompting a more troubled look from its bearer than a toy ought to elicit, particularly when blood-soaked carpets and a missing exit are arguably more worthy of his concern. Sounding distracted, he continues, "So we wonder now which it was: the beginning bringing with it a plague, or a plague bringing about the beginning." He lets the flashlight beam wander around their new surroundings, and chucks out a non-sequitur for good measure. "No air ducts, either."
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