As far as Smith's concerned, the hows and whys of Locke's problem can wait until they're in slightly less immediate-seeming danger. Locke gets settled into the chair, buckling any and all seat belts or other mechanisms to make sure the chair's passenger isn't accidentally dumped out, because as soon as everything's as set as can be, he grabs hold of the back of the chair (or any handles there that might be available), and does, in fact, push-and-run.
The other chairs are, of course, not getting out of their way. Smith tries to dodge as best he can, but sometimes, you just gotta plow through and trust to your wheelchair's support structures to protect your passenger.
They get about halfway to the door when the fan finally lets go and starts falling. Smith sees it, and pours on the speed, shouting out a howl of fear and anger as he takes a direct ramming-speed path for the door. It's possible that the door won't just swing open when pushed on, like it looks like it should, but if that's the case, they're fucked anyway, so he goes for it, tumbling them both through just before the fan reaches their head level. It crashes into a bunch of wheelchairs while the Johns end up... somewhere else.
The chapel, unlike the nondenominational faith spaces that hospitals these days tend towards, looks like something straight out of an abandoned cathedral. It's adorned with Christian icons and idols. Stained glass windows, the statues of Jesus and his saintly pals, an elaborate wooden crucifix on the wall. A metal box where you put your prayers for loved ones. The locks on it look vaguely rusted and bloody and the box is trembling as if there were something on the inside trying to get out, but after a moment, that slows to a halt.
Locke almost goes sliding out of his chair, but quickly gets the armrests in a death-grip. It goes sliding sideways across the floor with the force of that final dash, tipping perilously for a moment, but righting itself before it can spill its living passenger out onto the floor. It's quiet, bizarrely so compared to their recent experiences, and eerily still in here. Heart thundering and panting in the panic that's still thrumming in his bones, Locke turns a questioning eye on Smith but can't summon a voice this time to ask if the other man came through all right. He sizes him up, and seeing no missing limbs or rapidly-spreading pool of blood, gives him a wordless look of thanks, tinged by lingering terror.
Then, head bowed before the stained glass tableau, Locke decides it's time to get to work. If he accepts that the chair is his fate, then surely it will be. It can't be. He thought he did everything he was supposed to do, but, clearly not. There must be something else he's supposed to see. He pulls out Keyes' diary in shaking hands, and starts flipping through again, beginning where he left off, his mouth soundlessly forming the shapes of the words as he reads.
Smith's looking pretty freaked out, too, but yeah, no more injured than he already is. "Sorry. Sorry. Thought I'd had a better hand on it. Sorry."
Aw, he's even scared of Locke, a little. Isn't that... okay, it's not so good.
Anyway, the sounds of screams and such is really fucking disturbing, and even more so as Smith looks around and sees where they're all coming from. He is not going to get close to the screaming statues and their reaching out, no, thank you very much.
"You think now we're out of there, you can-- Oh. You're reading. Sorry. I'll just... keep an eye out."
By which, he means that he'll take a seat in a nearby pew and look around, still wide-eyed with continued fear, holding up the bone saw as though ready to lash out with it at anyone who tries to get too close.
It... actually doesn't even begin to occur to him to perform any obeisances to the obvious Christianity in the Chapel; though raised Catholic by his mother, he was never exactly what anyone would call devout, and he pretty readily dropped whatever lip service he may have ever given it in his adult life as soon as he returned from war to find both his parents had died. He doesn't have a problem with religion, per se; he just has no use for it, himself.
The text begins taking a turn for the worse before too long. Sweat beads on Locke's forehead as the screams from the glass swell around him like rivers. His finger quakes as he draws it along the page, and blood begins to seep through the tops of his boots. In his present condition, though, he doesn't feel any pain. And being so intently focused on his task, nor does he notice that he ought to. Above the mournful wail of Mary at Golgotha, he shouts out, "Doubt... he's talking about doubt! He's drinking... every day after work. His words on the page are shaking with his hands!"
The page rattles and nearly tears as he turns it. "He's sick. He feels sick he comes to work, three.... four.... five.... eight entries in a row..." Job screams but does not move from his place as the devil lashes out at the flesh of his beating heart.
"He feels sick at home! Nowhere is safe! His life... is not in parts, it's a whole, a terrible whole!" Angels sing, shatteringly discordant, as they plummet from the clouds. Locke's face is the picture of awe, a though witnessing a death, or witnessing a birth.
"He says... he says there are words... like sickness in his mind. Drepe bilde... and uccidete la... uccidete la immagine..." The Christ writhes on the cross, red light spilling through the room and blood spilling from Locke's palms, splattering on the floor as he points at the window bearing the dying Lamb. "Smith! Break the glass! We go through there!"
Smith flinches, when Locke calls his name, but then hops to. He'd been watching the blood accumulate as the wounds opened on Locke's body with wide-eyed terror, but now this gave him a chance to look at something else, and he took it.
"A-all right. You... you bandage up those hands, okay?"
The never-ending fear is getting rather disturbing, in and of itself. Hooking the bone saw on the webbing of his holsters, he blows out one of the candles, knocks it off of its holder, and picks the holder up. It's got a good, reassuring weight to it, the cool smoothness of polished metal. Actually, it's kind of cold. No, really cold, like ice.
"AAAAA!"
He drops the stick, then looks exceedingly confused as the metal doesn't look as frigid as feel indicated it should be, nor do his hands look like they'd been touching anything frozen. However, being a clever monkey even while frightened, he takes off his suit coat and uses it as insulation to grab the stick, which he then throws through the window Locke had pointed to, shattering it.
"Ha! It worked. Oh, but I broke a window in a church. That's probably bad. We should get out of here." He looks to Locke, his eyes still scared, but leaving the question of whether or not Locke would be able to manage it under his own power.
Physically, Locke seems much calmer than he did back in the wheelchair room. His face isn't twisted in terror anymore. But his eyes are frenzied and his voice is hard. The priest watching in stillness as his church burns and his orphans dissolve into ash, beginning to see in his mind's eye where the foundation of stone will be relaid, and scanning the onlookers for children too loosely clutched in parents' arms.
He winces in pain as the open wounds of unknown origin in his hands press slippery on the wheels of his chair, but he rolls himself painstakingly out of the noise and into the light, breathing too quietly for his companion to hear, "We are getting out. We are getting out."
Beyond the Chapel, the nursery is decorated all in very pale yellow, with pink kittens and blue puppies. There are mobiles hanging from the ceiling, drifting slowly and peacefully. The room is curiously pristine; there is no blood visible from the viewing window, but there are, shockingly, infants in the back row of cots--their crying is extremely loud and piercing, almost more like an animal's wounded keening than a real child.
Naturally, when they pass through to the other side, the candlestick is gone, and there's no sign of the broken window behind them.
"What the hell is that noise?!"
Smith goes over to the back row, where the cries are coming from. A closer examination reveals a series of grotesquely deformed children -- a little boy with cataracts over his eyes and whose left hand is more like a heavy thumbless claw; a girl whose head has a distended second child with only smooth dips in skin where her eyes should be and a row of sharp, overlapping teeth.
The wailing increases as he approaches, blood dripping from their ears and noses. The sight of them -- deformities that so closely remind him of what he'd seen in Varvarin -- causes his stomach to heave, and he bends over one of the empty cribs in the next row over, trying to throw up but not really able to, since he'd already emptied his stomach back in the Security Room.
Underneath the cots, there is the sound of skittering. The Siamese twin attached to the girl has disappeared, leaving the baby's brain exposed. She doesn't appear to notice, and, for that matter, neither does Smith. However, the bright lighting is beginning to get a little oppressive -- like standing in the hot sun in July.
Some part of Smith still remembers what it was like to live in the desert, and doesn't much catch on about the increase in temperature, aside from a line of sweat on his brow that he mistakes for the strain of his nausea. The babies in the back row, meanwhile, are turning pinker still... The reason they're crying so hard? They're being roasted.
John's no doctor, there's nothing he can do for clawed hands or milky blue eyes. He's rolling past them with looks of pity, heading straight for the door on the other side of the room, when he catches the smell of burning flesh. He looks up, but sees more than just Smith. Standing there as well is an older woman in a thick and raggedy fur coat.
Red hair down to her shoulders, a wide-set mouth and sickly-thin throat, looking foggily disconnected from her surroundings. She stares through the burning babies, saying nothing.
Mom?
He points an accusatory finger at her and growls, "You are not here." She turns to face him. "You are not here."
She starts speaking, but without sound, the movement of her mouth jerky, as though Locke's looking at a flip-book of photographs. He scowls and continues forward, wheeling his chair past her, though not confident enough to banish the hallucination by taking the path straight through it.
Smith finally gets himself together, in time to smell the burning children. He looks over... and immediately regrets it, as it does nothing to make his comparisons to Varvarin any better. He keeps from trying to heave again, though, not least of which because his attention is then caught by Locke's accusation. Smith follows the line of Locke's finger to where it meets the door, and sees... nothing there.
"You're right. Whatever you're seeing, it's not really there. Let's just... let's just get going, before this gets worse."
Smith would really like to help Locke out by doing the walking-through-the-hallucination for him, but, uh, no, he's just going to cower behind the wheelchair, a bit.
As they approach the morgue, they're greeted with an unusual situation - the door is locked. Antinora has generally liked to keep them from leaving places once they've entered, but a locked door to get inside is a first. As they stop, Locke in his chair and Smith on foot, the rows of babies behind them are all suddenly and instantly silent. Looking back, Locke no longer sees living children - or at least the images of living children - but in their places in the incubators are wooden dolls.
Next to the locked door is a 10-point keypad, 0-9. Taped above the keypad is a note, which Locke elects to read aloud. "A Doctor's Oath." This should prompt extreme skepticism, in light of their past few hours, but Locke sounds kind of hopeful. "'Bring me your broken and hurt, allow me to heal their cares. Offer me trust and In return, Let me provide hope.' Combination, combination..." He reaches for Keyes' journal again, but then stops. "No, it... won't be in there, will it..." Cue squinting at the little note. This isn't Locke's preferred kind of game, he'll take strategy any day, but Antinora wouldn't have put it here if they couldn't do it... "You much of a man for puzzles, Mr. Smith?"
"We can't get through. We can't... we're trapped here." He stops himself, pulling in and focusing again on the center. His breathing is still a bit fast, as is his heartbeat, but it's a little bit slower than it was a moment ago. Smith opens his eyes, trying to keep a tight rein on a fear that feels like it's been there so long that he's starting to fear, in turn, that it might never leave. He looks the paper over, his observational instincts, for the moment, awake.
"The capital letters don't match the sentence structure. Either e.e. cummings was on the hospital staff, or that means something."
"So they don't," he agrees. "So, I L, or L I. Or if we're pulling all of them, B O I... Boil? Maybe it's like a phone... Let's see, a b c, d e f..." Counting off letters under his breath to make sure he's got it right, Locke tries 4-5, 5-4, and 2-6-4-5.
The number pad emits a high-pitched tinny squeak of a tone each time a key is depressed, but nothing unlocks in response to his efforts. "Maybe in a different order... No other way of arranging the letters so they make sense, though..."
"Maybe it's just the letters that matter, in whatever order. Or... maybe something else about boiling? The boiling point for water? Maybe not the capital letters, and it wants the words the oath asks for?"
He's pretty much tossing out ideas, because it gives him something to focus on other than his fear. He's trying to give them slowly enough for Locke to try first, though.
He tries 1-0-0, again with no results, before leaning back and rubbing a hand over his face. "No, you were right. Capital letters must be it, hospital's got it all laid out for us, we just need to..."
A moment more spent looking at the note, and some of the anger seeps out of his expression. With a glint in his eye and the tiniest smug smile, he picks up the trail. "No, no these are them. B, 8." Beep. "O, 0." Beep. "I, 1." Beep. "L..."
The smile widens. "'Bring me your broken.'" That means 'I agree.' Beep.
With 8017 input, there's a click as the lock on the door disengages. Were Locke out in the woods, or in a dusty street in town, or anywhere really that's not in the damn chair, he'd offer a congratulatory 'Well done.' As is, even though they seem to be on the right path, he's not chipper enough. He's ready to get out of here and hopefully... no, he will reverse this.
He pulls open the door with a bit of maneuvering, and pushes himself into the morgue.
The other chairs are, of course, not getting out of their way. Smith tries to dodge as best he can, but sometimes, you just gotta plow through and trust to your wheelchair's support structures to protect your passenger.
They get about halfway to the door when the fan finally lets go and starts falling. Smith sees it, and pours on the speed, shouting out a howl of fear and anger as he takes a direct ramming-speed path for the door. It's possible that the door won't just swing open when pushed on, like it looks like it should, but if that's the case, they're fucked anyway, so he goes for it, tumbling them both through just before the fan reaches their head level. It crashes into a bunch of wheelchairs while the Johns end up... somewhere else.
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Locke almost goes sliding out of his chair, but quickly gets the armrests in a death-grip. It goes sliding sideways across the floor with the force of that final dash, tipping perilously for a moment, but righting itself before it can spill its living passenger out onto the floor. It's quiet, bizarrely so compared to their recent experiences, and eerily still in here. Heart thundering and panting in the panic that's still thrumming in his bones, Locke turns a questioning eye on Smith but can't summon a voice this time to ask if the other man came through all right. He sizes him up, and seeing no missing limbs or rapidly-spreading pool of blood, gives him a wordless look of thanks, tinged by lingering terror.
Then, head bowed before the stained glass tableau, Locke decides it's time to get to work. If he accepts that the chair is his fate, then surely it will be. It can't be. He thought he did everything he was supposed to do, but, clearly not. There must be something else he's supposed to see. He pulls out Keyes' diary in shaking hands, and starts flipping through again, beginning where he left off, his mouth soundlessly forming the shapes of the words as he reads.
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Aw, he's even scared of Locke, a little. Isn't that... okay, it's not so good.
Anyway, the sounds of screams and such is really fucking disturbing, and even more so as Smith looks around and sees where they're all coming from. He is not going to get close to the screaming statues and their reaching out, no, thank you very much.
"You think now we're out of there, you can-- Oh. You're reading. Sorry. I'll just... keep an eye out."
By which, he means that he'll take a seat in a nearby pew and look around, still wide-eyed with continued fear, holding up the bone saw as though ready to lash out with it at anyone who tries to get too close.
It... actually doesn't even begin to occur to him to perform any obeisances to the obvious Christianity in the Chapel; though raised Catholic by his mother, he was never exactly what anyone would call devout, and he pretty readily dropped whatever lip service he may have ever given it in his adult life as soon as he returned from war to find both his parents had died. He doesn't have a problem with religion, per se; he just has no use for it, himself.
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The page rattles and nearly tears as he turns it. "He's sick. He feels sick he comes to work, three.... four.... five.... eight entries in a row..." Job screams but does not move from his place as the devil lashes out at the flesh of his beating heart.
"He feels sick at home! Nowhere is safe! His life... is not in parts, it's a whole, a terrible whole!" Angels sing, shatteringly discordant, as they plummet from the clouds. Locke's face is the picture of awe, a though witnessing a death, or witnessing a birth.
"He says... he says there are words... like sickness in his mind. Drepe bilde... and uccidete la... uccidete la immagine..." The Christ writhes on the cross, red light spilling through the room and blood spilling from Locke's palms, splattering on the floor as he points at the window bearing the dying Lamb. "Smith! Break the glass! We go through there!"
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"A-all right. You... you bandage up those hands, okay?"
The never-ending fear is getting rather disturbing, in and of itself. Hooking the bone saw on the webbing of his holsters, he blows out one of the candles, knocks it off of its holder, and picks the holder up. It's got a good, reassuring weight to it, the cool smoothness of polished metal. Actually, it's kind of cold. No, really cold, like ice.
"AAAAA!"
He drops the stick, then looks exceedingly confused as the metal doesn't look as frigid as feel indicated it should be, nor do his hands look like they'd been touching anything frozen. However, being a clever monkey even while frightened, he takes off his suit coat and uses it as insulation to grab the stick, which he then throws through the window Locke had pointed to, shattering it.
"Ha! It worked. Oh, but I broke a window in a church. That's probably bad. We should get out of here." He looks to Locke, his eyes still scared, but leaving the question of whether or not Locke would be able to manage it under his own power.
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He winces in pain as the open wounds of unknown origin in his hands press slippery on the wheels of his chair, but he rolls himself painstakingly out of the noise and into the light, breathing too quietly for his companion to hear, "We are getting out. We are getting out."
Beyond the Chapel, the nursery is decorated all in very pale yellow, with pink kittens and blue puppies. There are mobiles hanging from the ceiling, drifting slowly and peacefully. The room is curiously pristine; there is no blood visible from the viewing window, but there are, shockingly, infants in the back row of cots--their crying is extremely loud and piercing, almost more like an animal's wounded keening than a real child.
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"What the hell is that noise?!"
Smith goes over to the back row, where the cries are coming from. A closer examination reveals a series of grotesquely deformed children -- a little boy with cataracts over his eyes and whose left hand is more like a heavy thumbless claw; a girl whose head has a distended second child with only smooth dips in skin where her eyes should be and a row of sharp, overlapping teeth.
The wailing increases as he approaches, blood dripping from their ears and noses. The sight of them -- deformities that so closely remind him of what he'd seen in Varvarin -- causes his stomach to heave, and he bends over one of the empty cribs in the next row over, trying to throw up but not really able to, since he'd already emptied his stomach back in the Security Room.
Underneath the cots, there is the sound of skittering. The Siamese twin attached to the girl has disappeared, leaving the baby's brain exposed. She doesn't appear to notice, and, for that matter, neither does Smith. However, the bright lighting is beginning to get a little oppressive -- like standing in the hot sun in July.
Some part of Smith still remembers what it was like to live in the desert, and doesn't much catch on about the increase in temperature, aside from a line of sweat on his brow that he mistakes for the strain of his nausea. The babies in the back row, meanwhile, are turning pinker still... The reason they're crying so hard? They're being roasted.
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Red hair down to her shoulders, a wide-set mouth and sickly-thin throat, looking foggily disconnected from her surroundings. She stares through the burning babies, saying nothing.
Mom?
He points an accusatory finger at her and growls, "You are not here." She turns to face him. "You are not here."
She starts speaking, but without sound, the movement of her mouth jerky, as though Locke's looking at a flip-book of photographs. He scowls and continues forward, wheeling his chair past her, though not confident enough to banish the hallucination by taking the path straight through it.
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"You're right. Whatever you're seeing, it's not really there. Let's just... let's just get going, before this gets worse."
Smith would really like to help Locke out by doing the walking-through-the-hallucination for him, but, uh, no, he's just going to cower behind the wheelchair, a bit.
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Next to the locked door is a 10-point keypad, 0-9. Taped above the keypad is a note, which Locke elects to read aloud. "A Doctor's Oath." This should prompt extreme skepticism, in light of their past few hours, but Locke sounds kind of hopeful. "'Bring me your broken and hurt, allow me to heal their cares. Offer me trust and In return, Let me provide hope.' Combination, combination..." He reaches for Keyes' journal again, but then stops. "No, it... won't be in there, will it..." Cue squinting at the little note. This isn't Locke's preferred kind of game, he'll take strategy any day, but Antinora wouldn't have put it here if they couldn't do it... "You much of a man for puzzles, Mr. Smith?"
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"The capital letters don't match the sentence structure. Either e.e. cummings was on the hospital staff, or that means something."
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The number pad emits a high-pitched tinny squeak of a tone each time a key is depressed, but nothing unlocks in response to his efforts. "Maybe in a different order... No other way of arranging the letters so they make sense, though..."
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He's pretty much tossing out ideas, because it gives him something to focus on other than his fear. He's trying to give them slowly enough for Locke to try first, though.
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A moment more spent looking at the note, and some of the anger seeps out of his expression. With a glint in his eye and the tiniest smug smile, he picks up the trail. "No, no these are them. B, 8." Beep. "O, 0." Beep. "I, 1." Beep. "L..."
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"L? What do we use for L?! None of the numbers looks like an L!"
Okay. Calm. Well, calmer. Smith turns his head, looking at the keypad.
"7? You know, if you put it upside down?"
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With 8017 input, there's a click as the lock on the door disengages. Were Locke out in the woods, or in a dusty street in town, or anywhere really that's not in the damn chair, he'd offer a congratulatory 'Well done.' As is, even though they seem to be on the right path, he's not chipper enough. He's ready to get out of here and hopefully... no, he will reverse this.
He pulls open the door with a bit of maneuvering, and pushes himself into the morgue.
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