Nightshift guardduty was always the weirdest at the New Changan Mental Institute. A nuthouse by heart, it had plenty of crazy patients, crazier nurses, and even a ghost story here or there. Everyone always admitted to that same feeling: of being watched by something that does not like you.
The same feeling was at the frontgate, where Bob Gaskins worked. Nothing special about him; just an ex-airman who came up from Tennessee for a new job. He had a wrinkled mustache, acne-scarred skin, and a developing beer belly.
Creepy place, but good pay.
Sure, there were a couple NDAs he had to sign, meaning he couldn’t speak about anything he had seen inside the place, but Bob chalked it up to patient confidentiality. Plus, other than a couple running crazies and some weird cops, he never saw anything worth a real discussion.
There wasn’t a good reason to risk the job by talking about it all, especially when all he did was sit at the computer and watch K-dramas. He never grew up on them, but everyone in New Changan seemed to be watching it. It didn't take long for the addiction from there.
“Eren Park! Wait!”
Bob chewed on pocky and sipped on ramune.
“Jade Kim, we could never work it out.”
“W-why? Is it because you come from a yangban family and I don’t?”
“No. It’s because… I’m a demon.”
The lights suddenly flickered. Wifi shorted out, pausing the show to buffer. Bob sat up with a sigh. “What now…” he grumbled to himself as he took out his flashlight and looked outside.
Nothing.
The scary thing about New Changan was the lack of critters or crickets. Downtown had a handful of rats, but those were just stowaways. The artificial island had little to no native creatures; just silence.
Then he felt a gun press against his neck. “Badge and gun. Hand them over now.”
***
It wasn’t hard for Gwen and Andrew to find a set of scrubs and medical face masks. With their badges, guns, and zip ties, they could do plenty after temporarily killing the power. “If I’m right about this, the camera systems will take about an hour to properly reboot.”
“Meaning?” Gwen asked.
Andrew wrapped the face around his mouth. His only distinguishing feature was now his bloodshot eyes. “It’ll be like nothing happened.”
The hall-lights were almost blinding at night. Unlike the mission with the CDRs, the electricity actually worked well enough to keep the place illuminated. Probably too illuminated, since it was borderline maddening.
“You know this place too well,” Gwen whispered. “Been planning this for a while?”
“Someone was,” Andrew replied. From his dreams, his visions, and his own intuition, he knew that Doctor Myers was probably planning this kind of attack ever since he was first admitted. Even lobotomized, the doc’s mind could still think of something to pass down.
Andrew made a right. “It’s a big facility; we need to check patient records to even see if she was admitted here.”
Gwen dryly chuckled. “I thought you were sure they’d stuff her here.”
“I’m sure that not everything goes to plan.”
The two of them walked into the admin room as if it were an ordinary day. They kept exhausted eyes and exhausted faces—part acting, part reality. “Jesus, that kid just wouldn’t listen to us,” Gwen play-acted. “Think he’ll be better tomorrow?”
“I hope so,” Andrew replied. Thank God he had a mask, because he could hardly hold a straight-face.
The receptionist looked up. She was some older lady with glasses thick enough to cause a reflection. The only thing that looked positive in her life was the picture of her cat painted with the words, ‘Be Happy’. She wasn’t following the assignment.
“Can I help you two?” the lady asked in a creaky voice.
Gwen, being the shorter and less intimidating of the two, spoke up. “Hi, we’re trying to get info on a patient, but they forgot to hand us the packet. Do you think you could help us out?”
The lady raised an eyebrow. “A packet?”
“Yeah,” Gwen lied. “We’re new here, so the doc handed us a packet with the patient’s info. I gave it over to my friend here, who gave it to another doctor who asked for it, but now we’re here with no packet and nothing to do.”
For a moment, the lady paused. Andrew started wondering what he was supposed to do, since holding an old lady at gunpoint would be a strange affair. Could he even pull the trigger on some innocent civilian?
“Fine…” the lady conceded. “It looks like our database is down right now, but I can check the files and send them to the copier. What’s the name of the patient?”
Andrew answered, “Hannah. Hannah, Kroeger.”
The lady nodded. “Okay… just sit in the breakroom for a second…” She got up from the chair and walked her way to the files. It was definitely going to take a while, since there seemed to be countless names in those files. Good thing the breakroom was next door.
Andrew and Gwen sat at their own table, where they sipped on some coffee and listened to some overhead gossip.
“Can you believe we had a demon attack? Thank God nobody was hurt!”
“I thought it was debunked.”
“What do you mean?”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“I think a higher up in the police department said that it was a hoax, or that it was a distraction from something else. Anyway, I find that recent raid to be even crazier. All those CDRs? Dead? I thought they were like special forces.”
“Can’t help it. One of them ended up working for the Pentagramists,” another voice sighed. “Have you been checking those posts? Apparently, there are demons that can disguise themselves as people. Some real skinwalker stuff.”
But by then, Andrew couldn’t keep listening. He just stared into the blackness of his coffee, which stared back at him like the abyss. Fuck, that nightmare of a mission just kept haunting him. Sometimes he forgot he was no longer a CDR, let alone a member of CDR-4.
“Hey.” Gwen placed her hand on his. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. Your team got roped into shit that had nothing to do with them. None of this is your fault.”
He looked into his coffee. “Yeah. I guess not,” he muttered. “Let’s not talk about this right now. We have a lot of other things on our plate. Once we get Hannah, we’ll have some better understanding of what people at the lab were planning. Or, at the very least, we’ll have someone who can help us out.”
“I get that, but why the rush?” Gwen asked. “We came into here with little to no plan, other than something your past life came up with. Not to disrespect him, of course.”
Andrew nodded. To be frank, he was being incredibly hasty in immediately trying to get into the mental institute. If one variable was out of place, then everything would’ve fallen apart like a tower of blocks. But the same thing could’ve been said about their limited time.
“I told you what happened to Doctor Myers. They lobotomized him by pushing a handdrill to his head. I’ll be damned if I get another person killed because of my fuckups.”
“But you’re forgetting something,” Gwen argued, “that’s assuming they actually put Hannah here.”
“She knew too much. I’m sure someone at high command assumed that, meaning someone in the Pentagramists knew that too,” Andrew said. “Now that I remember, Hannah even mentioned that they put a handful of CDR guys in here as psychiatric casualties. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also guys who caught on a little too early.”
To Andrew’s surprise, Gwen responded with quiet laughter. “I was with you, until you started mentioning people catching on. You might be getting a little too paranoid here, Mister Fugitive.”
She found it funny. Andrew didn’t. Sure, he had learned that the world was practically upside down not long ago, but he definitely sounded a tad too crazy. “I’m just saying, I had to think in a worst case scenario that was slightly better than the Pentagramists just shooting her in the head.”
Finally, after about fifteen minutes of waiting, the lady finally entered the breakroom with some documents. “Here’s the packet that the doctors probably mentioned. It took a while, since it had some of the confidentiality locks that those meetings insist on. All annoying things, since everyone here has the clearances.”
She placed the packet down and left. There wasn’t even time to thank her; she had already returned to her desk.
Gwen and Andrew shared a look. Then shared a laugh. “So that’s why we were hammered so hard for workplace spillage. Sounds like anybody could get what they needed, so long as they looked the part.”
Now they knew Hannah was in here for sure. Even though much of the data was still blacked out, it had the zone and room number. WIth half-an-hour until the cameras rebooted, they took the packet and moved.
***
This was going to be the second time Andrew entered Zone 4. Once as a CDR, and now as a fugitive. Using the nightguard’s badge, the two of them entered unassailed. Two more nurses in this place wasn’t unusual in the slightest.
At least so they thought.
Guns immediately trained on them as black-clad guards aimed their weapons. Andrew recognized them as the same uniforms that he saw on his mission. These guys must’ve been an almost private force; probably mercenaries.
“IDs. Now.”
Both Andrew and Gwen raised their hands. “Easy,” Gwen said as she quickly came up with a lie. “The Cap wants us to check the new patient. He wants to know what she knows.”
“Show us some ID.”
“Are you really trying to get in the Cap’s–”
“Either you show us ID, or we blow your heads off.”
Andrew took the quick time to look around. There only seemed to be two guards here; no other witnesses. There were only fifteen more minutes left on the clock. He weighed the options.
Fuck it.
He transformed his arm into the mace and fired his spikes in their general direction. In less than a second, the two guards were covered in shrapnel hitting their eyes, necks, kevlar, and groin. The shallowest was a graze; the deepest was in their organs.
Gwen didn’t even have time to fully upholster her captured pistol. It felt like a toy, compared to the power of demons. “Holy shit, that was close.”
“Yeah. It was.”
The two of them grabbed the bodies and ran into a nearby closet to change into their uniforms. Clearly, ordinary nurses weren’t welcome here. They had passed the invisible line between normalcy and conspiracy. “We better hurry,” Gwen said.
“I know. We only have fifteen minutes.”
“No, I mean with changing.” She zipped the kevlar around herself. “Bodies shit and piss themselves not long after death.”
After a minute or two, they came out the closet with their slightly ruined uniforms. A wipe or two helped with the blood. Funnily enough, the speed reminded Andrew of boot camp—easier days.
“Her room is at the end of the hall,” Gwen said with the packet in one hand and her new rifle in the other.
Walking these halls was as eerie as ever. Like last time, Andrew had the feeling of being watched by something. While he felt that a couple of the rooms were empty, a few of them had the echoes of screams or knocks behind the one-way ballistic glass. It was a real-life haunted house.
Only one of these rooms had someone with the semblance of sanity. He was sitting, almost meditating, in his straitjacket. For some reason, Andrew felt that he recognized this middle-aged man, especially when there was definite muscle underneath.
“Andrew.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
Ten minutes.
They made it to the end of the hall, where Hannah was staying. Sure enough, she was rocking back and forth, looking like an extremely sad puppy. “Let’s get her out,” Gwen sighed. “You got a key?”
“Sure.” Out of intuition, Andrew transformed his arm and fired a projectile right at the lock. With a superhuman wriggle, he pulled the door right open. “These doors are meant to withstand breaches from the inside, not out.”
As the two of them walked inside, Hannah looked as terrified as ever. She scrambled to the other corner of the room. “Get away! I didn’t know anything about him, I swear!”
Andrew looked around. No guards.
He removed his helmet for a second. He saw her face immediately relax as she settled down. “Hannah, we’re gonna get you out of here. First, you gotta hold still as we get this thing off of you.”
Gwen took the straitjacket off of her. Hannah looked like she could finally extend her arms past her chest. “God! I thought they already killed you!” she cried. “They said that you were a Pentagramist a-and I thought th-that you…”
Needless to say, she was lost in her own babble. Andrew had to grab her shoulders to pull her back to the situation. “We have less than ten minutes to get you the hell out of here. You’re gonna change into a nurse uniform, and we’ll pretend to be escorting you out. Understood?”
Hannah nodded.