“I don’t know what happened. There was a man throwing up blood outside of the center. Joseph and I went to go help. We brought him in but he wasn’t getting any better. There was so much blood. He was convulsing and foaming at the mouth. His eyes were red. Blood red. We didn’t want to move him anymore so I went looking for the doctors. When we got back the man was gone. So was Joseph. We saw them on the cameras. They were on level three. The doctors headed up there to help them. I don’t know why Joseph took him up there but someone had to stay down here to keep an eye on things. Another camera showed Melissa sneaking around on the fourth floor. She wasn’t supposed to be here this late. I was going to go check on her to see what was going on but I lost the feed from the cameras on level three. The screen was all red now. What the hell was going on? This needed to be reported. I needed to call the police. We needed an ambulance. The phones weren’t working anymore. Not even my cell phone. I tried to go outside to get a signal. The doors wouldn’t open. Nothing I did would open them. The entire security system was on the fritz. I was trapped. This had to be a dream. None of this could be real. Then the screaming started. All the patients were screaming. The locking system began to malfunction. Some locks were still working. The most important ones weren’t. The psych ward locks were off. The dangerous ones were free to run wild. All it would take would be for one of them to try and open their door and all hell would break lose.”

The most unstable of all the patients were out. This recording was from a time before my father had fallen into the madness that enveloped this place now.

“Have you seen any of them?” I asked.

Melissa stared back at me. She was obviously in some form of shock. Who knew what she had been through up here.

“They are on the other side of those doors. The only other way out of this floor is through there. We can’t go in there. They will do worse than kill us.”

“I have a feeling if we stay something worse than any of them will come for us. I think we can both agree on that. What I left behind the door I came in through isn’t great either. This place has left sanity behind. Doesn’t matter which floor we go to.”

Melissa nodded at me. She knew that the human threats we would face deeper in the psych ward were nothing compared to the evil that wandered the rest the building. I had lost my flashlight while carrying Joseph’s body from level three. I was unarmed and had only the flickering lights of the ward to guide us.

“We have to go through those doors. The emergency stairs are on the other side. That’s our way out of this place.”

I moved towards the door and motioned for her to stay behind me. I walked up and opened the door. The other side had the same flickering lights. The long hall had less doors than the downstairs. Only the most unstable of patients were kept in here. Of course, as luck would have it on this terrible day, every door was open. They were all out.

I grabbed her hand and lead her down the hall. We avoided the debris on the floor. Any noise could attract our unwelcome residents. As we passed each room I took a quick look to make sure there was no one waiting to jump us. Each room was clear as we passed the halfway point of the hall. The emergency stairs were close. Then I saw them. All of them. They were all in one room. A mutilated body was on the floor under them. Melissa whimpered. The noise turned them to us.

“RUN!”

I pulled her with me. Nearly taking her arm out of its socket as we rushed to the emergency door. The patients came barreling out of the room and down the hall towards us. I reached to the door and started to open it. I caught myself just in time. Earlier I may have just kept going. Early it would have meant nothing to me. But I had been in this hell long enough to know what was coming. I knew what came with the smell of rot that spilled out of crack in the door I had just opened.

“What are you doing!?” she asked.

“Get in that room! Now!”

I pointed at a room and threw her towards it. I pushed the stairwell door all the way open before following her. The rotten ones were there. They came out of the stairs and met the raging patients. They spat black sludge onto the patients. It burned through some of their faces. I made it into the room with her and closed the door. It was a storage closet. I could smell the rot. I could hear the screams. I could also hear the sizzling sound of the patient’s skin. It was awful. Some of the patients screamed obscenities. Some of them slammed on the closet door. I couldn’t help them. I pressed my weight against the door until things went silent. We both sat there in the dark of the storage closet hoping that the rotten ones had moved on. Their smell passed eventually. The smell of the patient’s skin didn’t.

“What are we going to do now? Where else is there to go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I just wanted to find my father.”

The intercom system screeched. I heard the familiar clicking sound of the play button from the recorders emit out of the intercom speakers. Then another message started.