The scraping sound from the stairwell was slow, deliberate, and wet. It was not the frantic scuttling of a Skitterer or the heavy tread of something huge. It was the sound of a thing with no need to hurry.
Time remaining: 36 MINUTES.
Leo didn't have time to wait and see what it was. He spun around, his eyes scanning the map in his memory. There was another stairwell, Stairwell B, further down, past the Pediatric Ward. It was a longer route, but any route was better than a blind confrontation in a narrow concrete chute.
He moved quickly, his flashlight beam cutting a path through the darkened, silent corridors. He soon found the entrance to the Pediatric Ward, marked by a cheerful, cartoon bear decal on the double doors, now peeling and stained with something dark. He pushed through.
The air inside was thick with a sickly-sweet smell, like bubblegum and decay. The walls were painted with bright, cheerful murals of jungle animals and smiling suns, all of them now looking monstrous in the dancing shadows of his flashlight. Small plastic chairs were overturned. A lone teddy bear lay face down in a corner, its button eyes seeming to stare at the floor in shame.
This place was a monument to violated innocence. The wrongness of it settled deep in Leo's bones. He could feel it now, thanks to his new skill. A thread of deep contamination wound through this ward. It wasn't the psychic residue of the Night-Stalker; this was something else. Something… methodical.
He moved deeper into the ward, past rows of empty cribs. A faint, rhythmic squeaking sound reached him. Squeak… squeak… squeak. The sound of rubber wheels on a linoleum floor. It was coming from a playroom at the far end of the hall.
Leo flattened himself against a wall, his heart pounding a slow, heavy rhythm. He doused his light and peered around the doorframe.
The room was lit by the faint, eerie glow of a functioning fish tank. And in that light, a figure was slowly pushing a medical cart back and forth, back and forth. It was dressed in the pale blue scrubs of a hospital orderly. Its back was to him. It seemed to be tidying up, placing fallen toy blocks back onto a shelf with stiff, jerky movements.
For a moment, Leo felt a sliver of hope. A survivor?
Then the figure turned, and the hope died.
Its face was a waxy, doll-like mask of flesh, stretched taut over a frame that was not quite human. Its eyes were perfectly round, black, and glassy. Its mouth was a fixed, pleasant smile. In its hand, it held not a tool or a weapon, but a single, oversized syringe filled with a cloudy, shimmering fluid. It turned to a crib that was not empty. It held a small bundle of blankets, arranged to look like a sleeping infant. With a gentle, practiced motion, the creature plunged the syringe into the bundle.
Leo's System provided the horrifying context.
[Lvl 8 Orderly]
[Traits: Paralytic Toxin, Relentless, Unnatural Strength. Compulsively returns things to a state of 'quiet order'.]
It wasn't just a monster. It was a corrupted ideal, a creature born from the hospital's own desire for quiet and control. It "cared" for the ward by incapacitating anything that moved or made noise. Permanently.
The Orderly finished its "injection" and turned, its head sweeping the room. Its black, glassy eyes passed over the doorway and fixed directly on Leo's position. It couldn't see him in the dark, but it had sensed him. It knew there was something messy, something out of place, in its ward.
Squeak… squeak…
It began to push its cart towards the door, its smile never changing.
Leo ducked back, his mind racing. He couldn't fight it head-on; the unnatural strength and the paralytic toxin were a deadly combination. He needed to use the environment. He looked around. On the wall next to him was a hand-sanitizer dispenser, the kind used in hospitals everywhere.
He had an idea. It was risky, but it was all he had.
He ripped the dispenser off the wall. It was nearly full of high-proof alcohol-based gel. As the Orderly stepped into the hallway, Leo acted. He threw the entire dispenser at the floor twenty feet in front of the creature. It shattered, splashing a large, invisible puddle of slick gel onto the linoleum.
The Orderly didn't react to the sound. It simply continued forward, its rubber-soled shoes hitting the patch of hand sanitizer at full stride.
For one comical second, the creature's feet shot out from under it. It pinwheeled its arms, the cart rolling away as it crashed backward, its head striking the hard floor with a sickening, wet crack. The syringe flew from its hand and shattered against the wall.
But it wasn't dead. It immediately began to push itself up, its movements unaffected by the blow.
Leo was already moving. He didn't charge it. He ran past it, deeper into the playroom. He vaulted over a low table and grabbed the heaviest thing he could see: the large, bubbler-style fish tank. It was full of water and gravel, weighing at least a hundred pounds.
With a desperate roar, fueled by adrenaline and his 8 points of Strength, he heaved it up. The Orderly had just gotten to its knees. Leo swung the fish tank like a wrecking ball, putting all of his momentum into the blow.
Glass, water, and brightly colored plastic fish exploded everywhere as the tank connected with the creature's head. The force of the impact drove it back to the floor. Its head, a grotesque parody of a human face, was utterly caved in. It twitched once, then went still.
[You have killed Lvl 8 Orderly. +650 XP.]
Leo stood panting in the flooded, wrecked playroom, his knuckles bleeding. The clock was ticking. He had no time to rest. He turned to leave, but as his flashlight beam swept the room, it landed on the teddy bear he had seen earlier. There was a fresh, muddy footprint next to it. It wasn't his. It was small, like a child's shoe.
Someone else—a survivor—had come this way. Recently. And they were heading in the same direction he was.
Time remaining: 29 MINUTES.