In Blackest Night

[Shang Tsung]

With a grunt, Shang side-stepped the nurse and smashed his elbow into the side of her saran-wrapped skull. A gurgling hiss escaped the woman before she was shoved down the flight of stairs by a scowling sorcerer. The man waited only long enough to her the snap of her neck against the platform below before continuing his ascent up the gray and white stairwell. She had been the third such employee of Alchemilla to try and accost him, with the other two now residing in mangled heaps in the guest lobby. Having gone so long without anyone trying to stab him, the sorcerer looked at it as a nice way to keep his heart rate up as he made his way through the building.

Ignoring the second floor, Shang made his way up to the top of the stairwell and exited out onto the third floor. After passing through a set of double doors, he tried to recall the layout of the floor. If his memory hadn’t failed him, the northern part of the corridor contained a series of treatment rooms, and if he went straight to the east, he’d pass the bathrooms, storage rooms, and a few more patient rooms before reaching the elevator. Opting to check out the store rooms first, Shang jogged down the hallway toward the eastern end of the building. He made it most of the way before a nearby door flung open and a woman came screaming out of the darkness at him.

Not seeing the blade in her hand until it jabbed into his side, the sorcerer bit down on his lower lip and threw an elbow at her skull. The blow snapped her neck back, but it was the stiff left hook that threw her against the door frame. Before the woman could right herself for another attack, Shang grasped her head in his hands, yanked her toward him, and then drove the back of her skull against the frame. When she continued to writhe after the first dull thud of bone on metal, he repeated himself, and this time, the dead nurse slid to the floor, leaving behind a smear of blood and brain matter.

For good measure, Shang kicked the nurse in the face before stepping away from the open door. Before he could continue on his path, the other rooms in the hallway slung open, and a pack of nurses spilled out. As they stumbled and shambled their way into the corridor, the overhead lights started to flicker. Holding his palms up, Shang scowled as two burning spheres slowly formed above his weathered palms. With the fluorescent tubes struggling to illuminate the corridor, the fireballs seemed like bright beacons in the on-and-off darkness.

Without letting the mass of workers collapse onto him from both sides, Shang twisted his torso and threw a fireball down both ends of the hall. The spheres both hit targets and erupted, splashing hungry flames against both approaching mobs. Drawing his sword, the sorcerer rushed at the three burning women to his right. They came at him with agonized shrieks and flailing hands, but with a cold and calculated series of stabs and swipes, Shang laid them low. As the jian’s tip sunk through the bosom of the third woman, the sorcerer was already shifting his focus to the four nurses who had nearly twitched and lurched their way over to him.

Tearing the blade free, he spun around and swung it down through the neck and into the ribcage of the nearest nurse. As the woman shrieked and went limp, her three ‘coworkers’ surged forward. Before Shang could free his weapon, the trio of blondes was upon him—their bare hands clawing and ripping at his clothes and the skin they concealed. A few jagged nails tore deep enough in the time it took for Shang to individually hurtle the three women off his body. In the scuffle, he’d lost his weapon, so rather than waste the time to pick it up; he dove at the nearest nurse. The woman, her face mostly concealed beneath blood and plastic wrap, made it to her feet in enough time for Shang to draw his handgun, press it into her skull, and pull the trigger. Brains, blood, and bone pieces erupted out the back of the nurse’s head as she sagged into a pile against the wall. Without skipping a beat, the man twisted around and fired three more shots that resulted in two fresh corpses on the ground.

Something about the garish display of gore and corpses should have perturbed him. Maybe it would have… back when he was still a man, but even now, the former Grand Master of the Mortal Kombat tournament felt nothing but disgust because he’d have to navigate around the pools of blood and viscera. After slipping the gun back into the makeshift holster, Shang trudged through the thin film of gore that covered the linoleum floor.

The sorcerer found the door marked storage and slipped inside. As the door clicked behind him, he flipped the lights on and started toward the opposite wall.

“You like storage rooms, don’t you?” A voice replied from behind him, causing Shang to pivot to face the figure standing in the corner next to the door. The young man in the hoodie stepped away from the corner and flashed a gentle smile as he scanned the room. “Why are we here again?”

“You sent me up here… said I needed to come up here first before making it to the basement.”

“I did?” The Youth muttered. His features twisted up as he tried to remember where he’d been just a few minutes earlier. “I mean, it’s possible that’s what happened. Afraid I don’t really remember, man.”

“How can you not remember?” Shang demanded as it became harder for him to suppress his frustration with the young man. “How come the only people in this place that can communicate in this place are all insane?”

“Insane?” The youth asked, furrowing his brow. “The nursing staff isn’t insane.”

“You mean the monsters in the hallway that tried to jump me?” Shang scoffed.

“Oh…” the young man muttered as a frown spread across his pallid face. “So they look like monsters to you?”

That remark caused the rest of the sorcerer’s thoughts to grind to a halt. “They are monsters. They’re all bloody and look like someone went a little homicidal with the shrink wrap!”

“You sure about that?” Shang’s acquaintance asked as he opened the door and peeked out. Almost immediately, his face twisted in disgust, prompting the sorcerer to shove passed him and back out into the now wholly illuminated hall. Instead of the twisted, bruised, and partially disfigured corpses of the wheezing nurses who had tried to kill him, Shang found himself staring at seven completely normal-looking corpses. They were all dressed in thoroughly bloodstained nurse’s scrubs, but now they had faces and features. “Is this supposed to shake my resolve?” Shang asked as he glanced over his shoulder, but when he looked back into the store room, it was empty once more. As quickly as he had popped up, the unkempt young adult in the dirt- and sweat-stained hoodie was gone.

Shang scowled as his eyes fell to something glittering on the floor where the Youth had once stood. Stooping down, the sorcerer picked the object up off the ground, and despite what he should have felt, he had only gradually mounting frustration. The discarded item that had reflected non-existent light on the very spot where someone had just been standing was a fireman’s key for the building’s elevator.

***

The streets were deserted.

Where had the strange, hellish creatures gone?

With his hammer still at the ready, the paladin jogged down the middle of the street. From what he could tell, he had returned to the district that housed the motel and the hospitals, but he hadn’t bothered to memorize the names of the crisscrossing streets. Someone probably thought it would be a smart idea to use some sort of grid for streets, but Argento’s brain was already well-adapted to the winding, intermittent paths and half-streets that made up both Darkshire and his native community. The nature of the streets and the dull, repetitive style of the buildings made it increasingly hard for the man to know whether or not he was heading in the right direction.

As the paladin came to an abrupt stop, he glanced to his right and wondered if he was staring at the same ‘Post Office’ he had passed ten minutes ago. Before he could solve that quandary himself, a female voice asked the very question hanging over his mind. “Are you lost?”

Turning around, Argento found himself staring at a red-haired woman in the sort of camouflage worn by ‘modern’ soldiers. Since the fatigues weren’t evidence enough, the woman also had a sniper rifle slung over her shoulder and a belt adorned with a handful of munitions and portable equipment pieces.

“Hello, Milady, I am Sir Argento Camarinos,” the paladin took a step forward and offered a gauntleted hand to the woman, who had the appearance of someone in her early thirties. Despite his friendly smile and tone, the Soldier held up her own gloved hand and shook her head.

“I don’t do physical contact,” she replied, her voice made it seem as if she hadn’t slept very much over the last few days, but she lacked the bags under her eyes that normally went along with sleepless nights. “…It’s a long story.”

“That is strange yet ultimately understandable,” Argento responded as he tried to soften his normally boisterous voice. “Are you likewise trapped in this hellish hamlet?” He inquired as he gestured with his hammer to the dismal, dirty street around them.

“Yea… something like that,” the redheaded soldier answered halfheartedly. “You off to the hospital as well?”

A wide grin spread its way across Argento’s rugged features as he nodded his head. “You are correct! I was heading to Alchemilla Hospital, but I am unfit to navigate this maze you call a street system.”

“Maze is a fitting word,” the Soldier replied as she pointed to a nearby lamppost. “When you’ve been here long enough, you’ll notice how things like that will shift around if you don’t keep an eye on them.”

“This truly is a place scorned by the light of the Sun,” Argento muttered as he glared angrily at the suspect lamppost. What other evil magic corrupted this place of monsters, mist, and mazes? Did the sorcerer still survive? “Can you help me to the hospital, Camouflaged Maiden? I need to rendezvous with my friend, for I fear that he cannot fend for himself.”

“Of course, you just need to head due north,” she remarked before pointing in the direction the paladin would need to travel. “Once you reach the house with the yellow trim, you need to go left, and the hospital will be right there. You can’t miss it… it’s the tallest building on its block.”

“Excellent!” Argento declared as he reached out and clapped her outstretched hand between both of his, already forgetting her earlier remark.

There was one brief moment where everything seemed normal, and then the woman yelped and started to shudder. It wasn’t until she wrenched her hand away that she was able to start breathing normally. When she looked back at him, there were tears in the corners of her eyes. “Damn it all, why the hell did you have to go and do that?” She screamed, although her tone held more grief than anger or frustration. She even went so far as to shove him. “I don’t want to know that kind of shit about strangers! I don’t!”

“I apologize,” the paladin muttered. “Can I go find some water for you, you seem a bit faint.”

“Just go!” The Soldier screamed as she clutched a hand to her head, turned around, and made for the nearby side-street.

With a frown, Argento turned and headed toward the hospital, unsure of what the woman’s strange behavior meant.