Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#176Reader Mode

T/N: Thank you K for the coffee! <3

#176

It wasn’t just a sneeze. It was a full-body, wet achoo that exploded out of McCullan, spraying droplets in every direction.

The sound lasted less than a second, but for Seojun, it stretched into a slow-motion nightmare. Long enough for him to mentally compose at least a dozen creative ways to kill the man. He was still weighing the merits of each method when a sharp wave of dread hit him.

The Nurse had heard.

Her head didn’t so much turn as snap sideways, the crack of grinding vertebrae echoing in the silence. Her eyes, stitched shut, seemed to lock onto McCullan all the same. The parts of her face not overtaken by that blue-black rot stretched tight over bone, exposing the grotesque absence of a jaw.

Then her fingers began to uncurl. The sound they made was soft and metallic like blades sliding free of their sheaths.

McCullan’s mouth opened and closed without a sound. His breaths came in short, ragged gasps, and his entire body started to tremble, a strand of spit dangling from his lips.

“S-stay back! You monster!”

He really should’ve kept his mouth shut.

But fear has a way of dragging the dumbest words out of you. The Nurse’s arm whipped through the air with a vicious hiss, trailing the heavy stench of old blood.

McCullan’s survival instincts finally kicked in. He flung himself sideways—not so much a dodge as a full-body flinch—crashing to the floor in a tangled heap. He rolled frantically, arms thrown over his head.

“Ahhh!”

The Nurse’s claws tore through the air, missing him by inches. A supply box just beside them exploded on impact. Splinters flew, metal shrieked, and a spray of debris peppered Seojun’s face like needlepoint. Dust filled the space in a choking cloud. As it swirled around him, Seojun felt the color drain from his face.

And then, somehow, the idiot made it worse.

McCullan, in his blind panic, was crawling straight toward Seojun’s hiding spot. Rage and raw terror collided in Seojun’s chest. He stared in disbelief as the man scrambled closer, wide-eyed and pleading.

Seojun met his gaze with a look that could kill. He drew a slow, deliberate line across his throat with his thumb.

Don’t you dare.

Every part of Seojun’s body screamed at him to run. To leave this liability behind and save himself. But, by some miracle, the Nurse was still stuck. She was half-buried in the wreckage she’d created, her limbs twisted in a mess of broken wood and shrieking metal. For one precious second, she was pinned, thrashing against the debris with a sound that could only be described as… grinding.

A terrible, wet, mechanical grind.

Seojun’s brain kicked into a gear he didn’t even know he had. Instinct gave way to analysis. He started tracking every twitch of her movements—the way her weight leaned too far to one side, the unnatural tilt of her head as she paused to listen. It was a small mercy in this waking nightmare. That hesitation bought them a few seconds. And in those few seconds, Seojun saw it.

A pattern.

She’s slow.

Not slow in a human way. The Nurse’s attacks were blisteringly fast, savage and precise. But the way she moved in between those attacks was all wrong. The surgical blades fused to her feet dragged across the concrete with every step, leaving deep, powdery gouges in their wake. And she moved in bursts. Violence, then stillness. Sudden, explosive flurries of motion followed by eerie, corpse-still silence.

It was in one of those pauses that Seojun spotted them. The wet, gill-like slits where ears should’ve been, fluttering faintly. Tasting the air for the smallest sound.

It should have filled him with hope.

But all he felt was dread.

Any rational person would’ve taken that moment to run. Seojun had used it to think. To study her. And now—

The moment was gone.

He didn’t need anyone to explain. One sound. One breath too loud, and that head would snap toward him, and those glinting scalpels would carve through the air like thrown knives.

Then—creak. The silence cracked.

Seojun’s head whipped toward the adjacent room, just past the morgue. A window was opening. Inch by excruciating inch, the glass slid upward. He hadn’t even realized there was a window there. That’s where Luciel, Brown, and Dennis were hiding.

From the shadows, pale fingers emerged—slender, almost translucent against the window frame. They moved carefully, gliding over the wall as if memorizing every curve and corner. For a moment, the hand just hovered there, ghostlike and disembodied. And suddenly, Seojun remembered a line from The Invisible Man’s Mansion. A journal entry about moonlight catching on a hand as it caressed a girl’s face.

But this hand wasn’t here to comfort anyone. The fingers pried the window open wider, then slipped out of view. A heartbeat later, they returned—now holding something small, flat, and metallic.

A… bathroom scale?

The sheer, baffling normalcy of it almost made Seojun laugh. Then Luciel’s face appeared in the window gap, her expression tight with urgency. She locked eyes with him, pointed sharply at the back of the Nurse’s head, and then held up the scale. One hard shake.

The message was crystal clear. And completely insane.

Distraction.

Luciel wasn’t the type to overthink things. Before Seojun could even mouth no, the muscles in her thin arm tensed, and she hurled the scale with everything she had.

The crash was spectacular.

Metal slammed into stacked supply boxes with a jarring clang, followed by the sharp tinkle of breaking glass. It was the kind of noise that could wake the dead, or in this case, distract one that was already moving.

The Nurse’s head snapped toward the sound. Her stitched eyes bulged grotesquely against their threads, and with a shriek of metal on concrete, she charged, blade-feet gouging deep into the floor.

That was their moment.

As the Nurse tore through boxes like tissue, the sound of splintering wood and screeching steel drowned out everything else—including the frantic, uneven footfalls of Seojun and McCullan as they ran like hell.

The noise behind them was horrifying. The shriek of metal, the crash of ruined boxes, the Nurse working herself into a frenzy. But through the chaos, a single thread of ice-cold relief cut through Seojun’s terror.

At least she wasn’t tearing through his flesh.

They didn’t stop. Didn’t speak. Just ran. Their footsteps slipped and skidded down the blood-slick hallway, lungs burning, hearts hammering against bruised ribs.

Just before they reached the stairwell, Seojun glanced back. The small window was sliding shut, vanishing into the dark. A desperate thought surged through him like a silent prayer:

Stay hidden. Stay quiet. Just hang on long enough for me to get help.

Freedom was so close now, just beyond the front doors. A few more steps and they’d be out.

But as they burst into the main lobby, the breath caught in Seojun’s throat.

Despair was waiting for them like an old friend.

“No. No, this can’t be happening!” McCullan threw his shoulder against the doors. They didn’t move. He pounded on them with both fists, the dull thuds echoing flatly through the cavernous space. “Hey! Is this a joke? Why won’t it open? Why isn’t it opening?!”

His voice broke into a jagged sob. The sleek suit he’d been so smug about that morning was now soaked through with sweat, rumpled and stained beyond recognition. But he didn’t seem to notice. He slumped against the doors and pressed his face to the cold steel, like he could will himself through.

“Why…” he whispered, and the fight bled out of him entirely.

Getting in had been hard enough. Seojun should’ve known getting out wouldn’t be any easier. He could hear the steady rain drumming against the other side of the wall. But it sounded distant. Muffled. Like it belonged to another world entirely. Even without McCullan’s broken sobs echoing in the air, it would’ve been barely more than a whisper.

They were sealed in.

Trapped.

Seojun swiped a damp hand across his face. A big part of him wanted to slide down the wall beside McCullan and just… give up. If crying could open those damn doors, he’d happily sit there and bawl until his last working eye gave out.

A dry, bitter sound scraped up his throat. He swallowed it back down. No point wasting spit on a curse. He was thirsty. At least that meant his brain wasn’t totally fried yet. His patience, on the other hand, was gone. He reached down, grabbed a fistful of McCullan’s sweat-soaked collar, and yanked him upright.

“Gah—stop—can’t breathe—” McCullan wheezed, face flushing from pale to blotchy red as his hands scrabbled helplessly at Seojun’s wrist.

Seojun gave him a sharp shake, hard enough to rattle his teeth.

“Listen to me. Your only job right now is to not have a complete fucking meltdown and get us both killed. Focus. Survive. Got that?”

McCullan nodded frantically, his eyes wide with terrified sincerity.

The moment Seojun let go, he doubled over, gagging and swaying like he might keel over any second. Seojun gave him a generous three seconds to get it together. One. Two. Three. Then he grabbed McCullan by the jaw and forced his head up, locking eyes.

“Talk. What’s the deal with these doors?”

“They’re—they’re locked. We’re trapped in this terrible place.”

Seojun stared at him, deadpan. Even a toddler could’ve figured that much out. His one good eye narrowed to a slit. McCullan must’ve seen the murder simmering in that look, because he flinched and started babbling, his voice defensive and high.

“How the hell am I supposed to know why they’re locked?”

“Tsk.”

Seojun’s wasn’t holding back out of kindness. Beating answers out of someone only worked if they actually had answers. Normally, he’d have written McCullan off as a total loss, but he couldn’t afford that luxury right now. Time for a different approach. Sometimes honey worked better than vinegar. He exhaled slowly, loosening the tension in his shoulders. Let his grip slacken. Even managed to soften his voice.

“You know what they say—when you need something most, that’s when it’s hardest to find. But McCullan, you’re not completely useless, are you?”

Seojun offered the barest ghost of a smile.

“I saw what you pulled at the Happy Pig Factory. That was real skill. Impressive, even.”

Seojun wouldn’t call McCullan a man of exceptional character, not even under torture. But even a weasel has its talents. And McCullan’s talent was locks. He’d cracked the one at the Happy Pig Factory. He’d gotten the morgue open just a few minutes ago, though it already felt like that had happened in another lifetime.

Had all of that really been today?

Seojun rubbed at the goosebumps crawling up his arms and licked his dry lips. When he spoke again, his voice was calm, almost friendly. Like he was asking for a favor, not gambling both their lives.

“Come on, McCullan. You’ve got this. Work your magic. Open the door.”

“I can’t.”

The two words, flat and final, were enough to snap Seojun’s fragile attempt at manipulation. McCullan looked up, pale and drenched in sweat, his face sagging with defeat.

“This isn’t a deadbolt I can pop with a paperclip. It’s magnetic or electronic. You can’t pick it. You’d have to rip it off the hinges. And with what? A truck? A tank? We’re fucked! We’re—we’re gonna die in here—mmph!”

Seojun didn’t think. He just shoved his gloved fist straight into McCullan’s mouth. Teeth scraped against the rubber. Warm spit soaked through instantly. Seojun’s gaze shot toward the dark stairwell. The last thing they needed was for that thing from the basement to hear this idiot screaming and come skittering up to say hello.

McCullan’s eyes, wide with panic, followed Seojun’s gaze. Realization clicked into place, and just like that, he stopped struggling.

This worthless piece of…

Seojun swallowed the curse and yanked his hand away. “Okay. Try Mina’s phone again. That woman downstairs… that wasn’t her, right?”

“No signal,” McCullan rasped, swiping a string of drool from his chin. “And seriously, what part of that thing looked like Mina to you?”

“I’ve never seen her face. How the hell would I know?” Seojun snapped, wiping his now-slick glove on McCullan’s ruined suit. His mind was racing. They needed another way out. Fast. But something tugged at him… a gut-deep itch, like he was missing something important. Something obvious.

And then—

“Don’t move. Hands up. Just like that. Slowly.”

The voice came from right behind him. Calm. Young. Female. Steady in a way that made it more dangerous, not less. At the same time, something cold and solid pressed into the small of his back. A jolt of ice shot through his spine.

There was no mistaking that feeling.

A gun.