Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie
#195
#195
“Gyaah!”
Whatever came out of him was nothing like the noises heroes make. Just a strangled, shrill yelp that scraped up the back of his throat. Seojun threw his weight onto his left heel and twisted hard at the waist, spinning away. The blades swept past his collar close enough to stir the fabric.
His body understood it had narrowly dodged death a beat before his brain did. The realization crashed down on him at once, and his heart— still with a reason to keep beating, unlike the nurse’s front of him— took off pounding hard enough to hurt. Somewhere in that dizzying rush of fear, a little flicker of regret bobbed to the surface. Too late to matter, of course. Never stopped him wondering, though—
“Seojun!”
The whisper was cranked down to almost nothing. He turned just in time to see something sail toward his face. His hand shot up on instinct, snatching it out of the air. His fingers closed around something soft. A rolled-up bedsheet. Brown was leaning out of the open window, pumping his fists as if cheering him on.
Seojun didn’t waste time thanking Brown for his well-timed assist. Even the half-second it’d take to tuck the card into his fanny pack felt like pushing his luck, so he clamped it between his teeth instead, freeing up both hands to snap the sheet open. It billowed outward, heavy and navy blue, exhaling a stale, moldy funk as it spread into a broad sail. Dust coughed up from folds that had probably gathered there longer than he wanted to think about. Anywhere else, he would’ve flinched back, holding it out at arm’s length with his face turned away.
But this wasn’t anywhere else. He was in the basement of an abandoned hospital where the dead got up and walked, and right now his survival hinged on a musty, ratty bedsheet. Live long enough and you’ll watch everything take its turn at saving your life. Even the bedding. You really never do know what’s waiting for you until you live it.
The sheet came down a little late, but it came down just right, falling wide enough to completely envelop Samantha. For a moment there was only silence. Then her arms jerked up and lashed out in instinctive frenzy, but that thrashing was exactly what trapped her. Every swing of her arms only pulled the fabric tighter around her. Her fingers tore into the sheet, ripping holes into the cloth, but the same hooked fingers just wrenched it down further. They caught on the rips, yanking and knotting it around her movements.
Fight. Wrap. The struggle only tightened the trap.
She never paused long enough to realize it was one. There was nothing driving her movements except blind reflexive rage of a body trying to rid itself of something it didn’t understand.
Heat shot up the back of Seojun’s head, quick and electric. His plan was working. The corners of his mouth twitched upward and he bit down on his lip to stop them, because the thing about a plan going right was that it wasn’t done going right yet. He stuffed the ID card into his pocket and swung the monkey wrench hard against the wall.
The clang cut through the frenzied thrashing of fabric. Samantha raised her head slowly… except her head was still on backwards, so it tilted up in a direction that made no sense. What was left of the bedsheet hung off her shoulders in long, shredded strips. One layer still clung to her skull, stretched tight across her face. For one horrible, surreal second, she looked exactly like a crinkled bedsheet ghost from some old story told to scare kids at bedtime.
Only this ghost was real. And it was standing a few feet away.
The bedsheet hid her defiled body, thankfully covering the horrors beneath. But even now, even like this, she was still Samantha. That thought could not be forgotten or ignored. Seojun reminded himself of it again and again: no matter what happened, under any circumstances, should he ever touch her.
This isn’t Pete.
The nurse Seojun had run into on the second floor had the unmistakable signs of the doctor’s handiwork. The poor man’s jaw had been unhinged, his teeth reshaped into sharp points that looked more like a shark’s grin than anything human. But at least his hands and feet had stayed hands and feet. Someone had simply swapped their positions. Strip away the teeth, and Pete couldn’t seriously threaten anyone because he couldn’t even move properly. Reflecting on it now, a body put together that badly had mostly just put him at a disadvantage. Pete had gotten in his own way more than anything else.
The clang of metal on stone brought the thoughts to an abrupt halt. Seojun swung again, but halfway through, his shoulders stiffened. A new uninvited thought crept in.
Pete wasn’t the only one put together badly.
Look at her.
Samantha’s body told a story just as broken. Hands and feet turned into something incapable of grabbing or holding. Her stitched-shut eyes robbed her of sight, and the four ears tacked onto her head? None of it was enough to win a fight even against a bedsheet.
That’s… strange.
Seojun hadn’t questioned it before. He hadn’t had the room to think when every second of looking at her filled his mind with nothing but the overwhelming certainty that she could close the distance in an instant, and that it would only take one swipe to spill him open. There hadn’t been time for thoughts beyond survival.
But now? Lining her up against Pete started to paint things in a different light.
All those vulnerabilities Samantha had, every little opening he’d been so lucky to exploit, suddenly stopped looking like luck. Her weaknesses no longer struck him as random side effects of whatever happened to her. It was the same thought that had nagged at him about Pete.
Weaknesses this glaring were starting to feel bizarre.
Blades for fingers. Blades for toes. Teeth filed down to jagged points. Fine. Those were weapons given by a deranged doctor whose sense of humor Seojun had more than a few violent opinions about.
But the stitched eyes? The extra ears?
How did those help her?
She hunted by sound, and she was good at it, no argument there. But flip it around. Give her back her eyes. Ditch the extra ears. Then take something like Samantha, something that could close a hallway that fast on those blade-feet, and drop her in a corridor with him, and this whole thought wouldn’t even be happening, because he’d already be redecorating the floor with himself. Dead.
Same went for Pete. Taking his ears hadn’t given him any kind of edge. Hadn’t sharpened anything else. It had just made him… deaf. That was it.
“……”
A strange chill swept through Seojun’s chest at what that meant. But there was no time to dwell whatever was really going on with Samantha and Pete. Not now. Later, if there was a later.
Seojun gritted his teeth and got back to work with the wrench. Clang after clang, he dragged the beat along the wall, the rhythm stuttering and doubling until the whole basement rang with it. A Pied Piper tune, if Piper had been having a panic attack. But clanging alone felt insufficient, so he threw in some heckling for good measure. Wouldn’t want her attention wandering.
“Samantha! Over here! Come on, Samantha!”
Honestly at this point, Seojun felt like his eardrums were about to burst, and he only had the standard two. Whatever this was doing to a woman with four, it had to be so much worse.
Samantha came to the clamor like a moth to a porch light, drawn and almost helpless about it. But there was nothing aimless in her approach. Every step of those blade-feet, every scything arm, was aimed at his throat. Cold sweat drenched the back of his shirt.
All he’d done was buy a moment’s distraction. That was it. The bedsheet had started out rotten but whole. Now it hung off her in ribbons, hacked down to strips, so many holes it barely qualified as a sheet anymore. Against claws like hers, a moldy blanket might as well be tissue paper. And the tissue was almost gone.
But the plan was working.
Seojun backed into the operating-slash-storage room, reeling her in behind him. She came a step at a time, winding herself deeper into the ruined sheet, every sharp swing tearing it wider. Through one of the newer gaps he got a glimpse of her torn open chest again. His stomach clenched and his jaw locked down on the urge to gag. That ragpicker’s blanket had maybe a minute left. Probably less.
His eye cut to the doorway, then past it into the hall. Something hot pushed up under his one good eye, blurring things at the edges. Every battered second of this idiotic plan had bought precisely what he was after, and there it was, framed in the open door: Johan and Brown crossing the hallway with a steel bookshelf between them, arms locked, shoulders up around their ears, moving fast.
The thing had to weigh a ton. The veins stood out along Johan’s forearms, his face gone dark red and running with sweat. Brown’s mouth was a thin line, his knuckles white. Neither of them dared slow down, let alone set it down. The lightest scrape of steel on concrete would whip Samantha’s head around as fast as the wrench had.
Two guys on a moving crew, hauling furniture through a dead hospital. No pay, no thanks. Seojun’s face went glum just watching it.
Then he shook the mood off. They might not be getting a day’s wages, but they were earning their lives out there. Better compensation than money, all things considered. His own body was filing formal complaints in every department. Seojun tabled them, having patched together something roughly resembling composure, and patted his pocket for the card.
Still there. Good.
He pressed his lips together and ran his tongue over the split in the lower one, that faint metallic tang lingering on the tip. Across the room, Samantha jerked forward, slashing at anything that dared to be underfoot. A hiccup climbed up Seojun’s chest. He swallowed it down with the rest of the panic and held himself still.
Closer. Closer. Samantha walked into the operating table and went to work on it, ripping into the rusted frame as if it had personally wronged her.
Now.
This was his chance.
Seojun came out from behind the far side of the table, low, knees folded into a burglar’s crouch. The monkey wrench was held tightly against his chest. The last thing he could afford was for it to slip—to clip a tray, scrape a stray table leg. Through sheer force of will he kept it steady. Silent.
Just a few more steps.
The door was the last thing between him and success, and every nerve in his body agreed this was where it broke one way or the other. He inched it shut a hand’s width at a time, unbearably slow. His chest burned around the breath he wouldn’t let go of. He’d curled in on himself without deciding to, the way a rat goes rigid when it can still feel eyes on it.
What he could see of the room had narrowed to almost nothing now, and in the near-total dark Samantha’s pale blue outline kept thinning, thinning, nearly gone.
But this hospital hadn’t seen maintenance in years.
Forget being quiet. He could spend an hour on this door. He could hold his breath until his lungs quit. It wouldn’t matter. Short of having oiled these hinges about five seconds ago, the sound was going to happen.
That part had never been his to control.
Creeeeak…
Tiny. Genuinely nothing of a sound. Half a minute back he’d been taking a wrench to stone hard enough to knock plaster off the walls, and this wouldn’t have made it through the noise.
Now it hit him like a gunshot. Hit Samantha the same way.
Her claws quit mid-swing, half-buried in the table, and stopped. All of her stopped, everything at once. She held there a moment, a horrifying statue with its hands sunk into steel, poised to keep going.
Then she moved.
Her spine straightened one slow crack at a time. The bedsheet slipped off her shoulders with a soft whisper, the last thin barrier between her mutilated body and the open room, gone. She rose to face him. The stitches held her eyes shut tight.
Seojun felt her see him regardless.
Four steps of floor between them. Maybe five. Nowhere left to lead her, no clever backup waiting in the wings. She’d worked that out as fast as he had.
Seojun’s good eye went wide. Noise didn’t matter anymore. He threw himself at the door with everything he had left.
“Hnngh!”
The hinges groaned and the door swung in, and Samantha went down, but not the way he needed her to. Maybe it was the last of her strength failing, maybe it was everything they’d done to her catching up all at once. Either way, she didn’t collapse. She lunged. Her claws bit into the floor, throwing herself forward with one long arm reaching out ahead.
Those long, long fingers found the closing gap between door and frame and jammed inside.
Seojun had no idea what was still moving her. Dying strength, or rage that had outlived it. He only knew the door had stopped. One blade’s width short of shut.
His palm came down on the sharp fingers before his brain caught up.
A thinking man would have used the monkey wrench. It was heavy, durable, and made for exactly this. A thinking man would have had time. What Seojun had was instinct, and instinct, brilliant as ever, had decided to slap the blades with the softest part of his body and call it a plan.
Miraculously, his stupid instinct worked. His hand caught the tip of her claw and knocked it clear, the point slicing shallow across his palm without sinking in. The whole thing felt like a reckless bet that had cashed out years of stored-up luck in one go. But the windfall ended there. His latex glove snagged on a jagged edge and peeled clean off, and before he’d finished registering its absence, the skin between his fingers was nicked.
It was barely a scratch. Almost nothing. Even the pain showed up late, closer to a sting than a burn.
But Seojun’s ability didn’t care. It never had. Not about timing, not about what he was in the middle of, and certainly not about the undead nurse on the floor trying to get her fingers into the door. That old, familiar pull started somewhere deep and rose to settle behind his eyes, a tide coming in.
It came when it felt like coming. It made no accommodations for the convenience of the person it belonged to. In a burning building, at the bottom of a lake, it would have shown up the same way and taken exactly as long.
Not now. Not now—
He’d made that particular plea so many times he’d lost count.
Somewhere above the rising drone in his ears, past the weight and the pull of it, a voice was calling his name. Seojun knew that voice. He reached for it. But it slipped away before he could close his hand.
Everything else went with it.
The dark came down over him. Familiar, that. Like a heavy coat he’d worn and worn again, and here it was, settling over his shoulders one more time.
Blackout.
When the world returned, it started with light. Too much light.
It came back as a cluster of them overhead, round and harsh, bearing down with a brightness sharp enough to make his head throb.
Seojun blinked against the glare, his mind dragging itself back together one thought at a time.
Surgical lamps.