Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie
#197
#197
Still, Seojun knew he couldn’t stay here forever, staring blankly like a dazed idiot. That awareness alone was enough to to make him move his dead tired body. His mental and physical stamina were already scraping the bottom of the barrel, but sitting there wasn’t going to make anything better.
More than that, though, Johan’s expression was getting to him.
The easy smile that usually appeared whenever Johan looked at Seojun was gone. In its place was something dark and painfully serious as he watched Seojun mumble incoherently under his breath. Johan looked extremely concerned.
And Seojun knew exactly why. Which only made him feel worse. He threw the blanket he’d used to wipe his face over the vomit, hiding the worst of the mess, then planted a hand on Johan’s shoulder and pushed himself to his feet.
“Jun, I’ll carry you.”
“You’re tired too. I’m fine. I just got a little startled, that’s all. It’s nothing.”
Seojun shook his head and waved him off.
They had no idea what kind of horrifying ghost might come crawling out of the dark next, and he wasn’t about to waste the stamina of one of their most valuable fighters just to carry him around on his back. Besides, as ridiculous as it sounded after he’d spent the last few minutes rolling around on the floor and throwing up, he really did mean it.
Seojun carefully checked the barricade piled in front of the operating-storage-room where Samantha was trapped, making sure nothing looked ready to collapse.
Johan liked to blame everything on coincidence whenever he got the chance, and in this case, maybe he was right. It really had been one bizarre coincidence after another that allowed Seojun to glimpse Samantha’s past. But coincidence or not, Seojun couldn’t afford to let what he’d seen distract him anymore.
If I want to make it out of here with Johan, I need to pull myself together. Wait… if I was able to see something from Samantha’s past, does that mean she hasn’t been dead for very long?
Seojun’s ability was unpredictable at the best of times, so he could never predict exactly what it would show him. Still, more often than not, the memories he saw usually came from the more recent past rather than from years or decades ago. And if bits and pieces of someone’s life were still lingering after death, maybe that meant there simply hadn’t been enough time for all the memories that came afterward to bury them.
There was another reason he thought that, too.
Seojun had once come into contact with a girl who had been dead for decades, and he had gotten nothing from her past except darkness. That was all that remained of Doade. Of course, Seojun had nowhere near enough experience with cases like this to treat that as a rule. For now, though, it was the best guess he had. And it wasn’t like obsessing over it here was going to magically give him an answer.
Besides, awful as the whole experience had been, it hadn’t been completely pointless. He had seen “the Doctor” Levi mentioned. That alone proved she had been telling the truth. Now that he knew her story was real, there was no reason to keep hesitating. All that was left was to follow through with the plan.
What the Doctor had done was gruesome enough to leave Seojun exhausted in every sense of the word, but at least now he could finally see the beginnings of a way out. A glimmer of hope. And things had already improved in one important respect. Samantha and Pete, two of that body-modification lunatic’s minions, were both trapped. With those two temporarily dealt with, the abandoned hospital was undeniably a little less dangerous than before.
“Come on, Johan. Get up.”
“Y-yeah.”
Now feeling a little more optimistic, Seojun grabbed Johan’s hand and pulled while he was still muttering to himself. Not that he actually had the strength to pull a guy built like a bear to his feet. Johan mostly got up on his own, brushing off his backside as he straightened his legs.
A few minutes ago, Seojun had looked like he was suffering through the mother of all hangovers. Now he looked completely fine. If anything, he seemed weirdly upbeat. Johan and Brown stared at him with matching looks of confusion.
Seojun ignored them completely. Instead, he gave the metal bookshelf tied to the rope a satisfied tap with one finger, then glanced toward the door of the operating-storage-room.
Scratch. Scratch.
The sound from inside made a thought suddenly occur to him.
Come to think of it…Samantha still listens to the Doctor even after everything he did to her? I really don’t get that.
Seojun frowned. If someone had put him through something that horrific, Seojun was pretty sure his first instinct would’ve been to rip the Doctor apart with his bare hands and worry about revenge afterward.
Still, there was at least one explanation he could think of. He’d encountered something similar before. There had been an evil spirit who wrung every last bit of use out of the people he killed. A man named April, who smiled with the innocent face of a little boy. He’d turned the couple he murdered into obedient lackeys and used them to threaten both Leah and Seojun.
That attention-seeking psycho.
Seojun found himself wondering how April was doing these days.
Hopefully awful.
Ghosts really made no sense. Not that Seojun had any interest in becoming an expert on them. If possible, he would’ve been perfectly happy never learning another thing about ghosts or monsters for the rest of his life. And when he thought back to the cornfield, what lingered wasn’t April’s gruesome, desperate state. It was Leah’s weight in his arms, slowly growing lighter.
That was enough. There was no point digging through a memory that was already beginning to blur at the edges. Better to let it fade.
Seojun reached into his pocket and carefully pulled out the ID card he’d stuffed in there earlier. At least he’d gotten what he came for. Now he just needed to find Luciel and get his pepper spray back. The thought of unloading a faceful of capsaicin into the Doctor’s tightly wrapped face sent an oddly satisfying tingle all the way up his scalp.
“Well, nothing else to do down here. Let’s get upstairs.”
Johan narrowed his eyes. Seojun had gone from puking on the floor to calmly taking charge of everything like nothing had happened, and somehow that only made him look more suspicious. There was no sign of a righteous man nobly enduring a cruel and merciless world. No, what Johan saw was a man wearing a downright nasty little smile, apparently looking forward to personally reenacting the Doctor’s final moments.
Johan pressed his lips together and tilted his head one way, then the other.
“Oh, right. Johan.”
Seojun picked up the bouquet he’d nearly forgotten, then held out the monkey wrench.
“This thing was useful. Good weight to it.”
The wrench had done enough work to qualify the basement as an active construction site.
Johan, still looking at Seojun with open suspicion, took it back almost automatically.
“Oh. Yeah. Christina gave it to me.”
“W-wait. What?”
Seojun had been trying to decide whether to tuck the bouquet under one arm or hold it against his chest when he suddenly went still. For a moment, he just stood there frozen. Then his mouth opened and closed a few times before the words came pouring out at alarming speed like he’d suddenly started speaking in tongues.
“No wonder it felt different when I swung it. How do I explain it…? It just sat better in my hand than the others. So that’s why. Christina accounted for this too. She really was thinking ahead the whole time. She knew exactly what ordinary people would need and prepares for the future!”
“Jun, why are you talking like that? You’re scaring me.”
Seojun’s eye practically sparkled. He took an eager step toward Johan, breathing hard with excitement. Johan immediately took a step back. Then, looking increasingly uncomfortable, he somehow managed to explain himself.
“Jun, Christina gave me the toolbox as a gift. She didn’t actually make the tools. I mean, I’m grateful she put so much thought into picking everything out, and yeah, I thought it was really sweet, but…”
“Right. Which means it passed through Christina’s hands.”
Seojun looked at him as if the conclusion were painfully obvious.
“That’s how holy relics work too, Johan. Something doesn’t have to start out special. Once it passes through the hands of a saint, it becomes a holy relic. It could be some random wildflower from the side of the road. A pebble nobody would look at twice. Even some half-collapsed shack out in the countryside can become a holy site!”
“……”
Johan fell silent. For once, he genuinely seemed to have no idea how to respond. He stared at Seojun’s gleaming eye, which was shining with enough fervor to make the whole thing feel vaguely religious, and wisely kept his mouth shut.
Then Seojun noticed Brown standing next to him with his jaw hanging open. Seojun’s cheeks were still flushed and his breathing was still a little heavy. He slowly turned his head away and cleared his throat twice. Then he raised his chin, composed himself with as much dignity as he could manage, and said,
“Sorry. I got a little carried away.”
Brown blinked. “A little…?”
Even after coming up with an explanation, Seojun somehow felt like Brown trusted him less than he had five minutes ago. Before that precious bit of goodwill could disappear completely, Seojun waved the bouquet in the air like a shepherd trying to move along a stubborn flock.
“Okay, okay. Anyway, we’re done down here, so let’s head upstairs. Samantha’s trapped for now, but with how persistent she is, I wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow got out. Let’s get the hell out of this basement. Better yet, let’s get out of this whole damn hospital.”
“Wait, Seojun.”
Seojun paused. Of all people, he’d expected Brown to jump at the chance to go upstairs. Instead, Brown was the one stopping them. Johan, who had been twirling the holy monkey wrench, blinked and looked over too.
Brown was biting his lower lip so hard that his chin had pulled inward. His expression was dead serious.
“Why? Did something happen?”
Sure, Brown had abandoned Seojun and McCullan once before, but aside from that, he was fairly mild-mannered, sensible, and capable of acting like a normal person. That alone made him unusually valuable in this ragtag group. Everyone else seemed to come with some combination of poor judgment, questionable social skills, or outright instability, so when Brown looked this serious, Seojun listened.
If it had been McCullan or Dennis, he probably would’ve dismissed half of whatever they were about to say. But Brown was different.
Brown wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and spoke carefully.
“We’re not planning on coming back down here, right? Then… I think we should block that place off too before we leave.”
He pointed toward the morgue. Seojun followed his finger and stared. At first, he didn’t understand what Brown was getting at. Then something started to bother him. The morgue looked different from when he and McCullan had run out of the basement. He stared for another second before it clicked.
“Huh?”
When Samantha first appeared, McCullan had fought desperately with the lock, but he didn’t get a chance to actually open that door. Now it was standing half open.
Seojun turned to Brown, silently demanding an explanation. Brown rubbed the back of his neck again and again, his eyes darting around the corridor. He looked visibly on edge. When he finally spoke, his voice came out a little higher than normal.
“Another nurse came out of there. Not Samantha. Someone else.”
“Uh… yeah, wha—?”
A bizarre series of noises escaped Seojun’s throat. Brown apparently mistook that for disbelief. His Adam’s apple jumped before he spoke again, this time with a painfully serious look on his face.
“I’m telling you the truth. He looked just as horrible as Samantha. It happened after she followed you and McCullan upstairs. We didn’t know what else to do, so we came back out into the hallway. Then the morgue door opened, and another nurse slowly walked out.”
Brown’s hands clenched at his sides.
“We couldn’t move. Not one of us.”
Someone swallowed hard. Seojun only realized it had been him when Brown kept talking without interruption. Brown looked both pale and flushed as he cast another nervous glance toward the morgue.
“He didn’t have any hair. Or ears. He didn’t have blades attached to him like Samantha, but his hands and feet were switched around.”
Seojun’s expression stiffened.
Brown shuddered. “His feet were attached where his hands should’ve been. He was wearing high heels, too. Every time he moved, he went pat, pat, pat across the floor on his palms. He was slow. Really slow. But none of us could move anyway. He was dressed kind of like Samantha, skimpy uniform and all, but he was definitely a man. And he just kept… staring at us. Right at our faces. Like he was studying them. Like he wanted to take them apart and see how they worked. We started screaming before we even realized we were doing it.”
Seojun felt like screaming too. There was no question who Brown was describing.
Pete.
So that was where he had come from. He’d been down here in the basement the entire time. Seojun stared at the morgue with a deepening frown. It had already looked creepy enough before, but now it had crossed straight into nightmare fuel. And somehow, despite all that, another thought forced its way to the front of his mind.
McCullan had been completely fucking useless!
Seriously, what had that guy actually contributed?
For someone who supposedly had all kinds of useful skills, he hadn’t helped them escape even once. All he’d done was slow them down and make everything harder. Seojun was starting to wonder what McCullan was even made of.
Could a normal person really be this useless?
Was he even human?
At this point, the idea that McCullan was secretly one of the Doctor’s spies almost sounded more believable. Because otherwise, there was no explaining how one man could be this much of a liability.