Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#175Reader Mode

#175

The joke fell flat. Dead silence followed.

Seojun risked a glance over his shoulder, his flashlight trembling in his hand. The beam jittered across a row of pale, horrified faces. The others stared past him—eyes wide, mouths hanging open, frozen like statues in the dark.

McCullan, who’d been crowing about picking the lock just seconds before, made a strangled sound. He stumbled backward, legs tangling, and hit the ground hard.

But it was Brown who sent a chill through Seojun.

Steady, unshakeable Brown. The one who always kept his head when everyone else lost theirs. Seojun searched his face for that familiar calm and found a terrifying void.

Brown was locked in place, staring at the woman ahead. His jaw hung open. His arms dangled uselessly at his sides, fingers twitching as if they’d forgotten their purpose. Seojun had never seen him like this, had never seen that kind of emptiness in his eyes. It was like his mind had fled, leaving an empty shell behind.

Seojun’s throat tightened. The easy explanation—that this was just another one of Mina’s elaborate pranks—died before he could voice it.

This wasn’t Mina.

“So, uh… you guys don’t know her?”

The words sounded so small in the heavy silence. The second they left his mouth, Seojun wished he could take them back. Stupid. Of course they didn’t know her.

Luciel didn’t even glance at him. She just stared at the figure ahead, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.

“The blood…” she breathed, so quiet he almost missed it. “The smell of it.”

That’s when it hit him.

The stench. A sharp, coppery wave that flooded his senses with the taste of old blood. It coated his tongue, thick and rotten, carrying the same fishy decay as the dummy in the operating room. But this was worse. So much worse. Bile rose in his throat, and he fought the urge to gag.

Crack!

The Nurse’s head snapped toward Luciel with a violent, grinding jerk.

The sound—like dry branches snapping—shot ice down Seojun’s spine. He watched, mesmerized by the horror, as tendons strained like taut wires under her papery skin. Her neck twisted too fast, too far, in a way that defied every law of anatomy.

As she moved, something caught the light. Dangling from her collar, illuminated by his wavering flashlight, was a cheap, fluorescent green name badge. A single name was scrawled on it in black marker:

SAMANTHA

But it wasn’t the name that made his knees go weak.

It was the wound. A deep, brutal ligature mark circled her throat. This wasn’t a clean cut; it looked as though it had been ground in. Like a thin wire had been twisted tighter and tighter until it chewed through skin, muscle, and cartilage… a perfect match for the noose on the dummy.

Her head twitched again.

Crack!

Fresh blood bubbled from the wound, black as tar in the flashlight beam. It oozed down her neck, a slow, viscous trail across skin that had gone cold long ago.

Scrape. Click. Scrape.

She took a step closer.

Seojun’s lungs burned. When had he stopped breathing?

He realized no one else was breathing, either. The air was thick and crushing, squeezing them from all sides. Six people, frozen in place. No movement. No sound. Just silence.

Finally, his brain accepted what his eyes were seeing.

This wasn’t a costume. Not a prop or some horror animatronic rigged for a scare. The scalpel fingers, the flesh folded like gills where her ears should have been, the head hanging at that broken, impossible angle…

It was all real.

Seojun’s thoughts scattered, refusing to form a coherent explanation. A human body couldn’t bend like that. Vertebrae couldn’t grind without shattering. His mind, desperate for an escape, latched onto the only thing that didn’t make him want to scream.

This nurse isn’t human. It can’t be.

She was something else. Something supernatural.

Because the alternative, that a person had done this to another person, had twisted and cut and sewn her eyes shut while she was still breathing… that thought was too terrible to hold. It slipped through his mind like blood through his fingers.

His phone shook, the screen flickering as his fingers went numb. He forced himself to ease his death grip, to take a breath, to think.

Why were they still alive?

The answer came, cold and sharp.

Because we haven’t screamed.

They’d whispered. Moved carefully. Made no sudden sounds. They hadn’t triggered whatever this thing was—ghost, zombie, or something far worse.

She can’t see us, Seojun realized, clutching the thought like a life raft. Her eyes are sewn shut. She’s blind.

She had only reacted when Luciel whispered, snapping toward the sound like a predator. A stubborn spark of hope ignited in his chest. It was small, pathetic, but it was there.

Okay. She’s blind. She tracks by sound. If we stay quiet, we can get out of here.

It was a good plan. A solid plan.

Then McCullan opened his mouth.

It started as a small whimper, a choked sob he tried to swallow down. Dennis lunged, slapping a hand over his mouth, but it was too late. Like trying to cap a volcano with your palm.

Fear ripped out of him in one long, jagged shriek. The sound ricocheted off wet concrete, multiplying until the corridor became nothing but his own terror screaming back.

And then—

Silence.

No. Worse than silence. A heavy, absolute stillness fell.

Samantha’s head snapped toward the sound, instant and precise. Her face locked onto McCullan as if she could see straight through the stitches in her eyes.

Then she began to weep.

Not tears. Blood.

Thick, black rivers seeped from beneath the threads, pouring down her cheeks. The stitches pulled taut, straining against something pushing from within.

No one moved. No one dared to breathe.

Everyone stopped. Instincts howling danger. Bodies not catching up yet. That awful in-between moment before everything goes to hell.

Brown’s voice shattered the stillness.

“R-RUN!”

The word cracked like a starting pistol, and the Nurse exploded into a sprint.

Metal shrieked against concrete as dozens of scalpels scraped and clashed where hands and feet should be, throwing sparks into the dark. She didn’t run like something alive. She tore down the corridor like a machine built for slaughter, a chaos of grinding bone and screaming steel.

They scattered like frightened animals. No plan, only instinct. Bodies crashed into walls, into each other. Terror stripped them down to their most basic impulse: survive.

Seojun’s legs moved on their own, his vision tunneling.

RUN.

Rot and stagnant water hit them like a wall. Getting stronger. She was closing in. Those scalpel-claws whistling through darkness—

Panic. Panic consumed them whole.

An elbow cracked into Seojun’s ribs. A heel crushed his foot. Hands shoved at his back as bodies tangled and thrashed, trampling each other in blind terror like rats fleeing a fire.

Luciel hit the ground and took Brown down with her.

Dennis bounced off a wall, stumbled, kept running.

The corridor became a deathtrap—too cluttered, pitch black, too many bodies trying to occupy the same desperate inch of space.

And the sound got faster. Closer.

Clank-clank-clank-CLANK-CLANK—

Like a sewing machine gone mad. Like chattering teeth. Like death ticking off the seconds.

Someone crashed into a tower of boxes. They came down in a roar of cardboard and dust, and the air turned thick and gray. Visibility dropped to zero. Seojun gagged on the grit that filled his mouth.

Then—

A scream cut through the chaos.

Luciel.

Shit. Did the Nurse get her?

Adrenaline surged like fire through Seojun’s veins. He shoved a box off his arm, hearing it scrape across concrete, and tried to get up.

He never made it to his knees.

Silver flashed. Seojun threw himself backward as blades sliced past his cheek, close enough to feel the air stir. The scalpels had missed his face by inches.

The Nurse was right on top of him.

The Factory Manager’s attacks had been wild, sloppy. Violence fueled by rage. Terrifying, sure, but still sloppy.

This was different.

This was surgery.

Each scalpel moved with precision, carving the air where his head had been a second before. The blades overlapped and pivoted, a deadly formation designed to separate muscle from bone. It wasn’t one weapon; it was dozens. One touch and he’d be flayed open. As her arm pulled back, his dropped phone illuminated the blades. The edges were crude and serrated, rusted and meant to tear, not slice.

Cold sweat soaked his shirt.

Seojun scrambled backward until his shoulders hit the cold morgue door. As his phone’s beam swept the floor, it caught Brown wrestling a massive box off Luciel. She was pinned, one arm clawing uselessly at the concrete. The only sound was the grating scrape of cardboard.

It was enough. The Nurse’s head turned toward the noise.

Crack!

She took a deliberate, scraping step toward them. They were next.

They were going to die.

A thick drop of blood fell from the wound in her throat, hitting the dusty floor with a soft pat. Brown didn’t see it, too focused on freeing Luciel, too focused on making noise.

“LUCIEL, THIS WAY!”

Dennis’s panicked voice cut through the din. He was pointing to a set of double doors across the hall.

Brown didn’t hesitate. Brown hoisted Luciel onto his back and broke into a clumsy, desperate run. Dennis threw the doors open, dragged them through, and slammed them shut.

Half a second later, the Nurse hit the barrier with a grinding screech of metal on metal.

She attacked the door in a frenzy. Her fury was so intense that surely she’d be screaming if she still had a mouth. Dozens of scalpels raked across the surface, again and again. The impacts shook the entire frame, the vibrations traveling through the concrete floor and up Seojun’s legs. He felt every strike like a phantom blade tracing lines on his skin.

A shudder ran through him, but it wasn’t from fear. It was rage.

Dennis, you son of a bitch.

The fanatic had locked them out. He’d slammed that door knowing full well Seojun was still out here. McCullan too, but to hell with McCullan. Dennis had looked right at him, had seen him, and had shut the door anyway.

Sure, Seojun would’ve done the same thing.

But being the one left behind?

His fists clenched until his knuckles cracked. His breathing turned shallow and quick. Heat surged through his chest, up his neck, across his face. The anger burned through him, replacing the terror from seconds before.

He didn’t want to run anymore. He wanted to destroy something. To wipe that smug look off Dennis’s face and leave it as wrecked as the door he’d just slammed.

Then—

The Nurse went still.

The assault stopped. The corridor fell silent. She stood rigid as a corpse, her head twitching in small, mechanical jerks, as if trying to lock onto a target. Back and forth she turned, between the ruined doors and the two of them on the floor. Her stitched eyes bulged, weeping black. Her fingers clicked in endless repetition—open, shut, open, shut—scalpels catching light as they grasped at nothing.

Seojun swallowed hard. This was it. His chance.

Sweat stung his eye. He didn’t dare wipe it away. He ran through his options.

The operating room?

Dead end.

The morgue?

Still locked. And who knew what was behind it.

Think.

The emergency exit? Impossible. Buried under a mountain of boxes. Even if he could dig through, every sound would give him away. And for what? Another locked door, just like upstairs. He’d be trapped. He’d die cornered like a rat.

That left one option.

The stairs. Back the way they’d come.

The plan formed: slip past the Nurse. Reach the stairs. Run until his lungs gave out. Escape this nightmare hospital and never come back.

And screw the teddy bear.

What the hell had he been thinking? Coming here for that? Risking his life for a stuffed animal? He’d survived the Factory Manager through dumb luck, and somehow that had made him cocky. Made him think he could handle this.

Arrogant. Stupid.

The memory of those scalpels flying past his face… that was all the reality check Seojun needed. One wrong move and he’d be dead. Over a stuffed bear.

Seojun had never felt more like an idiot.

Forget the bear. Get out of this hospital. Find help.

That was the plan. The only plan that mattered.

Seojun peeled himself off the morgue door, every muscle screaming. The whisper of fabric. The grinding scrape of dust under his sole. Every tiny sound roared in his ears. He moved in increments, slow and silent. The Nurse remained motionless, head caught in that horrific, twitching loop.

Don’t make a sound. Don’t even breathe.

Just make it to the stairs. Nothing else mattered.

Then he saw the doors Dennis had slammed in his face.

Damn it. Luciel.

His feet stopped moving. She was trapped in there, maybe hurt. He remembered how she’d hung limp on Brown’s back, a girl not much older than Christina. Something twisted in his chest.

Could he really leave her behind?

No. She’ll be fine, he told himself, smothering the thought with cold logic. Luciel had Brown. She had Dennis. Two devoted protectors willing to die for her. The only person Seojun needed to save was himself. He glanced at McCullan, a grown man cowering against the wall. Not his responsibility.

His jaw tightened. He took another step.

McCullan must’ve sensed what Seojun was thinking, because panic hit his face like a switch flipped. He didn’t dare speak—just waved frantically, while the other stayed clamped over his mouth. When Seojun finally met his eyes, McCullan dropped his hand and mouthed the words: Friend. My friend. Please don’t leave me.

Seojun stopped. Just for a moment. And something stirred in his chest. Pity maybe. McCullan’s expression cracked open with hope, his fingers reaching out like a drowning man.

Seojun ruthlessly looked away.

You know, my friends list is getting a bit crowded. Time for some cuts.

That’s when he understood what a liability actually looked like. By lowering his hand, McCullan had exposed his face to the dust still hanging thick in the air.

Seojun’s eye went wide.

Just hold your breath, you moron. Pinch your nose. Swallow. Literally anything.

But McCullan had never been known for self-control. Or maybe he was just fearless in the most catastrophic way possible.

His face scrunched up. His nostrils flared. His mouth fell open.

“HAAAH… CHOO!”