As he hurried over the second floor landing, he heard Trish’s murmurs echoing from overhead. Patient beds stuffed with restrained and groaning figures blurred on a heavy pant as he struggled desperately to catch up to the group. Florescent light pulsed in greenish yellow tones that tricked his eyes and deepened the shadows everywhere. Footsteps marched in unison on the third floor.

Tom nearly sped past the tiny winding staircase. Tucked inside an old open linen closet with tatters of medical gauze, restraints, and grey laundry hanging in tawdry sheets from its warped shelves, he hurried up the creaking old set.

“…inhumane experiments with electroshock therapy. He believed that this metal apparatus around the patient’s head would serve to evenly distribute the sensation. This would, in effect, render the subject…”

As the last words of Trish’s speech droned on, the old lights flickered and died. Tom sprawled up the last step and crashed face first into the wooden floor.

“Stay where you are,” she commanded. “The lights will come back on in a moment. There is a backup generator.”

He crept toward the obnoxious blue glow under Charlotte’s little feet in the windowless lab.

Always the more excitable of the twins, John howled, “What the fuck is that?!”

…And ever the answering gunfire behind those aggressive utterances, Jerry’s immense pair of combat issue army boots slammed into his ribs.

The butt of his palm plowed into a brick “leg” of the slab table. Tom managed to wriggle out from under it before the ruckus of several heightened tensions turned the museum onlookers into wild things and brought the restrained mannequin and its sled-like perch crashing from the table. A large foot trampled the small of his back, and his fingers insistently scrounged at Charlotte’s white skirt, like a puppy clinging to its mother’s tit.

She helped him up.

“I… don’t think the lights are coming back on,” he whispered.

The lab was one suffocated blind pool of commotion as people lost their orientation in the claustrophobic surroundings. A series of bass rhythms punctuated each bounce as a tourist plummeted down the old steps. Glass shattered, and the noxious smell of turpentine and bleach rose like chlorine from the thronging pool. He put a steadying hand down on the restrained figure, leaning over the table in an effort to stretch his throbbing vertebrae. The patient on the table groaned.

“I… don’t think the lights are coming back on,” Tom swiveled his head and repeated, louder this time. His breath lifted in a faint paint. His vision focused and faded out as the toxic gasses filled his lungs. Something about this darkness … something hollow, reverberated the drums in his skull like rich mud-drenched concrete pipes peppered with abandoned remains.

He stumbled into Trish, and they went careening faces first into the medical supply cabinets.

“It’s back here,” she hissed in his ear. Her hands crept down his chest, over a thigh, and found his jeans. The fly slid down for her experienced fingers, his cock eagerly pouncing at her palm’s long slow massage. Constant moans of frustration and hot fantasy burbled like a fountain from his throat. Her thumb flicked over the head in a dull raspy rhythm, while the tip of her tongue buzzed around his ear.

Faint hissing filled his consciousness like another language as her fingers worked him endlessly in the commotion. When she pulled his hand roughly to her breast, Tom blinked repeatedly. His eyes searched her intense red brown, like sticky mud around rotting bones, unable to find any recognition of the words that he heard.

His hips pumped needily without it though, begging release through hollow cries as the entire shell of the attic spun away into hot night. Tufts of breath escaped his nostrils on panting steam, and Trish covered his mouth hard with her own as he pinched and tugged at the pert nub of her nipple. She sucked air from his lungs then shoved him away, her hand a constant blur over the meaty shaft of his cock.

Her head canted toward the old cabinet again. “Go on,” she whispered, “how bad do you really want to fuck the dead?”

Through the haze of the blackout, something invisible molded his hands into an intangible fleet of destruction; he moved faster, fingers whirling into blurry claws in the darkness. His hips pumped her hands faster and faster, and the lacquered wooden shelf of greasy bottles and oils toppled to the slippery floor. Voices squealed over a gurgle and the wet splat of crushed flesh.

Sensation screamed, and he tasted the panic-laced air with his skin. Sweet. Thick. Heavy.

She let go of his screaming prick.

He panted.

Trish clawed at his back, prompting his hands up. Draft swept from the wall, carrying a cold murky scent like a buried stream. Wet mortar. The outer wall fell with a tremendous crash under his unyielding tugs and frenzied pounding.

Light exploded grisly green from the old shattered fixtures on the wall. The house spun under vicious kicks from the storm outside. It shuddered and quaked as though it would implode.

“I told you that the lights would come back on,” Trish murmured.

Tom took two looks at her, then another, his mouth hanging open like a stuffed turkey’s ass. Her blonde mane had disappeared, replaced by writhing pupae in a cocoon of shriveled white that extended to a husk of bony hips. Black oil trickled down withered darker skin, and a long tail extended behind the snake-like crimson scales that covered her sex and stretched emaciated breasts. Her smile revealed razor-sharp teeth and a flickering tongue. Above a tri-slit nose, her blood red eyes narrowed on him with a sneer.

His heart thudded and stopped. A claustrophobic gaze studied the contracting walls of the chamber as marching echoed from the hallway below. Once subdued and mechanical, the groans of the prisoners of Sunnyville turned loud and angry, growling as they freed each other from their bonds and ascended the steps. He scuttled back, spinning quickly and peering over the toppled medical hutch.

His foot connected with something wet and pulpy. As he turned to face the white-blue light that poured from the hole in the wall, his eyes connected with John’s dead albino-red orbs and a shriek burbled from his throat. Sounds faded back in on a roaring tide of screams. Charlotte’s leg lingered beside John’s corpse, crushed beneath the hutch, and she wriggled and struggled like a fishing worm on a hook.

“Mmmm, they’re going to have a lot of fun, don’t you think?” Trish purred.

“…They?” he gasped questioningly.

“You know…” she murmured derisively. “I warned you not to touch them.”

A shudder scraped its long nails down the back of his neck. “Please,” he found himself pleading, “I’ll do anything. Call them back. Please.”

“I know that you will,” hissed around that long tongue. The steel blue vein within pulse as she lapped at lips of a similar color.

A last lone set of footsteps exited the wall like a solitary death knell, the blue glow settling heavily into the dummy on the table. Tom could only watch numbly as Trish tugged the old leather straps open on the contraption to release the writhing, screamer. The rebirth was like observing an insect emerge from the cocoons in her hair. –A very large insect to the metamorphosis-tune of two-hundred and sixty or so pounds with heavy musculature rippling beneath bronze skin.

“A… c..c..convict?” he stuttered, finally overcoming his shock and tugging at Charlotte’s arm as other members of the tour ran toward the exit. He heard their screams on the second floor as Sunnyville’s newest population scurried into their decaying grasp.

Charlotte’s ankle was impossibly pinned beneath the ornate scroll design of the upper racks.

“Let me help you with that,” the low dusky voice growled from inside the cage helmet.

Tom’s eyes widened and lifted as the convict shoved the case upward, slamming it against the back of the wall. The old wood disintegrated, sending splinters flying. Kneeling over Charlotte as she lapsed in and out of painful consciousness on the old wooden floor, he took the brunt of the aerial shards to his back, relieved that neither the convict or Trish seemed terribly interested in her. Instead, they both circled him like vultures around fresh meat.

“Well, you always wanted to fuck the dead,” Trish laughed obnoxiously, black sludge oozing from the red scales of her nipples and drizzling down her tight abdomen. “Guess you’ll have to settle for BEING fucked to death by them…because they’re *mightily* pissed off.”

THE END