"F-FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!" Axel's shout echoed through halls that felt both achingly familiar and nightmarishly wrong. The bulletin boards that should've held cheerful club announcements were now monuments to decay, their surfaces warped by decades of moisture, peeling away in strips that resembled necrotic flesh. Fragments of paper clung stubbornly to the cork, bleached text advertising events long past - was that date really from...? No time to focus.
His sneakers squealed against linoleum that bore a patina of grime so thick it could've been growing. Each footfall left crimson impressions - Christ, had he really run through that mess back there? The stench of organic breakdown hit his nostrils in waves: sweet-sick-metallic, like meat left too long in summer heat. His empty stomach performed gymnastics.
"This isn't happening... this CAN'T be happening!" The words came out as a strangled wheeze. His lungs were furnaces, each breath tasting of copper and mold.
The sounds behind him - god, those SOUNDS. Wet meat slapping against floor tiles. Groans that existed in that terrible space between human and animal. He made the mistake of looking back and nearly tripped over his own feet. The creatures pursuing him wore the tattered remains of uniforms that seemed... wrong. The cuts were different, the colors just slightly off from what he remembered. Their skin hung in loose grey-green folds, like week-old lettuce left to rot. Their jaws... Jesus, their JAWS. Hinged too wide, packed with teeth gone black with decay and something else. Something worse.
"S-should've just stayed in the dark," he gasped. A section of ceiling had given up its fight with gravity, forcing him to dodge around fluorescent lights that dangled like broken wind chimes. Water dripped somewhere in the darkness, a metronomic counterpoint to his thundering heartbeat. Just ahead lay room 101 - the storage room where he'd spent countless lunch periods hiding from... from what? The memory slipped away like smoke. But he'd been there just minutes ago, drawn by that impossible blue light that sang to something primal in his hindbrain.
"GRRRAAAHHHHK!" The thing that lunged from the doorway still clutched a mop in hands gone purple-black with decay. Something about the uniform patch on its chest tickled Axel's memory, but the face was too far gone to recognize. He ducked the wild swing, but his own momentum betrayed him. His knee found broken tile, skin tearing as he went down.
"NO NO NO!" Terror gave him wings. He scrambled up despite the white-hot pain in his leg, driven by the animal certainty of prey being hunted. The storage room door gaped ahead like a promise of salvation, that beautiful azure portal still humming with otherworldly energy. Home. Safety. A world where his greatest fear was just avoiding the next beating from... from who? Why couldn't he REMEMBER?
The portal's light painted everything in electric blue as Axel hurled himself forward. Reality became taffy, stretching and compressing until his eyeballs felt like they might implode. Then CRACK! His shoulder found concrete with bone-jarring force, sending a kaleidoscope of stars wheeling across his vision.
"Made it... holy shit, I made-" The words died stillborn in his throat. Through the shimmering gateway, dozens of grasping hands reached with desperate hunger. Milky eyes and gnashing teeth caught the otherworldly glow, turning them into creatures from the deepest circle of hell. "Please close, please close, PLEASE FUCKING CLOSE!"
THUMP. THUMP.
The portal's death throes spat out two nightmares before collapsing with the sound of a thousand mirrors shattering.
In the sudden darkness, Axel's eyes struggled to process what tumbled through - something in a lab coat, the white fabric turned to a Jackson Pollock of rust-brown stains and viscera. Beside it writhed a hulking shape in the tattered remains of what might have been athletic wear, its muscles grotesquely swollen and malformed.
"GET- NGHHHH!" The scream died in Axel's throat as ice-cold fingers latched onto his ankles. The stench hit him like a physical blow - sweet rot and copper pennies and something else, something that triggered lizard-brain panic. Putrid breath washed over his face as the lab coat thing loomed above him. Its tongue - dear god, the TONGUE - lolled out like spoiled meat, dripping black ichor that burned where it touched his skin.
CRUNCH.
"AAAAAAGHHHH!" Pain exploded through his forearm, white-hot agony that sent lightning bolts of nausea straight to his gut. The athletic monster's teeth weren't just sharp - they were WRONG, rows upon rows of jagged needles that worked like a saw, grinding through his jacket, through skin, through muscle. Blood fountained between its blackened gums, hot and sticky against his skin. Each gnashing movement sent fresh waves of torment through his nervous system.
Axel's free hand scrabbled desperately against concrete, fingernails tearing as they searched for anything, ANYTHING. His fingers closed around something cold and cylindrical - a length of pipe, providence or cruel joke? He swung without thinking, without aiming.
THWACK! The sound was sickeningly wet, like a watermelon being split. Grey matter and bone fragments painted his face in a warm spray. The creature's grip slackened, but the damage was done.
Axel kicked free and crab-walked backward until rough cinderblock pressed against his spine. In the wan light filtering through grimy basement-like windows, he watched in horror as the bite wound PULSED. Angry crimson lines spider-webbed outward from the ragged edges, spreading like time-lapse footage of cancer cells. Each heartbeat pushed the infection further, turning his veins into rivers of liquid fire.
"No... oh god, please no..." His voice cracked, barely recognizable as human. The two corpses twitched and jerked upright with the horrid grace of broken puppets. But Axel barely noticed them now - he was too focused on the alien COLD spreading through his chest, seeping into his bones like frozen mercury.
The basketball thing shambled forward, its ruined cranium a roadmap of devastation where Axel's pipe had connected. Bone shards glinted wetly in the dim light, brain matter oozing between the cracks like obscene mortar. But those eyes - milky orbs filmed with cataracts yet somehow blazing with predatory focus - locked onto him with terrifying intelligence.
"HRRRAAGHK!" The beast lunged, muscles grotesquely distended beneath necrotic flesh. Something about its proportions was deeply wrong - shoulders too broad, arms too long, as if whatever force animated it had tried to improve upon human anatomy and created an abomination instead.
But where terror should have paralyzed him, Axel felt something else surge through his veins like liquid nitrogen. Pure, uncut RAGE flooded his system, turning his vision crimson at the edges. His hand shot out with impossible speed, fingers sinking into the creature's throat with a sound like overripe fruit being crushed.
"GET! CRACK OFF! CRACK ME!" Each word erupted from his chest like artillery fire as he slammed the monster's head against unforgiving concrete. Bone splintered, tissue tore, and still he couldn't stop. The wet percussion of destruction became a symphony, each impact sending fresh sprays of putrid gore across his snarling features.
"FUCKING DIE!"
Behind him, latex squealed against rotting flesh as the lab coat horror raked elongated fingers down his back. Fabric parted like tissue paper, followed by skin. The pain was distant, meaningless compared to the thundering bloodlust pounding through his skull.
Axel pivoted, pipe whistling through stale air. The impact... oh god, the IMPACT. Steel met skull with a sound like a watermelon being dropped from orbit. Black ichor fountained from the thing's ruined mouth, splattering across Axel's face in burning droplets. But he was already swinging again, and again, and AGAIN. Each blow reduced the creature's head to increasingly smaller components until nothing remained but a red ruin atop twitching shoulders.
"Hehehehe... HAHAHA!" The laughter ripped from his throat didn't sound human - couldn't BE human. It echoed through empty halls like the howl of something that had never known mercy or sanity.
CRUNCH! His fist exploded through solid wood, sending splinters cascading across grimy tile. The pain was ecstasy, every torn knuckle and shattered bone singing with unholy pleasure. Another punch reduced the door to kindling.
Crimson handprints marked his stumbling progress down the corridor, each one larger and more distorted than the last as his fingers began to elongate. The infected arm pulsed obscenely, muscles writhing beneath grey-mottled skin like mating serpents.
"Need... need to..." Coherent thought dissolved like sugar in acid. The fluorescent lights stabbed his changing eyes like ice picks, each flutter of the dying bulbs sending fresh waves of agony-pleasure through his mutating nervous system.
He barely recognized his own reflection in a shattered display case - features twisted into something feral and hungry, teeth pushing past bleeding gums in jagged rows. The exit sign's crimson glow painted everything in shades of hellfire.
"H-help... sssssome..." The words died in a gurgling snarl as Axel collapsed against cold cinderblock. Consciousness strobe-lit through his fragmenting mind like a broken film reel. His last human thought was a desperate hope that whatever emerged from this chrysalis of agony would have the strength to tear reality itself apart.
Darkness swallowed him whole, and deep within, something darkly stirred.