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Eldritch Horror? No, I'm A Doctor
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The skin came away with a wet, tearing sound, like fabric ripping apart. Blood sprayed across the concrete floor, splashing the walls, painting abstract patterns in bright red across the gray stone. More blood than should have been possible from such a small area, fountaining out in arterial spurts that caught the fluorescent lights and turned them pink.
"What the fuck," Ralph breathed.
Both Major Generals stood frozen, their minds struggling to process what their eyes were seeing.
Beneath the torn-away face, beneath the layer of skin and muscle and tissue, was something else entirely. Something white and smooth and featureless. A mask made of porcelain or bone or something that had never been alive and never would be. Two holes for eyes. A vertical line where a mouth should be. Nothing else. No expression. No humanity. Just a perfect, terrible blankness.
Nox's hands didn't stop moving. He grasped the white mask with both hands and pulled again.
This time the mask came free with a sound like bones snapping, accompanied by another spray of blood that painted both Major Generals' faces and uniforms with warm, sticky red. The smell hit them immediately: copper and iron and something underneath that smelled wrong, like spoiled meat and old flowers mixed together.
Axel made a choking sound. Ralph's hand flew to his mouth, but he was too shocked even to vomit.
Both of them were covered in blood now. It dripped from their hair, ran down their faces, soaked into their uniforms. But neither of them could look away from what they were seeing.
The body that had been Nox stood there for a moment longer, its face now a ruined mass of exposed muscle and bone, the white mask held in one bloody hand. Then it collapsed, the muscles going slack all at once, joints giving out, the whole structure folding in on itself like a puppet with its strings cut.
The body hit the concrete floor with a wet thud and lay there, motionless and empty.
The white mask in its hand, however, moved.
It crawled. Not with legs or limbs or anything recognizable. It just moved, skittering across the concrete floor with quick, precise motions that suggested intelligence and intent. The mask crawled over to Volker's unconscious form and climbed onto his chest, moving up toward his face with patient determination.
When it reached his face, it stopped for just a moment, as if considering. Then it pressed itself firmly against Volker's skin.
The screaming started immediately.
Volker's eyes snapped open, wide and wild and filled with an awareness that should not have been possible for someone under anesthetic. His mouth opened and the sound that came out wasn't human. It was beyond human. It was the sound of someone who had just looked directly into whatever waited behind death and realized death would have been kinder.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The scream echoed off the concrete walls, multiplying and amplifying until it filled the entire cell, the corridor beyond, possibly the entire building. It was so loud that both Major Generals instinctively clapped their hands over their ears, trying to block out the sound, but it went straight through their palms and into their skulls anyway.
From the medical wing three floors up, scientists and guards stuck their heads out of doorways, trying to identify the source of the sound. It was louder than any of the research subjects. Louder than anything they'd ever heard from this building.
Volker's back arched off the floor, his spine bending at an angle that should have snapped it. His hands clawed at the mask, trying to pull it off, but his fingers found no purchase on the smooth porcelain surface. The mask was sinking into his skin, embedding itself, becoming part of him.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
The screaming didn't stop. If anything, it got worse. Volker's vocal cords should have shredded by now, torn apart by the sheer force of the sound, but somehow they held. The scream went on and on, riding a single impossible breath that never seemed to end.
Four seconds.
Five seconds.
Six seconds.
Blood was running from Volker's nose now, from his ears, seeping from the corners of his eyes. The mask was halfway embedded in his face, the white porcelain visible beneath translucent skin that was trying desperately and failing to heal around the foreign object.
Seven seconds.
Eight seconds.
Nine seconds.
The guards in the corridor were backing away, their weapons raised but their hands shaking. Whatever training they'd received, whatever horrors they'd been prepared to face in this building, this was not it. This was something else entirely. This was wrong on a level that bypassed rational thought and went straight to the animal hindbrain that knew when to run.
Ten seconds.
The screaming stopped.
Just like that. Cut off mid-shriek, as if someone had thrown a switch. The silence that followed was somehow worse than the sound had been, because it carried the weight of what had just happened.
Volker's body went limp. Not relaxed. Limp in the specific way that bodies are limp when nothing is living inside them anymore.
Then his eyes opened.
They were his eyes. Same blue color. Same shape. But something behind them had changed fundamentally. The person who had been looking out through those eyes was gone. What remained was something else, wearing his face like a costume, and it knew exactly what it was.
Volker sat up. The movement was smooth, unhurried, completely natural. He looked down at his hands, turned them over, flexed the fingers. Tested his range of motion. Rolled his shoulders. Cracked his neck.
Then he looked at the two blood-covered Major Generals standing in the doorway and gave them a thumbs up.
The gesture was cheerful. Almost jaunty.
"Job done," he said, and his voice was exactly the same as it had been before. Same tone. Same cadence. Nothing to suggest the person speaking was anyone other than Heinrich Volker.
Both Major Generals stared at him.
Then they looked at each other.
Then they looked at the collapsed, empty body on the floor that had been walking around calling itself Nox five minutes ago.
Then they looked back at Volker, who was still giving them a thumbs up, smiling pleasantly.
The color drained from both their faces.
Ralph opened his mouth. No sound came out at first. He tried again, forcing air through vocal cords that didn't want to work.
"AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Axel joined in half a second later, his scream harmonizing with Ralph's in a chorus of pure existential horror.
"AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Volker stood up slowly, brushing concrete dust off his prison uniform like he was cleaning up after a particularly messy lunch. He stretched once, loosening muscles that had been locked up during the procedure, then walked calmly to the cell door. He stepped over the collapsed body on the floor like it was a piece of furniture someone had left in an inconvenient spot and stopped in front of the two screaming Major Generals.
"Guys?" he said over their screaming. "You're getting my new face all wet with blood. That's not great for first impressions."
The screaming continued.
"Also I think one of you peed a little. I can smell it."
From somewhere down the corridor, more guards were running. Footsteps pounding concrete, voices calling questions that had no good answers. The building waking up to the sound of two Major Generals losing their minds in a maximum security cell.
But neither Ralph nor Axel could stop screaming.
Also, they were both completely covered in blood and probably going to need therapy.
"AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The first guard to round the corner took one look at the scene and immediately joined the screaming. His rifle clattered to the floor as he backed away, adding his voice to the chorus of horror.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The second guard made it three steps closer before his brain processed what he was seeing: two blood-soaked Major Generals screaming their lungs out, a cheerful prisoner giving a thumbs up, and a collapsed body on the floor that looked like someone had scooped out everything that made it a person and left just the skin behind.
He bent over and vomited. It splattered across the concrete floor in chunky streams, adding a new smell to the mix of blood and flowers and existential dread.
"Oh come on," Volker said.
"I just got this body. Do you know how hard it is to get vomit smell out of a prison uniform?"
The third guard saw his colleague throwing up, heard the screaming, caught a glimpse of the scene, and immediately contributed his own vomit to the floor. Then he started screaming too.
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
More guards were arriving now, and the pattern repeated itself. Look, scream, vomit. Scream, vomit, look. Vomit, look, scream. The corridor was turning into a symphony of horror, with multiple guards adding their voices and stomach contents to the chaos.
Volker sighed and finally lowered his hand. "Is this gonna be a thing now? Because I have places to be."
I have to vomited too god fucking damnit
The screaming and vomiting continued, echoing through Cell Block D like the world's most disturbing choir practice.