Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2006-06-19 10:21 am
rionaleonhart) wrote2006-06-19 10:21 am
Entry tags:
That Scrubs/Silent Hill Crossover, Part Three.
The Internet is working again! Hopefully it'll keep working this time.
Anyway, the third part of the Scrubs/Silent Hill crossover, which is starting to really bother me. There's only so much you can put Dr. Cox through without starting to feel like a horrible person. I love Scrubs because it is wonderful and hilarious and why the hell have I thrown it into Silent Hill?
Spoilers, as always, for 'My Screwup' and 'My Lunch'.
Part One
Part Two
“Where are we going, anyway?” Ben asked as they walked through far-too-similar foggy streets.
“I don’t know.”
“Ah. Cool.” Their footsteps echoed unnervingly off the buildings around them in the near-silence. Dr. Cox was absolutely convinced that, without Ben here, he would have gone completely insane within five minutes of encountering the first bizarre creature, let alone the fourth.
Of course, it was perfectly possible that he had gone completely insane already. He was walking through an abandoned, foggy, monster-infested town, with his dead friend at his side, and no real reason for staying there apart from a need to be anywhere but the hospital and – and he was uneasy about considering it, but – there was always the quiet, inescapable fear in the back of his mind that, if he left, the world would become normal again. A world with no monsters – but no Ben.
There were some things he was willing to sacrifice his safety for.
The pager suddenly went off again, making him jump. Ben giggled at his reaction, and Dr. Cox gave him a half-hearted glare.
“Don’t suppose there’s any chance of that being you, is there?” he asked, looking down at it. The screen was still blank. “Why the hell does it keep going off?”
“Not unless I’ve got some kind of psychic-paging superpower, which would pretty much make me the worst superhero ever. It’s probably one of the people from the hospital, isn’t it?” Ben asked, craning over his shoulder to see it.
“Can’t be. We’re too far away.” Dr. Cox frowned, tilting it. “Is this in range of anybody? Are the monsters trying to page me?”
“Well,” Ben said, looking down the street, “you can ask them. There’s one right here.”
“Oh, isn’t that just fantastic?” Dr. Cox groaned, squinting through the fog. For God’s sake, he was already getting bored of being attacked by skinless monsters. He supposed it would probably be funny in retrospect.
If he ever got out of here.
“You could just run away,” Ben suggested.
“Do you honestly think I’d be able to stay sane knowing that they’re still out there, waiting to get me?”
“There are more of them anyway. It wouldn’t really make much difference.”
Dr. Cox ignored him, tightening his grip on the knife as he cautiously approached the twitching creature. It was true that he hated the idea of these things hiding out there in the fog, but there was also a bizarre satisfaction in killing them that he couldn’t deny.
He tried not to think about it, and plunged the knife into its chest.
The creature twisted and flailed and lunged at him, but he managed to avoid its attacks and stabbed it again and again. Eventually it collapsed, with a high-pitched, unremitting scream. There was an uncomfortable silence when it eventually stopped, broken only by the beeping of Dr. Cox’s pager.
“They’re probably the transplant patients trying to take revenge on me,” Dr. Cox muttered, eyeing the pager and wondering whether it would shut up if he just slammed it against a wall, and then gave an oddly forced laugh. “I don’t know whether to feel glad that they’re getting the chance to torment me for what I did or guilty because I just keep killing them again.” He was only half-joking.
“I don’t see why they’d want revenge when you were only trying to help them,” Ben said. “And anyway, I don’t think dead people turn up again all that often. They’re probably just, y’know, regular hideous monsters.”
“I thought you were dead,” Dr. Cox pointed out, after a split-second hesitation.
Ben looked confused for a moment, and then laughed. “Oh, yeah. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d expect to forget.” He crouched, inspecting the body of the monster. “I’m not like these things, though.”
There was a brief silence.
“...is it supposed to twitch like that?”
And then it slithered across the tarmac and flung itself at Dr. Cox.
The next thing he was aware of was of lying on his back in the road, staring up into the fog and breathing raggedly. It took him a moment to realise that he was still alive, that Ben had managed to force the creature off him. It was lying next to him without moving, its head at an odd angle – for a human, at least; he wasn’t sure whether these creatures even had neckbones to snap – and the pager had finally fallen silent (and he was beginning to notice a pattern here, which made – well, about as much sense as everything else that had happened so far), and Ben – Ben was laughing now, which – wasn’t exactly how Dr. Cox would have reacted, but –
“Sorry,” Ben gasped, still laughing. “It’s – the way it threw itself at you, it – scary as hell, but it – it was pretty funny.” He managed to compose himself. “No more laughing when you almost get killed. I promise.”
“...thanks,” Dr. Cox said, slightly stunned. There was a pain in his abdomen, and the lower part of his shirt was stained with blood, but he seemed mostly unharmed – the cut was shallow, but in the perfect place for the monster to rip out his kidneys if Ben hadn’t stepped in before it had the chance. “For, uh. For the saving my life thing. Not the promising not to laugh. Laughing’s okay.” He tried to sit up and inhaled sharply through his clenched teeth. “Ow.”
At some point during the struggle he had convulsively seized the creature’s wrist – was still gripping it, so tightly that his entire arm was shaking. He dropped it as soon as he realised. It had felt slick and rubber-like, and he could see the marks of his fingers indented into the flesh.
“Hey,” Ben said, grinning despite his exhaustion, “it’s only fair after you saved me.”
“When was that?” Dr. Cox asked with a sidelong glance at him, as he dragged himself painfully to his feet.
“Noticing the leukaemia thing?” he said, raising his eyebrows, and then placed a hand over his heart, mock-offended. “You don’t remember my cancer? I’m hurt.”
...of course it had been that. How had he forgotten?
“Probably be dead by now if you hadn’t been there,” Ben said quietly, looking out into the fog. Something about that struck Dr. Cox as odd, but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
-
JD was pretty sure from the moment he walked into it that the place Dr. Cox had gone to wasn’t going to make his Top Five list of towns. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, the roads were cracked, the outsides of the buildings were dirty – it looked completely abandoned, and the watery sunlight was doing a little to reassure him, but it was still creepy. If Dr. Cox had wanted to be alone, he guessed he’d found the right place.
Of course, if Dr. Cox had wanted to be alone, he should probably have killed JD before he set out. It was too late now.
-
“Okay, Ben,” Dr. Cox suggested idly as he walked past the entrance to Rosewater Park for the fifth time, “fun as it is to wander around in circles and get attacked by these things, do you think maybe we should actually try going somewhere?” Like, say, somewhere that isn’t Hell on Earth?, he almost added, but he felt oddly compelled to stay in the town. There was something he was forgetting, he was sure of it. “You were here before me, weren’t you? Do you know your way around?”
There was no answer, and he realised with a horrible creeping slowness that he was alone.
“...Ben?”
He looked around, and then began to slowly retrace his steps. The streets here all looked identical, and the fog seemed somehow thicker than before, and his footsteps sounded so much louder when he was alone. He kept going, trying not to think about what he would do if he had lost him, if one of the monsters –
– and then Ben leapt out at him from an alleyway with an impressive imitation of the hideous screeching of the monsters, and Dr. Cox barely managed to stop himself from attacking him with the knife before starting to laugh uncontrollably.
“You know, Ben,” he managed eventually, “I’m much less likely to kill you if you don’t do that.”
“It was worth it.” Ben tried to mimic Dr. Cox’s shocked expression. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”
Something about this was wrong, kept nagging at the back of Dr. Cox’s mind, but he didn’t care because Ben was there with him.
-
Okay, the good news was that JD had finally managed to track his sort-of-mentor-but-not-really-anymore down after three patients died on him and he ran off to an abandoned creepy town.
The bad news was that said sort-of-mentor had clearly gone crazy and was now alternating between yelling at him about monsters and talking to someone who wasn’t there.
At least he’d found him, though. That was a start.
“Right, Newbie,” Dr. Cox said, walking towards him and crossing his arms across his chest. “Seeing as you’ve been kind enough to join me in a town so hellish and horrible that it could only have been created by my ex-wife herself, I’m going to have to ask you exactly what it is that you did to piss her off.”
“I followed you here,” JD said. “I know that you’re still blaming yourself for what happened, but – ”
Dr. Cox gave an odd, forced laugh. “You’re telling me that you’re here because of me? So if you get killed, it’ll be my fault. Another death on my record. Yeah, that’s exactly what I need right now.”
“Dr. Cox – ”
“Newbie,” he said, looking directly into his eyes. “I can’t go back there. Hell, the monsters couldn’t drive me out of this place, what makes you think you can?”
“You have to – monsters?”
“Those slimy things that – for God’s sake, Newbie, have you been walking around with your eyes closed? The monsters are all over the place.”
“There aren’t any – look, it’s not important. You have to come back to the hospital. What are you doing here?”
“He’s got a point,” Ben said. “If you only came here because of me, why aren’t you leaving? Aren’t there people you need to be looking after back at the hospital or something?”
Dr. Cox didn’t look at him. “I can’t go back to the hospital. I killed three people. If I go back, I might make another mistake.”
“That’s stupid. I don’t know much about this stuff, but I’m pretty sure rabies isn’t the kind of thing you’d normally check your donors for.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. I wouldn’t be able to work like this. Hell, it’s all I can do just to stay on my feet.”
“Well,” Ben said, after a pause, “you don’t have to go back there, but maybe you could at least go someplace that isn’t trying to kill you all the time.”
Dr. Cox looked at him. There was a part of him that felt that he should stay here, that this was a fitting punishment for what he had done, but there was also a part of him that wasn’t an idiot.
“Yeah, okay,” he said eventually. “Let’s go.”
-
“Thanks for sticking with me,” Dr. Cox said quietly, as they walked along the path out of the town. “I – really needed you here.”
In spite of the situation, JD couldn’t help grinning. Getting a sincere expression of thanks from Dr. Cox almost made all of this worth it. “Well, y’know, I couldn’t just let you run away, and – ”
Dr. Cox looked at him, his eyebrows raised. “Wasn’t talking to you there, Lizzy.” He turned back to the empty space beside him. “Don’t mind her, she’s just so obsessed with me that she’d naturally assume that I’m always talking to her.” He said nothing for a moment, still looking to his side, and then laughed. “I think you’re onto something there. Maybe – oh, God, I knew this seemed too easy.”
-
He wasn’t really surprised. In a way, he’d kind of expected this.
“What do you think, Ben?” he asked, staring into the chasm with his arms folded.
“Ben’s not a girl’s name,” JD pointed out. Dr. Cox looked over at him in disbelief.
“Great, Newbie’s lost it. Ben? Did you see another way out?”
Ben shrugged. “Nah. Hey, JD, which way did you come in?”
“Why’ve we stopped?”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s got something to do with that big hole in the road. Why are you ignoring me?”
JD said nothing, keeping his eyes on Dr. Cox. Ben shifted his weight from foot to foot impatiently.
“Okay, I know I freaked you out a bit with that stuff about my sisters, but that was years ago, and if you’re still not over it – ”
“Wait,” Dr. Cox said, trying to keep his voice quiet enough for JD not to hear. “He doesn’t seem to know you’re here – he could be delusional.” He paused. “...for two years, I thought you’d died. I thought you’d forgotten to check up on your leukaemia, and – but that can’t have happened, because you’re here.”
“So you went crazy for me. That’s sweet.” He looked at JD. “So, uh, there was some kind of group hallucination thing? You think he thinks I’m dead?”
“I don’t know. This place could probably do some weird things to his impressionable young Newbie mind.”
Ben said nothing for a moment. “...you feel that you’ve forgotten something?”
Dr. Cox frowned. “...yeah, kind of.” He tilted his head, thinking. “...must be your cancer. We’ve got to check up on it. I’m not going to lose you again.” He began to walk quickly back the way they had come. JD hurried to keep up.
“Where are we going?”
“The hospital.”
“But it’s the other way.”
“Oh yes, of course, I had forgotten how to get to the building that controls my life. I’m sorry, Karen, I just don’t have time to figure out how to get out of here.”
“We were on the way out just then,” JD protested, confused, but Dr. Cox kept talking over him.
“I saw a hospital here earlier on – it’s probably abandoned, but it might have some working equipment, and we need to test Ben as soon as possible because we don’t know how bad his leukaemia is.”
JD stopped walking. Dr. Cox turned around and glared at him.
“Come on.”
“Dr. Cox – ” JD hesitated. “Dr. Cox, Ben – he died two years ago. I saw him – you went to his funeral.” He paused. “...I think you’re delusional.”
Dr. Cox stared at him for a moment longer, and then laughed too loudly and carried on walking.
-
Brookhaven Hospital was dark and cold and shadowy, and JD’s quiet breathing was so unnerving in the total silence that Dr. Cox was almost tempted to stop him from doing it. Ben was so quiet that he was finding it difficult to remember that he was there, and something about that bothered him.
“Come on, Ben, you’re supposed to be clumsy,” he said when the silence got too much for him, keeping his voice low and quiet without quite knowing why. “Can’t you crash into a wall or something, just so we can have some normalcy here?” He pushed open a door and glanced around – it was difficult to see in the darkness, but it seemed to be some kind of office, the wallpaper peeling and the desk rotting. Nothing interesting. He let it swing shut again. “You know, I never would’ve thought that it was possible, but I think that we may actually have been lucky enough to come across a hospital that I hate even more than Sacred Heart.”
The pager crackled loudly and started to beep again. He glanced automatically down at it, and then groaned and began slamming his head rhythmically against the nearest wall.
“Dr. Cox?” JD asked, concerned.
“Okay, Newbie, I’m sure you’ve been looking forward to this, and now you actually get to meet one of those hideous monsters that I’ve been telling you so much about. Lots of fun, right? If you want to stay out of its way and somehow manage not to get killed, well, that’d be fantastic.”
JD looked confused, but Dr. Cox was too busy focusing on the faceless creature stumbling towards them to repeat himself. It had the same slimy, skinless appearance as the knife-wielding things that he had encountered outside, but it seemed larger – almost as tall as he was, he thought, although it was difficult to tell with its erratic gait – and wore a tattered, bloodstained long coat that might once have been white. He couldn’t see a weapon, and at this range there probably wasn’t much that it could do, but he wasn’t planning to stick around long enough to find out whether it was dangerous.
“Are you going to fight it?” Ben asked quietly in his ear, and he started and whipped around, always keeping one eye on the advancing thing.
“Do you have to sneak up on me like that? Seriously, Ben, I think this place can finish me off on its own without you giving me a heart attack.”
“What are you talking about?” JD asked, confused and frustrated and becoming increasingly alarmed. “Can’t you just do whatever you need to do so we can go home?” He tried to push past them and carry on down the corridor – towards the monster, the idiot – but Dr. Cox held him back.
“Can’t you stop trying to get yourself killed?” He was suddenly very aware of how exhausted he was. “Look, I don’t think I can fight this thing right now, so what do you say we head upstairs and find someplace to hide?” He turned and started walking back to where he remembered seeing a stairway, followed by Ben, a very bewildered JD and – a little way back – the creature. He wasn’t particularly worried about it – the things moved so slowly that outpacing them was not exactly taxing – but something about that white-coated thing made him feel sick when he looked at it, and he had a feeling that JD was going to do something incredibly stupid if he let him wander around near the monsters.
He had to give the kid credit for not panicking, though. It seemed that he might have had more stones than he’d thought.
Of course, that brief moment of something that might actually have been a tiny bit like respect was destroyed almost as soon as it was created, when they were standing in a claustrophobic room on the second floor.
“What do you mean, you couldn’t see it?”
“I don’t know! It was dark!”
“It wasn’t that dark. For God’s sake, Newbie, you should at least have been able to hear it, even with the pager going off.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” he said, clearly trying very hard not to back away. “And, um, your pager couldn’t have gone off, could it? We’re not in range.”
“No,” Dr. Cox explained, very slowly and patiently in his I’m-being-very-very-calm-right-now-because-I-am-placating-myself-with-thoughts-of-how-I-am-going-to-kill-you-in-five-seconds voice, “but the pager isn’t going off because people are paging me. It’s telling me when there are those monsters nearby. The ones that you can’t see.”
JD blinked. “...how?”
He groaned and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t know. All I know is that those things are trying to kill me, and if you can’t tell they’re there because you’re apparently devoid of senses as well as sense, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder trying to keep them from killing you as well.”
Part Four.
Anyway, the third part of the Scrubs/Silent Hill crossover, which is starting to really bother me. There's only so much you can put Dr. Cox through without starting to feel like a horrible person. I love Scrubs because it is wonderful and hilarious and why the hell have I thrown it into Silent Hill?
Spoilers, as always, for 'My Screwup' and 'My Lunch'.
Part One
Part Two
“Where are we going, anyway?” Ben asked as they walked through far-too-similar foggy streets.
“I don’t know.”
“Ah. Cool.” Their footsteps echoed unnervingly off the buildings around them in the near-silence. Dr. Cox was absolutely convinced that, without Ben here, he would have gone completely insane within five minutes of encountering the first bizarre creature, let alone the fourth.
Of course, it was perfectly possible that he had gone completely insane already. He was walking through an abandoned, foggy, monster-infested town, with his dead friend at his side, and no real reason for staying there apart from a need to be anywhere but the hospital and – and he was uneasy about considering it, but – there was always the quiet, inescapable fear in the back of his mind that, if he left, the world would become normal again. A world with no monsters – but no Ben.
There were some things he was willing to sacrifice his safety for.
The pager suddenly went off again, making him jump. Ben giggled at his reaction, and Dr. Cox gave him a half-hearted glare.
“Don’t suppose there’s any chance of that being you, is there?” he asked, looking down at it. The screen was still blank. “Why the hell does it keep going off?”
“Not unless I’ve got some kind of psychic-paging superpower, which would pretty much make me the worst superhero ever. It’s probably one of the people from the hospital, isn’t it?” Ben asked, craning over his shoulder to see it.
“Can’t be. We’re too far away.” Dr. Cox frowned, tilting it. “Is this in range of anybody? Are the monsters trying to page me?”
“Well,” Ben said, looking down the street, “you can ask them. There’s one right here.”
“Oh, isn’t that just fantastic?” Dr. Cox groaned, squinting through the fog. For God’s sake, he was already getting bored of being attacked by skinless monsters. He supposed it would probably be funny in retrospect.
If he ever got out of here.
“You could just run away,” Ben suggested.
“Do you honestly think I’d be able to stay sane knowing that they’re still out there, waiting to get me?”
“There are more of them anyway. It wouldn’t really make much difference.”
Dr. Cox ignored him, tightening his grip on the knife as he cautiously approached the twitching creature. It was true that he hated the idea of these things hiding out there in the fog, but there was also a bizarre satisfaction in killing them that he couldn’t deny.
He tried not to think about it, and plunged the knife into its chest.
The creature twisted and flailed and lunged at him, but he managed to avoid its attacks and stabbed it again and again. Eventually it collapsed, with a high-pitched, unremitting scream. There was an uncomfortable silence when it eventually stopped, broken only by the beeping of Dr. Cox’s pager.
“They’re probably the transplant patients trying to take revenge on me,” Dr. Cox muttered, eyeing the pager and wondering whether it would shut up if he just slammed it against a wall, and then gave an oddly forced laugh. “I don’t know whether to feel glad that they’re getting the chance to torment me for what I did or guilty because I just keep killing them again.” He was only half-joking.
“I don’t see why they’d want revenge when you were only trying to help them,” Ben said. “And anyway, I don’t think dead people turn up again all that often. They’re probably just, y’know, regular hideous monsters.”
“I thought you were dead,” Dr. Cox pointed out, after a split-second hesitation.
Ben looked confused for a moment, and then laughed. “Oh, yeah. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d expect to forget.” He crouched, inspecting the body of the monster. “I’m not like these things, though.”
There was a brief silence.
“...is it supposed to twitch like that?”
And then it slithered across the tarmac and flung itself at Dr. Cox.
The next thing he was aware of was of lying on his back in the road, staring up into the fog and breathing raggedly. It took him a moment to realise that he was still alive, that Ben had managed to force the creature off him. It was lying next to him without moving, its head at an odd angle – for a human, at least; he wasn’t sure whether these creatures even had neckbones to snap – and the pager had finally fallen silent (and he was beginning to notice a pattern here, which made – well, about as much sense as everything else that had happened so far), and Ben – Ben was laughing now, which – wasn’t exactly how Dr. Cox would have reacted, but –
“Sorry,” Ben gasped, still laughing. “It’s – the way it threw itself at you, it – scary as hell, but it – it was pretty funny.” He managed to compose himself. “No more laughing when you almost get killed. I promise.”
“...thanks,” Dr. Cox said, slightly stunned. There was a pain in his abdomen, and the lower part of his shirt was stained with blood, but he seemed mostly unharmed – the cut was shallow, but in the perfect place for the monster to rip out his kidneys if Ben hadn’t stepped in before it had the chance. “For, uh. For the saving my life thing. Not the promising not to laugh. Laughing’s okay.” He tried to sit up and inhaled sharply through his clenched teeth. “Ow.”
At some point during the struggle he had convulsively seized the creature’s wrist – was still gripping it, so tightly that his entire arm was shaking. He dropped it as soon as he realised. It had felt slick and rubber-like, and he could see the marks of his fingers indented into the flesh.
“Hey,” Ben said, grinning despite his exhaustion, “it’s only fair after you saved me.”
“When was that?” Dr. Cox asked with a sidelong glance at him, as he dragged himself painfully to his feet.
“Noticing the leukaemia thing?” he said, raising his eyebrows, and then placed a hand over his heart, mock-offended. “You don’t remember my cancer? I’m hurt.”
...of course it had been that. How had he forgotten?
“Probably be dead by now if you hadn’t been there,” Ben said quietly, looking out into the fog. Something about that struck Dr. Cox as odd, but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was.
JD was pretty sure from the moment he walked into it that the place Dr. Cox had gone to wasn’t going to make his Top Five list of towns. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, the roads were cracked, the outsides of the buildings were dirty – it looked completely abandoned, and the watery sunlight was doing a little to reassure him, but it was still creepy. If Dr. Cox had wanted to be alone, he guessed he’d found the right place.
Of course, if Dr. Cox had wanted to be alone, he should probably have killed JD before he set out. It was too late now.
“Okay, Ben,” Dr. Cox suggested idly as he walked past the entrance to Rosewater Park for the fifth time, “fun as it is to wander around in circles and get attacked by these things, do you think maybe we should actually try going somewhere?” Like, say, somewhere that isn’t Hell on Earth?, he almost added, but he felt oddly compelled to stay in the town. There was something he was forgetting, he was sure of it. “You were here before me, weren’t you? Do you know your way around?”
There was no answer, and he realised with a horrible creeping slowness that he was alone.
“...Ben?”
He looked around, and then began to slowly retrace his steps. The streets here all looked identical, and the fog seemed somehow thicker than before, and his footsteps sounded so much louder when he was alone. He kept going, trying not to think about what he would do if he had lost him, if one of the monsters –
– and then Ben leapt out at him from an alleyway with an impressive imitation of the hideous screeching of the monsters, and Dr. Cox barely managed to stop himself from attacking him with the knife before starting to laugh uncontrollably.
“You know, Ben,” he managed eventually, “I’m much less likely to kill you if you don’t do that.”
“It was worth it.” Ben tried to mimic Dr. Cox’s shocked expression. “I wish I’d brought my camera.”
Something about this was wrong, kept nagging at the back of Dr. Cox’s mind, but he didn’t care because Ben was there with him.
Okay, the good news was that JD had finally managed to track his sort-of-mentor-but-not-really-anymore down after three patients died on him and he ran off to an abandoned creepy town.
The bad news was that said sort-of-mentor had clearly gone crazy and was now alternating between yelling at him about monsters and talking to someone who wasn’t there.
At least he’d found him, though. That was a start.
“Right, Newbie,” Dr. Cox said, walking towards him and crossing his arms across his chest. “Seeing as you’ve been kind enough to join me in a town so hellish and horrible that it could only have been created by my ex-wife herself, I’m going to have to ask you exactly what it is that you did to piss her off.”
“I followed you here,” JD said. “I know that you’re still blaming yourself for what happened, but – ”
Dr. Cox gave an odd, forced laugh. “You’re telling me that you’re here because of me? So if you get killed, it’ll be my fault. Another death on my record. Yeah, that’s exactly what I need right now.”
“Dr. Cox – ”
“Newbie,” he said, looking directly into his eyes. “I can’t go back there. Hell, the monsters couldn’t drive me out of this place, what makes you think you can?”
“You have to – monsters?”
“Those slimy things that – for God’s sake, Newbie, have you been walking around with your eyes closed? The monsters are all over the place.”
“There aren’t any – look, it’s not important. You have to come back to the hospital. What are you doing here?”
“He’s got a point,” Ben said. “If you only came here because of me, why aren’t you leaving? Aren’t there people you need to be looking after back at the hospital or something?”
Dr. Cox didn’t look at him. “I can’t go back to the hospital. I killed three people. If I go back, I might make another mistake.”
“That’s stupid. I don’t know much about this stuff, but I’m pretty sure rabies isn’t the kind of thing you’d normally check your donors for.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. I wouldn’t be able to work like this. Hell, it’s all I can do just to stay on my feet.”
“Well,” Ben said, after a pause, “you don’t have to go back there, but maybe you could at least go someplace that isn’t trying to kill you all the time.”
Dr. Cox looked at him. There was a part of him that felt that he should stay here, that this was a fitting punishment for what he had done, but there was also a part of him that wasn’t an idiot.
“Yeah, okay,” he said eventually. “Let’s go.”
“Thanks for sticking with me,” Dr. Cox said quietly, as they walked along the path out of the town. “I – really needed you here.”
In spite of the situation, JD couldn’t help grinning. Getting a sincere expression of thanks from Dr. Cox almost made all of this worth it. “Well, y’know, I couldn’t just let you run away, and – ”
Dr. Cox looked at him, his eyebrows raised. “Wasn’t talking to you there, Lizzy.” He turned back to the empty space beside him. “Don’t mind her, she’s just so obsessed with me that she’d naturally assume that I’m always talking to her.” He said nothing for a moment, still looking to his side, and then laughed. “I think you’re onto something there. Maybe – oh, God, I knew this seemed too easy.”
He wasn’t really surprised. In a way, he’d kind of expected this.
“What do you think, Ben?” he asked, staring into the chasm with his arms folded.
“Ben’s not a girl’s name,” JD pointed out. Dr. Cox looked over at him in disbelief.
“Great, Newbie’s lost it. Ben? Did you see another way out?”
Ben shrugged. “Nah. Hey, JD, which way did you come in?”
“Why’ve we stopped?”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s got something to do with that big hole in the road. Why are you ignoring me?”
JD said nothing, keeping his eyes on Dr. Cox. Ben shifted his weight from foot to foot impatiently.
“Okay, I know I freaked you out a bit with that stuff about my sisters, but that was years ago, and if you’re still not over it – ”
“Wait,” Dr. Cox said, trying to keep his voice quiet enough for JD not to hear. “He doesn’t seem to know you’re here – he could be delusional.” He paused. “...for two years, I thought you’d died. I thought you’d forgotten to check up on your leukaemia, and – but that can’t have happened, because you’re here.”
“So you went crazy for me. That’s sweet.” He looked at JD. “So, uh, there was some kind of group hallucination thing? You think he thinks I’m dead?”
“I don’t know. This place could probably do some weird things to his impressionable young Newbie mind.”
Ben said nothing for a moment. “...you feel that you’ve forgotten something?”
Dr. Cox frowned. “...yeah, kind of.” He tilted his head, thinking. “...must be your cancer. We’ve got to check up on it. I’m not going to lose you again.” He began to walk quickly back the way they had come. JD hurried to keep up.
“Where are we going?”
“The hospital.”
“But it’s the other way.”
“Oh yes, of course, I had forgotten how to get to the building that controls my life. I’m sorry, Karen, I just don’t have time to figure out how to get out of here.”
“We were on the way out just then,” JD protested, confused, but Dr. Cox kept talking over him.
“I saw a hospital here earlier on – it’s probably abandoned, but it might have some working equipment, and we need to test Ben as soon as possible because we don’t know how bad his leukaemia is.”
JD stopped walking. Dr. Cox turned around and glared at him.
“Come on.”
“Dr. Cox – ” JD hesitated. “Dr. Cox, Ben – he died two years ago. I saw him – you went to his funeral.” He paused. “...I think you’re delusional.”
Dr. Cox stared at him for a moment longer, and then laughed too loudly and carried on walking.
Brookhaven Hospital was dark and cold and shadowy, and JD’s quiet breathing was so unnerving in the total silence that Dr. Cox was almost tempted to stop him from doing it. Ben was so quiet that he was finding it difficult to remember that he was there, and something about that bothered him.
“Come on, Ben, you’re supposed to be clumsy,” he said when the silence got too much for him, keeping his voice low and quiet without quite knowing why. “Can’t you crash into a wall or something, just so we can have some normalcy here?” He pushed open a door and glanced around – it was difficult to see in the darkness, but it seemed to be some kind of office, the wallpaper peeling and the desk rotting. Nothing interesting. He let it swing shut again. “You know, I never would’ve thought that it was possible, but I think that we may actually have been lucky enough to come across a hospital that I hate even more than Sacred Heart.”
The pager crackled loudly and started to beep again. He glanced automatically down at it, and then groaned and began slamming his head rhythmically against the nearest wall.
“Dr. Cox?” JD asked, concerned.
“Okay, Newbie, I’m sure you’ve been looking forward to this, and now you actually get to meet one of those hideous monsters that I’ve been telling you so much about. Lots of fun, right? If you want to stay out of its way and somehow manage not to get killed, well, that’d be fantastic.”
JD looked confused, but Dr. Cox was too busy focusing on the faceless creature stumbling towards them to repeat himself. It had the same slimy, skinless appearance as the knife-wielding things that he had encountered outside, but it seemed larger – almost as tall as he was, he thought, although it was difficult to tell with its erratic gait – and wore a tattered, bloodstained long coat that might once have been white. He couldn’t see a weapon, and at this range there probably wasn’t much that it could do, but he wasn’t planning to stick around long enough to find out whether it was dangerous.
“Are you going to fight it?” Ben asked quietly in his ear, and he started and whipped around, always keeping one eye on the advancing thing.
“Do you have to sneak up on me like that? Seriously, Ben, I think this place can finish me off on its own without you giving me a heart attack.”
“What are you talking about?” JD asked, confused and frustrated and becoming increasingly alarmed. “Can’t you just do whatever you need to do so we can go home?” He tried to push past them and carry on down the corridor – towards the monster, the idiot – but Dr. Cox held him back.
“Can’t you stop trying to get yourself killed?” He was suddenly very aware of how exhausted he was. “Look, I don’t think I can fight this thing right now, so what do you say we head upstairs and find someplace to hide?” He turned and started walking back to where he remembered seeing a stairway, followed by Ben, a very bewildered JD and – a little way back – the creature. He wasn’t particularly worried about it – the things moved so slowly that outpacing them was not exactly taxing – but something about that white-coated thing made him feel sick when he looked at it, and he had a feeling that JD was going to do something incredibly stupid if he let him wander around near the monsters.
He had to give the kid credit for not panicking, though. It seemed that he might have had more stones than he’d thought.
Of course, that brief moment of something that might actually have been a tiny bit like respect was destroyed almost as soon as it was created, when they were standing in a claustrophobic room on the second floor.
“What do you mean, you couldn’t see it?”
“I don’t know! It was dark!”
“It wasn’t that dark. For God’s sake, Newbie, you should at least have been able to hear it, even with the pager going off.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” he said, clearly trying very hard not to back away. “And, um, your pager couldn’t have gone off, could it? We’re not in range.”
“No,” Dr. Cox explained, very slowly and patiently in his I’m-being-very-very-calm-right-now-because-I-am-placating-myself-with-thoughts-of-how-I-am-going-to-kill-you-in-five-seconds voice, “but the pager isn’t going off because people are paging me. It’s telling me when there are those monsters nearby. The ones that you can’t see.”
JD blinked. “...how?”
He groaned and covered his face with his hands. “I don’t know. All I know is that those things are trying to kill me, and if you can’t tell they’re there because you’re apparently devoid of senses as well as sense, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder trying to keep them from killing you as well.”
Part Four.
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I'm not sure if I've commented on this story before, but if I haven't, WOW. I've never seen anything Silent Hill related but the story still...works, somehow.
Also, I love Dr. Cox angst. And JD worry. Also, Ben. :P
Continue soon, please!