Gone Black

Horror Stories

No one knows how it started and no one knows why exactly a hospital in Southern Illinois was shut down and its patients not allowed to leave. In a desperate attempt to save his nephew, Ben Scofield breaks into the hospital only to be confronted by unsettling blackness.

By: Nick Medina

Nick Medina is a young author from Chicago, Illinois. He has been published in print, online and audio formats by magazines, journals and short story anthologies in the United States and the United Kingdom. He hasn’t been writing for very long but the quality of his work is very high. He credits his ability to learn quickly down to the fact he’s always looking to write about anything and everything. He often uses short story prompts in a variety of genres to improve his all-around writing skills. However, his favorite genre is definitely horror.

Click here for a PDF of Gone Black.

Gone Black
By: Nick Medina

Donald Whitley, town treasurer, said he saw one of the victims peering through a window on the fourth floor. He was so shaken by what he saw staring back at him that he could scarcely speak. He tried to draw a sketch of what frightened him, but when he put pen to paper his hand trembled so badly that he couldn’t produce a proper portrait. Eventually he expressed his horror with two words: “Gone black.”

It started six days ago in a hospital south of Springfield, Illinois. No one knows how it started. No one knows why. Some say it’s the result of mutated germs. More paranoid minds blame it on an experimental treatment gone wrong. Whatever the cause, it went undocumented at first. For four days no one knew it was as detrimental as it was. The host – the infected and diseased – crawled from room to room on the intensive care floor changing (converting, infecting, tainting, diseasing, poisoning…all of the above?) the unconscious and unresponsive patients; the ones in medically-induced comas and on respirators. The doctors couldn’t help but notice some of the changes in the comatose patients, but since the ill were unable to walk or talk, the docs didn’t know how bad things really were. They didn’t realize the horror taking place right under their noses until the fifth day when the patients on the third floor, the ones who never had any problems walking or talking, started to crawl.

Local authorities surrounded the hospital after that, sparking rumors that the feds would move in next to burn the place to the ground in order to keep the unknown from spreading. Aside from the doctors, nurses, interns and aides (ignoring the Hippocratic Oath they took) who fled the hospital as soon as they realized they were in danger, the cops let no one in and no one out.

Ben Scofield’s nephew, Danny, thirteen and suffering from leukemia, was on the second floor in the children’s ward with the other convalescing kids when the hospital went into lockdown. That’s why Ben Scofield snuck in on the sixth night.

Hospital smell, a nauseating mix of sick, anti-bacterial cleaning solution and death, converged upon Ben’s nostrils like worms on a corpse when he slunk inside. Darkness ruled the long, tiled corridors. The overhead lights were out – the bulbs busted – but electricity still flowed through the building, which kept the emergency lights from flickering to life. If only Ben had thought to bring a flashlight.

He crept along the corridor, afraid to make too much noise. While he didn’t truly know what Donald Whitley meant when he used the words “gone black” to describe what he saw peering out of the hospital window, Ben understood that it was really bad.

The doors up and down the corridor were closed. Ben sensed no sign of life. He had been to the hospital many times to visit his nephew, but with the pitch-black passageways and the absence of hospital personnel milling about, the wards seemed so much more massive, so much more confusing, so much more ominous.

Ben ducked beneath the dark windows as he navigated his way through the hospital so as not to be spotted by the authorities outside. The silence up and down the empty corridors bothered him most of all because silence meant one of two things to him: fear or death. Either those still trapped inside were too scared to make noise or they weren’t capable of making noise. Either way, the thought caused every hair on Ben’s body to prickle and it made his bladder beg for relief.

The red ring around the elevator button on the wall at the end of the hall seemed brighter to Ben in the darkness. Attracted to the light, he lurched toward it with his index finger outstretched. He stopped himself from pushing the button just as the tip of his finger grazed the cold metal. Not only would the elevator make noise, but it occurred to him that it could be a trap. Who’s to say what lurked on the other side of the encapsulating doors? He turned to his left in search of the stairs instead. The STAIRS sign, hanging by wires from the ceiling, was barely visible in the darkness. Creeping along as cautiously as he could, Ben opened the stairwell door and listened. The silence inside screamed at him. One surviving light bulb, maybe three or four stories up, flickered, casting weak rays of intermittent light down to the ground floor.

Fearful yet resolute, Ben stepped inside and carefully pulled the door closed behind him. He went to take a step, but his nerves and the unease in the pit of his stomach intensified the pain in his bladder. If he kept going he’d ruin his Levi’s, not that he was concerned with the welfare of his jeans. Deciding to keep dry, however, he used the corner of the stairwell as a bathroom, hoping the entire time that whatever was crawling around in the darkness wouldn’t catch him with his hose in his hand.

With the aching alleviated, Ben crept up the first flight of stairs to the door-less landing. He increased his pace to two stairs at a time when he heard something like a sandbag thudding against the stairs overhead. He reached the second story landing just as the source of the thudding came into view; it slumped down the flight of stairs connecting the second and third floors, and suddenly Ben knew exactly what Donald Whitley meant when he uttered the words “gone black.”

“Holy mother,” Ben gasped.

The thing – the former human? – didn’t make a sound although its mouth hung open in a gaping scowl. Ben fell back against the second floor door with his right hand groping for the handle behind him. The thing, one of the unfortunate patient’s from the third floor by the looks of it (it wore a blue hospital gown along with an intravenous catheter, complete with the tube and fluid bag trailing it on the stairs, still taped to its arm), came closer.

Its eyes were wide although no eyeballs looked back at Ben. The sockets were empty – nothing more than enormous black pits. Its mouth, a toothless, tongue-less ebony orifice opened wider. Oddly enough, Ben found himself gawking in wide-eyed horror at how the creature didn’t crawl as much as it dragged itself along with its deformed and elongated arms – easily equaling the entire length of its shrivelled body – and abnormally long, boney fingers.

He’s gone black, Ben thought to himself about the pitiful patient, the poor sap’s gone black!

Ben’s fingers found the door handle behind him at the same instant that the man-morphed-monster raised one of its outlandish limbs. Ben wrenched the door open just enough, and just in time, to escape the monster’s grasp. He held the door closed behind him, sweat seeping down his forehead and face, without thinking about what kind of hell he might have just stepped into on the second floor. He waited, holding the handle in a white-knuckle grip, expecting to feel the monster tugging on the other end, but the force he expected never came. After minutes that felt like endless hours, Ben let go of the handle and headed for the children’s ward.

He stomped his sneakers against the tiled floor in an all-out run, no longer caring how much noise he made. He’d been spotted and that’s all that mattered. He had to find Danny and they had to get away, assuming Danny hadn’t already been found.

In the darkness, Ben saw the glare of the children’s ward window plastered with colorful drawings and paper cutouts. He recognized the black and red flying V guitar Danny had constructed before his thirteenth birthday. It gave him chills to think that the hands that had created the small piece of art might now be freakishly long.

Ben slid to a stop at the end of the hall and tugged on the door there, but the door wouldn’t budge.

“Son of a…!” Ben hollered. He cupped his hands against the window to look inside. Just like the rest of the hospital, the children’s ward was dark except for a few machines that disturbed the blackness with their blinking lights. The sight made Ben sick to his stomach. After all that these children had suffered through – pain that would have had even the most dedicated masochist begging for death – they were left alone by the very people responsible for making them well again. Who were the real monsters? The doctors who had bailed on their patients or the patients who had transformed into something that no one had a name for?

Ben spat the bitter taste of bile from his mouth and reeled around in search of something that would shatter the glass. A wheelchair folded against the wall by the nearest nurses’ station would do the trick. As he reached to grab it, his eyes landed on something else that took his breath away: a woman with normal features.

“Hey,” Ben hollered at the woman lying on the floor beneath the counter of the nurses’ station. Relieved to see another human without black pits for eyes or an unhinged jaw, the absurdity of the woman’s position didn’t immediately occur to him. She was flat on her back, her eyes closed.

“Hey,” Ben said again, dropping to his knees beside her. “Wake up!” He leaned close to read her nametag. “Wendy! I need you to help me.”

He shook her by the shoulders and that’s when he realized that something wasn’t right. Her flesh was cold. Her eyes didn’t open and her lips didn’t move.

“Oh no,” Ben grumbled. He felt for a pulse in her neck though he knew he wouldn’t find one. Despite the absence of blood on her body, Wendy was dead. It didn’t make sense to Ben at first. How could she just be dead when all the rest were changing into something so sickening? Then he saw the syringe hidden between her fingers, the needle still stuck in her side.

“Suicide,” Ben muttered. His hope fading, he turned away from the dead nurse and picked up where he left off. He grabbed the wheelchair by its handles and swung it with all his might at the window that looked in upon the children’s ward. After three blows, a crack spread through the glass. Just as Ben was about to hit it with another good whack, something moved beyond the window, stopping him stock-still. He waited. When minutes passed and nothing else happened, he cupped his hands against the fractured glass and peered inside.

“Danny?” he shrieked. But he didn’t see Danny. He saw something much more terrifying than what he’d seen in the stairwell. Attracted by the noise, children of all ages – toddlers to teenagers – all dressed in tiny gowns and terry robes, dragged themselves out into the open. They were all silent. They were all hideous. They had all gone black.

Ben dropped the wheelchair. His knees almost buckled.

“Danny?” he cried again, his voice cracking this time, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “What the hell’s happened here?” He slid against the wall to the floor where he clutched his knees to his chest and let his head fall limp on his neck.

“I’m so sorry, Dan,” he sobbed. The loss of his nephew, a child that had been to hell and back and to hell again, a child that deserved so much better than pain and misery and a face full of gaping black holes, tore Ben’s heart in half; it rendered him nearly immobile.

Somewhere not too far down the corridor the squeak of door hinges sounded, sending an ear-splitting screech through the stifling silence. Although he heard the noise, Ben didn’t lift his head. If the monsters were coming for him then he didn’t want to see. Instead of prodigious palms slapping against the floor, however, another noise met his ears.

“Ben?” the voice said, and Ben knew who it belonged to.

“Danny?” he shrieked.

“Ben!” Danny shouted. With only nine years separating the two, they were more like brothers – Danny never called Ben “uncle.”

Ben pulled himself to his feet and threw himself at the frail boy.

“They’ve all mutated into monsters,” Danny uttered, his voice a mixture of shock and despair.

“You’re the only one left?” Ben asked.

“They all…killed themselves,” Danny said. “They wanted me to do it too.” He put his hand in the pocket of his robe and withdrew a fully loaded syringe.

“What’s inside?”

“I don’t know.”

Ben tore the syringe from Danny’s hand and hurled it down the hall. “Thank God you didn’t use it. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Danny swallowed hard. “There’s no way out,” he said.
“I got in, didn’t I?”

“But how? They won’t let anyone out. They want us to die here.”

“There’re guards at every one of the doors,” Ben agreed, “but there’s no one by the loading docks…at least there wasn’t,” he said, flashing an uneasy smile to reassure the boy although he couldn’t reassure himself. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Ben grabbed Danny’s atrophied upper arm, being careful not to squeeze too hard, and pulled him back toward the stairs.

“They’re everywhere,” Danny whispered. His wide eyes, set over sunken cheeks, roamed the halls for the horrors he had lived with during the past two days.

“They won’t get us,” Ben said even though he didn’t completely believe that himself. He put a finger to his lips, indicating that he needed Danny to be quiet, when they reached the end of the hall and he was once again faced with choosing the elevator or the stairs.

Still wary about confining himself inside a virtually inescapable box, Ben tiptoed to the stairwell and pressed his ear against the door. Silence. Why the hell were these things so quiet? Ben waved for Danny to stand back before opening the door. Opening it was like opening Pandora’s Box just a crack. An oversized hand, long, boney, pale and bulging with veins, shot past the doorframe in pursuit of Ben’s ankles. Danny screamed. Ben threw his weight against the door. He could feel the bones in the monster’s arm explode like the exoskeleton of a beetle under a boot.

“Elevator!” Ben barked.

Danny smacked the button on the wall and the machine came to life. The glowing digits above the elevator doors indicated that the lift had been stopped and waiting at the sixth floor.

“Come on,” Ben groaned, bouncing on the balls of his heels in anxious anticipation of the elevator.

“Ben,” Danny said in an empty whisper. He tugged on the tail of his uncle’s shirt.

When Ben turned around he saw what took Danny’s breath away. Coming down the corridor, dragging its shriveled shape straight toward them, was another patient gone black; this one covered in scar tissue from third-degree burns.

Ben swatted his hand against the elevator button several times in a row as though pressing the button again and again would communicate to the machine that lives were on the line.

“Come on,” he urged the lift. His eyes bounced back and forth from the numbers overhead to the monster gaining on them.

“Ben?” Danny pleaded.

“We’re gonna make it,” Ben insisted.

The number 4 flashed overhead. The monster’s flesh squeaked against the waxed floor. The number 3 lit up. The monster reached the end of the hall, its empty expression never changing, its speed never increasing. It advanced at its own pace, confident that it would get what it wanted.

“Ben!” Danny’s voice quavered, he tugged harder on his uncle’s shirt.

“It’s gonna be all right,” he said, putting a reassuring hand on Danny’s shoulder. “We’re gonna make it.”

The worst part of it wasn’t the fear of knowing what would become of them if the monster caught up; the worst was that the damn thing didn’t make a sound. It just stared with its empty eyes and its cavernous mouth as it came closer. It didn’t shriek or growl or hiss like the otherworldly oddities in the movies. It was utterly silent, which made it all the more unnerving.

Danny tried one last time to pull Ben away from the elevator just as the monster lunged and the elevator dinged, the doors mercifully rolling open. At that, Ben scooped Danny up in his arms, and together they fell backward into the elevator. The monster fell short in its attack. Ben hit the floor hard, causing the elevator to bob on its cables. Danny trembled in Ben’s arms.

“Close, damn you!” Ben hollered at the elevator doors. But they didn’t close, and the monster crept closer.

“No!” Ben screamed. He kicked the creature right in its extended jaw, but it was too late. The thing had already touched one of its extra-long limbs to Danny’s bare skin. It retreated, satisfied, just as the elevator doors closed.

“Danny?” Ben said, his voice shaking beyond his control. “Are you okay?”

Danny’s head bobbed as he turned to face Ben. He, however, wasn’t nodding to reassure his uncle. His eyes were gone. His mouth hung open against his chest. Ben screamed upon trying to separate himself from the monster in his arms, but he had nowhere to go.

The muscles in Danny’s torso contracted and his tongue disappeared somewhere down his throat just as he tapped a far-reaching finger against his uncle’s temple. By the time the elevator descended to the ground floor and the doors rolled open again, Danny and Ben had both gone black.