The institution for holding inmates deemed unfit for social life was named Hickory Dickory Dock.
As the sound of her footsteps grew closer, there was an immediate desire to be anywhere but near Greta Andrews.
She was a tall, heavy woman, and her six-foot eight-inch body towered over the unfortunate residents of Hickory in 1966.
Every morning, Ms. Andrews would enter the psychiatric ward to distribute muffins. Her imposing presence made even the toughest patients uneasy in their damp, cold, and dark rooms.
Maggie Magpie, who was twenty-one, was wandering the hall when Greta grabbed her by the neck and said, "I didn't say I wanted to see you. I don't want your darn muffins." Greta lifted Maggie two feet off the ground. "Are you going to eat my muffins?" Greta asked. She then squeezed both of her puffy fists into her eye sockets, which made an unusual squishy sound. When she dropped Maggie, she ran hysterically in shock until her body hit the floor at the end of the hall with a thump. Despite her fall, Greta continued moving forward. The smell of blood was all around, and some was dripping from the ceiling. Now, with Maggie gone, Greta wiped the blood from her hands and fingers.
You could see where the blood had begun to coagulate. "We should have waited," Greta said to herself. She waited for a while, and there were odd gusts of wind coming from the upstairs window. "What are you eating?" asked the tall woman. "A muffin," the boy exclaimed. "It's too hot to argue." The putrid smell emanating from the boy was overwhelming. "It has started to rain," Greta sighed. "I love days like this - just the sound of raindrops on branches, soft thunderclaps, and the feeling of wetness." She liked the way nature looked when it was wet, which is strange coming from a woman who had just demolished Maggie moments earlier.
The sub-zero temperatures were no longer hospitable in the evening, as Squeezeball, the kid living in the east wing, found out. He wouldn't be squeezing any balls anytime soon because his hands had frozen off after getting lost in the frosty pine forest not too far from Hickory. He was eventually found, but by that time it was too late. He had passed stage three.
When frostbite sets in, the cold seeps around the fingers causing them to crystallize. There is nothing you can do. One of Dr. Tsunami's female surgeons had to perform an amputation. Greta Andrews never realized the horror of frostbite. Sadly, this was not the first time that people from Hickory got lost out there.
The water could still be heard pounding hard against the seawall. It is uncertain how the fire broke out that night, but Keepup rushed out of the blazing hospital where almost an entire side was engulfed in flames.
The sirens were now masking the sounds of the angry currents hitting several boats in the harbor, breaking apart the ice and smashing a small boat against the wall, sinking it. As the fire truck arrived, about a dozen men jumped out and started preparing to enter the building. "They're in there, sir! They're stuck on the ninth floor," Keepup stammered to a man with a gruff, trimmed dark brown beard and heavy brows. He pointed to where they were.
"Okay, sir! How many are there?"
"There are many. I don't know. You have to hurry!"
"Here, take this blanket and breathe in some oxygen. We'll get your friends out of there."
"Thank you, sir!"
Eight men went in, but only one came out.
"What happened in there, Rodriguez?" said Lieutenant M. Allen.
"Their all dead."
"What do you mean, they're all dead?" Rodriguez slumped onto the lieutenant's shoulder. "Rodriguez, speak to me, goddammit!" Allen slapped him to keep him from passing out. It was hopeless. Some first-year firefighters walked up. "Men, get him out of here..." "...And go find that scrawny man who was here too," but Keepup had gone. Allen assembled another group of men to enter the inferno.
Antwan, the boy who was left to die in the snow, has now been resurrected from one of the mirrors in the hospital. He stands tall, walking powerfully in black armor. He has a round shield and a sword at his waist. He sees Greta teasing a girl and uses his shield to stop her. Antwan's shield knock blows her twenty feet away. Then Greta comes at him, putting all her weight on him and trying to grab his neck. "You are weak, Antwan. You will always be a Zordaswog," she says. Antwan takes a deep breath and with one powerful burst of energy, he jolts her back forty yards, crushing her through two of the rooms that were cooking. The dead firefighters from the first group are visible, some with their heads torn off by Greta. "You should know by now, Antwan, that you can't escape from Hickory," she says. Then Greta transforms into a coyote and lunges at Antwan, but he throws her off. The coyote sprints down the dilapidated hall with dangling light fixtures. The old paintings in the hall make popping sounds as Antwan moves.
By noon the next day, most of the fire had been extinguished, leaving only smoldering holes where small flames and smoke could still be seen.
Then the arm of a girl popped through the rubble. The flats on every floor could be seen when looking up. Part of the hospital remained intact, while the other part was detached and indistinguishable. This detached part of the hospital formed a dark, amorphous black cloud over it. They thought they had the girl but struggled to free her from the mess.
Greta pulled her back into the hospital and led her up the windy, creaky old stairs. "Eat your muffins, Ariel. You'll make a great Zordaswog..."
"...Soon you will become a robot like the rest, and then a zombie girl," she said as she showed Ariel her muffins.
"Don't these look good to you?"
"No, you sick travesty," Ariel replied.
"Oh, girl. Antwan can't save you now. He doesn't want to marry you. To him, you're just an immature little daddy's girl." Then Greta took out her hatchet and threw it into the wooden door.
"Look at the muffins," she said. The muffins decomposed rapidly in a time-lapse. Suddenly, there was a loud sigh of relief. Arial had escaped!
She had physically healed, but was still struggling with mental illness. The trauma had been too much for her, causing constant nightmares about Greta. Consequently, she had to move in with her friend Vicky.
She went by the name Vick. She was mostly cool and loved to have fun with the firefighters who rescued Arial from that place. She was talking to old Bernstein, a black man who was quickly climbing the ladder. He had a lot of support, but anyway. Vick was trapped in her dream. "Ariel, get out of the elevator," she said. "Pull me up, Vick," Ariel replied. Vick helped her out and noticed that the elevator had tilted somehow. She didn't know it, but none did, the firemen were talking to her dead friend. She drifted off again into her psychosis. "We have to get you out of here," she said in a panicked voice, "the building is going up."
"The Zordaswogs are after us," Ariel said.
"The what?!" Vick exclaimed.
Then they saw towering 6'8" Greta Andrews stomping her way out of the smoke. She was now walking with passion, putting some muscle into her stride with every step.
"Come on, Vicky! We have to run!"
"I can't, Arial. I have dysentery."
"What? Did you soil yourself?"
There was a loud scream on one of the floors above. Greta took her hatchet out of her pink backpack and started scraping the paint off the wall with it. The flames had engulfed half of the second floor, but Greta remained calm.
Greta became angrier as the dead began to rise from the mirrors in all the rooms. They were the people who had lived in the hospital years ago and those who were left to die there. Arial and Vicky descended the stairs but ended up on the thirteenth floor. As they turned a corner, they stumbled upon a giant spider devouring the heads of two women trapped in its web. The floor was dark and filled with excruciating despair. Arial had Vicky fixed in a baby stroller she got on the fifth floor. Today, she was pushing Vicky as hard as the damn cart could go, which wasn't very fast.
The stroller was primitive, but it still rolled perfectly. All the floors seemed to go on forever. We met Elmira Ellsworth in a room where she was sucking her thumb. "I need my bottle," she said in a childlike voice. "Where's my bottle?" It was strange to see her sitting in a demonic posture on an old red sofa. At the age of late fifties, Ms. Ellsworth moaned and started rubbing a silver crucifix on herself. Her long black hair fell over her eerie face as she lifted her black cassock.
"Vicky, would you like to see something?"
"Ignore her, Vicky," said Arial.
"Let's go, girl! She's a Zordaswog."
"They turned into robots before they died and resurrected as zombies. That lady you saw there is not human. She doesn't have emotions of her own."
They closed the door behind them and climbed into bed. "Arial, can you help me lift my legs out of the stroller? My dysentery is really bad."
They closed the door to room CIN before looking at Ms. Ellsworth, who had placed the crucifix between her legs.
"Here you go, Vick. Can I call you Vick?"
"Yeah, that's fine. Let's try to be quiet though."
"I know, okay." Vicky was concerned that they would make noise and the Zordaswogs would hear them.
She always disturbed others when she tried so hard to be quiet. While getting into bed, she accidentally dropped her perfume on the floor. However, it didn't matter because they were both sound asleep within seconds.
It was the longest twenty-three minutes of their young lives before falling asleep. When Vicky woke up, she was lying in the desert.
She could see herself lying there as she floated out of her naked body.
"If I ever have a pet, I'm going to name it 'Meditation' Arial."
A tall man, Dr. Tsunami, walked out of a dark room at the end of the hall. "And in those days of 1966... right, girls?" he realized what the girls were thinking.
"I have a theory, girls," he said. "Nine out of ten people are evil," he continued. "You learned that Keepup was not only evil but also crazy. One day he said, 'Can't you reach the water? You need a stool.' Then he smashed the stool on the ground and said, 'Now run back to your room. Hurry, or I'll catch you. Can't you keep up?'."
Vicky and the firefighters went to see Arial, who was upside down and caught in a spider's web. Greta entered the room and said, "Hi, you handsome men. Would you like to try some of my muffins?".