As Mortuus returned to the bunker, he couldn't help but feel a sense of relief wash over him. It wasn't like he had money to repair the damages done by The Sticher. With a quick push, he parted the tarp and confidently entered. It could have been a better replacement door, but it did the job.
Mortuus walked down the bunker hall, his boots loudly tapping the floors with a heavy sound. It echoed through the bunker and seemed to fill the hollow emptiness.
He stopped in front of the battered doorway of the main room, his eyes wandering through despite being covered. It was the place he didn't go to; the image of Mordecai's body in there was too damaging.
He sighed and walked into a room down the hall from it. A sign on the door read, "Subject E-5." Next to it was an old, tattered clipboard with sunbleached notes. The notes said something about a seventeen-year-old kid, but that was about all he could make out of the notes.
He never harbored an understanding of the room's significance but felt connected to it. He never knew that, at one point, his body was being held there and that he was that young man. Then again, he wasn't alive at the time, just a mangled corpse.
He didn't know that the reason for all the needles in that room was from when Mordecai was stitching Mortuus's face back together. Something he wasn't ready to know was that his disfigured face that repulsed even demons was, at one point, even worse.
He sat on the bed and opened his drawer to put Mrs. Middleton's tin in it. He had several other containers of THC oils in the drawer.
As he placed the tin down, a shine from the back of the drawer caught his eye. "What's that?" He questioned, never having noticed it before now. Had it always been there?
Mortuus grabbed it with an unsteady hand, unsure if he wanted to know. It was a necklace with a gold pendant. Something about it felt unnervingly familiar, and the small flakes of red on the necklace's shiny metal seemed to intrigue him further.
He suddenly found himself being pulled into another intense hallucination as he held onto the object. It popped open and revealed a blood-stained photo of a girl and a boy. Was this Peter and Maria?
Even though his name was revealed as Peter Morgan, his soul was still shattered, just as Death had heralded. And as long as his soul remained that way, the hallucinations would continue to happen.
As he gazed intently, the elusive outline of a youthful man and a girl gradually came into view. Their figures were ghostly grey outlined in a whitish hue, while their eyes were glowing with their respective colors—the boy's green and the girl's blue.
"Do you like it, Maria?" The ghostly man asked the apparition girl. She smiled sweetly, the area around them seeming to radiate with her positive emotions.
Mortuus could see the blush on her cheeks, even in her pale appearance.
At one point, the necklace had been hers, but now it was a painful reminder of her fatal bullet wound and Mortuus's own death. It was tragic enough that both of them were dead, but what made it worse was that the boy was only seen as a killer.
Even after Peter's death, everyone believed he'd killed her. A statement that led him deeper into his depression, and now as, Mortuus still seemed to follow. It didn't matter that he was innocent; the world had decided, and it wasn't going to change.
Mortuus could feel himself descending more as the two ghosts conversed, and it wasn't the first time he'd fallen into a memory. This one seemed to sting more than the others, with its joyful essence that couldn't remain.
Without even looking, he knew that vines were creeping along the floor, blending into the background- The same vines that had taken over Micheal. Mortuus felt them, and their presence was toxic and unbearable.
He padded toward the two, the man falling to ash and blowing away while the girl remained frozen in motion. She stood there as if time had suddenly stopped. The vines were wrapped around her legs and pulsing with life.
"Maria?" Mortuus asked softly, his bandaged hand resting against her cheek. Her skin was soft and smooth like silk. A faint smell of honey and lavender was filling his nose as he stared into her beautiful ocean eyes.
As he looked at her, he felt something in his chest. The pain he felt was not the typical sharp pain. It was an airy feeling.
The feeling was so unfamiliar that he was taken aback and stumbled backward in shock. His hand clenched the gold pendant to his chest.
"What's happening to me?" he pondered, his hand clutching the necklace as if for dear life as he grabbed at his chest. "My heart feels high."
As he stumbled, he fell backward, the ground turning to dust below him. He fell, the darkness swallowing him as he neared the bottom. Mortuus awoke in a cold sweat as he hit the ground, sitting up like a stiffened corpse.
He could feel the cold touch of a blade's metal as he sat there.
His bandages were strewn about the room, and it looked like a tornado had crashed through it. Blood soaked the room like grotesque rain. Its red stains seemed to scream against the white walls. Shards of glass glistened in the blood like diamonds.
Most of the blood was dried, but some still dripped down the walls.
He had been like that for a while, but how long was unknown. Mortuus tore the knife from his wrist vein. At this point, pulling a deeply embedded knife from his skin had become second nature.
The blood dripped steadily from the blade and into a pool on the ground. Dozens of cuts and stab wounds fed blood into the pool- A grizzly sight but not an unusual one for him.57Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfCyuJ1lUVQ
