Chen Ge carefully examined the paper bags on the counter, his expression growing more somber by the second. He rubbed the names written on the bags with his fingers and finally spotted the problem.
Several of the bags still had ink that hadn't fully dried — the names on them had just been written!
He whipped his head around and swept his gaze across the nurses' station. There was no obstruction, no place anyone could be hiding.
"Whoever prepared these meds has to be nearby. They haven't gone far — they just stepped out for the moment." Chen Ge wasn't sure whether the other party had noticed him, so he grew even more cautious. He climbed over the nurses' counter and slipped into the ward directly across from it.
He left the door cracked open and stood in the doorway, watching the corridor.
"The names on those bags were just written. The pills might be freshly prepared. Who on earth would be doing something like this in the middle of the night?" A few names had already formed in Chen Ge's mind. The prime suspect was the deformed face — before he'd become a patient in a mental hospital, he'd been a doctor. And judging by what he'd done to Chen Ge's own father, this person was vindictive to the extreme.
"Could he have prepared the medication and force-fed it to the prisoners?" If that were really the case, there would've been no need to write individual patient names on each bag. So things probably weren't that straightforward.
It had just passed midnight — the most unstable period of the night. Chen Ge would rather spend extra time than leave the mystery of these bags and pills unresolved.
Standing in the doorway, he stared through the crack at the dim, seemingly endless corridor.
Roughly ten minutes later, a blurred black figure appeared at the far end of the third-floor hallway. It was too far away for Chen Ge to tell whether it had emerged from one of the wards or come running up from another floor.
"Is that the mental patient?" He couldn't make out a face, and he didn't dare turn on his light. All he could do was grip the skull-crushing hammer and hide behind the door, ready to strike.
The figure's gait was strange — staggering and lurching, as if it might topple over at any moment.
As it drew closer, Chen Ge noticed something even stranger.
The thing made absolutely no sound when it walked!
"With the way it's staggering, there's no way it wouldn't produce footsteps."
In the brief moment he was distracted, the figure moved nearer still, and Chen Ge caught a faint glimpse of what it was wearing.
A white nurse's uniform stood out starkly in the pitch-black corridor, utterly out of place among the reeking bedding strewn about the floor — as if it didn't originally belong here.
"It's not the deformed face. Seems like a woman?" Chen Ge couldn't be sure. He pressed his upper body against the ward door, his eye glued to the crack. He didn't dare blink, afraid of missing something important.
"It's coming."
The dark figure in the nurse's coat had its head bowed, its mouth moving as though muttering something. It was getting closer and closer to the ward where Chen Ge was hiding, and he could see it more and more clearly.
The approaching figure was none other than a monster wearing a nurse's uniform — its waist was bent at an unnatural angle, its body parts grotesquely uncoordinated, even its fingers slightly deformed. The whole thing looked as if it had been hit by a car.
The sight of this nightmarish nurse shattered every pleasant fantasy Chen Ge had held about nurses for the past twenty-plus years of his life. Separated by a single door, he gripped the skull-crushing hammer as sweat began to bead in his palm.
A mess of black hair hung forward, concealing most of the face. As the creature passed the doorway where Chen Ge was hiding, it suddenly stopped.
In that instant, Chen Ge held his breath and slowly raised the hammer.
The nurse seemed to sense something. Its lowered head began to rise, black hair sliding to either side, revealing a perfectly ordinary face.
"Her?!"