Fan Fiction ❯ Frailty ❯ Dr.Killjoy ( Chapter 3 )

"Frailty"

Chapter 3- "Dr. Killjoy"

...Was it a boiler room? She wasn't sure, but if the roughly ten-by-ten foot room Raven had just entered wasn't, it could do a good job of fooling even the most trained eye, with it's dirt-ridden scale-machines, numerous sacks of coal that were stashed in every empty area possible and an endless assortment of dark-green pipes that ran every which way, making freely moving around a difficult task. With all of the blockage, it looked to be a dead-end, but Raven knew better through experience. This had been the first full room she had entered since being introduced to Horace, thus the path that would lead her deeper into the bowels of the basement had to be somewhere between these four walls.

After running a hand across a pipe to make sure they weren't heated, she dropped to her belly and begun to crawl underneath one of the many metal tubes (A task she by all means did not want to perform, but alas, was left with no choice) as she went about doing this, her mind wandered back to an event that had occurred no more than ten minutes ago, and only a hall away...

Raven had to be thankful for Horace's existence. Had he not shown up and destroyed the iron gate, she would have been, to put it bluntly, up a shit creek without a paddle. But despite his invaluable assistance and over all friendly demeanor, when he grew near her, she could not help but feel every bit as threatened as her encounter with Hermes. When it was pondered over, if Horace's soul was so restless, it obviously had to have come at some sort of event that occurred within his life-span...and considering he appeared to have been a prisoner here at some point, it was obvious that it was his fault. So why in Hell would some one who had doomed themself be so willing to help her escape? ...Unless he wanted something from her in return...

After recovering to her feet and spotting the entry way to a thin hallway, Raven gave the entire subject of Horace a mental shrug and proceeded to exit the boiler room. Halfway through her venture down the corridor, a voice that sounded quite near-by hollered in a nervous sort of agitation, "WHAT'RE YOU WAITIN' FOR, YOU BASTARD?!? JUST GET IT OVER WITH!!" Immediately recognizing it as trouble, Raven hastily cleared the rest of the hall and turned yet another corner that led her to the left, after which she found herself in what would appear to be a dead end, till her eyes raised to the ceiling and saw that the walls extended upward another ten feet, easily saving space for a second floor.

Perhaps a few years, months or possibly even days ago, there had been a ladder that would allow clearance to this floor, but as Raven surveyed her surroundings, she found no object that would assist her in climbing to the destination; ultimately making the dark titan feel quite fortunate that she had been blessed with the power of levitation.

After focusing, she murmured, "Azarath Metrion Zinthos..." and promptly became air-born.

The flight didn't last long. As soon as Raven had come within the right distance to land, she let her powers go and fell gently to her feet. Again, she found herself in a narrow corridor (A sight she had become quite prone to seeing) However, this hall was so short that there was hardly any room to even turn around in without falling back down the hole. At the end was an oak French door, possessing closed blinds that had been positioned on the other side. Just as Raven's hand grasped the knob, the voice shouted once more, "C'MON YOU SICK PEICE OF SHIT! ...DO IT! I AIN'T AFRAID OF YOU!" his words contrasting horribly with the terrified tone.

"Don't worry, guy....I'm coming!" The titan muttered before turning the knob and pulling the door halfway open. It was all the space she needed to see what was going on.

She was looking into a large carpenter's work area, furnished with work-benches, buckets full of wood-shavings and several power-saws, however none of these things were what caught Raven's eye. At one end of the room was a wooden pole. Crudely nailed into the floor, it stood a some eight-to-nine foot distance. Tied firmly to it was a blind-folded corrections officer--clearly the man whom had been demanding to be killed. At the other end of the room stood an entirely new beast, every bit as disturbing as the beheaded freak-show that she had been fighting. The hulking monster was so repulsive that Raven had to bite her tongue to keep from shrieking in horror.

Like the last creature, this monstrosity was human in it's general form, the only difference being it's abnormal girth. It's height reached such an extent that even when hunched over (Which appeared to be it's predominant stance) it easily cleared seven feet. It's head, chiseled with a short fore-head, was absent

of both hair and eyes, leaving only a gaping mouth that was lined with dull, peg-like teeth and ears that were large enough to be confused with government satellite dishes.

It was clothed only from the waist down in a pair of faded green trousers, looking to be of a military fashion. On it's back was an abnormally large hump that extended outward nearly five inches and stretched from it's shoulders to the small of the spine. Protruding from this hump, like appendages, was a vast array of long-distance artillery, ranging from the common-day Berreta to a nineteen-twenties Tommy Gun.

The creature was dormant, till the officer again begun to shout, "GET ON WITH IT, FUCK-FACE! PULL THE TRIGGER, YA' GODAMN FREAK!"

Abruptly, it dropped to it's hands and knees. In sequence, every gun that extended from the hump placed aim on the doomed officer (Raven took notice of one gun in particular--a double-barreled pump-action riot-shotgun that utilized dum-dum rounds--highly illegal in Gotham).

Having the strangest sense of deja-vu involving Trevon, Raven closed her eyes and thought to herself,

You asked for it, man...Damn it! I might have been able to help if he'd just kept his mouth shut!

In unison the guns begun to pulverize their target. Much to Raven's relief, there was no scream. He simply slouched over and coughed up a few spatters of blood before succumbing, however what was quite possibly the first positive emotion she had felt in this place quickly turned to fear when she realized the creature had spotted her.

It wasted no time falling back to it's knees and directing it's arsenal at her. Knowing that there was not enough time to utilize her powers, she dropped to the floor and rolled into a safe-haven, just barely evading a fatal hot wave of bullets. Just after returning to an up-right position, she caught sight of the perfect item to use as 'Catapult ammo', if you will--an un-touched block of lead that had to have weighed at least thirty pounds.

After performing another evasive maneuver just to stay one step ahead of her opponent, Raven raised her hands and audibly called out, "Azarath Metrion ZINTHOS!".

Once engulfed in the familiar dark haze, the block was lifted from the ground and chucked into the head of the hunched creature, acquiring a direct-hit. The hefty block forcefully smashed in it's face, causing the large abomination to recoil then come crashing to the floor in a large heap.

It may have been down, but Raven refused to take any chances; judging from the officer's fate, this particular genre of demonic being was far more intelligent than the other. If she gave an inch, it would go a mile, no doubt about it.

Standing over it, Raven placed the small stub on the end of the magnum's barrel directly on the beast's face, then cleanly relieved the firearm of three rounds. It gave a die-hard squirm on the first blast, feebly flinched on the second and made no move at all on the third. After issuing several light kicks to it's ribs, Raven pronounced it dead and decided to pressed on.

At first glimpse, the room looked as though it were an invariable dead end, with no alternate exits any where in conventional sight It wasn't until Raven begun to ran-sack the place, pulling everything away from the walls, did she notice a collection of large ply-wood sheets stashed away in a corner of the room. Piecing things together, she seized the timber and jerked it away, letting sheet by sheet fall to the floor. Once the wall had been stripped of everything, it revealed an exceptionally short door-way, above which there was a sign, reading, "Generators".

This set of halls were far less illuminated than the last. Not a saving grace of light anywhere, but in ways, it didn't seem too horrible. If the power generator was somewhere in this place, there was the ample possibility that power to this bizarre Hell-hole could be restored--at least then she wouldn't be alone and in the dark. The corridors turned and twisted, leading her in a number of directions, but never once did they swerve to multiple paths, for which she felt thankful.

After what seemed like an hour of walking, she came to a clearing. Due to the pitch black that shrouded her vision, it was tough to tell just what she was walking into, till she ran into a metal object of some sort. Getting her priorities in check, she begun to grope around it until she found what she was looking for--a switch.

Click

The industrial machine begun to emit a low humming noise, indicating it's operation. Shortly following this, the room she was in was bathed in a pale light from above. But it brought no good discoveries. Raven looked around, saw them and her heart stopped. They surrounded her. Machete' beasts every direction she turned. Had they been waiting for her? Was all of this planned? She wasn't sure, but at that moment the light had been turned on, it did only one thing. Assisted to make death imminent. They approached slowly--taking inch-by-inch steps, as though savoring the moment. Even their inanimate blades seemed chaotically hungry; as if ready to rend her helpless flesh.

"Stay...stay back...." Raven weakly warned before falling to her knees. She thought she would make it out of this place alive. Come away with a new out-look on life. But it was not to be. The truth was not kind. As they steadily closed the gap between her and themselves, the tears begun to pour from her eyes. There were no sobs. Only tears.

"How....how could this happen to me?" She stumbled.

"What have I...what have I..." Raven didn't finish before her vision begun to blur. The last thing she would remember before blacking out was raising her head toward the ceiling and releasing a deafening scream--stemming more from a new found white-hot rage than anything else.

A half hour later, she lay face down on the floor, her pulse ordinary, her breathing normal. Slowly, her eyes begun to twitch, but still unconscious, the subliminal messages flourished inside her mind, the first she recognized as the man from the phone--

Did you think I was just joshing when I said there was something wrong with you? The curse of Carnate may have helped you this time, but if you are not cured before departing, it will SWALLOW you...

The second voice was Hermes. Indeed, he had paid his first visit to her mind, taking his usual nasal inhales while speaking,

If you truly want to be free of this place...you should really just die...though where you end up may not be as glorious as you once thought...

As her eyes begun to open, once last message crossed the border of her head, sounding like a small, terribly angered child,

You used to get so mad at us, then you couldn't even remember! I NEVER understood how you could just forget....

She begun to painstakingly lift her self from the cold, rigid floor, a slight soreness in all of the areas that had been pushed against it underneath her weight.

Though she had a terrible head-ache, there were no serious cases of amnesia. She easily recognized the room, how she got there and the fatal predicament she had wound up in as a result of entering. What she couldn't remember was killing even one of the beasts that were ready to butcher her. But as she came to, she realized that not even one of their corpses remained in tact. Nearly every square inch of the room was sprayed with their blood and littered with random appendages. In ways, it almost looked as though the whole lot of them had been shoved into a wood-chipper.

Whatever happened, it didn't look like it had occurred in self-defense. No, whomever went about committing this did it out of passion. As if brutally dismembering living beings was their fix. The beasts may have been savage cold-hearted murderers with no regard for their victims, but not even they deserved this. Nothing, no matter what level of disgust it had achieved deserved this...

At first the thought that Horace had come about and helped her for the second time of the night briefly crossed her mind, but it was promptly eliminated with a subtle gasp. Raven had looked down at herself and realized that she was smothered in blood....their blood, nearly head to toe. As it sunk in, the memory of her phone-conversation came whirling back into her head.

"....He was right!" The wide-eyed titan cried in horror, "There is something wrong with me! ...Something...on the inside..." It was undeniable. Some contemptible animosity was beginning to swell inside of her.

Until she had reached the stair-case that would lead her back up to the prison, Raven wandered aimlessly, pondering over what to do with herself. She stopped and stared momentarily.

"The way to the lethal injection chambers..." She murmured to herself in a weak voice.

"Just like Harvey said...."

Even with the lights on, the prison still seemed eerie, but the lack of human companionship and the knowledge that she could get killed at any moment were dominating contributors.

After stopping by a bathroom to clean the blood from her, Raven spotted the Lethal Injection room toward the end of the hall, and proceeded to let herself in.

The door from which she had entered lead into the witness room, adjacent to the actual execution chamber. On the stand there sat three chairs, all of which were populated by dead, syringe-ridden officers. Laying on the injection-bed was an in-mate, a single needle shoved between his eyes (Which, in comparison to the others, was a sensational way to go) Raven tried her best not to stare at the countless bodies as she maneuvered toward a door that possessed a glowering 'Exit' sign above it.

Her hand grasped the knob, but before she could turn it, something caught her eye. A duo of security-monitors that had been positioned in the witness section, strangely, the word 'Paused' flickered at the corner of one of the screens. The cameras themselves stood only a few feet away, pointed toward the bed. Intrigued, Raven made her way toward them (Again, placing her mind elsewhere as she grew near corpse-ridden chairs).

Standing on her toes, Raven reached upward and pressed the 'Play' button. In compliance, the screen begun to relay it's contents.

Beside the bed stood a man, outfitted in medical fatigues that looked as though they were from the early nineteen-hundreds, but what was stranger was the fact that he, when looked at closely, appeared to be transparent. A few feet away from him an old film-projector sat, on a chair, it's shot aiming directly toward the man. It wasn't until then had Raven made the bizarre discovery that it was he who was being projected.

"Hello, students!" The man spoke in a voice that she easily recognized as the apparition from the phone. "It is I, Doctor Killjoy! Today I will be demonstrating how to properly administer a lethal injection.." With that, he turned toward the bed, on top which was the very in-mate who lay there now. He squirmed and struggled around in his bindings, but it came to no avail.

"Now, naturally, the subject of the injection is not going to want this procedure to take place, and will likely begin to struggle, as a means to procrastinate, as you can plainly see...the best course of action to take in this case, would be to...."

Raven winced as the would-be Doctor issued a hard slap across the in-mates face, then repeated this process, speaking as he did so,

"Beat them..."

SMACK

"Into a more...."

SMACK

"...Dormant...."

SMACK

"...Condition!"

After he was finished, Doctor Killjoy reached for a syringe. In response, Raven's jaw dropped open.

"No!" She gasped.

"By now it's become rather blatantly obvious that we're not gunning for humanity during this particular execution, so....TO EACH, HIS OWN!". The projection took a step forward and jammed the needle between the inmate's eyes, instantly causing Raven to head back for the doorway. She didn't want to stay in this room. She didn't want to stay in this building.

She opened the door and was met by a blast of chilly night air. Before leaving, she gazed back toward the execution bed. Could something that demented and cruel truly be capable of curing her? And she stared....and she wondered....

-End Chapter 3-