The hospital transformed after midnight. What little hum of normalcy filled the day was replaced by a suffocating silence, the kind that pressed against your ears and made you second-guess every sound. Most of the students had retired to their bunks, grateful for the reprieve of sleep. But for Edward, tonight was his assigned shift.
He didn't mind, at first. Night shifts were meant to be quiet. An easy job. Monitor the station near the surgical wing, log a few temperature reports, and check supplies. Easy work for a student who couldn't stop talking.
Edward adjusted the ID badge clipped to his uniform as he moved down the corridor. He whistled, though the tune cracked midway when he passed the darkened stairwell to Sublevel 3. He glanced over his shoulder. Nothing. But he picked up his pace.
At the monitoring station, a small desk light buzzed over a narrow terminal displaying hallway logs. Beside it sat a monitor cycling between a few camera feeds, grainy black- and-white footage of empty halls and closed doors. Edward sat with a sigh, stretching his legs.
"Easy night," he muttered. "Nothing but shadows and—" The screen glitched.
He blinked, leaning closer. One of the hallway feeds, West Corridor B, restricted wing, flashed static, then resolved into a new image: the camera had shifted angle. It now faced a sealed door, previously off-frame. The timestamp blinked erratically.
Edward frowned. "That's not normal."
He tapped the console. Nothing. The controls were locked. A second later, the camera feed glitched again, and this time, he saw movement.
A figure. Not human.
It was tall, almost scraping the ceiling. Thin, almost skeletal, but with a pulsing, unnatural bulk beneath the skin, if it could even be called skin. Its limbs moved with jerky speed, arms too long, body twisting as it passed under the flickering light. Then it paused.
Turned.
Stared directly at the camera.
Edward's mouth went dry. He backed away from the monitor, heartbeat thudding in his ears.
The feed returned to static.
He scrambled from the desk and ran back to the dorms. Halfway down the hall, he collided with Williams, who grabbed his arms.
"Whoa… Edward? What happened?"
"There's… there's something on the camera," Edward panted. "In the west wing. Big. Inhuman. I swear it saw me."
Williams frowned. "Calm down. Let's go see it together." "I'm not going back!"
"Then wake Finn. I'll check it out myself."
Williams turned and walked toward the station without waiting for a reply.
Back in the dorm, Edward burst through the door, startling Finn awake.
"What the hell?" Finn groaned.
"There's something wrong! The camera… west wing. The feed glitched and something… someone… was there. Not human."
Finn sat up instantly. "A monster?"
"Yes! It stared at the camera. Like it saw me. Am telling you this place is creepy, like monsters in the basement kind of shit."
Finn jumped out of bed and began pulling on his jacket. "We need to tell the others. Wake Franklin. Wake Eve."
Meanwhile, in the cold corridor outside the surgical lab, Williams reached the monitoring desk. The screen now displayed normal camera cycles, no static, no abnormalities.
But then a faint noise echoed behind him. A soft, scraping drag along the wall.
Williams turned slowly. The hallway behind him was empty. He waited. Nothing moved. Still, he felt watched.
He backed away from the terminal, hand instinctively reaching for his penlight.
Back in the dorm, the students gathered, groggy but alert. Rika looked pale, hair pulled back tightly. Eve sat on her bed, arms wrapped around her knees.
Franklin paced near the door, shirt half-buttoned. "Okay, if something is in the restricted wing, why haven't they sounded an alarm?"
"Because they don't want us to know," Finn said. "They think we're expendable. Remember what Rika overheard? 'Collateral.'"
Edward nodded, hands still trembling. "It looked... wrong.
Like its bones didn't know how to move right."
Franklin snorted. "You're not exactly a trained observer, man."
"I know what I saw."
"I believe him," Eve said quietly. "We've all been noticing things. Whispers, static. Now it's moving."
Finn grabbed his notebook. "We have to start tracking everything. Like something wrong is really going on and the people here are acting as if everything is normal."
"What are we suppose to do?" Rika whispered.
The next morning, the students' suspicions deepened.
Staff walked faster. Conversations halted when students approached. Entire wings were declared off-limits without explanation. Even Jonah, who often dismissed their theories, seemed subdued.
"I was in the admin block," he told Williams quietly. "I passed the director's office. Heard him on a secure call. Said something about 'unexpected autonomy.' I think they're having a problem."
"Specimen Seven?"
Jonah nodded. "How the hell am I suppose to know what's about."
Williams exhaled slowly.
That night, no one slept well. Edward was excused from further shifts. Cameras were quietly deactivated. And far down in the restricted wing, where no students were allowed, a heavy vault door creaked slowly open.
Behind it, something wet shifted
in the dark. And the lights, one by one, began to flicker.