Page 85 of No Asylum Here

“I didn’t survive.” The man sounded sure of himself. Yet, the conviction of his words was just a shred undermined by the fact that he was bound up like the human equivalent of Fort Knox.

Worrying my bottom lip, I studied the man for a beat. None of this made sense, but I needed all the pieces to the picture to decide what the truth really was. “Right… Why would your father give you a second dosage of the Treatment, knowing that you were so dangerous after the first?”

“He was hoping to beat me into submission so I’d become his little bitch. Being the arrogant asshole that he is, he had no doubt he would. He wanted to turn me into a weapon.”

“But why?”

“My theory is that he wanted to develop a formula that would turn discarded people in the asylum into super-soldiers for the government. This all started during the Vietnam War. Thought he could sell them to the government and make a quick buck. But now, he’s simply making an army to keep him at the top of the food chain around here.”

“And he had you committed when he couldn’t control you.”

I nodded. “Bingo. He declared me legally insane, signed the paperwork and threw away the key. After that, he began administering the Treatment to all his staff in the hopes of creating another army of super demons, trying to create another like me for his pièce de résistance.

My stomach clenched. “Demons?”

“Something like that. The serum slowly takes over the body and, if they survive, the creature takes over the host at will. The host still has all their memories and often a portion of their personality too.” Mal’s gaze darkened. “But they’re different. Crueler. We all are.”

“What about Barbara and the baby? You watched them be buried. You saw them go into the ground.”

“After Rook shot me, he had them both dug up. Back then, I was still in general pop, and I saw Bunny a week later in the cafeteria with her dolly in tow.”

Tension wound my body tight, and suddenly I found myself feeling overly exposed. Uncomfortable and unsure all over again. I rose to my feet and pulled my lab coat off the coat hanger behind my desk and shrugged it on, fastening the buttons in place.

“And the baby?” I continued as I rolled my skirt back in place.

“He dug that up, too. Ran his tests.” There was a hint of disappointment behind his eyes as he watched me dress. “If I had to guess, the poor thing’s probably floating around in one of countless specimen jars.”

“So, let me get this straight. You, Bunny, and your father came back to life because of the Treatment?”

“That was my guess at first. But no.” The hole in his mask offered me a glimpse of his grim smile beneath. “You’re going to want to sit down for this next part, Doc.”

Swallowing, I lowered myself into the chair behind my desk and took a sip of cold coffee so I had something to do with my hands. The nerves from my withdrawals had finally settled down; the medication was working, thank fuck. But now I was shaking for different reasons.

“Something happened that day Bunny died.”

With a frown, I took another sip of my coffee. “You mean besides all the death and murder?”

“Dark forces took notice of St. Bart’s that day. From then on, we stopped existing in the world we came from. All of us. We are now on a different plane of reality.

I nearly choked on my drink. “Dark forces? A different reality?”

While I couldn’t deny that there was a lot of weird shit going on within these old church walls, it was also difficult to believe him as much as I wanted to. He sounded…

“I sound crazy, don’t I?”

With a sigh, I looked out the window. It was another overcast day, with the unrelenting blanket of fog making it impossible to see the mountains beyond. “What kind of reality are we talking about here? Because if you’re telling me we’re in Hell⁠—”

“I might call it Hell, sure. In the biblical sense? No. It’s more like a pocket of purgatory where the occasional soul is sent for who the fuck knows why.”

He canted his head, that dark look making me squirm in my seat. “You mentioned before that you killed someone.”

“Not on purpose. It was…malpractice.”

His chin tipped with a slow nod. “Ah.”

“Let’s say I believe in Hell. Or whatever the fuck you want to call it.” My voice cracked. Panic was setting in. As much as it sounded like complete bullshit, a part of me believed him. “Are you saying I’m dead?”

“I don’t know what we are. We’re not dead. We all have pulses. We all bleed. But we’re not really alive either, Doc. We’re stuck in an in-between state. Like Limbo, only shittier.”