As he hurried over the second floor landing, he heard Trish's murmurs echoing from overhead. Patient beds stuffed with restrained and groaning figures blurred on a heavy pant as he struggled desperately to catch up to the group. Florescent light pulsed in greenish yellow tones that tricked his eyes and deepened the shadows everywhere. Footsteps marched in unison on the third floor.
Tom nearly sped past the tiny winding staircase. Tucked inside an old open linen closet with tatters of medical gauze, restraints, and grey laundry hanging in tawdry sheets from its warped shelves, he hurried up the creaking old set.
"...inhumane experiments with electroshock therapy. He believed that this metal apparatus around the patient's head would serve to evenly distribute the sensation. This would, in effect, render the subject..."
As the last words of Trish's speech droned on, the old lights flickered and died. Tom sprawled up the last step and crashed face first into the wooden floor.
"Stay where you are," she commanded. "The lights will come back on in a moment. There is a backup generator."
He crept toward the obnoxious blue glow under Charlotte's little feet in the windowless lab.
Always the more excitable of the twins, John howled, "What the fuck is that?!"
...And ever the answering gunfire behind those aggressive utterances, Jerry's immense pair of combat issue army boots slammed into his ribs.
The butt of his palm plowed into a brick "leg" of the slab table. Tom managed to wriggle out from under it before the ruckus of several heightened tensions turned the museum onlookers into wild things and brought the restrained mannequin and its sled-like perch crashing from the table. A large foot trampled the small of his back, and his fingers insistently scrounged at Charlotte's white skirt, like a puppy clinging to its mother's tit.
She helped him up.
"I... don't think the lights are coming back on," he whispered.
The lab was one suffocated blind pool of commotion as people lost their orientation in the claustrophobic surroundings. A series of bass rhythms punctuated each bounce as a tourist plummeted down the old steps. Glass shattered, and the noxious smell of turpentine and bleach rose like chlorine from the thronging pool. He put a steadying hand down on the restrained figure, leaning over the table in an effort to stretch his throbbing vertebrae. The patient on the table groaned.
"I... don't think the lights are coming back on," Tom swiveled his head and repeated, louder this time. His breath lifted in a faint paint. His vision focused and faded out as the toxic gasses filled his lungs. Something about this darkness ... something hollow, reverberated the drums in his skull like rich mud-drenched concrete pipes peppered with abandoned remains.
