Malignant

“Lewis,” a voice said, and at first Lewis didn’t hear it over the beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor. He kept on mopping.

“Lewis,” it said again, and Lewis looked up. It was two in the morning, and the only person in the room was Lopez, and he was comatose. Lewis only knew his name because one night he had finished cleaning early and had went through the file hanging outside the door. Lopez had been a resident of The Ellisville Manor Nursing Home for longer than Lewis had worked there, and Lewis had always wondered which would kill him first: old age or the ever-growing tumor in his belly. Lewis had never quite understood the term “vegetable” until he’d been around Lopez for a while.

“Lopez,” Lewis said, “Mr. Lopez, was that you?”

He stared at Lopez until he felt foolish. Even if Lopez had been conscious, he couldn’t have formed a single ineligible word, not with that big tube in his throat. Besides, Lopez had been like this for years. Lewis laid his mop against the end of Lopez’s bed and walked out into the hall. No one was there. The long stretch of lonely white tile was all that was there and nothing more. He rubbed his eyes and glanced down at his watch. It’d been a very long time since he had slept or even ate for that matter. That, he assumed, was all it was. It had happened before. He figured that with enough sleep and food deprivation, even the most sound of mind people are going to hear voices eventually.

Lewis picked up his mop and finished the room as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to be in there any longer than he had to be. Up until now, he’d never really noticed the way that Lopez’s eyes were half open, showing a little of the dull whites, or just how waxy his skinned looked. It reminded Lewis of a corpse whose chest still managed to rise and fall somehow.

When he finished the room, he thrust the mop down into the bucket and wheeled it out into the hallway before putting it through the wringer; afterwards he shut Lopez’s door. Now there were only two more rooms to be mopped and then Lewis could go back downstairs and restock the public restrooms. There’d be people down there, living, active people with normal sized bellies and pink, healthy skin. He much preferred their company, even if they did look down upon the janitor.

The next room he entered was also home to a geriatric patient. This one was only slightly more conscious than Lopez. Her hair was gray and reminded Lewis of wet yarn. She sat in a halfway up position called the Fowler’s Position. Lewis knew it was called that because he’d read it in a medical book he’d found in a patient’s room one night. He didn’t know her name, but she was most always watching muted infomercials when he entered to clean. Tonight she had a long sting of drool hanging off of her bottom lip. It was at least two feet long, and Lewis caught himself stealing glances at it the whole time that he mopped.

The woman breathed in all at once with a loud slurp. Lewis gasped and dropped his mop. The handle clacked against the tile, and the woman flinched. When he looked up at her, her eyes were open and staring at him. She opened her toothless mouth as if to say something, and then closed it. Lewis picked up the mop and finished the room. His nerves were starting to get the better of him, and it made him feel like a child. The thought of being afraid of these moldy oldies should have been funny, but tonight he was actually creeped out.

He wheeled his mop bucket out into the hallway once again.

“Just one more,” he said, forcing a grin. He wanted to laugh at his stupid, unreasonable fear but couldn’t. The next room was at the far end of the hallway…past Lopez’s room. Lewis grabbed the handle and walked his mop station in that direction. He dreaded walking past Lopez’s room. The flickering lights overhead didn’t help matters, filtering through yellow stained light coverings, and Lewis hated himself for not changing them out. If he’d taken the time to perform a little maintenance, then the hallway wouldn’t be so damned creepy.

When Lewis walked past Lopez’s room, he came to a grinding halt, and the dirty mop water sloshed out of the bucket and onto his work pants. Lewis didn’t notice. He was too busy staring at the door that stood ajar. It was a tiny little crack, and it wasn’t entirely impossible to think that maybe the door had just came open on its own after Lewis had shut it, but Lewis knew better. He had heard the doorknob click into place.

The room needed to be checked. What if Lopez had come out of his coma somehow? The idea sounded goofy to Lewis. He wasn’t an educated man, but he’d watched enough Discovery channel and read enough hand-me-down medical texts to know that someone who has been in a catatonic state for years wasn’t going to just waltz out into the hallway.

He reached out with his hand and pushed the door open. Instead of beeping, the heart monitor chimed one long, high pitched note. Over the loud speaker, an automated voice declared a code blue. People would be there soon, but the thought didn’t make Lewis feel any better. He walked on into the room, and saw that the bed was empty. Where Lopez should have been, there was only a faint indention in the shape of his body.

“Lewis,” that voice said again. Lopez stepped out from the shadows. The front of his gown was covered in bright red blood.

“So healthy...I’ve been watching you.” Lopez’s mouth didn’t move. The words came from within him somehow. His face looked just as lifeless as it had when he had been lying in bed. Lewis backed up towards the door as Lopez approached, trailing an IV stand behind him. Lopez’s bony fingers grabbed the front of the blood stained gown and began ripping it open. There underneath, where there should have been pasty skin, was a crimson slit that oozed blood and pus. Lopez’s tumor filled stomach had finally ruptured and inside was a gaping mouth filled with hundreds of teeth.

“Lopez is dying, Lewis, he’s dying!” the thing inside him screamed. Lopez’s arms were stretched forward. The parts of his skin that were exposed were black or cyanotic. Lewis backed out of the room just as a doctor and two nurses ran by him into the room. He heard them scream when they saw it. One of the nurses ran out and down the hallway. The doctor was close behind, but was hit by the thrown limp body of the other nurse as he ran out. The doctor hit the floor head first. Lopez’s body stumbled out after him, arms out stretched and blood around his lips. The thing in his belly was still screaming.

“Please, oh god, no, no, this can’t…” the doctor’s voice failed as Lopez seized him around the throat. He kicked and bucked, but Lopez’s thin arms held strong. Lewis was too shocked to run. He could only watch as the doctor’s head disappeared inside Lopez’s stomach. When the thing’s teeth clamped down, the doctor’s headless body fell backwards and painted the white wall red in one huge splash. Lopez’s head lolled around, and the thing screamed again. Now it was climbing out of the hole in Lopez, pulling itself along with slimy tentacles. The sound of its gooey body smacking against the floor snapped Lewis out of his stupor. Lewis turned and ran towards the elevator, and hit the button over and over again. The elevators always took forever to reach that floor. The thing was pulling itself closer and closer, all the while hissing and calling out Lewis’s name.

The elevator was nearing. Only a couple more floors now. The thing was within ten feet of Lewis and closing. It looked like a pile of eels with one huge mouth. Finally the elevator doors opened, and Lewis jumped in, hitting the ground floor button almost before his body was totally inside. The thing slithering around on the floor hissed once more, louder than ever, as one of its tentacles broke off and raced towards the closing elevator doors faster than a snake could ever dream of. Lewis saw it and screamed. It made it through the doors just before they shut and raced up Lewis‘s pant leg. He grabbed for it, but it was too slippery. It was making its way up his leg towards his rectum.

He screamed again, and ripped at his pants trying to take them off, but it was too late. The thing was inside him now. He could feel it crawling up his intestines. It burned worse than anything he had ever felt, and his vision went wobbly.

Lewis woke up to the sounds of a serene.

“Ellisville 84 en route to Ellisville Memorial Hospital,” someone said.

It didn’t take him long to figure out where he was. A policeman was sitting in the corner of the ambulance, and two paramedics were standing over him. Neither of them noticed Lewis’s eyes were halfway open.

“Fucking sicko, killed two people and cut one of their heads off,” the policeman said, “I don’t know what he did with it.”

“Oh, man, first night on the job, and I get to take care of a psycho,” one EMT said, “So, you think this guy will fry for this?”

“Oh, yeah, I’d say so. It’s a pretty clear cut homicide. The world would probably be better off without him anyway. I‘d just like ten minutes alone with him first.”

Lewis’s stomach churned at the thoughts of his own execution. He felt ill. He felt as though something inside of him just might burst its way out and take another host.

“What the hell’s happening to his stomach,” someone said. Lewis couldn’t tell who said it. Everything was going blurry again. Soon his vision completely failed, and just before everything went black, he felt something tearing its way out of him. Something hungry and malignant.