Insane Vibe

The doctor, for that is whom Fred considered him to be, Fred thinking he remembered the man working alongside the emergency room team that earlier received injured Rebecca, helping the family to bring Rebecca into the emergency room docket. The doctor pushed the inserted fingers deep, to the knuckle, far into his now gaping mouth. The man, the doctor, with his two fingers now deeply inserted into the recesses of his almost supernaturally opened gaping mouth, terror reflecting hideously in his startled frightened eyes – eyes that remained on Fred watching him through the green tinted panes of the waiting room – with a massive flex of his temple facial muscles proceeded to bite down, chomping as if he had no control in the matter, severing, biting hard through the flesh and bone, severing the flesh and bone just below the now white, drained of blood, knuckles that formerly attached the digits to his hand.

Fred gasped. Shocked, he motioned to the others, to John and Ellen. “Look! Look at that!” he cried, motioning to the man in scrubs outside the window. The others swiveled their heads. As the others caught what Fred was looking at, at what was also directly looking back at them, the man, the doctor, his panic-stricken eyes still staring at Fred and now the entirety of the former Dale Alsop group, the man spit out the severed digits in a ground blanketing spray of blood, saliva, flesh and bone. Then he bent down and fastidiously as he could, in his condition, picked them up again.

“Good Lord!” It was Ellen. She was beside herself. John, too, Fred Martin and the children, recoiled, averted their gaze yet could not help themselves. Their eyes were drawn to the seemingly unbelievable horror on display outside the waiting room window, in the hospital parking lot, just by the hospital entrance.

The man had obviously lost his senses. He waved his injured digit-less left hand about, blood spilling on the parking area concrete. The Alsop family, what remained of it, plus Fred Martin and John, continued to watch the man from their position standing now in the small family waiting area. And the man, the orderly or doctor, waving about his bloody left hand, continued to stare at the family, through the green-tinted window looking out from the waiting area to outside, to the parking lot. It was the expression on the man’s face, however, that bewildered and frightened the Alsop group more than anything.

For the man was smiling. He chews his severed digits and smiles. Yet it was more than a grin, it was evil incarnate. Blood dripping from the man’s jaws, he chewed, grinned, those watching from inside thought they could hear the crack of the finger bones when the man pushed the bloody fingers, fingers he’d picked up off the ground after biting them off and spitting them out, back to his molars. To eat apparently.

This was too much for the children. Jerome, on the other hand, thought it was cool. He moved forward, toward the window, to get a better view. At the window, his nose to the pane, he watched. The crazy doctor had a gleam in his eye. The man seemed to be energized, by bolts of electricity or something, his body wiggled, as if he was, but was not, dancing. His arms flailed, whether holding and biting off fingers, or eating chewing them.

Still, behind those raving gleaming crazed eyes, Jerome, all thirteen years of him, thought he noticed something. Jerome thought he saw a rational man behind the crazy man. And this rational man’s crazy eyes and behavior, the doctor, orderly, whomever he was, Jerome thought he saw this man’s eyes pleading for help! He also saw that the crazed man, smiling and crunching down swallowing now portions of his bite-severed fingers, had locked his eyes onto his, Jerome’s eyes. And the man was coming wiggling, dancing, flailing his arms, smiling right at Jerome standing nose to the glass at the window!

“Get away from the window!” It was Ellen. She viewed what was occurring, rushed forward. Toward the window she grabbed her boy by the shoulder, turned him. But the man’s eyes were hypnotic. Locking onto little Jerome’s eyes, when Jerome looked deeply into the man’s eerily beaming vision, something was transferred to Jerome. The little boy was hit by the same electric current, the same psycho wave that affected the orderly. For Jerome, torn away from the window, viewing as he had the hideous smiling man’s maniacal bloody grinning gaze, when turned, looked at his mother with the same crazed look eyes!

What’s more, Little Jerome immediately stuck his pinky finger in his mouth and bit down hard, severing the digit from his right hand. Those gathered could hear the bone crunch distinctly as the boy’s incisors ripped through the finger bone at the point where it attaches to the hand. Now the finger is gone! Inside Jerome’s grin widening bloody red chewing mouth!

Blood spouted; it spurted. Ellen’s dress, the boy’s T-shirt, covered in crimson. Ellen shrieked. Then, glass shattered, fell loudly and smashingly onto the floor. “The man’s head just broke through the window!” Ellen erupted amongst the crashing fall of breaking tinkling glass. And it had, the smiling hypnotic man’s bald and now bleeding head rammed fleshy red through the green tint window. “Heeere’s, Johnny!” the bloody bald head grinned.

Previously published by Mad Swirl