Walt Greendale
Walt closed the gas valve, strangely unfazed by the pile of dead patients sitting before him. All six had originally been sent to his office from the EnPro facility, just a few floors away. All six now lay in a crude stack, all six missing a large section from their chest. Not a single one of them still had their heart. They’d all sustained too much burn damage from the containment incinerator for Walt to determine anything else from the bodies. One thing was certain, though: they certainly did not die painlessly.
As a former trauma nurse, Walt had seen almost every kind of pain imaginable. He thought back to the teenager that had been rushed to hospital with razor blade cuts all over his wrists. His pain was nothing now. Walt might have cried a bit over that particular patient’s history, but now that mattered about as much as the dessert special at Denny’s, because right next to him were six workers that had clearly been torn into by…something. The last time he’d seen chest wounds like these was when he’d treated a man at a zoo, for injuries sustained from a lion attack. He compared that incident to this one. The hearts of these six patients weren’t just ripped out; they were slashed out with claws.
He was so intent on the missing hearts that he almost missed the charred remains of a leather shoulder holster. The strap was now fused to the inside of the patient’s security uniform, but the holster itself was missing. It hadn’t melted or burned up, but it wasn’t tucked under the arm like a holster generally would be. Walt stood up and looked around the corridor, eventually locating the severed holster in a corner on the floor. Given the condition of the attached strap, it seemed as if the holster was thrown clear as the strap was burning apart. Perhaps it had been thrown during its carrier’s death throes. Whatever the case, the holster was essentially worthless now, so Walt extracted its contents and cradled them carefully in his hands.
The weapon in the holster had the look of a classic Berducci pistol. The gun had evidently been in the fire for a bit, as the decorative plastic portions of the slide had melted. Walt decided he wanted to observe the gun in more detail, but first, he decided to locate the safety switch. His only experience with firearms was an old Crossman air rifle from his youth; he recalled the safety being near the trigger guard. He found a switch that resembled that and pressed it, causing the pistol’s magazine to drop out of the gun and on to the floor. Whoops, wrong one. Walt quickly gathered up the magazine and slipped it back into the grip. He had difficulty getting the magazine to stay inside, so he slapped it as hard as he could. This caused him some pain, but it did lock the magazine into place. He’d just have to get used to that if he wanted to stay alive, Hippocratic Oath be damned.
