CH 14

Any discussion in the hallway screeched to a grinding halt, leaving his words to echo in the silence and leave its mark on everybody’s minds. QiLeren’s question was cool, calm, devoid of emotion – it pierced into the fear that lay dormant within them, the fear of being watched by a pair of bloodthirsty eyes matched only by its hands coated in red.

“The surveillance cameras…are on…all twenty-four hours…” Dr Lu’s words quivered, seconds away from bursting into tears.

“Where is the surveillance room?” SuHe immediately asked. “How many cameras are there in the hospital?”

“…It’s… It’s in the A block outpatient lobby,” whispered Dr Lu, voice breaking. “There are a lot of cameras…most of the main hallways have one…” He shot SuHe a look of despair.

SuHe observed the blinking red light above them before patting Dr Lu’s shoulder in an attempt at reassurance. “Let’s find a save route and leave this place.”

The party followed Dr Lu as he lead them around in circles to avoid the cameras the best he could, preoccupied with their own swirling thoughts. As soon as they reached Director Li’s office, XueYingying collapsed into a nearby chair and shot suspicious looks at the closed door, face pale.

“We shouldn’t worry too much about this,” SuHe reasoned calmly, sitting down as well. “Even if the murderer has been using security footage to find his victims, it’s not possible for him to stay in the surveillance room at all times…”

If anything, Dr Lu actually looked more worried at SuHe’s unspoken words – it wasn’t possible because the murderer periodically set out to ‘hunt’.

“If we’ve been lucky enough, he may very well have been ‘hunting’ every time we happened to be caught on camera,” continued SuHe in a measured tone. “If we were to take into account the number of victims there has been thus far, he would likely have had to go out frequently enough for our whereabouts to go unnoticed. We can’t let ourselves remain passive though – with the decrease in numbers, it’s inevitable that he will spend more time trying to find his target. If we don’t do something about this he will find us, luck or no.”

Situated at the foot of a statue, Dr Lu started biting his fingernails anxiously. “Or maybe… Or maybe he already knows where we are and held off because we have so many people…”

This abrupt realisation thrust the room back into the rushing terror. All thoughts of the traitor amidst was immediately banished to the back of QiLeren’s mind; the problem of the murderer was enough.

Searching for an outlet for his chaotic thoughts, QiLeren fished out the notebook and pen he found what felt like eons ago, intending to sketch a rough blueprint of the building so that Dr Lu can mark in the cameras.

Dr Lu, who had been turning the room upside down in his quest to find items of good omens, trotted over upon noticing QiLeren’s plan of action. “Whoa,” he said, gaudy Buddhist statue necklace looped around his neck, “that is one old notebook. The pages are so yellow.”

“I found it in your hospital,” replied QiLeren, flipping the book over to its cover. Sure enough, printed in neat letters was the name of the hospital.

“That’s impossible. We have standard issue notebooks, and that’s not what they look like.” As he spoke, Dr Lu pulled out a pristine copy from Director Li’s desk drawer. “See, this is what they’re meant to look like.”

The pair’s dispute drew SuHe’s attention, forming a circle of three as they pondered over the difference between the two notebooks.

Compared to the one in Dr Lu’s hand, QiLeren’s notebook was obviously from an entirely different generation with its aged yellow paper and employment location printed on the front. Dr Lu’s, on the other hand, was in immaculate condition. A colourful wide shot of the hospital was splashed across its cover, and beneath it was its motto. Putting the two together, there was a feeling of transgenerational clash.

Dr Lu examined QiLeren’s notebook thoroughly before concluding, “Your notebook is at least twenty years old.”

“How do you figure?” asked QiLeren.

“The name of the hospital printed here is The People’s Hospital of X City,” he explained, pointing at the cover. “There’s a word missing.”

“First?” QiLeren mused. “Are you sure it’s not just an abbreviation? We even call it X City Hospital sometimes in conversation.”

Dr Lu shook his head. “Maybe, but they’d never abbreviate the hospital name on the cover of a book. I remember a colleague telling me when I first started working here about how they changed the name. It was around twenty years ago, I think, when they had to rebuild. The “first” was added in after its reconstruction, so this notebook should be from before then.”

Why was there such an old notebook here, and who put it into the drawer? Before QiLeren could voice his concerns, the ground beneath their feet gave a groaning shudder, sending the glasses cups and notebooks off of the desk into a shattered mess at their feet. QiLeren, who had been standing, nearly fell over as well, steadying himself on the table.

Before he could regain his bearings, a series of loud, muffled noises came from the hallway outside, as if something heavy was dropped onto the ground.

The screeching of metal on metal reached their ears like a sinister omen, stopping them in their tracks.

Within the dead silence, QiLeren heard SuHe ask deliriously, “Are you sure we…didn’t pass any cameras on the way here?”

Dr Lu was in no state to reply, slumped in his chair and gasping for oxygen like a fish out of water.

This setting, this sound, this timing… There was no doubt about it in any of their minds – it was the sound of a chainsaw being dropped!

XueYingying snapped first, jumping up from the chair as if it burned before throwing the door open. She screamed as if she had just witnessed the world’s most terrifying scene and took off in the other direction.

Run!

Her flurry of activity spurred everyone else into action –

QiLeren charged out of the room. He didn’t turn around, but out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the figure standing nearby, who, lifting the bloody chainsaw in his hands, gave him a perverse upturn of his lips.

All the calm and logic QiLeren previously held onto shattered, leaving him with nothing but pure survival instinct as he sprinted away from the murderer. Behind him, the thumping of hurried footsteps drew closer, and closer, and closer…