Blood. The entire room was covered with blood, not metaphorically nor figuratively, but literally. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, and even the back of the steel door were covered in blood. The walls were painted in red so much that one couldn't even guess what their original color was. The ceiling was just as red as the walls, which makes you wonder how blood got there in the first place. The only ceiling fan in the room had guts, intestines, and other grotesque innards dangling from its rotary fans. The floor had puddles of blood scattered throughout the entire room with the addition of bloody footprints that they made from stepping on the so-called "liquid" that they thought before hand.
Once you thought the horrors were over, the main attraction was still in store, literally. The layout of the room was a bit different from the first storage room, the previous one had shelves neatly placed on the edges of the room, but this one was indeed quite different. In order to match the chaotic and bloody nature of the room, the steel shelves were not placed neatly on the edges, but instead, in the middle of the room, not even dead center, as they were placed a bit further to the right, throwing off the only symmetry and balance of the room, if it had any in the first place.
There were three shelves in total, and they weren't even placed neatly beside each other, they were misaligned, crooked, and looked as if they were falling apart from the load that they carried, human meat. The entire three shelves from top to bottom, all six ties equating to two tiers per shelf, were stacked to the brim with dead, rancid, grotesque, and rotting human meat. The bottom portions of the shelves were filled with innards, guts, livers, lungs, and other things you could find inside of a human body and were chaotically stuffed into the bottom of the shelves, some of it even overflowed and was plopped on the red-stained ground, which was the reason why Josef found a human heart lying on the floor, which he thought was delicious, juicy meat, well, to some select few, it might have been delicious. Although it looks as if they were decaying, they were still quite fresh, as blood still trickled down from the shelves, adding more and more droplets to the already blood-soaked ground.
The only sense of order and symmetry that could be found in the room lies on top of the shelves. All the contents of the top parts of the shelves were arranged quite marvelously, which would make you wonder if the sections of the shelves were displayed by different people. It was perfectly arranged into a neat line of three rows per shelf, none were misaligned or crooked, only a keen and nitpicky eye could find the flaws in their arrangement. No blood whatsoever, all the features were perfectly intact, no bruises, scars, or any other exterior wounds could be seen, all the mouths were closed, and all the eyes were bulged open, starring out into the cold, blood-red room from their lifeless perspective. In the eyes of a madman, the severed heads on top of the shelves were quite near to being regarded as a piece of art, but no one in the group agreed.
Caden's mouth gaped wide open, dropping the human heart that he held on the ground, making a plop sound as it hit the ground where no considerable amount of blood had piled up. His hands were shaking, they were shaking so vigorously that he didn't even notice them, so were his eyes, his entire body even.
Gerald was almost the same. His eyes were bulging out more than Caden's were, his arms flopped, and he didn't move even an inch. It seems like he was trying to form some words, but all he could do was twitch his mouth, unable to formulate any further thought as he witnessed the gruesome display of order and chaos.
Josh and Matt were a combination of the previous two. Not moving, just staring at the lifeless heads that were aligned on the top shelf, some were even positioned perfectly where their lifeless gaze stared directly towards them, as if they were piercing you with their bloodshot gaze, their stares made them feel guilty as to why they were still alive while they were displayed on the cold shelves, lifeless, like a deer mount on the walls of a sketchy cabin in the woods.
Serenity could also feel the gaze of those who had passed on to the afterlife, and fear quickly struck her. It was a mixture of a variety of emotions—dread, fear, disgust, but all in all, it could be summarized as an extreme emotion that couldn't be fully explained as her reaction was cut short by her falling to the ground, unconscious. Blood splashed all over her as she was quite unlucky to have fallen unconscious on one of the most blood concentrated areas of the room, which was due to the blood from the shelves flowing in that direction because of different potential factors, including the cracks in the floor that made the blood flow along them or if it was because the room had a slight incline, but the details were unnecessary to elaborate on.
Avery, on the other hand, was just like Serenity, quick to respond. Serenity was quick to faint, but Avery was quick to run away in disgust. She took one look at one of the heads neatly displayed on the shelves, it was that of a girl, one of her friends, her gaze met with hers, they were both looking towards each other, the only difference was that one was standing while the other didn't even have legs to stand on, nor a body. She quickly left the blood-soaked room, both her hands covering her mouth as she tried to hold in her natural urge to vomit. She ultimately failed at holding it in, as after she took a few steps into the cafeteria, she wasn't quite strong-willed enough as the gastric juices flowed from her mouth like a waterfall.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She tried to calm herself, she inhaled for a few seconds, exhaled for nearly the same duration, and repeated. She was smart, she could very well infer things from very little information, which resulted in her being good at academics. Because of this, as she glanced over her throw-up, she quickly noticed bits and pieces of last night's dinner, which was burger patties, or at least what they had thought were burger patties. The school didn't serve pork patties, but there were stacks of it in the storage rooms, and there were shelves filled with human remains, which studies showed were quite similar tasting to pork. She put two and two together, and the result made her vomit even more.
Back in the room, Josef stared at the bloody shelves. He was quite stable in this moment, he was shocked to some extent, obviously, but not as much as the others. Even as gruesome as it looked, he felt simply nothing. Yes, he did think that the sight was disgusting, yet he didn't have the urge to throw up. It was nightmarish, yet he wasn't scared enough to make him faint. It felt oddly familiar for some reason, it's as if he dreamed of it or something, or if he had experienced something similar to it, which made his reaction to this one dull. He couldn't quite put it into words nor explain why he thought this way.
He thought there might have been something wrong with him. He thought about his friends dying, which made him quite furious and saddened, but as he looked into the eyes of the unknown bodyless students, he simply felt no emotion at all. Was it because he had no connection to them, or was it because his morality had been stripped from him due to the previous scenes he had witnessed in the short span of the incident? He was not sure himself.
He averted his vision, he looked to the side, only to see another site of nightmares. There were already innards and heads, so the only thing remaining was the rest of the body.
At the far back of the room, which they haven't explored yet, lay a mountain of legs, arms, and hollowed-out torsos. It had formed a pile large enough to be more than half the height of the room, it was even taller than them. Feet and arms were sticking out from everywhere as a massive pool of blood was piled underneath.
Caden's focus on the shelves was interrupted as he saw Josef's head move in his peripheral, naturally, he gazed upon what Josef was looking at. He saw the same sight that Josef saw, but if Josef didn't feel anything towards the pile of body parts, Caden certainly did. Images of the room where the scientist performed the experiments flashed in his mind. He remembered how he hid under the piles of fresh bodies in order to escape death. He remembered the texture and the ice-cold temperature of the lifeless bodies he surrounded himself with.
As he remembered all of this, he quickly ran outside, and just like Avery, he vomited everything in his stomach. But at least they were not alone. As the others came to their senses, so did their bodily urges. As they snapped out of focusing on the contents of the shelves, they quickly rushed out of the rooms and joined Avery and Caden in barfing their brains out. Even though no one said it out loud, they all instinctively knew what they had been eating for the past week.
Josef followed behind, not barfing, but he was lost in thought, he couldn't exactly explain to himself if he was normal or not. He thought about his feelings towards the dismembered students, and he was definitely not right in the head to simply feel nothing out of it, it was like glancing at the display of a store that you didn't particularly care about. It bothered him a lot. The lifeless bodies didn't bother him at all. The first time he saw a scene similar to this was with his classmates in the class 1-F classroom, and during that time, he felt like he would go crazy from looking at his classmates' corpses. That very first sight was able to mark in his memory that he will definitely be seeing similar sights again soon, but he was still bothered as to why he reacted poorly to such a stomach-turning sight this time. He might have indeed gone crazy back then and didn't notice until now.
He entered the cafeteria just to witness his friends barf in unison. During this time, no words were exchanged, not even a single utterance, only horrifying thoughts and vomit. A few minutes passed by, and after drinking some water, they had all calmed down to some extent. Sure, they had all witnessed a horrible sight before, like the massacre in the class 1-A classroom, but it wasn't as gruesome as the sight they had just witnessed.
They were finally calm and were able to formulate thoughts again. They glanced over at each other in order to assess how their peers were doing. They felt a sense of camaraderie from their equal share of vomit. They were a bit relieved that the others were in the same boat as them, excluding Josef. They were quite confused with how Josef was doing, but they didn't think about it any further as their thoughts were quickly interrupted when Gerald remembered something very important.
"Where's Serenity!?" he exclaimed.