The First Two Chapters of My Book, “Crossroads”!
0: Waiting for You
The engine of the motorcycle growled and snarled underneath its rider, driving the two of them down the long stretch of empty asphalt street before them. Streetlights cast the entire night in a bright, sickly yellow wash while tall, looming skyscrapers rose up so high over the street that their black, glassy bodies, only occasionally spotted with squares of white and yellow light, barely allowed any view of the sky overhead. The sky that could be seen in between the buildings was mottled black and grey with no stars visible through both the clouds and yellow light from the streetlamps.
The motorcycle let out a loud roar as its engine was revved by its rider and the two went barrelling right through the heart of the city with hardly any other vehicle to impede their path. The equally-barren sidewalks, store-fronts, and buildings swept across the blank, impassive face of the rider’s helmet and the streetlights danced across the smooth, jet black surface before they caught on the image of a bull’s skull printed in gold across the front of the helmet. The air whipping by jostled and batted at the fringe on the rider’s black leather jacket and on the backs of the legs of their black leather chaps while their black leather gloves tightly held the bike’s handlebars and the thick treads of their large, black boots gripped the foot pedals. The wind howled passed the rider’s helmeted ears, making sure that they didn’t hear anything outside of the enthusiastic purr of their precious bike, and the city almost seemed to slide passed the two without leaving any impression, the two isolated and encapsulated in their own little sphere of wind and the rumble of the engine.
Sweeping around a corner and heading down yet another deserted street, the rider noticed a large blocky shape on the road ahead and quickly realized that it was a giant, silver bus. With the bus moving at a slower speed, the rider and motorcycle quickly caught up with it and, as the two vehicles drove side-by-side, the rider looked up into the windows running along the side of the bus and spied someone with bright red hair and large, silver eyes who turned to stare down at the rider, meeting the gaze behind the helmet’s visor. For a brief second, the little, windy world of the rider and biker contained two people, instead of just one, but, just as quickly as the connection was formed, the biker turned dismissively away and revved the bike’s engine to put on speed, beginning the attempt to leave the bus behind.
But, a sound suddenly pierced the wind and the roar of the engine, the grating shriek of brakes being furiously stomped on and the piercing blare of a horn being leaned on, and the rider straightened up in surprise as the bus swung towards the motorcycle, forcing the rider to slam on the brakes in turn. The bike tried to get out from the shadow of the bus and put as much space as possible between the two as the bus continued to turn until it was almost horizontal on the road and still trying to stop, the rider crushing the bike’s brakes as six tires squealed against the asphalt. The bike fought to stop until it went out from under the rider and they were thrown to the asphalt. The bike skidded away while the rider landed with a muffle cry and they rolled, their helmet cracking and splintering as it hit the road. They tumbled for a moment and knocked every part of themselves before they finally rolled to a stop, lying on their stomach, while, after a screeching moment, the bus tilted away on its wheels and slammed down onto its side, screeching and skidding as metal met asphalt, but the rider barely even registered it happening as their mind continued to spin and tumble, hidden eyes blinking as their vision blurred.
A ringing filled the silence left in the rider’s ears after all the screeching had died away and, as the rider laid there and blinked, a pair of legs appeared that couldn’t have been there before, standing on the road directly in front of them, before the darkness on the edge of their vision flowed inwards and they finally fell into darkness.
********
A glimmer of consciousness flickered, the sensation of being pulled surfaced, of their heels repeated being knocked, and the rider looked up at the dark, starless sky overhead getting smaller and smaller as it retreated further and further away or the rider fell further and further down. They tried to stir and tried to stop, but the soreness across their body flared up and tiredness quickly pulled them back under, making them go limp again as they fell away from themself.
1: A Stray Child
Harsh, stark fluorescent lights shone down as the tall, muscular man blinked, the light burning into his blurry eyes and he brought up an arm to block it out while he swung his other arm down to push himself up, but the bang of his arm forcefully contacting whatever he was laying on sent a sharp pain shooting through his arm and he let out an echoing “Fuck!” as he clutched his injured arm to his chest. Finding his bruised and scraped jacket laying over him, he threw it aside before he sat himself up more carefully and looked around him, discovering he was laying on a plastic bench on a somewhat drab and dingy subway platform.
The floor was laid out in large slaps of mottled grey stone, or fake stone, while the walls as well as the pillars that lined the edge of the platform were covered in off-white tiles, but, under the harsh fluorescent lights that ran in parallel lines along the ceiling, the entire space looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Dust and dirt stained the floor and it was immediately obvious that grime was ground into the grout between the tiles on the walls. The man also could have sworn that he could see mould or mildew beginning to pepper the walls and the ceiling and it wouldn’t have surprised him judging by the smell of the place. The entire space had a distinct air of having been abandoned for some time and a thick, stagnant stillness hung on the air which tasted stale and old, like it had been sealed up for a while. There was a silence, too, like a heavy cloud hanging over the station, that made every move the man made and every ruffle of his clothing or scuff of his boots sound especially loud, the stillness and lack of any sound pressing in on his eardrums.
The rider turned to look down at his feet where he found his helmet sitting on the floor, waiting for him, and he quickly scooped it up to examine it, seeing the shattering cracks on one side where his head had first hit the road. The cracks radiated out from the temple of the helmet, breaking the bull’s head emblazoned on the helmet, but also cutting through the man’s reflection. The cracks split his long, strong-boned face in two, cutting across his long, pointed nose and through one of his narrow, brown eyes. Looking at himself as he was, he could say that he definitely could have been a lot worse, he had a bruise blooming across his tan skin on one of his strong, pronounced cheekbones, another on his flat chin, and a third over his strong brow, but he felt it wasn’t too bad, all things considered. He set his broken helmet and to one side on the bench beside him along with his leather jacket, ran the hand of his uninjured arm through his short, jet-black hair which spiked back up into a peak immediately on its own, and let out a long breath through his thin mouth before he noticed the blue plastic of the cast that had been strapped tightly around his injured arm, bringing it up to his eye to inspect it suspiciously for a moment and he flexed his hand a little to make sure that everything was still in working order with only a little tinge of pain resulting from it.
The man braced his hand on the wall behind him to push himself to his feet, grunting at the soreness that flared all over his body as he did so, until he stood at his full height and stretched his broad shoulders and muscular arms, his muscular torso clad in nothing, but a black tank top and leather vest which left the tattoo of the bull’s skull on his shoulder fully visible. After stretching and having worked a little of the stiffness out of his limbs, the man turned to look at the wall behind him, searching for anything that could give him any information about what platform he was on, but the only thing that marked the walls were the big, black letters spelled out across the tile behind him which said “LAST STOP”. The rider looked back around to confirm that he was indeed completely alone on the platform, starting to wonder to himself just exactly how he had gotten down there after the crash or where the person who had brought him down there had gone. Glancing to the stairs at one far end of the platform, he figured that they must have gone to get help or to look after the other people who had been involved in the crash, his mind flickering back to the red-haired person who he had seen in the bus just before the accident, and, as much as he might not have admitted it out loud, he hoped that, whoever they were, that they had made it out at least as well as he had.
Casting aside the momentary concern, the tall man strode up to the edge of the platform, his large boots stepping onto the yellow, bumpy tiles that marked where passengers shouldn’t step, and he gripped one of the pillars with his uninjured hand to lean out into the dark channel that held the rails for the subway train at its bottom. The lights from the platform didn’t seem to extend much into the darkness of the tunnel, only illuminating the open area where the train would sit to take in passengers, and, even as the man tried as hard as he could to see anything down either end of the tunnel, all he could see was black. He focused his hearing, trying to pick up on the sound of a coming train, the sound of anyone else in the subway, or anything that might mean he wasn’t alone, but he couldn’t hear anything immediately. However, as he focused on his hearing more and more, he swore he could hear something, a mumbling that might be the sound of a group of people whispering to each other, far away and just on the edge of his hearing like they were talking in the next room over. He couldn’t hear any of the words being said, just the vague impression of speech and he wasn’t sure if it was really speaking, but he could have sworn that it was there.
“Hello?” called the man, as he straightened up and looked around, his deep, masculine voice echoing on the tiled walls and down the concrete tunnel.
“Hey! You’re finally awake!”
The man jumped at the unexpected response directly behind him and whirled around to find a blonde-haired person standing where he was certain no one had been before and where he should have been able to hear them approach him on the quiet.
“You had us all worried there for a while,” smiled the person, tucking their hands into the pockets of the huge, puffy black coat they were wearing, their voice bright, sunny, and slightly high in pitch, “We were started to get scared that you had broken something serious and weren’t going to be waking up. So, are you feeling okay? Still a little banged up?”
The man didn’t respond, still off-put not just by the person’s sudden appearance, but also just the presence of a person in general, as he took a moment to scrutinize who had just appeared before him. They were more than a head shorter than he was, but, given that he was pretty tall, they must have been about average height, and they seemed to be lithely athletic in physique, but it was hard to tell underneath the big winter coat and the baggy jeans they were wearing, how they were able to wear a coat that thick when it was not cold outside was a surprise to the man. Their face was pointed and soft with a pointed chin, soft nose, soft cheekbones, big, bright green eyes, and a soft, smiling mouth as it sat on top of a long, graceful neck while their long, platinum blonde hair fell down around their face and over their narrow shoulders. Their skin was light and without much colour with freckles peppering the bridge of their nose and upper cheeks, but there was an ethereal lightness to their presence, like a lightness on their feet or almost like they could float away at any moment. They looked like they were maybe slightly younger than the man was, but that could have been the skin tone and freckles.
“Uh, did you hear me?” posed the person in the coat, leaning a bit closer, “Are you alright? Are you having trouble with your hearing after the crash?”
“Were you the one who did this?” posed the man in leather, lifting up his arm in the cast.
“Oh no, that was the driver of the bus that was also in the accident,” answered the person in the coat, “She patched you up pretty quick, luckily for you there was a first aid kit on the bus. She carried you down here all by herself, too! She left me here to look out for you.”
“So, she’s the one to blame for all of this,” grumbled the man, “At least she had the decency to patch me up after she caused that crash.”
“She caused the crash?” the other person responded.
“She swerved into me, flipped her bus, too,” replied the man, “Weren’t you on the bus?”
“Nope, I was down here, I heard the whole thing, though,” explained the blonde, “It sounded pretty bad. So, what’s your name? I’m Chris, as in Christopher.”
The man didn’t answer, simply staring at Chris.
“Oh, come on, it’s not that weird of a name, is it?” posed Chris, smirking, “It’s a perfectly normal boy’s name, right? Come on, what’s your name?”
“Daniel,” the rider answered, moving passed Chris to go retrieve his jacket.
“Finally, I was starting to think you’d never tell me,” responded Chris, smiling, “You don’t really seem to like people, do you?”
“I try my best to avoid them whenever possible,” stated Daniel, plainly, as he put on his jacket with a little difficulty and a little flinching when he slipped his injured arm into the sleeve before he turned back to Chris, “Have you seen my bike?”
“You mean like your motorcycle?” posed Chris, blinking a little, “Yeah, I think it’s upstairs.”
Daniel immediately turned his gaze towards the stairs leading up from the platform before he started towards them, turning his back to Chris like he wasn’t even there anymore.
“Wait! You can’t just go walking off in this place!” urged Chris, heading after Daniel as the man strode towards the stairs and quickly headed up them, “You don’t know what’s going on here!”
Daniel’s quick stride made him ascend quickly, he was halfway up the stairs by the time Chris has reached the bottom, and Daniel didn’t even turn around to glance back in Chris’s direction as he reached the top of the stairs and found himself in a large, but deserted and starkly-lit hall. The hall was completely and utterly deserted, just like the platform had been, the undulating, cave-like walls arching up into the vaulted ceiling plastered in a wash that might have been white at some point, but which had obviously yellowed and turned a rather dull and dingy beige which the stark fluorescent light raining down from the suspended lights didn’t help make any whiter. Daniel’s footsteps on the mottled, grey stone floor echoed, but quickly faded in the silence, like the steps weren’t loud enough to dispel it. Across the room from the stairs were a set of four escalators leading upwards, though they were still and not moving, but Daniel didn’t spare the room much more thought as he quickly noticed the black motorcycle which was laying on its side right in the middle of the room, shattered pieces of it scattered on the floor all around it.
Daniel hurried to its side as if it was an injured pet and his heart ached like it was as his brown eyes took in the sight of the gouged off paint, the cracks in its body which destroyed the bull’s skull that had been painted on the side of its fuel tank to match his helmet, the one handlebar and one wheel which had been twisted and bent, and all the various pieces which had come off of it. He had built and customized that bike with his own two hands, it was almost like it was a part of him and an extension of himself, and it had been completely mangled and transformed into something so much less proud and so much less intimidating which made Daniel suddenly feel much colder and more anxious. Pushing aside what he was feeling for the moment, Daniel looked to the black leather saddlebags which had been strapped to either side of the bike behind and to the back of the seat, seeing that one had definitely been ripped away in the crash, but the other two seemed to be perfectly fine. He opened up the largest one on the back and found his tools still there, closing his hand on a long piece of metal and pulling out a tire iron. Almost immediately, he felt hope rush into him, he could repair his bike as long as he had his tools and as long as he was still able to hold them.
Renewed and reinvigorated by the knowledge his bike was going to be okay, Daniel slipped the iron back into the bag before he quickly pushed it upright onto its wheels and started with it towards the escalators, already beginning to think about what was going to need repairing and how much the replacement parts were going to cost, but, as he reached the foot of the escalators and looked up, he stopped in his tracks.
Daniel rested his bike against the bottom of one of the escalators before he started up the stalled steps, his eyes never leaving what was at the top of the escalator and barely even blinking as his mind worked to try and convince himself that what he was seeing wasn’t really there. It must have been a trick of the light, or just the way the rooms were built, or maybe it was even the knocks to the head that he had gotten during the crash because what he was seeing just couldn’t be the truth, but, once he reached the top of the escalators, there was nothing that he could do to convince himself that what he was seeing wasn’t reality.
There were no doors, no entryways, or any other space underneath the white stone arches set into the walls, almost like they had been bricked up and plastered over. Where there should have been doors, there was nothing more than more blank, off-white sections of wall. It didn’t make any sense even as Daniel stepped up to the wall and placed his hands against it, he had to have been carried down onto the platform so there must have been doors there once or there must have been some other way down the platform, but it just didn’t make sense that the escalators would have led to nowhere. Daniel placed his ear against the wall and knocked on it, trying to hear if there was any space on the other side. “Hello?” he called, loudly, his voice echoing on the quiet for a long moment before it was swallowed by the silence, “Is anyone there?” But there was no response and, as far as he could tell, there seemed to be nothing, but solid wall on the other side of the blocked archway.
Thinking about other ways out, Daniel turned quickly around and went pounding down the escalator steps two at a time, his footsteps echoing momentarily as well, until he reached the hall floor again and gave the room a much better look, but what he saw only made him more confused and more worried. There were more white stone arches circling the perimeter of the hall, as if they were supposed to lead to hallways and other platforms, but they, too, were completely sealed off, the wall continuing under the arches to give only the suggestion that doors and corridors should have been there. The hall was completely sealed off as far as he could see, with the undulations of the curving, round walls pretty much uninterrupted from the grey floor all the way to the vaulted ceiling overhead from which the long fluorescent lights hung. And, perhaps even more unnerving, there weren’t many of the usual signs that one would expect in a subway and those that were there were all completely blank. The stark white, harsh light from the fluorescents shone down oppressively over the space and left almost no shadows anywhere, almost like the lights were exposing the unbelievable reality in order to mock and laugh at his inability to understand it. It was like the room was merely an imitation of a subway hall, something half-finished, something which would only pass without a close inspection, or something to give the appearance of something familiar and not make him notice the truth before it was too late.
Daniel could feel his heart-rate beginning to quicken and his lungs beginning to constrict, like they weren’t getting enough air in, but, no matter how much he wracked his brain, he couldn’t understand what was going on. He went over to one of the arches near the staircase, placed his hand against it and knocked there, too, but, once again, there was no sign of any echo on the other side. He could feel his options for escape dwindling in the back of his head as he turned and charged back down the stairs to the platform where he found Chris waiting for him.
“Look, I’m sure you have lots of questions right now…” started Chris, as the blonde took a step back from the bottom of the stairs, but Daniel quickly cut him off.
“What the hell is going on here?!” questioned Daniel, loudly and accusingly, “You said they brought me down here, but there’s no way in or out up there! All the entrances are sealed off!”
“They did bring you down here!” countered Chris, standing his ground, “The bus driver dragged you down here and patched you up. Everyone involved in the crash was here a while ago, you all came here from outside!”
“So you’re telling me that all those doorways just sealed themselves off just now?!” posed Daniel, his brow furrowing, “You really think I’m dumb enough to believe that all those doors just magically disappeared once we were down here?!”
“I get it if it’s hard for you to understand,” assured Chris, “But, you need to know that you and everyone else who came here are in serious, grave danger. You need to go find the others and help them, there’s no telling what could have happened to them by now. If you want to get out of here, you can’t fight this alone.”
Daniel grunted dismissively, seeing that Chris was probably just going to keep spouting nonsense, before he noticed the door at the far end of the platform to what appeared to be a bathroom judging from the sign on the door. Daniel blew passed Chris and strode directly over to the door, shoving it open and finding a dimly-lit room covered floor-to-ceiling in grey, monotone tiles and lit by more fluorescent lights which occasionally flickered. Sinks with mirrors over them lined one wall while urinals and toilet stalls lined the other, but Daniel didn’t care about any of it. The muscular man stormed around the room, checking every inch of the walls and even shoving open the stall doors for any sign of an exit or anything that could be considered as an exit, but found nothing, just a windowless, tiled box, and Daniel growled angrily through his teeth at the thought that he had somehow become trapped through what he felt was other people’s negligence and sheer accident.
“I didn’t want you to find out like this,” said Chris, standing in the doorway, “I wanted to ease you into it so it wouldn’t be so hard to believe, but I guess we don’t have that option anymore.”
Daniel charged right up to Chris and stared down at him, “What the hell is this place?!”
“It’s a trap, don’t you see?” responded Chris, “Something called you all here, promised you whatever you wanted, but, now that you’re here, it doesn’t want you to leave.”
“I wasn’t called here by anything,” countered Daniel, “The only reason I’m here right now is because of that damn crash.”
“Are you really sure about that?” posed Chris, “Either way, there’s something here, something that wants you, and something that isn’t going to let you go without a fight.”
“I don’t care whatever brought me here!” replied Daniel, “All I care about is how the hell I’m supposed to get out of here!”
“The only way out is deeper,” stated Chris, pointing over to the train tunnel to one side of them, “But, you’re never going to be able to get out on your own. You’re going to need help if you want even a chance of escaping and the others who were in that crash with you have already gone off. You need to help them; they’re all in terrible danger. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen and…Hey!”
Daniel pushed passed Chris, causing the smaller person to stumble back as the muscular man headed for the stairs once again.
“Are you even listening to me?!” called Chris, as he hurried after Daniel, “You need to go and help the others, it’s not going to be any easier, but it might be your only hope!”
“I don’t need to help anyone, I don’t need anyone else. Never have, never will,” stated Daniel, as he reached the stairs and ascended up them again, “They got themselves and me into this, they can get themselves out of it as far as I’m concerned.” Daniel hurried back up into the doorless atrium and jogged straight over to his bike resting against the escalators where he reached into the back saddlebag to pull out the tire iron, gripping it in his uninjured hand and feeling the cool, solid weight of it in his hand, before he returned back to the stairs.
“What are you doing?” questioned Chris, as Daniel came back down to the platform.
“If the only way out is deeper, then I’m heading in, I’m finding a way out, and then, hopefully, I’m coming back for my bike,” answered Daniel, barely even sparing Chris a glance as he stepped up to the edge of the platform.
“What? You’re not listening to me! What’s out there, you can’t face it alone!” insisted Chris, moving up to the platform’s edge while Daniel hopped down onto the gravel floor of the train tunnel which crunched and shifted a little under his boots, “You don’t understand what’s down there!”
“Well then, make me understand,” responded Daniel, turning to look at Chris who straightened up a little and seemed to struggle to find the words.
“This thing, it calls people here, broken people,” explained Chris, the energy and life draining out of his face as something knowing and serious entered his eyes, “It promises things, says it will solve all your problems, but, once its lured people into its clutches, it swallows them whole. It plays on your most self-destructive tendencies and vulnerabilities, and it convinces you that the only way to be free of whatever is making you miserable is to join it. It may even say that it loves you, but it’s all a trick, it’s all lies just to get you to not resist when it devours you. This place is like a spider web, it’s supposed to trap you without you knowing you’re trapped. This place…warps, it changes. It’ll become whatever it needs to in order to trap its next victim and this thing will throw everything it can at you in order to ensnare you. It’ll promise you whatever you want, but you need to understand that it’s all a trap.”
“The only thing I want right now is a way out of here,” stated Daniel, “There’s nothing else it can throw at me that I’ll want more than that.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised,” replied Chris, before bending at the waist to look Daniel in his brown eyes with his green ones, his long platinum blonde hair hanging down in sheets, “Look, there’s nothing I can do to stop you if this is what you want to do and, honestly, there’s probably nothing I can really say to explain what’s going to happen, you’ll just have to experience it for yourself. All I’m trying to do is prepare you for what’s about to happen. All I want to do is help.”
“Yeah, everyone says that, but they rarely actually mean it,” said Daniel, dismissively.
Chris chuckled a little, a light, warm sound that seemed strangely tinged with melancholy, “You’re one closed-off guy, aren’t you? Well, you’ve heard the only advice I really have to give, go find the others from the crash. I tried my best to stop them from going, too, but none of them listened, either. But, I don’t think they’re all completely lost, not yet anyways, so, if you can find them and stop them from falling into this place’s clutches, then maybe you’ll have a chance at actually escaping like you want. Hell, maybe you’ll be the one to make it out alone. I think, if there’s anyone who could do it, it would probably be you, but, no offence, I’m not holding my breath.”
“If you’re so worried about me, then why don’t you come with me?” posed Daniel.
“Sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be of any use in this fight,” answered Chris, “The only thing I can offer is advice. It’s up to you whether or not you take it and, if you don’t, then I’m afraid you’re on your own. Besides, seems to me like you prefer being alone anyway.”
Daniel turned away to look down into the dark tunnel that stood before him, the deep, impenetrable darkness patiently waiting for him within the wide open mouth of the tunnel, almost like it knew that he had no other choice than to venture inside it and it was just waiting to snap closed on him the minute he walked inside. He still wasn’t sure if Chris was actually being truthful or really knew what he was talking about, but he had to be honest that it definitely seemed like Chris believed it and he spoke with enough conviction to make Daniel wonder if it could really be true. “I suppose that I should say thanks for the advice,” remarked Daniel, turning to look back onto the platform, “I’m still not…”
But, there was no one there. The platform was completely empty and quiet, as if the silence had rushed in to fill the space left by Chris. Daniel blinked a little, surprised by how quietly and quickly Chris seemed to be able to move and by how noticeable the disappearance of him was. It almost seemed like the platform was suddenly so much emptier and so much more abandoned without Chris’s life and energy to brighten the dingy space, the fluorescent lights all seeming slightly colder all of a sudden.
Still, Daniel shrugged it off before he started forward and readied himself to delve into the train tunnel as he left the light of the platform behind and, for several long moments, there was nothing, but pitch darkness as Daniel strode along with nothing, but the sound of gravel crunching under his boots to tell him that he was moving forward. He swapped the tire-iron to his injured hand and slipped over to one side to find the tunnel’s concrete wall with his fingertips, letting them brush against the rough surface so that he knew that he wasn’t going to wander off onto the tracks for fear of stepping on the third rail.
The tunnel seemed to continue on and on and not one trace of the light from the platform seemed to penetrate, becoming nothing more than a circle of light that Daniel could see growing smaller and smaller when he looked back over his broad shoulder. He tried to keep his head clear and his ears focused on any other sound that rose above the sound of his own footsteps, whether to listen for an oncoming train or a sign that he really wasn’t alone in the dark, but, even as he continued to see and hear nothing strange or worrying, Daniel couldn’t help, but feel like he was being watched, like there was something eternally waiting behind him for the right moment to pounce. Daniel wanted to blame it entirely on Chris for putting those strange explanations into his heads, but, at that moment, those words seemed a little less bizarre and unbelievable despite his best efforts and he couldn’t stop himself from tightening his grip on the tire iron even though it made his arm ache a little more. After the harsh fluorescent lights of the platform, it took a long time for Daniel’s eyes to get used to the dark and, with every passing moment, he felt the unseen eyes gnawing more into the back of his mind and making him more wary of just what was around him so, when the faintest of glows appeared in the tunnel ahead of him, Daniel felt his heart leap and he picked up his speed to reach it.
The glow grew brighter and brighter and redder and redder as Daniel jogged towards it until he could see that it was coming from a red light that was secured onto the side of the tunnel and he broke into the bubble of bright red light, casting him into black and crimson as he stood there for a moment to collect himself. Daniel looked back, but found he could no longer see the light from the entrance anymore, seeming to leave him too deep to the tunnel to turn back now, and he turned his attention to his surroundings since the bubble of light allowed him to finally see where he was. The concrete walls and ceiling of the tunnel were lined with wires and ductwork as more red-coloured lights continued off towards what looked like a fork in the path at the far end, but was far enough away that it was difficult to make out in the limited light. The tracks continued off down the tunnel, marking out a clear path right through the middle of the concrete corridor, and, after a moment to shrug off the eerie feeling from a moment before, Daniel continued following the tracks deeper into the tunnel towards the far end.
Moving from one bubble of crimson light to the next, Daniel kept walking until he finally came to where the tunnel split in two, both tunnels lined with more lights along one wall at regular intervals with the left-hand tunnel being lit by more red lights and the right-hand tunnel being lit with orange lights. Looking from one to the other, Daniel knew he had to decide which he would head down first and he eventually choose the one lit in red because he figured that maybe the red lights meant that that train had been stopped and he wouldn’t need to worry about it. Daniel kept his hand running along the wall just in case as he headed down the branching tunnel, even though he could now see the tracks in the deep red light, and, once again, there was nothing to greet him, but the sound of his boots crunching down on the gravel and the sight of more red lights stretching away into the darkness ahead. He did notice that several of the red lights seemed to flicker and stutter every once in a while as if they were old and beginning to die, but Daniel took this as another sign that the tunnel probably hadn’t been used in a long time and he probably wouldn’t have to worry about a train.
Daniel strode on for a little while, still seeing and hearing nothing that was out of the ordinary and no sign that any train or person had passed through recently. He looked for any sign of another platform, a utility room, or really anything to break the monotony of the same red-lit concrete walls and the same rhythmic crunch of his boots on the gravel. Then, he felt a sharp pain spark in one of his fingertips brushing the wall as something poked into it, making him let out an echoing “Ouch!” and swipe his hand away from the wall to bring his finger up to his eye. The blood bubbling out from the cut on his finger looked black in the red light and Daniel’s brow furrowed in confusion before he turned to look at the wall and discover that there was something sticking out of the concrete. Moving in closer to the wall to get a better look, Daniel discovered that it was actually what looked like the twin spikes of a piece of barbed wire, imbedded in the wall. Only further confused, Daniel began to notice that it wasn’t just one piece, but actually continued onwards along the tunnel’s walls, snaking and slithering along the wall almost like a vein of silver crystal in rock.
Daniel began to follow the vein of barbed wire, tracing its path along the wall with his gaze as more and more veins began to appear, slithering and vanishing into the grey cement. Daniel looked around as he continued to walk and found that the sides of the tunnel were slowly becoming more and more consumed by the barbed wire, shattering and forcing their way through the concrete and even ensnaring the red lights like some sort of industrial ivy. He even looked up towards the tunnel’s ceiling to find even more barbed wire there, too, their sharp points glistening sinisterly in the crimson light, before even the floor began to become ensnared in the wire with the tracks beginning to become overgrown in wire.
Daniel slowed his pace a little out of fear of tripping on one of the wires that began to run along the ground and landing face down on a bed of barbs, and it wasn’t too many steps further into the tunnel that he noticed his exhaled breath beginning to fog on the air as the temperature seemed to plunge and get colder and colder as he went. The muscular man huddled a little deeper in his fringed leather jacket and was just beginning to think about maybe turning back around and trying the other branch of the tunnel in the hopes that it was less hazardous and bizarrely malicious when he noticed that what he thought at first was just another bubble of flickering crimson light up ahead seemed to be growing larger. He stopped his walking and thought for a moment before the realization struck him, it was the other end of the tunnel. Daniel realized he had finally reached the end of the tunnel and that realization pushed away all of the other thoughts in his head, making him begin to dash forward and ignore the wires under foot, off to the sides, or overhead.
A part of Daniel knew he should probably turn away, that anything that stood at the end of all that wire couldn’t be good and that it very well could not be the exit he had been hoping for, but he just couldn’t turn away from even the slimmest likelihood of a way out of this strange, bizarre situation and, besides, he just didn’t understand. He couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing and feeling and he almost couldn’t stop himself from charging deeper and deeper into the razor-edged tunnel until he finally went stumbling out into a vast, crimson space.
*******
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