Ice Cold - Part One: The Dark Zone

Chapter Fourteen

The tunnel never got any lighter as Alex crept farther down, and the beam from his tiny flashlight hardly did him any justice. The air around him was cold and moist. He could feel it coming through his thin hoodie. Worst of all were the thoughts that kept gnawing at his mind; would he be able to find a way out of here at all?

No, that was morbid thinking, he told himself. The tunnels could not possibly go on forever, and even if they did, he knew where the entrance was, or what was left of it. Help would come as soon as possible.

However, the thought of being buried alive had a mind-bending power over Alex, and he was simply not willing to wait for help to arrive. If this was a mine, then surely there was another access point to the surface of the mountain, whether it was an air duct, an auxiliary entrance, or the main entrance itself.

Alex was trying to keep the heart in his chest from exploding. He had to keep his cool, that was more important now than anything. He waved his light all around the tunnel for any signs that might lead him to an escape route, but no other options revealed themselves except forward. Alex felt as though he had been walking through the dark tunnel forever, constantly stepping over and bending under disfigured, broken segments of the mine's structure. Panic was welling up inside him again as he cursed the seemingly endless tunnel. Thoughts were racing through his head and he could feel it getting tougher to breath. Was it because he was starting to lose his mind, or was he only traveling deeper and deeper under the mountain?

"JESUS!" Alex cursed out loud, his voice reverberating throughout the dark, crumbling corridor. Nearly falling forward, he managed to snatch hold of the small end of a tree root sticking out of the wall as he was almost taken over the edge of a massive hole in front of him. In the sudden jump scare, Alex accidently dropped his flashlight into the chasm. As he regained his footing, he watched the faint beam of light spin as it continued to fall. Alex held his breath, waiting for the flashlight to stop falling. After several seconds, he heard the light hit the ground, but the beam itself was hardly visible at all. Alex's jaw dropped and he tightened his grip on the root. That was perhaps the luckiest thing to happen to him all day. If the fall itself had not killed him, surely bashing his head off of the walls of the hole several times would have done the job.

His brief thoughts of relief faded when he realized that he was now without a source of light and trapped underground in a highly unstable mine. Yet as he stared blankly down at the flashlight, he was still able to faintly make out his surroundings, as if the light was somehow illuminating the tunnel.

Without thinking, Alex glanced up. To his surprise, he was looking up into a vertical tunnel, similar to the hole he had just dropped his flashlight into, and saw the dim outline of what looked like a shaft leading above ground. A smile instantly expanded across his face, only to be wiped away by one curious fact: the faint light that shone through the shaft was the light of the moon.

Alex's eyes widened and he felt an intense wave of goosebumps travel along his arms. There was no way he could have been trapped in the mine long enough for night to fall. He could see the dark of night through the vent above him, which would have meant that he had been wandering this tunnel for hours. It didn't make any sense.

To make matters worse, his state of panic was preventing him from calling up through the mine shaft in the hope that somebody might hear him.

He bit his lip as he reached out and felt along the mouth of the hole above him for something to grab onto. The walls of the tunnel were completely ragged with chunks of dirt, roots, and other forms of debris sticking out of them. So why should this one be any different, he wondered. He thought about Nickole, and how she had to be absolutely frantic right now, knowing that her older brother was trapped in this life or death situation.