Rushing water and a putrid smell, the slick rungs of the ladder squishing underneath my palms, some sort of weird algae growing there. Everything I could sense perfectly except for what lay below— I could smell, hear, and feel. I could even taste the bitter tang hanging in the moist air, some sort of earthy mildew making my tongue burn. I just couldn’t see for shit.
Their voices had quieted as they waited for me to climb down. My foot brushed the bottom of the long tunnel before I heard their ragged breaths— the noise of the dripping water had drowned them out until I was right next to them. Above I could hear the scrabbling of the dead.
I carefully lowered myself down and felt something wet squish under me. A hot, humid mist seemed to permeate the air, and I instantly began sweating. Down here it was at least ten degrees warmer than outside and a film formed quickly on my body, the dirt and blood all mixing with the sweat. I yearned for a hot shower and some shampoo. My body ached all over, sore in every imaginable place, and a rash had formed on my inner thighs from all my running. I needed a rest.
But with the sounds of zombies above, we couldn’t stop here.
“I can’t see a thing,” the voice of Madison drifted over, off to my left. “It’s so dark down here.”
“It’s spooky,” Savannah’s voice echoed a distance back. “How are we going to find our way out?” It sounded like we were in a fairly large chamber, the floor covered in a shallow pool of water, that steady running drip drip drip plinking into even more water somewhere further down the tunnels. From the sounds of it there were multiple channels and pipes branching off in different directions.
“Sam,” Rachael’s distraught voice called out, and I felt a hand extended and grab my arm. “I’m so scared.” She wrapped her arms around me and I felt her entire body shaking. “I wanna go home. We never should’ve left.”
“I know,” my own voice came out, screechy and hoarse, my throat feeling raw from all of the screaming I’d done. “I never should have brought any of you here. We should have just holed up in one of the houses and stayed. At least then… then Amanda and Cassandra wouldn’t have…”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Madison said, edging over to me. Suddenly a hand whacked me in the face.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” she laughed nervously, “I can’t see a damn thing in here.” She felt around in the darkness once again and gently laid a hand on my shoulder. “You couldn’t have known this would happen. It’s not your fault. Besides, we all wanted to get out. At least Amanda and Cassandra aren’t down here…”
“Guys,” Savannah called, her voice further away. “Come over here. There’s a huge tunnel.”
“Hey, don’t go wandering off!” I yelled, my voice reverberating off of the walls amid the splashing and that annoying drip. I pulled away from my sister and walked toward where her voice had come from. “Stay with the group. Who knows how many branches this sewer can take us down.”
“That’s right, brat,” Madison said behind me. “Don’t get lost or I’ll kill you.”
“Come here then.”
We followed her voice until I bumped right into her, accidentally stepping on her foot, my own feet sliding over the slick ground. I grabbed her arm to stay upright— I didn’t need to get any more dirty, nor did I want to fall into the sludge— and nearly brought her down with me.
“Hey, watch it!”
“Sorry. If it’s any consolation, I just got pimp slapped by Madison,” I joked. Or tried to— I didn’t even smile, in all honesty.
“It’s okay,” she sighed. “Anyway, feel along this wall.”
I extended my hand until I felt the slimy concrete wall inches in front of me. I moved it upward and could feel it curving slightly, rounded. I moved it to the left until I felt empty air, and then ran my fingers along the opening’s sides. I couldn’t even touch the top of it.
“Wow, this thing must be like six feet tall.”
“Yeah, and there’s at least one other like it on the side wall to our left.”
“Okay,” Madison croaked, “now we have choices. But do you really want to gamble with these corridors in the dark?”
Rachael chimed in, “Yeah, what if there’s another ladder leading down, and we trip into it? Or what if there’s one of those reservoirs that hold storm drain runoff and we drown?”
“I doubt that we’ll run into another ladder leading down,” Savannah said, “I once knew this kid, Christian Something, whose dad worked for the county sanitation and he went in the sewers all the time. Mostly the tunnels slope downward and empty out along the east and west sides. I think he said there’s one tunnel that goes south which leads straight to the ocean. One time he told us that his dad went down there and found a dead body caught in the grate, just sloshing around. A little boy who’d been swimming saw it. It was kind of messed up.”
“Please don’t talk about dead bodies sloshing around down here,” I said bitterly. “We just need to figure out where to go. Did Christian say anything about reservoirs?”
“Not really, but I’m sure they have those. Florida gets a lot of hurricanes and whatnot, so it makes sense.”
“Alright,” Rachael said. “So we don’t go south, and we avoid reservoirs. Great. Now how do we navigate down in this hellhole?”
“Blindly?” offered Madison.
“No, we can’t do that,” I grunted. “Unless you want to break an ankle or get really lost. And I’ve already got two messed up ankles as it stands.”
A brilliant idea suddenly flashed in my mind, and I prayed to God I still had it. I hadn’t used it the entire time, so hopefully its battery was stilled charged. I pulled at it with some difficulty from my damp pocket, struggling to get a grip and cursing women’s jean pockets, and finally withdrew it. I hit a button. My phone buzzed to life, a happy Verizon logo flashing onto the screen and offering dim, but very welcome, illumination.
“Let there be light!” I shouted triumphantly. And then my face fell as I saw the battery charge— 67%.
“What the heck? I charged this thing right before we left. I haven’t used it since.” I flipped it open and saw that since we’d left I’d made fifteen calls to random numbers. “I’ve— I’ve ass-dialed fifteen people,” I stared incredulously at the screen. And crazily— and I mean I was stunned— I’d gotten one call myself. I stared at it until my eyes burned, hope suddenly coming and going, so fast that it actually made me even more tired and depressed than before. My pessimistic side won this time.
Sure, they’d called, but that was at least three days ago. Maybe they weren’t even alive anymore. And plus… what help would anyone be at this point? Right now, we needed the light. Wasting the battery on a call which might not even go through down here seemed like a dumb idea. So I didn’t tell them about it, didn't want to give them empty hope. Instead, I flipped it closed again.
“Good job bubble butt,” Rachael said, her eyebrows drawn, the lines of her face set into harsh relief in the meager white light. “We better hope you have good battery life on that thing.”
“I think this is like four hours, if we use it sparingly.”
The light barely reached a few inches outward, hardly cutting into the inky blackness. It only caught the wall and part of the opening. The wall was slicked with green and black goop, little bits of stuff sticking to it. I glanced down at my hand and saw it was smeared with the stuff. Scowling, I wiped it onto my already ruined pants.
The tunnel opening yawned ominously ahead into complete darkness, the sound of rushing water not too far away.
“Okay. First thing’s first, we have to know which direction to head.”
I held the phone up and waved it around the opening until I saw something carved into the stone next to it. I could make out the numbers 117 and the letter E. Under that the cryptic letters PS were revealed, but I had no clue what it meant.
“So this tunnel is 117E. That must mean it travels east.”
“What about that other tunnel?” Savannah asked. I nodded and crossed the room. After a moment I found the opening. The information by that tunnel read: 177W.
“West. Which way?”
“I have a bad feeling about that running water back there,” Madison said. “This tunnel sounds dry, at least.”
“Yeah, but the air coming from this one feels cooler. Like it heads downward. I don’t think we want to go down,” Rachael suggested.
A shrill cry echoed above the sound of our voices and rushing water, and suddenly something large smacked into the shallow water behind us. It sent a wave of hot, gross-smelling spray into the air and flopped around, grunting.
“Oh hell no,” Savannah cried. “Okay, how about this plan— just pick a tunnel and run.”
“Okay, follow me. Stay close and try to be quiet. We don’t need the zombies following us.”
I took the lead, guiding my dwindling team down the west-running tunnel at sort of a power-walking speed, trying not to run too fast. I didn’t want to lose them or slip and fall. While there was no water in this tunnel, the ground was still slimy and I didn’t much feel like cracking my head open.
The tunnel stretched forward for what seemed like a couple yards before veering off to the left slightly. It took us down a long corridor, with little concave openings on either side and grating, though none of them were nearly large enough for us to enter, even if we crouched on all fours.
Behind, more shrieks filled the chamber, the raspy voices of the dead carried by the acoustics of the tunnel, loud and terrifying. The sound kept us plodding forward, my friends feet slapping the ground, their breaths quickening.
As we ran ahead, I kept fighting the feeling that I was going too fast. My feet slid over the ground and I had a hard time controlling my speed. That’s when I realized the ground was gently sloping downward— just as Rachael had suggested.
Okay, great, I thought. You’re going downward. That’s fine. But there better be a way to go back up.
If there was no way up I knew that we were trapped. There was no way that, being so far underground, there were any possible options besides going up. Florida’s landmass is low-lying— I mean, the highest point above sea level is about 345 feet, and that is the lowest high point of any U.S. state. So what I’m saying is that there were not going to be any exits down here.
I continued onward anyway. Just to get away from that horrific sound.
We travelled for half an hour, far enough away so that the sounds of the dead had died off. We’d slowed to a walk now, exhausted and suddenly cold, really cold, shivering and wet. I estimated that the tunnel had taken us maybe a mile or more from our starting point. I’m not too sure; I’ve never been good at judging distances. I knew one thing, though— we’d gone downward. And now the once dry tunnel had a small trickle of water running down the center, steadily becoming larger.
I turned my phone around and made sure that my friends were still behind me. The light shined brightly and they winced and shielded their eyes from the glow.
“How much farther do you think this runs?” asked Madison, rubbing her eyes.
“Not sure,” Savannah answered, “but probably for a pretty long distance. This is kind of a big city, after all.”
Rachael coughed.
“This place is so creepy,” I whispered as I led them onward, their very own Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. “It’s like those old catacombs in Paris. I can just picture it. Except those catacombs are way less scary, since their dead people don’t get back up and try to eat you.”
“I wonder— when Fortunato died… maybe he came back again as a zombie,” Rachael said.
“What are you talking about?” Savannah asked.
“You know… ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. That Poe story where the main guy, Montresor, gets revenge on Fortunato by sealing him in the tomb. He just leaves him there to die.”
“What a douche,” Madison exclaimed. “I just can’t imagine dying all alone in a place like this. It’s—”
I stopped so suddenly that everyone plowed into me, but I kept my balance.
“Why’d you—”
“Hush,” I hissed. “I think I heard something ahead of us.”
I’d heard something a few feet into the darkness— it sounded like scraping, sort of like something skittering over the floor.
I cautiously crept forward, holding out my phone like a crucifix, my hand shaking. The light cast shadows on the curved walls, but it didn’t illuminate anything else. And then it leapt forward.
“Oh my God,” Savvanah shrieked. “That thing is huge!”
“That’s what she said,” I laughed at the terror on her face. “It’s just a dumb rat.”
“But look at it,” Madison pointed.
The thing was huge, alright. It could easily be the size of a house cat, had matted, grey fur that was missing in patches, and had terrible, blood-red eyes that bulged from its skull. It had one ear and was missing a few whiskers, as well as a bunch of red, open wounds along its sides. It was sloshing around in the water, nibbling on something unidentifiable.
“It’s probably more afraid of us than we are of—” I’d stepped forward to go around it and it hissed at me, perking up, it’s hackles rising in agitation. “My God that’s one rabid rat.”
“I hate rats,” Savannah said, a shiver running through her. “I can’t go near it.”
“Oh, for Christsakes,” exclaimed Rachael as she pushed past me, “we’ve fought walking corpses trying to eat us and you’re gonna let a dumb mouse stop you?” She waltzed over and delivered a sharp kick into the beast’s side, sending it flying down the corridor. It squealed as it flew through the air, landing with a wet plop some feet ahead. “There.”
She took her place behind me again and coughed into her hand. “Let’s get going.”
We continued for what seemed like forever. I kept checking the time on my phone every minute, so it crept by at a snail’s pace. We’d been walking for only ten minutes when we heard them running up behind us, their groans materializing out of nowhere.
“Holy crap!” cried Madison. “They’re right behind us. Where'd they come from?”
“Let’s go!”
I ran down the tunnel, the water now ankle-deep, splashing through the murky stuff awkwardly. Ahead the tunnel emptied into a larger room, and I was glad for a change in scenery.
We broke into that room and it was filled with water that reached up to our knees. The sound of zombies was getting louder behind us and I stopped trying to illuminate the tunnel to concentrate on escaping. I waded faster to cross the room when suddenly my body met a wall of spongy-cold flesh.
I’d run straight into a zombie.
“Therearezombiesdownhereholyshit!” I yelled, backing up just as the thing reached out to claw me. Its rancid breath caressed my face and I gagged. Suddenly the room we were in filled with grunts and groans.
The water rippled and splashed around me, and I held the phone out, whipping it around to find where the attackers were coming from. But the phone light was pathetically dim in the open space, and all I could see were faint outlines. Those outlines, however, indicated that there were a shit ton of zombies in the chamber. And if anyone knows anything about shit tons, it’s that a shit ton is much more than a regular ton. It's simple physics, guys.
In the ensuing chaos I not only lost track of where my friends were in relation to me but— and this is the icing on the cake— my hand was batted away by a zombie, only to have my phone fly out of my sweaty palm and hit the water.
“OH GOD NO!” I shrieked. I dove for the phone, following the light from the screen. I fell to the water just as the screen winked out, all hope evacuating my body like a bad bout with diarrhea. We were doomed if we couldn’t see. Doomed to wander this labyrinthian hell.
My friends screamed all around me, their voices reverberating off of some kind of high ceiling, their voices mixing with those of the zombies’. I didn’t know where they were— there was movement everywhere and I was all turned around. But it sounded like they had all disbanded and had gotten separated.
My hands searched frantically in the water for the phone, and my heart was racing wildly as I heard the zombies closing in on me. At this point I didn’t even know if the phone would work anymore but, by God, I wasn’t going to lose it if there was a chance it would. I’d dropped it a thousand times, once into a mop bucket full of soapy water— so with any luck it’d work.
Too bad I wasn’t known for my amazing luck.
My hand patted the ground, left and right. I searched with growing horror, until--
I felt a spongey, wet glob squish beneath my fingers. It jerked in my grip and I realized with mounting disgust that I'd grabbed the face of a zombie that had been lying at the botton of the pool. I squeeled and pushed back, thinking for one brief moment, Fuck the phone. But I knew I was a dead woman without it. I clenched my eyes closed and darted forward, plunging my arms back into the cold. Feeling across the bottom seemed pointless. It wasn't there, it wasn't going to be--
But then my shaking hand closed over the small brick that was my phone and I pulled it out. There was no time to restart it to see if it worked so I shoved it into my pocket and stood.
The water churned with thrashing bodies. I was positive that the zombies chasing us had already spilled into the room, adding to the throng that had been lying in wait within the chamber, and knew my only chance of ever seeing the sun was to get out now.
But I couldn’t leave my friends.
Speaking of, their voices seemed far away, like they were running from the room. I couldn’t tell where they’d run, of course, but they were at least going somewhere.
I took off in a random direction, sloshing through the water, dodging the lurching swipes of zombies left and right. For the second time that day I got pimp-slapped— by a zombie, no less.
I dodged around a zombie that was basically a skeleton with strips of gristle and muscle dangling from its limbs and my mind flashed to the catacombs of Paris.
This place is a catacomb now, I thought, there are so many dead people here.
I broke through a small group and ran into a wall— I bounced off of it and nearly collapsed. I bumped into something in the dark and clung to it, realizing that I was using a zombie to keep balance. I grimaced and pushed it back, sending it into an unknown number of zombies, toppling them like a bowling ball.
I ran my hand over the wall I’d just hit until my palm met nothing but air— a tunnel.
As I turned down the tunnel something shot out and grabbed my hair, wrapping around it and yanking. I let out a howl and pulled away, fighting against the pain, my hair tearing from the roots. I finally broke free as a large clump of my hair ripped away in the zombie’s grip. Gasping for breath, cold and exhausted, I ran down that tunnel until I couldn’t hear the frantic sounds of the zombies. I ran even farther, not stopping until it was completely silent except for my ragged breaths, until I fell to my knees in the shallow water and started to cry.
It was silent except for my hiccupping sobs, so silent. I couldn’t hear my friends, didn’t know where they went— if they’d made it. I was lost, alone and in the dark. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but this tunnel was a very tight squeeze— I’d had to bend over just to get in.
I sat there and cried, shoulders hitching, as my hand absently withdrew the phone from my pocket. I pressed my thumb on the power button and waited for the screen to light up. And when it didn’t I can’t say I was surprised.
I fumbled with the useless thing for a second before I pried the battery out of the back. I squeezed it in my palm, willing it to not be dead. But there was no way it’d work— all was lost.
I had the fleeting urge to crush the battery but stopped myself. Looking uselessly at the battery (it was pitch black and I couldn’t see a thing), I put it into my pocket with the phone. Then I swallowed my grief and stood on wobbly legs.
Sighing, I continued forward in the darkness. Alone.
So, utterly, alone.