Chapter Text
Her brain was the first thing to reboot. Like an old PC filled with too much porn, everything seemed to move slower than it should. Time was irrelevant, she was not alive yet. The synapses trying to make sense of anything, trying to find something in the nothingness. Next was sight, of which there was none. Complete and utter darkness consumed her, a void of nothing unfolded.
This only added to the confusion. For her whole life sight had always seen things, now there was nothing. Even the shapes were gone.
Next was hearing. Time was too short to make out anything yet, which was par for the course, absent voids were often devoid of sound. Then there was a thud, a sound of a bump. A heartbeat, her heart perhaps. The sounds of vigor.
The next was feeling, this did not go over so well. Shock ran up her leg into her spine, causing her to brace and lean upwards. She had limbs, which was good, but one of them was on fire, which was bad.
No,
What?
Fire makes light, no light here, not on fire.
The voice made a good point, it may just be the last point it ever makes as she was consumed now by the ever-growing pain in her leg. It was worse than any electrical surge or knife cut she’d ever received. It was like someone had, one by one, removed every atom from her leg and pulverized it.
Every breath she took was erratic, the pain seemed to make the air heavier and more compact. It was like she was drowning in her own pain! Oh god, her leg was taking all of her oxygen!
Illogical
Why?
Legs don’t need H2O, they consist of biceps, gastrocnemius, and gluteus, all of which are powered as a byproduct of oxygen.
Good to know.
Time was nothing, impossible to calculate or comprehend. She could have been withering there for minutes or days. But all the same, time did pass and the pain became more tangible. Her entire lower body felt heavy, or rather heavier than usual, stings of pain echoed through them but were masked by the crushing feeling in her leg. Causing a terrible realization. There wasn’t just something on her leg there was something In her leg.
The ground was splintery and uneven under her wild jerking movements. She could feel the tears build up and fall out of her eye sockets which may as well be empty. She couldn’t see what was wrong she could only vaguely feel what was wrong and that made it all so much worse. Pure primal fear spiked inside her, making it even harder to understand the world around her. Her mind was flooded with vague ideas of live's past. Trying to find a solution, or maybe just as a distraction. Trying to grasp onto anything.
Hell came to mind. Short blips of memories long since gone flashed by her, sitting under her pastor's gaze. Hell was the fiery pit you went to for your sins, whether it be adultery, stealing and murder, homosexuality, or being ‘Jewish’. The pasture didn’t stay too long.
Small bits of memory came shooting past her. Her brain tried desperately to distract her from the hellscape she’d entered. Setting the school on fire, the group's escapades at the mall, the prom, going to college, beating the living shit out of Andy at softball.
She couldn’t tell left from right, up from down. The snippets her brain conjured up made her feel as if she was breaking apart. Like she was, at one time a person but had since broken into thousands of little pieces.
You’re like the Yugoslavia of people.
She tried to grasp at these little pieces of the world, to try and make sense of anything out of the endless abyss she was only barely aware of. The pain was everything, her entire existence was this. Any preconceived notions or past endeavors were meaningless.
There was no death, no decay, no morals or humanity.
Just pain.
It sapped what little strength she had. Even her eyelids grew heavy as the weight of her own existence wade down. They closed and the world was just as dark and painful as when she had entered it. The void swallowed her whole, and deep down she hoped she would never wake up again.
Greggory opened his eyes and was rather unsurprised to see nothing but darkness. What was out of place, however, was the thick layer of smooth rock and gravel below him.
Surely the rocks had crushed him and his friends. Surely his mortal form was well and splattered beneath the earth's mighty fist and he was simply sailing away into the void.
The throbbing in his head said otherwise. He gave out a short grown of pain, his head was not splattered but it certainly had taken a beating.
“Hey, you okay?” A voice, wavering with worry, came out just a few meters away.
“Yeah, I think so, my head might have been squashed to paste.”
There was a sigh of relief, “it doesn’t sound like it, I think you’ll be alright.” Angus said.
“I could still have gotten squashed. Maybe I'm a ghost, then I could haunt that other ghost.” He said, with a genuine gasp of delight.
“Then we’ll haunt him together.” The voice came back with a soft chuckle
Gregg felt a large pair of arms fold around him, embracing him in a hug, of which Gregg returned. They spent a moment there, for just a few seconds. Just happy to be alive. A little part of him didn’t want it to end but his brain, having been unsquashed, was now beginning to replay the last few minutes that had occurred.
“Wait, Bae?! You alive?” He yelled out into the darkness, breaking contact with Angus.
There was a groan of pain from the opposite wall. “Yeah? Maybe? I can’t see shit.”
Usually, he’d have a witty retort or something odd to say, he sort of reveled in the social chaos he could create, but now didn’t seem to like a good time.
“Mae? How bout’ you?”
…
…
Nothing but silence. Obviously, she was not doing so well.
“Mae?!” He said again this time much louder.
…
No response, silence filled the cavern save for the intermittent hacks of Bae attempting to clear the dust out of her throat. A proverbial weight was brought down on the group. As if all together their souls sunk a little farther in their bodies.
“Mae! Come on don’t…” Gregg began before Angus interrupted.
“Hold on, she might be knocked out somewhere around here.”
Or worse… The thought came as fast as it went, best not dwell on such just yet.
He fiddled around in his pocket before pulling out a flip phone. Old, but reliable. The room was, quite suddenly, illuminated by a weak white light. This still caused the other to real back in pain as the light smashed into their retinas.
“Ahh! Damn, I think my eyeballs just melted.” Gregg gasped, putting both paws to his head to attempt to adjust at a more reasonable rate.
“Well I’ll be, now there’s light and I still can’t see,” Bae said, doing much the same as Greg.
“It’s a good thing ghosts don’t need eyes.”
The small quips did well to improve the mood, a coping mechanism. It was the best they could do as the light flickered around the now much smaller cavern with no sign of the red-eyed cat.
The sinking feeling seemed to double. The edge of their minds instantly came to the worst conclusions, of course, were struck down before they could fester. Best not to bring down the others with such news.
They searched around the cave, looking for any evidence of her presence. They found nothing. A sad note but not unsurprising.
Greg could feel in his gut, he knew what happened. He kept eyeing the black hole that was once a functioning elevator. The ambiance of the cave seemed to drown out even their short shuffles across the cave. It called out to him in a way, the farthest reaches of his mind he knew where Mae was. He just couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud. Then it might just become true. And he had the distinct feeling the others felt the same way.
“Do you… Do you think she walked off somewhere? She seems to have a tendency to do that.” Bae asked though it didn’t feel like much of a question. It sounded like she didn’t half believe it herself.
Angus bit, “Maybe, though you’d think she’d leave a track behind right?”
“Well, she is small and makes less of an…”
Greg stepped closer to the edge, his mind cutting out Bae and focusing entirely on the empty pit in front of him.
His mind was split, his right side wanted him to move forward, to confirm its hypothesis and see the mangled corpse of his best friend, as if it would bring some kind of closure.
The left side wanted nothing to do with such things. It seemed perfectly content to simply wander around the darkened caves up here forever and die of unnatural causes, forever pushed by the thought that she just might be around the next corner.
Eventually, the right side won out and he stood over the seemingly endless pit. He couldn’t see anything, nothing but an endless void. A void that swallowed his best friend whole.
He had only a vague idea of what happened during the cave-in. He was so sure they had won out, that they had pulled Mae to safety.
Surely she’s just hiding deeper in the cave, afraid after the shock.
Not entirely implausible but the fall made more sense.
How long… How long were they out for?
Bae and Angus had stopped talking, they stared over at him. He couldn’t see them past the glare of the flashlight but he could feel their eyes.
Maybe, maybe she survived the fall?
Maybe…
He took in a deep breath and yelled into the void, “MAE!”
His voice resonated and echoed off every wall. It lingered for a few seconds, it was like the cave was taunting him, taunting him for having killed his friend. A welt of emotion formed in his throat and for a moment he wasn’t sure he would be able to keep it down.
His voice faded into the chasm, and the soft ambiance of the cave resumed as if it had never been disturbed. The feeling again, like something was pushing its way up his throat, it was pure emotion. Once again he forced it down and breathed in once more.
“MAE!!!” His voice rang out once more and again he was greeted by the ambient moans of the cave. Nothing.
Emotion, was it sadness? Hate? Guilt, perhaps. It foamed upwards from the empty space where his soul used to be, it thrashed at his heart and ate its way up. It was like a wave of realization, reality washing over him like a tidal wave.
“Gregg, look, we don’t know what happened or where…” Angus began.
“Shut up, just shut up! We all know god damn well that she didn't walk out of here!” Gregg spat. Angus had only ever had Gregg talk to him like this once before. When Casey disappeared.
“MMMMMMAAAAAEEEEE!” He yelled once more. No one answered.
All Bae and Angus could do was look on. They knew what happened, of course they did. They weren’t fast enough, or strong enough. Mae was dragged down with the elevator, if the fall didn’t kill her the weight of the lift surely did.
It was nice to pretend that she’d simply walked off, that she was sitting on the couch at home waiting for them to return so she could berate them for taking so long, if only for a little while.
“Mae, please…” He didn’t yell this time. He fell to his knees. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Why couldn’t he have gotten squashed too? Like he wanted.
In the middle of his groveling, his ears perked up. A new sound arose from below. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it was distinct enough. It was something unnatural. Something cat-like?
“Gregg…” Angus began again, but was cut off by Greggs harsh Ssh!
It sounded like…
RRRRRRHG
That was definitely a good word to describe this.
Pain was once again back on the menu as that sickening feeling rushed through her once more. A voice had called out to her, she was pretty sure, maybe it was god? Or maybe it was a manifestation of her mind trying desperately to distract itself from the fact it was dying and drowning in a sea of pain.
Though it wasn’t all-consuming this time, it was understandable at least. It wasn’t so primal it was, human.
And it hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before. It was sort of like her body was on fire, as much as the voice would tell her otherwise. She was pain, the bastion of all the pain ever felt by mankind.
Like Jesus but way less hot.
But a little less boring.
Thanks, voice.
Speaking of which she had managed to find her own. The first noises were simple, quiet, through aches and sputter as she writhed on the ground with what little body was movable.
Shut up a moment, I hear something.
Surprisingly she did just so as she strained her ears. Her mind was thankful to have a distraction from the pain emanating from her lower body.
“MMMMMMAAAAAEEEEE!”
Whoever's voice that was, it brought good feelings, feelings of hope, happiness, a light at the end of the tunnel.
Her eyes opened and for a short while the pain was a simple backdrop to her newfound fascination with the glowing spot just above her
It wasn’t the beautiful white light she’d hoped for on death, it was far dimmer than she’d imagined. Her image was hazy at best, her eyes filled with fuzzy blocks and shapes alike, yet she got a distinct feeling that someone was up there watching her.
God?
Damn, I mean darn, I really should have listened to mom more.
God called out once more, this time much quieter. As if the words glided down on holy wings. She’d have missed it if she hadn’t been so transfixed.
“Mae, please…”
She knew that voice, a light sprung to life in her brain.
No, that wasn’t god, it was something more tangible. Gregg?
The last 24 hours came crashing back on her. The ghost, the murder cult, the shape god. It swarmed her head and once more she felt unsteady, like she was falling farther down that chasm.
But she rallied, more aware of the situation she was in, all too aware that if she fell back unconscious she may never wake up. The timber covering her was from the old mine shaft and the wood splintering her leg was probably of the same nature.
This was all just synapses, the brain comforting itself to its surroundings, background noise. The one issue that strained her head now, apart from the still creeping pain of her lower body, was one single word. Escape.
She couldn’t move, not unless she cut her leg off. She had seen 127 hours, she knew she lacked both the equipment and the willpower to do such. There was only one other viable option really.
She breathed in as much as her lungs would allow to let out a scratchy “hey”. It was barely audible above the ambiance of the cave, but it was audible nonetheless. There was no response. The light was still up, far away in the darkened cave sky, yet it was still, unmoving.
Her throat hurt, it was hard to rasp anything out. She sputtered and coughed, trying to free up space in her throat. She wasn’t sure how long they’d wait for her. Maybe they thought she was already dead. They’d leave and never see her again, then she’d really die and they’d never know because they already thought she was dead!
Sort of poetic for you, don’t you think?
No, no one in Shakespear or Le Mis ever died of exposure.
Didn’t that prostitute die of exposure at the barricade?
I don’t know, I only watched the play for the music. Also, I think she bled to death.
Fair enough. Thought not completely out of the question.
She did her best to ignore that last part, only vaguely aware of the wet, crusty feeling against her legs.
She took in another gasp of air, trying to fill her lungs up for one final effort. “Help!” It sounded louder to her this time, it echoed faintly off the walls, traveling up the ravine. Unfortunately in her endeavor to reach her voice to the heavens she made one fatal mistake. She moved. It was a short accidental up twitch of her abdomen as the words came out, it proved fatal.
Her leg screamed in anger for being jostled from its ease. It pulsed and raged against its master. Christ, it was unbearable. A wave of shock racked her body, her mind was quite unprepared for such a bombardment.
She made many grunts and small yelps of pain as air was forced from her lungs. The only thing she could do was breathe. It was all she had left.
God, no. Gregg yelled down to her again, though, she couldn’t make it out. It was loud enough sure, but she was too taken by the pain and her loud inconsistent breaths to make much sense of it.
English is for suckers, only fascists and colonizers use it.
She’d like to make a witty retort, she really would, but the weight was too much to bear. The light at the top of the tunnel was getting a lot brighter. Sweat poured down her face, her mouth was so dry yet she protruded so much liquid.
God, why couldn’t the crash just have killed her?
There it was, the sound that his soul had dismissed near minutes ago as a lost cause. A concise, yet quiet, ‘help’. His spirit did a full leap from the chasm, filling his heart with hope. She was alive, there was still time.
“I hear her, she’s alive!”
The other two stumbled to the edge. Angus pointed his frail light downwards, it did little to illuminate the depths. There was no sight of her. Bae and Angus shared an uncertain glance to each other but seeing Gregg so confident was enough to give them hope for now.
Gregg had delved into his mind, the cogs turned to push out a solution. This wasn’t a joke, he needed to focus, think logically. His first thought was as anyone would have. Get down there.
They could tie their clothes together and form a rope.
Not enough length. Mae can’t stand to grab on, possibly blocked, or worse.
His thoughts were rudely interrupted by the other two. Bae was looking to Angus, “how do we… What do we do, here?” She was putting on a facade of temperance and calm though it was a poor one at best. Her voice shook just a little, just enough to show the cracks.
Angus looked just as worried, “I’m, not sure, maybe enough rope survived for us too…”
No rope seen since entry save for the lift, lift is dismantled rope unusable. Found rope or any other accommodations would be too old to be useful.
The words echoed through Gregg's head. His head was right in that sense, it was rather clever. But being clever was, as they said around the playground, ‘gay’ and he’d be damnded if he lived up to any cliches.
Technically you're damned anyway.
He squashed the proverbial voice in his head with a thick hammer. Focus. We need supplies, a way to get down a full, 90° drop straight down.
Bae owns a tool shop yah dunce.
That’s a solid 20-minute walk there and 20 back. Too long, with Maes' condition unknown, it would be too risky.
No, what they needed was Wifi.
Fuck authority.
The instruments of capitalism will be used to bring about its destruction.
Not if you go crying to them.
“Bae,” he started turning to her. She gave a small jump, obviously caught up in her own plans with Angus of rescue she’d nearly forgotten the orange fox was here.
“Where’s the closest hotspot?”
“What, for like, Wifi?”
“Yes for wifi, now where?” He had no time for redundancy.
“Just a few minutes from here, down by the old mart.” Her mind was running just a few seconds slower, not seeming to put one and one together for his plan.
He looked back down the mine shaft, the one that had unceremoniously eaten his best friend. It seemed smaller now, recoiling from his mere presence and newfound fortitude.
“Mae! I’m going to get help and a rope coil. I will be back I swear. In the meantime, and I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT DIE!” And with that said he sped off into the darkness. Angus and Bae following behind.
They had been given another chance, he had to grab on now and cling no matter what. Even if it would make the fall so much worse.