My eyes flew open as I gasped. The cold air filled my lungs like an icy fog. Groaning, I raised my hands to my face. I touched my eyes, my nose, my mouth. Everything seemed intact.
Then why couldn’t I see anything? I didn’t know if I had gone blind. In the pitch darkness, surrounded by only the sound of my own ragged, panicked breathing, I raised my hand.
A few inches above my chest, I felt a velvety lining with something hard underneath. I tried pushing at it and quickly realized it was wood.
I repeated the experiment on both sides of me, seeing my way with my fingers. I felt the interior of the coffin, pressing in on me from all sides. For a moment, I could only lay there, stunned. And then, an animal panic ripped its way through my chest. I felt like I was suffocating. My vision seemed to turn a translucent white as waves of adrenaline shook me like lightning. I started screaming, beating my fists against the lid. It wouldn’t budge even the slightest bit. It felt like I was striking concrete. I knew there must be tons of earth on top of me, pressing in on me.
I tried to calm myself, to focus on my breath like the Buddhists taught. The panic was too strong, though. My thoughts kept scattering. I couldn’t remember anything. I tried to think. How had I gotten here?
I don’t know how much time passed with me beating my fists against the lid, kicking my legs, breathing too hard. I must have been consuming my oxygen at a tremendous pace. I began to feel light-headed. The waves of translucent light over my vision seemed to intensify, spinning and spiraling into morphing shapes. I wondered if I was dying. Perhaps this was death. Some people thought that DMT is released at the moment of death, after all, leading to a psychedelic experience as consciousness rises up.
Something shook the ground like an earthquake. I heard a deep rumble pass through the ground, currents and waves of rising and falling shockwaves. I was thrown around in the coffin, smashing my head against the sides. Then, suddenly, I felt myself falling. I screamed, my stomach filling with butterflies. I felt the rushing of gravity all around me for a second before the coffin crashed into something hard. It split down the middle, the lid cracking open. I tumbled out into a cave. I looked down, realizing I was wearing an orange jumpsuit, like some sort of convicted murderer.
From a hole in the ceiling high above me came streaming down pale winter sunlight. Stunned, I blinked rapidly, breathing in the sweet, sweet air. I looked up at where I had fallen from. Stalactites kept tumbling down like guillotine blades as small aftershocks swept through the ground. Streams of dirt and pebbles fell through the air, tinkling against the ground. It formed a repetitive, rhythmic tapping against the cacophony of the shards of stones smashing all around me.
I cowered into a ball, covering my head with my arms. Within seconds, the shockwaves had passed by. Trembling and weak, still seeing the white fog of hypoxia over my vision, I started crawling away from the coffin, nearly the place of my death. I looked up at the ceiling, and the sunlight streaming in through the cave stirred something in my memory.
***
I was walking along the crowded city streets. The same kind of pale winter sunlight streamed down through the alleyways. I remember constantly checking my back, thinking I saw something horrifying trailing me in the crowd. Something twisted and black seemed to slink through the people pressing in on each other like canned sardines. But it kept disappearing under the constant shifting of many bodies. The cat-like odor of many human bodies pressed together seemed strong, even overwhelming.
I felt rivers of sweat flowing down my face, despite the cooling breeze that swept through the streets with every passing tractor-trailer and car. I kept running blindly forward, pushing my way through the crowd. I knew I had escaped from the faceless men in the black suits, but they were never very far behind. They had given me some kind of poison that still twisted through my stomach like writhing snakes. I suddenly felt very sick.
I stumbled off to a nearby garbage-strewn alleyway, stepping over needles and cigarette butts. I bent over, retching, but my stomach was empty. After gagging, I threw up some frothy blood.
I heard the cocking of a pistol behind me. Still weak and shivering, I turned to see two of the agents standing there in black sunglasses and dark suits. They had close-cropped dark hair. They all looked like they were churned out on an assembly line: muscular, white and clean-shaven. I could barely tell one from another, even back in that den of horrors I had escaped against all odds.
“You can come with us peacefully, or you can come in a body bag,” the one on the left hissed, his mouth twisted into a tight, grim smile. I slowly put my hands up as they shoved a cloth bag over my head. I felt the sting of a needle going into my neck.
I wondered if it was more of the hellish alpha-UBIK crap they had given me back in the lab. But within seconds, I knew it wasn’t. I felt waves of lightness and relaxation pass through my body as my consciousness faded. I felt arms grabbing me as I stumbled forward, and then I remember nothing until the coffin.
***
All along the sides of the cavern tunnel, patches of strange, luminescent mushrooms grew. They gave off an eerie, greenish light. It gave me just enough light to see ten feet or so in front of me.
Strange white patterns kept forming in front of my vision. It brought back horrifying memories of my time being tortured by the agents in that lab. Pieces of the experience came back to me slowly: being tied down to a cold, steel table and having a needle full of black, sparkling fluid stuck into my arm. There was a feeling like lava as the drug had spread throughout my body, and then the white patterns had taken over, so intense that I could see nothing else except for the crisscrossing grids of blinding radiance that streamed over everything.
“This is alpha-UBIK,” one of the agents with a false rictus grin said, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses. “It’s part of our new MKULTRA program. Supposedly, it gives some people psychic powers, though others it just kills or drives insane.” He leaned close to me. I could smell the stale coffee and cigarettes on his breath. “Do you want to make a bet on your fate, or do you want it to be a surprise?”
I remember screaming as the pain intensified a thousand-fold. The kaleidoscopic patterns whizzing across my vision slowly receded. Suddenly, every color in the world seemed crystal clear. I felt like I could see each individual atom of every lightbulb, every speck of dust, every tiny piece of microscopic dandruff on the agents’ black suits.
A few moments later, I had seen the black, hunchbacked creatures skittering over the walls, silently climbing it with their sharp, blood-red claws. The CIA agents hadn’t looked back, hadn’t seen them coming. I remembered them jumping on the agents with gnashing fangs, biting into their jugulars like vampires. There were sucking sounds all around me, cold, rotted hands untying me, and then…
The drug that they had injected me with made everything seem jumbled. The memories seemed like they were in no sequential order, but were instead just flowing back to my consciousness randomly.
***
A woman in the same orange jumpsuit that I was wearing sprinted into the main tunnel from an adjoining cavern. She froze when she saw me, her eyes wide and frightened like a deer in the headlights. I saw deep claw marks gouged into her shoulders and arms.
“Don’t kill me!” she cried, putting her hands up. “God, don’t hurt me!” I could only stare, speechless. The abrupt appearance of the woman had stunned me for a moment. I put my hands up.
“Why would I want to hurt you? What did that?” I asked, pointing to the scratches. She glanced behind her nervously, as if afraid that speaking the name of the creature would bring it into existence.
“We’re not alone down here,” she said, wincing as fat drops of blood dribbled their way down her skin. “I only caught glimpses of something peeking around corners at me, but it kept hiding. It charged me when the tunnel went pitch-black, clawed me pretty good. I ran for my life out of there, but I think it’s just toying with me.
“It changes down here from a cave to some sort of endless warehouse, and beyond that, there’s forests inside a massive room with incandescent bulbs hanging down everywhere.”
“What?” I asked, thinking the woman had clearly gone insane. “Go back to the ‘We’re not alone’ part. What else is down here with us?”
“I only caught glimpses,” she whispered grimly, “but its face was black and oily, its limbs thin and spidery. It had two glowing white eyes like headlights, but everything else just looked black and shiny. It seemed to have eight legs, like a spider. From its elongated, narrow chest extended two arms that ended in fingers like scalpels. It was something straight out of a nightmare.”
“That has to be a hallucination,” I said, shaking my head.
“Could a hallucination do this?” she asked, pointing to the deep gashes on her body. I didn’t know what to say to that.
I continued talking to the woman and found out her name was Aria. I told her mine was Jay. Like myself, she had patches of memory loss before waking up down here. Unlike myself, she hadn’t woken up in a coffin, but in a room with flickering lights and blood-red carpeting. She found herself laying on the carpet, noticing how wet and sticky it seemed. Slimy, even.
“Well, first things first, we need to find a source of water,” I said. “If this cave is as large as you say it is, it should have underground streams running through it.”
“We need to get out of here!” Aria hissed quietly, her face a combination of terror and pure animal panic. “I don’t give a shit about water. If that thing I saw catches us, we will never need water again.”
***
We had no idea which direction to travel. The cavern intersected four ways. We decided to go left, as a breeze blew through the cave from that direction. The glowing, fluorescent-green mushrooms scattered over the walls gave us enough meager light to continue stumbling forward.
“I heard something about following the wind if you’re lost in a cave,” I said. There was a wet, fungal smell to the breeze, almost like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Up ahead, there was a soft, flickering light barely stabbing its way through the thick clouds of darkness.
“Yeah, but even if the wind does lead to an exit, it doesn’t mean it will be large enough for us to go through,” Aria said despondently.
“Well, it’s our best shot,” I said as we moved forward through the winding caverns and towards the soft, white light ahead. The cavern started to change into a bizarre hallway of an office building. The stone floor merged with the soaking wet ruby-red carpet in patches and spots. The sides of the cavern slowly transformed from a granite slab to a cracked, dirty wall the color of cigarette smoke. Bright red molds spiderwebbed across the wall and the ceiling, their pencil-thin tendrils disappearing underneath the wet carpet.
As we stepped on and felt it squish under our feet, I noticed a smell like blood and vomit rising from it. Above us, fluorescent lights flickered and hummed. Many had burnt out entirely, and others only gave off a dim glow. Their incessant buzzing felt like a drill through my brain.
The hallway stretched off seemingly forever. Thousands of identical doors lined each side of it, each one painted a glossy jet-black.
“This is like one of the places back in the direction I originally came from,” Aria said, sounding nervous. Her eyes constantly flicked from side to side, scanning every door. I was about to say something when I heard something click up ahead. I glanced nervously down the hallway, but I saw nothing. “It’s just like where I woke up, except it was a giant room the size of a football stadium instead of a hallway. The ceiling must have been five hundred feet above me. Who could have built such a place as this?” I just shook my head.
“Maybe the government did, or maybe no one built it,” I said. “What if I’m just strapped down to a table somewhere being given injections of alpha-UBIK while a virtual reality headset plays this? Maybe you’re not even real. Hell, maybe I died in that coffin and this is all just a hallucination of my oxygen-deprived brain.”
Far down the hallway, one of the glassy doors opened slightly. Half of a black, spidery face peeked around the corner, its thin mouth spread into a wide and excited grin. Its eyes seemed to shimmer with lunacy and a deep, predatory hunger as it gazed down at us. Aria hadn’t seen it yet, and she continued calmly walking toward it, speaking as if everything were normal.
“No, this is definitely real,” Aria said with a half-smile. “Not even in my wildest nightmares could I imagine a place as bizarre and endless as this.”
“Aria!” I hissed, backpedaling quickly. She looked up and froze like a statue when she saw the alien half-face gazing at us. It slowly disappeared back behind the threshold. The door closed with a muted click.
“Run!” she screamed, turning and sprinting past me in a blind panic. “It’s back! It’s back!” The amount of pure terror in her voice immediately caused me to jump into action. Aria sprinted a couple hundred feet with me at her heels. I looked behind us and saw a black, spidery creature loping down the hallway on eight sharp legs that shone like the skin of a centipede. Its eyes appeared to spiral in waves of a harsh white glare.
Aria turned toward a random door, flinging it open. She ran through it without a moment of hesitation. Through the door loomed thick, black shadows, and Aria’s silhouette disappeared from view immediately after stepping inside.
The predatory creature stalking us gave a shrill, gurgling cry. It sounded like an infant wailing through a mouthful of blood, or the screaming of a man who had molten lead poured down his throat. It shook the walls and floors like thunder.
In that moment, I was only a being of pure instincts. The animal panic in my mind took away all rational thought. I dashed through the door after Aria, slamming it hard behind me in my wake. As the door closed, the wailing of the strange, spidery creature was abruptly cut off, as if we had just entered a soundproof chamber.
My eyes quickly adjusted to the bizarre scene in front of us. We were outside, standing on a flat, black plain that extended to the horizon. A woman’s decapitated body lay on the ground a few feet away, her white blouse soaked with clotted, dark blood. Blood spatter surrounded her corpse, as if someone had taken a paintbrush with red paint on it and waved it around.
Two small, crimson suns revolved slowly around each other in the slate-gray sky. The pale spheres looked hazy and weak, like two bloody, mutilated eyes. The sky looked like a solid wall of dirty mist that extended to every horizon. But strangest of all, situated on the black soil that loomed like an infinite abyss in front of us, dozens of rows of escalators stretched thousands of feet into the air. They disappeared into the gray mist high above us.
“What the fuck?” I whispered, looking at the door behind me. It stood in the middle of the black soil without any wall around it. It had no thickness. I walked around it, examining it, but it looked like a random door had just been stuck into the soil. I felt a pulsing energy from it, though, a power that felt almost like the white light of the alpha-UBIK drug trip.
“I think we have a problem,” Aria whispered, watching the escalators closely. That same, spidery black face was peeking around the edge at the bottom of one, its rictus grin still plastered across its obsidian flesh. As it met my gaze, it skittered out on its many legs at a tremendous speed, gnashing its curving, twisting teeth together with a rhythmic cracking like snapping bones.
At that moment, something in my chest seemed to give. The white waves of translucent light I had seen when the agents had injected me with alpha-UBIK started again. Before I knew what was happening, I felt myself rising off the ground as a burning pain like fire spread throughout my arms. I raised my hands in the air, feeling sick and weak as the waves of translucent light pounded against my eyes like a drumbeat. A high-pitched ringing started in my ears.
The creature crashed into Aria with the speed of a runaway train. There was a shattering of bones and a spray of blood as its razor-sharp fingers easily decapitated her. Her head went flying across the soil, landing only a few feet in front of me, her sightless, horrified eyes staring blankly up at me. I felt her blood spatter across my face and chest like warm raindrops.
I felt something in my chest like a swirling hurricane, and the white light covering my vision coalesced into a spear. With my hands raised, something sharp and bright shot out of my body like a bullet, slamming hard into the abomination as it rushed me. It flew back twenty feet, landing on its back, its spidery legs twitching and writhing in the air. I felt a massive weakening inside myself and fell limply to the ground. With the last of my energy, I started half-crawling, half-stumbling over to the door. As I pushed it open, I kept the vision of my hometown in my mind. The last translucent waves of light faded, and I felt a piece of myself being sucked out into the door, some piece of consciousness that flew out of the top of my head and spiraled in the air like two twisting snakes or a DNA molecule. I felt totally drained and empty, and yet, as the door swung open, I realized it had worked.
On the other side of the threshold, I saw the rolling hills and thick forests of my hometown. As the creature behind me pushed itself up to its feet and gave a roar of fury and hunger, I stumbled through the doorway, slamming it closed behind me.
I remember walking forwards a few steps before collapsing, and then there was blackness for what felt like a very, very long time.
***
I opened my eyes, feeling groggy. Everything looked faded and surreal. I saw the trees looming overhead, felt cold concrete under my back. An old woman in filthy clothes with crooked, yellow teeth and a smile like a cat leaned over me. Next to her, I saw a shopping cart filled with bottles and cans.
“You alive, sonny?” she asked in a quavering voice. I looked around, seeing the house I had grown up in across the street. I was laid out on the sidewalk, shivering and covered in Aria’s blood. “I thought you was a corpse when I first seen ya. All that blood. Whose blood is that, anyway?” I shook my head, rising to my feet and pushing past her.
“I know where you come from, boy! You come from the Badlands! I seen it!” the woman screamed at me, raving and insane as I stumbled away down the street, simply happy to be alive.