This Was A Bad Idea

🪐 prolouge !!!

[Content warning: this story contains depiction of gore and may be graphic for some audiences. It is prinarily a horror story. Please proceed at your own discretion.]

November 17, 1992

Hailey is never getting out of here.

She knows that now, as a fact. The cold walls scrawled with initials, the glint of an old metal lock clenched tightly in her hand. She imagines dying in here, her body swallowed by mildew and time until it is mutilated beyond recognition.

The reek of cheap beer and cigarettes filled the tight space as bodies flittered in the dim twilight. She knows that she will never see the sky again as her hands raked across the metal ladder, cold under her clenched hands as she made her way down. She felt like she was being swallowed by the earth, by the damp walls.

Something feels wrong. Into the dark abyss, she can feel the tendrils of those cramped walls closing in on her like they're gnarled hands squeezing her lungs. Like they're ghosts, clogging her brain and filling her limbs with a heavy, leaden feeling.

Something feels wrong about the group of teenagers crammed in this tunnel, with the overpowering reek of weed and the stench of sweat that seems crammed into each molecule of thin oxygen.

She only came here for the challenge. She already has her lock clenched tightly in her hand, bought from a hardware store yesterday. She'd already carved her initials into it. Now she only needs to launch her plan forth into the damp tunnel walls. She looks up. Dark, pitted ceiling. Brackish, grease-smudged walls. Names scrawled in dark sharpie.

The air burns her tongue. It burns her brain. It feels like the oxygen itself is wrapping her skull in a vise.

She can see bodies everywhere. Crouching on the ground. Kissing, backed against the walls, hands under shirts. Passing cans of alcohol to one another. She was offered one, but didn't take it.

The only thing that could make this night worse is having her brain numbed to the point of oblivion. It would be like the sharp edge of a knife filed down until it's too blunt and broken to use. Then she would really never get out.

Her skull flickers, like it's full of static. Her thoughts crunch around her like the thin flames wielded by the colorful plastic lighters held in everyone's hands. They're sheathed in bright pastels, the color of hard disks of candy. She knows she shouldn't be here. She shouldn't have come.

Hailey cranes her neck to look up at the brand new ladder that someone bolted to the slick wall, the edges smooth.

She reaches her hand for it but something reaches her first.

A burst of pain splits across the back of her neck. A muffled squeak dribbles out of her as she feels the sharp burn of a flame. A snarl of panic grips the back of her skull.

Someone is pressing a lighter against her neck. Her entire body gives a sharp spasm with the white-hot agony that follows.

"Who the fuck-" She shouts but her voice dribbles off into nothing. There's no one behind her.

The pinprick of agony is gone and she whorls around to see a bright light, a burning inferno that doesn't belong here. The full force of the sun has shattered through the haze of bodies. The screams start to bubble from all around her. Her lips have just closed around the word when she realizes it's too late.

Fire. The air suddenly feels suffocating, pressing against her like a thick stew that she's being boiled alive in. The damp tunnel is illuminated with an unearthly light.

That's when she sees the fires curling on the ground, like snakes made of the sun itself. Emanating from the small puddles on the ground, she smells the sharp scent of gasoline, kerosine, some vague chemical that she can't quite place. The flames beat the stifled air, curling and latching onto people's clothes.

Bodies are on the ground now, filling with the scent of charred flesh and mingling with the stench of burnt teenagers. Limbs jerk in wild statico, moving in ways that should be impossible. People clump together like wet strands of hair flushed down a drain, arms reaching for the ladder. The cacophony of their desperate screams jumble around her brain like static, burning to a wretched fever-pitch that slams at her brain with the force of a sledgehammer. Her legs drive into action.

One of her fingers hook around a rung of the cold metal ladder but someone grabs her shoulders, sharply jerking her backwards with a jolt that feels like an atomic bomb has exploded underneath her skin. She feels a shoe slam against her shoulder as a kid pushes past. He's too strong.

"Get the hell out!" Someone screams. "Go!" A sob wrenches from her lips as Hailey crumples on to the ground just in time to see a boy launch himself at the ladder only to get shoved down just like her.

"Hailey!" A voice cuts through the darkness like a knife. Hailey latches onto the sound, clutching to it like a lifeline. Her heartbeat quickens, trying to catch hold of the voice as her own thoughts crunch like rusty nails.

Michelle.

Where is she?

She tries to scramble to her feet just as one of the whorling tongues of fire catches up to her.

A breathtaking burst of pain crumbles over her entire body as the flames rake their razor-sharp hands up her back, shredding through her tissue-paper thin skin. The lock clenched in Hailey's fist peels away, falling to the ground as her body starts to cave in. It feels like she jumped into a swimming pool full of needles.

The pain bleeds through her, agony burning white-hot in every crevice of her body. Dark ink seeps through a piece of paper as it crumbles to nothing.

The world flickers, like the fire burrowing deep underneath her skin. There's a burst of muffled static as her own screams devour her last snatches of consciousness. Her lips open, forming words that don't come out. All around her, bodies fall like leaves, dead husks turned into human torches.

Hailey knows she is never getting out of here. Her brain breaks with the sobering realization that she will never see the sky again. Never see the waxy spat blue and lines of ochre that streak the endless abyss above her. Never.

Her eyes whorl around the inferno, looking for anything beautiful to latch onto before her body finally shuts down. A star bleeding through the sliver of broken sky, a pastel scrawl of initials on the wall. Something. Anything.

Her flickering vision jerks past burning teenagers, the sound of inhuman screams wrenching through the blood soaked air. She can see a familiar white button down illuminated with fire, burning away.

A girl. Her girl. Chunks of her caramel-colored hair curl away from her blackened skull, the grotesque remains of her face turning into a slab of charred meat. She's unrecognizable, those lips that Hailey would brush against with a soft kiss now swollen with fire. A scream tears past Hailey's broken lips, past the darkness filling the cracks in her fading consciousness. It uproots her from everything, sending a spasm of agony roiling through her so massive that she can't feel anything but the feeling of her own skin turning to ash, her bones snapping apart, skin coiling with flames.

Her girlfriend is on fire.

And so is she.