The Exit

Prologue

Endless, all-consuming darkness.

I'm swimming slowly, somewhere deep down.
I feel calm, and at the same time, a coldness permeates me.

Somewhere, there is a flickering light.
While I strive with all my being, a dark figure appears out of nowhere, right in front of me, and...

Strange basement. There is no lighting, but the contours of the room gradually appear. You can see a couple of doors, a table... oh, I'm gradually getting used to the darkness; the outlines of furniture appeared: bedside tables, a wardrobe, a mirror... Hmm, broken?

Getting up from the floor, the first thing I did was check to see if the doors were locked. The entrance was locked; the other led to the bathroom, and there were no windows in the room. For some reason, I didn't feel like going into the bath at all. As I moved from the door to the bathroom along the left wall, I felt for the switch. It became clear that the room was terribly cluttered: torn sheets of paper on the floor, rags everywhere, and partially broken dishes on the table. Closer to the entrance to the bath, something resembling a large clot of blood of an unknown consistency appeared.

I swore and began to examine the room in more detail, rummaging in the closet. Looking into the nightstand, I finally found something useful - a diary. Unfortunately, most of its pages were torn out and apparently scattered around the room. I decided to test my guess and took a random page and leaned it against the notebook. It didn't quite fit, but the handwriting and font matched. Moreover, the numbers of the torn-out pages could be found quite easily. I decided to leave this for later, and I tried to read what was there to get at least some idea of what happened. Suddenly the bathroom door opened, a burgundy silhouette began to crawl towards me, and I screamed and fell into the darkness again.

I woke up to someone pushing me in the side. The carriage was knocking and noisy. I was sitting on a leather seat. Next to me, I saw my colleague. He was looking at me, smiling with a slight mockery.

- Hey, wake up, sleepyhead, we have to go out next station! - I hear from Syoma.

Syoma is my colleague; he does not use a car and prefers to travel by metro. We go for a run around the neighborhood every morning, and that's actually how we met. As it turned out later, we got a job in the same office building, albeit in different offices. Nice dude. He says he works as a director for some company; they make games for phones. His prudence allowed him to take a rather high flight: a wife, two children, real estate - it's strange that he doesn't drive a car, right?

I have recently turned 25 years old. I work as a manager at White Deer LLC. I don't have any special hobbies, only habits that developed when I interacted with certain people. Many people say that I have not achieved anything special, and this is partly true. On the other hand, many people notice a strange feature in me - a difference from others. I easily find an approach to people and win them over; I think these skills would be useful in intelligence, but physically I am weak, so I was afraid to choose such a fate for myself. I want to tell you more about Semyon because, in this story, he plays the main role, not me.

Well, let's get started... Where to start?

One day, my colleague did not come to work without telling me anything about it, and later it turned out that he was missing: the police couldn't find his whereabouts, and family as well.

The subway tunnels slowly floated through the windows of the car; the wind was rustling, but the people around were suspiciously silent, as if frozen. Semyon took out his smartphone from his bag and looked at the screen; strange interference was visible, looking at which he decided that it was his imagination. Then the light in the car began to blink, there was a dull thud, then a clanging, grinding sound, and the car turned on its side, knocking Semyon over so that he hit his head on something and lost consciousness. When the car moved a little, the train stopped moving. The light turned off, screams were heard for a while, then a crunching sound was heard. From the depths of the tunnel, a dark red luminous substance was barely visible, which was approaching and becoming larger.