Thirteen hours

The beginning

  It started with my best friend and I walking through the woods, we'd come all the way from America to photograph and learn about the german countryside. We were trying to stay away from all the war zones for today as we headed deeper into the woods, we both had walkies and flares just in a case and we'd thought we were ready for anything.

I stepped over a broken branch and snapped a photo of a crow that was resting in the tree a few steps ahead of me.

"I wonder why we're only seeing crows, it is supposed to be pretty full of life up here," Carson said, looking back at me.

"It is kind of weird isn't it?"

"Maybe it's haunted and we're gonna get killed." He joked.

We walked for hours, soon enough even the crows stopped showing up. There was no sign of life, anywhere, the grass thinned and the trees got thicker. It was like the trees were hiding something and all other life ran away. There was a pungent smell in the air, like a million rotting corpse from the past. I turned to Carson and stopped walking, chills ran up my back and the hairs stuck up all over my body. There was a darkness in the air, secrets being held by the thickening trees and the thinning wildlife.

"Do you feel that?" I whispered. Feeling vulnerable and scared.

Carson didn't look at me while he nodded, scanning the trees. "There's a lot of history here. It's probably nothing. Let's keep going."

I nodded and slowly kept walking. Somehow I felt like we were walking right into something bad, something we shouldn't see or be around. We walked for around another hour when I stopped to take photos of the area, so we could look at them if we got lost. I was going through them to make sure they were clear when I saw something, in the photo I took of the north, there were two strange shapes coming out of the ground. I slowly turned and tried to find them with my eyes, they were dark and distant, but it looked like...Pipes?.

"Hey, Car," I said and hit his arm. "Look over there."

He turned and looked as well. "What the hell? What are pipes doing way out here?"

"I don't know," I said quietly, looking around. "Should we go check them out?"

Car was silent for a moment. Then. "Yes, of course." He started walking and I followed, making sure to snap pictures as we walked.

My hands were shaking as we came up to the pipes, there came out of the ground straight up to my waist. Car reached out and ran his hand over one of them. "This is crazy, where do you think they go?"

I shook my head. "I don't think we should be here."

"Oh come on, this is exciting, These go down, straight down." He said tapping on the other one. "Can you hear that? It's echoing at the bottom, that means there's an opening down there."

I glared at him. "Why would there be an opening underground?"

"We are in Germany, where there was a huge war, why'd you think?" He looked around. "Maybe there is an entrance somewhere."

"Why the hell do you want to go down there?!" I hissed.

"Oh come on, you can't tell me that you aren't at least a little bit curious to see a german bomb shelter."

"What if it's not a bomb shelter," I warned but followed him as we wandered over to a ditch in the hill nearby. I stayed up while he shuffled down the hill and inspected the hillside.

"What is it then?"

"I don't know, We shouldn't be here, we don't know a lot about around here."

"We researched here for months, Sam. We know that there was a german family that lived around here and no one else ever came up here, why would there be anything else besides a bomb shelter...." He trailed off as he looked at across the way slightly.

"What is it?" I demanded.

"Holy crap. You need to see this." He said, mouth hanging open and eyes wide.

Interested I followed his path down the hill and stumbled to Car's side. I saw what he was talking about. On the hillside, there was a slab of wood about ten feet tall and four or five feet wide.

"Sam?"

"Yes." I stared at the wood.

"Can we please find what is in there."

I wanted to say no, I knew I should've said no, but instead I walked forward and inspected it. "We might need a crowbar."

"I've got one in my bag." Car said and dropped his backpack on the ground then bent and unzipped it.

"Why do you have a crowbar?"

"Incase something like this happened." He said and pulled out a black crowbar. He then joined me by the wood. After several tries the wood creaked and groaned, nails snapped and bent and the wood slid away from the entrance and down the hill slightly. I stood and put my hand over my mouth. A horrid smell of rotting flesh and molding.....everything filled the air. Not only was the smell bad but the sight before was horrifying. The cement under the wood was cracked and stained with dark colored liquid. Cement steps went down into a darkness that went far beyond the lighting. Large parts of the cement on either side of the entrance were chipped off but were nowhere to be seen.

Car and I exchanged glances and I think we both knew that we couldn't just walk away, this couldn't be a bomb shelter, and we both had the urge to find out what happened here.

So we both stepped over the small entrance and Car handed me a flashlight. And we descended into what I was sure was hell.