Dream Journal

Jailbreak Disastrophe

The air was warm and dank, something that screamed I could only be trapped in some kind of factory or prison. The lights had gone out, and the sour reek of rusting metal pierced the air. The soles of my feet and the pads in my knees were squishy, soaked with my own sweat, and I could barely breathe. I extended an arm to stretch and my knuckles clanged into metal. I retracted my arm in a panic, rubbing the sore, bulging veins on the backs of my hands.

I wiped the beaded sweat carefully from my forehead and tried to inch forward. When I did, my spine grinded against metal. I growled and felt around. More metal. My heart skipped a tiny bit. I crawled forward and my forehead bumped into rusty metal, scraping my skin. I retaliated against the burning and panic began to crawl through me like wildfire. If there was one thing I feared, it was being trapped in a dark tunnel.

I bent my head down after deciding that if I stayed cramped up in the tunnel any longer I might suffocate. The pipe network twisted and turned and I feared that I would get stuck turning a corner or that the pipe would become more narrow and I'd be jammed. My mind tried to wander away from the thought of dying in this place, but I didn't have much to focus on. I couldn't remember who I was or what I was doing there.

I wondered if there was a way out, and whether I was taking the right path. No matter what I thought, it always led back to death or at least something that would give me a brutal case of the chills even in the harsh heat.

I continued to crawl on through the rusty thing, wading up to my wrists in thick, cold slop. I blinked, expecting the lights to come on at any moment. But they never did.

At last, I arrived at another corner. To my left was another dark tunnel, and to my right I could narrowly see a flicker of blue. My heart skipped another beat and I immediately crawled toward the blue light.

The tunnel widened as I headed toward it, and I found that the tunnel ended here, and flowed into a room. I poked my head into the opening and drew a deep breath. There were no windows, and the air was still stagnant. But it was a relief to have found my way out of the cramped, bleak labyrinth. I pulled myself out of the tunnel and sat on its edge with my neck craned, legs swinging. I pushed myself forward and the soles of my feet thudded hard and flat on the sheet metal floor. A screeching clang echoed throughout the hollow walls like nails on a chalkboard and I twitched.

The room was nealy pitch dark, aside from a tiny amount of light escaping from the tiny bare lightbulb hanging from a wire ten feet above my head, splotched with patches of dirt, grime, and stains. On the other side of the room was the cutout of a doorway, leading to ultimate darkness that I couldn't see through at all. I leaned into the door and pressed my ear into the thin metal. There were voice just outside.

"Find and kill her-"

"Termination of-"

I heard the two men mumbling through the door. When the voices faded and their boots stopped clanking against the metal floors, I gave the doors a little push and came tumbling out. It was a strange room filled with vertical pipes like the support poles you'd find in a basement. Along one wall was a broken desk and a chair covered in maps and operations, none of which I could read. I wandered from wall to wall and pulled myself into the next room, which I found to be filled with mirrors. The entire wall was made of mirrors at some point, I guessed, but more than half of them had been shattered and now laid in millions of shards on the floor. Staring back at me from the pieces of those mirrors was a tall, blonde woman wearing tattered camoflauge pants and a black shirt stained with contaminated water. I furrowed my eyebrows. I wasn't sure if I was familiar with myself or not.

I shrugged the thought away and packed the maps and papers away in my bag. Beneath one of the binders that was in the stack was a handgun. I tucked that away in my belt and headed for the other door just to the right of the first.