Days Of The Underdogs

Zero

Their calls echoed into the dark, dank tunnel, reaching all the way to his sensitive hearing. He could feel them above ground, scouting through the city, trying to sniff him out by following the iron-scent of his blood. They thought he was up there, lurking in the shadows of the tall, looming buildings, with nowhere to run and nowhere to truly hide in the vast, crowded land that was his father's creation. Especially not with a shoulder slashed almost all the way through, bleeding so epically, that the stench of his own blood would lead to his capture.

If it weren't for the tunnels, he would have been easy prey.

Glow in the dark wire, a luminous yellow, lit the path he followed, leading him further and further away from the voices above, and deeper into the unknown. The memory of these tunnels were faint and uncertain; full of anxious waiting, day and night, for the lean silhouette of a man he once worshipped to reappear out of the depths of overgrown shrubbery that filled what they called their back garden.

Only once had he personally ventured into the struggle of the weeds, bushes and trees to find the little concrete shack his father had built around a latch in the ground; a latch that covered a cavernous hole, which descended an unfathomable distance beneath the surface to the tunnel-system below. He hadn't before possessed the guts to sneak into the tunnels, to seek out what his father hid so vigorously. But now, with no other choice, he'd finally taken that vicious, straight fall into the black underpass.

As he followed the wire twisted and pinned along both sides of the earthy walls, he imagined the effort it must have taken to dig the passages out. One man alone did all of this, all in a bid to create a channel to somewhere forbidden to their people by the laws of their city.

People... Was that what they really were?

He paused mid-step, the thought resonating within him; it made him recall the time he'd sat in his uncle's office, watching as his father paced by the window and his uncle stared at him with glistening eyes while he spoke. "Your son, Jerome... my nephew! He will do wonders for our people. A natural-born miracle!"

"People?" Jerome had questioned, his voice faint. "Monsters, maybe. But not people. Not like the rest of the population." He'd paused to look at his brother, his face a picture of remorse. "We aren't natural, Matthias. We're creations; beings the world should never have known."

Creations... Did that include him, too?

His injured shoulder cramped at the thought, the red, smooth liquid a sticky mess all over his plain grey t-shirt, patches of it still wet, other bits drying crisply; it was almost soothing. Didn't bleeding make him human?

He pressed onwards, continuing on his guided path into unknown territory. He must have made it a lot further than he realised, for the calls above had since faded, and only silence enveloped him. The walls seemed to close in on him, gaining narrower the deeper he went. He couldn't make sense of whether he was going uphill or down; it was like the world was on a tilt, shifting out of proportion.

The moment he spotted a break in the wire, he hesitated. It disappeared entirely, his only source of guidance gone in the blink of an eye. The usual panic a normal person would feel should've filled him with dread in that moment, but instead his mind went into overdrive, and he closed his eyes to imagine the layout around him. This was how it was supposed to be, he knew. His father had done this on purpose; created a path only so far, until the person following it had to use their instincts and knowledge to find their way through.

So, with one hand pressed to a side of the earthy tunnel, he dug his fingertips into the dirt and wandered with his mind, following the smell of the earth. It was like a magnetic pull; it led him onwards, taking him forward one step at a time, until he picked up the pace, the darkness around him propelling him towards his destination. This was a test, he knew. A path designed for him, one only he could follow. Any other would not be able to go on; they'd struggle to even find their way back. But he knew his father's mind, and so he knew this system. It was a database, stored with endless information in the depths of his memory.