101 Ways to Skin a Hoodie

Chapter 4

I'm standing in a dim room. I grope around me waiting for my eyes to adjust, and as I do I realize that room isn't the right word for this place. It seems that I'm in a cave, and as my pupils dilate I can make out the fact that I can't make out how large this cave is. There are tunnels branching out all around me, each one as naturally cragged as the next. They go on for what seems to be an eternity.

I spot a tunnel that seems to have a somewhat natural downward slope, and begin walking through it, thinking it would be easier to let my legs play into gravity. As I travel further down the tunnel I begin to notice a certain smell, but I don't pick up on what it is until my foot kicks something that goes clattering out ahead of me. The noise makes me start, and I pick up my pace to go see what I had kicked.

However the faster my legs move the farther away the unknown object ahead of me seem to get, the tunnel stretching around my head, constricting my lungs and taking the air out of my mouth. Panic sets in and I break into a sprint, a cold sweat pouring down my back. My muscles ache and a chilling wind beats in my dry throat. I feel my knees buckle and I fall, coming to a grinding halt over the item I was trying so desperately to reach. Beads of sweat fall onto my outstretched hand, and as I go to pick up the thing that I had once kicked it suddenly snaps to life, rending off my hand from the wrist down.

I let out a scream of pain as blood pours out of the stump of my wrist, the canine animal skull chewing slowly up my arm with inch long incisors. A red glint in it's empty eye socket shines through the murky air of the cave, and I gasp wordlessly as I gaze back into it.

It speaks in a voice of grating ashy terror; "A warning to you, child of null."

My hand aches with a dull pain, and I jump awake. This causes me to lift off of the iron platform and I spin back into the not unfamiliar sensation of freefall. I quickly get my bearings again and start to descend back towards the platform under me, but as I do I notice something that could be interpreted two different ways depending on if you are an optimist or a pessimist. I like to think of myself as a realist, so what I observed is simply that when I was squinting from the wind on my descent I happened to see that a long way down, past the infinite darkness, there seems to be an even darker mass stretching onward, which I can only assume to be ground of some sort.

I touch back down on the metal sheet and shake a still sleeping Ben awake.

"Tell me I'm crazy, but is there a landmass growing closer by the second beneath us?"

Ben snaps awake immediately, and he scoots over to the edge of the platform and peers over the edge. I do the same across from him and now I can tell for certain; a definite "ground" of some sort is hurtling closer to us by the second. When this processes fully I feel a drop in my gut. I scramble back onto the platform, mind racing. Ben moves back towards the center as well.

I doubt a five or so centimeter thick sheet of iron will be able to protect two teens from what can only be a massive dispersion force across an unmoving surface.

Ah.

Got it. "Ben, can you make this sheet any thinner?" I ask hurriedly.

"What, by removing some of the atoms from it or something?"

I give him a roll of my shoulders to say "I don't know, if that works," and I see Ben's eyes widen in understanding. We both spring into action at the same time. Ben starts sliding his hands through the air and I leap off of the thinning platform. I twist through the air in practiced motions and maneuver myself so that I'm under the sheet of metal.

My back towards the approaching ground I struggle to pull my hoodie over my head, and once I get it off I chance another look behind me. I can now make out depth in the black landscape below us, shadowy hills rise and fall off into the horizon. It would almost be a magnificent sight if it wasn't for the current time crunch that we're working under.

"ARE WE ALMOST THERE?" I yell up to Ben over the roaring wind. He responds with "Got it!" and the previously firm sheet of iron starts to flap in the wind, first by the corners, and then by the edges.

Ben jumps off and glides down next to me, the sheet flaps in the wind, almost fully elastic now. It starts to gain altitude above us since it has considerably more air resistance, and I barely manage to grab a corner of it by stretching out my limbs to decelerate a little.

Holding onto my hoodie with my mouth I scramble to grab a second corner and I motion for Ben to do the same. While he's fumbling to get a firm grip of them a look down again, the ground now seems vaster than the void around us. It's probably around 30 seconds to impact. I look back up and Ben has his two corners, so I motion him to take my corners as well, and once he does I start tying the sleeves of my hoodie around them.

For the final knot Ben lifts his hands briefly and then grabs onto the body of the hoodie. The makeshift parachute we've constructed unfurls, but I'm not holding on to anything. Ben starts shooting up past me, and I barely manage to reach out and grab his ankle with my right hand. My body snaps downward with the sudden change in velocity, and I feel my shoulder pop out of it's socket. I shriek in pain and struggle farther up Ben's body, wrapping my left arm around his knees, my right arm now dangling loosely at my side.

Ben is muttering, "shit shit shit shit," to himself. The parachute looks like it's going to work. The parachute has to work. I squeeze my eyes shut and brace myself for contact with the ground in the infinite void.