49Eventually the children reached what seemed to be some sort of clearing - there was larger, open area by the side of the track, clearly the platform, and the track continued through the tunnel leading away from it.
"Stop," Ryan warned, stopping abruptly and squinting through the tunnel. Jody shone her torch in the direction of his gaze to help him.
"What are you looking for?" Bailey inquired.
Ryan's forehead was creased in a deep concentrated frown. "I swear to God that I saw something in that tunnel."
"What is this 'something'?" Jody asked, suspicious that Ryan may only be winding them up.
"A person," Ryan described briefly.
"Why would a person be down here?" Bailey questioned.
"How do you think we got down here?" Ryan pointed out.
"We fell down a pit," Jody stated.
"Exactly," Ryan responded. "Maybe they'll know what to do."
"If they knew what to do, they wouldn't still be down here," Bailey retorted.
"Well it's worth a try," Jody insisted.
They pressed on past the platform and through the tunnel, Jody flicking her torch around erratically. Yet there was no sign of this person Ryan had spoken of - not even footsteps or breathing.
"Are you sure you saw this person?" Bailey asked suspiciously, raising an eyebrow.
"I swear on my life," Ryan responded, too busy trying to source out this person to concentrate properly.
"Well I'm pretty sure the tunnel is getting narrower!" Jody said suddenly, her head snapping back and forth. "I can't stand small spaces!"
"Relax," Ryan said casually. "You stay here with your fear of the unknown, and I'll go on ahead and see what's there!"
"Good luck doing that without a torch, mate," Bailey sneered. "What if you have another panic attack?"
Ryan scowled, brought out his own phone, turned the torch on and shone it in Bailey's face as if to prove a point, before setting off down the tunnel alone, without another word.
"What an idiot," Jody sighed.
"You do realise it was your idea to go down this tunnel anyway?" Bailey pointed out.
"It was yours to go looking for this pit," Jody retorted.
That had him.
Meanwhile, Ryan strode out confidently along the tunnel, alone, his phone torch lighting the way ahead. Or rather, he tried to stride out confidently. He was pretty sure that Jody's statement of the tunnel's increasing narrowness had been her own claustrophobia playing tricks on her mind, but Ryan couldn't deny the hairs standing up all over his body, though the air in the tunnel was warm and stale. Ryan was slightly claustrophobic himself - or more specifically, he had a fear of suffocation. (Naturally, his panic attacks did nothing to help with this.)
He sighed, the resigned sound echoing off the stone walls and ceiling. Why oh why hadn't he taken his benzos?
Because you couldn't take it with everyone there, said a little voice in his head.
Ryan reached into his pocket, popped out one pill and swallowed it dry. He took his benzos anywhere he went - you could never be too safe, as shown with his little episode back there, and he certainly didn't want another one of those!
As he continued on, Ryan wasn't sure whether he felt more or less scared. The tunnel wasn't too narrow, and his torch lit most of the way ahead, but he had this strange paranoia that any moment, a runaway train was going to come rattling down the track, from either behind or in front of him, and kill him, in spite of his rationale that trains hadn't been running through the tunnels for a very long time. Though it might just be a side effect of walking on a train track.
He'd been so lost in thought that he didn't realise at first that he had reached a fork in the track, with a smaller tunnel trailing off from the main one.
Which one to go down?
If only Bailey and Jody were here - then they could split up and see what was down each tunnel.
But what if they didn't meet up again? What if the tunnels branched off to unthinkable numbers of other tunnels, and they got lost in the sprawling maze, apart, and never returned to above ground?
From his panic attack up until this point, Ryan had been aware of a slight but dismal ache in his chest, albeit only subconsciously as he had other things to focus on. But at this point, at the admittedly terrifying prospect of getting lost in this potential tunnel maze and being completely at the mercy of whatever was down there - and the person that Ryan had caught sight of - the ache increased at least threefold and became an insistent throbbing that permeated his entire chest, left shoulder and arm. Having read the Maze Runner book series, this only increased his paranoia, though his rational mind said that he was highly unlikely to come across any Grievers here.
Then again, rationality also dictated that he and his comrades shouldn't be down here in a place like this in the first place, but here they were.
Ryan gritted his teeth, both out of pain and desperation, and leant against the wall of the tunnel to think. He couldn't afford to fall apart. There wouldn't be any sort of phone signal down here - hell, there wasn't even any when they were in the forest above ground - so they couldn't communicate that way. The best option seemed to be to backtrack, find Bailey and Jody, and then they could investigate these tunnels together. Ryan hadn't had the strongest relationship with either of them, but they were better than nothing. He'd appreciate some company when coming face to face with any unsavoury characters, especially with the instability of his heart.
With that, Ryan pulled away from the wall and started to walk back the way he'd come. But his ears picked up a small sound that didn't sound like his shoes crunching on the stones and the brittle train track. As the hairs stood up all over his body, the pain in Ryan's chest began to escalate.
His first instinct was to run like the wind, but his feet refused to move.
Ryan turned on the spot - and what he saw peaked his adrenaline and cortisol levels to the point where he screamed both out of terror and out of the pain that exploded throughout his entire chest.
"What's taking him so long?" Bailey sighed in exasperation.
"These tunnels were built for trains," Jody stated. "How long do you think it'd take a teenage boy to walk all the way through it and back at walking pace?!"
Before Bailey could formulate a response to that, his attention was captured by a long, shrill sound coming from somewhere far down the tunnel.
A scream.
Ryan's scream.
Bit of a shorter chapter this time, hope you like it.