Avery

            
This is a rough draft. I'll come back and work on it later, maybe. But certain people were telling me it had been too long...





            Avery was interrupted by the dark.

            Without a flashlight on hand, the empty halls turned ominous when the unappreciated glow of light vanished. Avery immediately turned, wide eyed, to the man whom she had nicknamed Trench in favor of his attire.  His face was invisible, but she could feel the anxious aura surrounding him. Groping for a tangible stronghold, her fingers found his arm and tightened. Trench took an uneasy step forward, the simple movement issuing an echo that resounded off the metal walls.

            “Wait!” Avery hissed. Trench turned, loosening her grip on his arm. Every move they made echoed through the hallway. They couldn’t risk being caught. Not now. Not when they were so close.

            “What else can we do? We’re stuck, Vi. Nowhere to go but forward.”

            “We could go back.” Avery gestured behind her, but her fingers slid over a smooth surface. She gasped, before turning fully around, both palms examining the surface.

            “There’s a wall.”

            “What?”

            “A wall. It’s a wall, Trench. We’re stuck.”

            “That’s impossible.” Trench turned, examining the wall himself. “How could it possibly…”

            “Who cares. All we need to worry about right now is finding your girlfriend. She wasn’t back there, so we need to keep going.”

            The blackness seemed to darken. As the two made their way forward, the room seemed to tighten, as if oxygen had been traded for the dark.

            “I think the hall goes pretty straight for a while. Careful, though. There may be stairs or something at the end.” Colton remarked. Avery nodded, then, realizing he couldn’t hear her, said, “sounds good.”  Gliding her fingers over the smooth wall to her left, Avery cautiously stepped forward. No past experiences had ever prepared her for the utter darkness she was left in now. The only thing she could do was hope there was a way into light again.

            For several minutes, the only sounds Avery heard was the pound of their feet against a metal ground. Slowly, the floor began to slant downward. The condition of metal slabs beneath their feet started to deteriorate. Once, Avery tripped on a loose bolt. The slabs seemed to bend into each other. As Avery reached down to feel one, she realized that a crack had splintered the middle of it. The two halves had slanted upward to form an unnatural mound of metal. Each metal plate seemed to be unequal to its neighbor, so they all formed an uneven and difficult surface.

            Without warning, Avery’s hand disappeared into the wall. It seemed as if her hand had simply gone through the wall. Avery gasped and yanked it out quickly. Reaching up, she felt around to see if the opening was surrounded by a frame. Finding no visible difference on the wall around the opening, she reached her hand inside, tracing the walls behind the opening. They were wooden.

            Her fingers slid across a light switch. Groping below it, she felt something like human skin. She had just enough time to scream before she was yanked inside.