I was originally going to present this as an Otherspace, but instead, you get a rumor.

I’ve always been a city person. My heart is downtown and I’m quite at home among skyscrapers traffic jams and apartment buildings. I can work the transit system like a back-alley monte carlo game. I know where to get laid, a job, decent food at 4 AM, and a gun with the serial numbers filed off. So when a buddy of mine found an access door for some subway maintinance tunnels open, I was there just as quick as he could call me. I love exploring the last few bits of my city that I havn’t already seen.

At the beginning, the tunnel was pretty much as I expected. It was cold, and although there were little lights in cages every dozen feet or so, they were all off, and we had to rely on flashlights. We marked our passage with chalk. It was really interesting, seeing all the tunnels and maintinance bays that had never seen service or had been shut down. We were running into rooms forty feet tall, and subway stops that were complete and untouched, having never seen use. It got so that we were beginning to lose track of time, we were having so much fun.

After a while, we began to see graphitti, which we took to mean that we were coming to an exit, so we continued. The scribbles on the wall were not your usual wall scrawlings, but we didn’t really notice.

When we began to see garbage, we were sure we were almost out the other side. We stumbled onto what appeared to have been home for several homeless, but none of them were around. We were poking idly when I heard Jackie gave out a bit of a startled gasp. I asked him what he found, and when he didn’t answer, I turned and saw him with his throat pressed up against a rusted butchers knife zap-stapped to a pole. Now, I did what came natural then, which is to say I shit myself and ran like a scalded dog. I didn’t even register what was holding the other side of the pole.

As I ran, they chased me. They were all dressed in salvation army fare, although most of them were barefoot and many of them didn’t wear a shirt, either. They were very skinny, quite pale, all the men had beards, and each and every one of them had a weapon made of some kind of junk.

After a while, I came to a dark opening, and the tunnel I was running through stopped suddenly. I heard running water and figuring raw sewage and breaking my legs could possibly be worse than being stabbed to death, so I jumped. They didn’t follow. I hit the cold water and let myself be dragged along with the current until I figured I would be out of sight, not counting the pitch black I was in. About then, my feet hit bottom, and the water became shallower, until I was only about chest deep. I cracked a glow-stick, but everything was still pretty much black. I could at least see the wall on one side, though. I began walking downstream, looking for a way out, when I began to hear a chittering noise.

At first I just put it down to my imagination, but pretty soon I was whirling to face the direction I thought it was coming from every couple of seconds. It shouldn’t have been a surprise when I started to feel insect-like crawlings up my legs, but I screamed like a six year old girl anyways. In my panic, I dropped the glow-stick, and it washed downstream, and that’s when the midden really hit the windmill. I was clawing furiously to get them off, but they were tenacious buggers, and huge. They felt like milipedes, only the size of your arm. They bit and clawed at me, and eventually I lost my footing and was dragged downstream, still being eaten by some damn loathsome mutant creepy-crawlie. I blacked out, then.

I didn’t expect to wake up, and was actually pretty surprised when I did. I was rather more surprised by the company I was keeping when I did. The homeless guys that I’d left Jackie with had me chained, Jesus-style, to a bike rack. They were in groups of four and six, cooking rat over barrel fires. I was freezing cold and soaking wet, and wondering how on earth they could be going around in bare feet with no shirts on while I could see my breath. I was completely ignored. They talked to each other in some kind of gibberish, ate, slept, shit, fucked and argued like something you find in National Geographic. Alot of them had their faces and chest painted with lines and spirals. The all had junk on strings hanging around their necks and wrists and off of their spears. There were watches and jewelry and parts of blenders and shit like that. It was like a suburban household exploded and they made jewelry out of it.

They completely ignored me until they’d slept six times. When that happened, they took me off of the bike rack. I was too weak to do anything about it, but they dragged me through more of those damned tunnels. I fell asleep a couple of times, but I sure as fuck was awake when their lamp went out and the chittering started. One of them pulled out my flashlight and turned it on, and the chittering went away. Eventually, we his a tunnel with tracks in it. After a minute or two in this one, they dragged me into a subway station I didn’t recognize. They heaved me up onto the platform and turned around, fading back into the dark. I was kicked awake by a transit cop and told to get the hell out several hours later. So I dragged my sorry carcass to street level and realized I was in fucking Denver. Like Colorado. So, one maxed out credit card, two nights at the best hotel I could afford, and twelve hours on a greyhound later I’m back home.

Thing is, though, I gotta go find Jackie. You can have my savings, six grand, if you come with me. Getting there will be simple. There should still be chalk on the tunnels. You in?