Chapter 3: End of the Track

On and on he trudged. At last, he recognized a faint light. The sky was brightening ever so slowly. He judged there was more brightness on his right hand. (This was his first indication that he was moving north.)

As the darkness lifted slightly, Andrew could see that the “road” was just barely-discernable parallel ruts. As if the last vehicle to pass had been an ox-drawn wooden wagon. He tossed aside the now-useless stick.

Then he came to a collapsed iron gate. There was a small clearing, but no sign of the track continuing any further. The gate’s purpose was clear: beyond were scattered semi-legible headstones and a partially collapsed chapel. The steeple was swaying in the wind; the back wall was laying in the weeds. There might be shelter in a corner of the structure; the storm still drove the rain in curtains.

Andrew was tired, damp, and hungry. He had a horrific headache (in fact, he had a concussion from the crash). All he could think about was getting the rain off his face.

Picking his way through the churchyard, he tried to read the headstones’ inscriptions in the dim light. There were a few names, but no dates he could make out.

And then the soggy ground swallowed him up!

When Andrew stopped sliding, he pushed the mud from his face. Once again Andrew was lost in total blackness. He shook his head, and immediately regretted it as vertigo and nausea overwhelmed him. After collapsing, he was unconscious once again for hours.

When he awakened, he carefully turned to look up. Above him, he saw a patch of bright blue sky. The rain had blessedly stopped. There was a terrible dank odor. A muddy stream trickled near his feet. He was in an irregular underground chamber, apparently.

The ceiling opening that he fell through was at least 12 feet over his head. The room’s walls were a loose mixture of sloppy mud and soil. There were no roots or rocks to help him climb up to the surface. He couldn’t get out!

Worse, the room was strewn with decayed corpses and skeletons. The bodies were partly wrapped in remnants of cloth shrouds, instead of coffins or caskets. Apparently, the cemetery above him had deep graves, many with multiple bodies stacked inside. He guessed that later the stream had excavated the muddy room (undermining the graves), so then the dead had fallen through the ceiling.

(Perhaps a plague had taken whole families, causing relations to be buried stacked together under one marker.)

Without even any useful wooden pieces to help him escape this cave of death, Andrew had no hope of escape.

It was this revelation that drove him to ultimate despair. He had no food; the stream stank of decomposition and black mold was everywhere. And the pain in his head was excruciating.

When he roused again, sundown had ended the light from above. Andrew knew that his life was over.

It was several hours before death took him. (Blood had been leaking into his brain since the crash.)