Staying Alive – a dark little tale

This is one of a collection of little stories called the “Three in the Morning Collection” because there are three of them and they are written by an insomniac idiot. Let me know what you think and if you want to read the others.

Staying Alive

We have been here, according to my Casio, for five days and fourteen hours. Seepage through the seals on the flood Door means that we get water and we have a food supply but Barry refuses to eat and spends most of his time slumped against the tunnel wall in a stupor. I tend his injuries as best our resources and my knowledge allow because I really, REALLY, need Barry to stay alive.
We were checking wiring in the cable trunking that runs along the concrete walls of the Main Bore when we heard the dreadful distant rumbling and felt the pressure wave and knew what was happening. Barry grabbed an orange Emergency Box off its hooks on the wall, I snatched up the tool kit from the floor and we ran for the nearest Branch Tunnel. We made the Branch, heaved and shoved the Flood Door closed, knocked the clips home and spun the locking wheel – just as millions of gallons of water from the reservoir eighty feet above us thundered into the Main Bore, pushing with it rubble, debris and the pulped remains of our colleagues. The door held. We stayed alive.
When the Main Bore flooded the lighting failed almost immediately. We have our helmet lamps and the Emergency Box contains, amongst other things, spare lamp batteries and a supply of light sticks containing chemicals which, when shaken, produce a cold light for several hours. Initially we tried turning off the helmet lamps to conserve them but now we keep one on all the time. I try not to think about the lamps dying and then the last light stick fading out. It is more than darkness; it is like being smothered by a soft black blanket that presses ever closer. The eyes have nothing to work on and so the optic nerves make up their own patterns and pictures and things come to visit. A lamp stays on.
So here we sit. The Branch we ran into extends fifty yards into the hillside and then stops. There is no way out and no fresh air supply. We have two choices, not including suicide, which is becoming a possibility. We can sit and wait for the rescue which isn’t going to come in time or we can crack the seals on the door, wait for the pressure to equalise so that it will open and attempt to find pockets of air along the flooded Main Bore. Of course Barry cannot make the journey to the surface and if the light sticks fail I am not sure that I can stand the “More than Darkness” alone.
So here we sit or, in Barry’s case, slump.
Time passes.
Hunger gnaws.
Reluctantly I stir and come to my feet. Barry’s eyes open and widen as he sees me approaching. He begins to bang franticly on the cable trunking on the wall, trying to attract somebody – anybody. He would like to run away from me but he cannot because Barry has no legs. He has to bang on the trunking with his left hand because he has no right arm below the elbow. In a few minutes, when I have managed to sedate him with one of the preloaded syringes from the Med Kit in the Emergency Box, he will have no right arm above the elbow. One of the items in the toolkit I grabbed up is a hacksaw and, according to my Casio, it’s dinner time.

The End