Young Writers Society

I just escaped from the asylum. I had to or else I was going to vindicate those who put me in here, and I wasn't about to give them the pleasure. I couldn't give them the joy of watching me deteriorate into madness behind the stony walls of Martin's Peak.

The day I was hauled in here like a street dog I was told not to even think about escaping because without the warden's say so no one ever got passed the barred windows and intercom controlled steel doors. Yet, here I was on my knees, edging towards my liberation through the sewer system underneath the hundred year old building. My captors thought they were on the ball but they missed the hole I had been hacking through the washroom floor into the sewers for weeks.

I didn't belong here. I wasn't mad, I wasn't mad at all. I was saner than all of them, than everyone that put me in here. If they thought they could drive me nuts by surrounding me with freaks they were the mad ones. If they thought they could fry my memories and make me forget the events of the past two months they were the mad ones. If they thought they could get rid of me so easily than they were madder than mad. They were hopelessly mad and were the ones who belonged in this place. Oh, but boy did they try, and they almost succeeded to boot because every day I spent in here my mind would slip a little more. I did my best to hide my creeping madness but once or twice the nursing staff caught me whacking the imaginary spiders that were crawling on my wall. I was embarrassed and told them I was pounding away my frustrations but their satisfied grins told me they weren't buying my explanation. Their wicked goal to steer me into madness was working and they were proud of the job they were doing. But I had a score to settle and that was the only thing that had glued me to reality, in deed it was the sole driving force pushing me right now through this maze of tunnels.

I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was certain I was lost. More than once I found myself back at the escape hole only to scuttle back into the bowels of the sewer. But that had been hours ago. There was an opening somewhere and all I had to do was to find it before I was found by the guards. I watched the sewage spill out of it every morning from the courtyard. But without a blueprint of the sewer system it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

It was so dark that I couldn't tell my hands from the tunnel walls, I was like a blind man, led only by his most basic senses and instinct for survival. I was touching up against something spongy and sticky, it covered my legs and arms too but I didn't need eyes to tell what it was. The smell said enough. I tried holding my breath, I didn’t want to suck in that toxic odor, but I couldn’t afford to deny myself the little air that I was getting down here inside these tunnels. I'd expected there to be more air down here but I was wrong, I was also expecting it to be a little more spacious, on that count too I was wrong.  My body was being compressed from everywhere, I felt like I was crawling through a rabbit hole which only got tighter the further I got.

I had to get out of here, I was suffocating. I was…

What was that!

I shook my left leg wildly, holding back a scream as a sudden and sharp pain nibbled into my foot? Not again. Damn rats were everywhere. This was the fourth time the vile creatures tried to make a meal out of me. I reckoned I was reaching their nest and the little buggers were becoming a overprotective. I was never fond of rodents and the thought of bumping into a whole assembly of rats made my skin crawl but I couldn't very well stay down here, I had to move on, to find my way to the surface, to return to Seattle, back to Sarah. I pushed on bravely, buoyed by memories of her pretty smile, by her sweet lavender aroma. I hope she was safe and sound, but in my gut of guts I had the unpleasant feeling that she probably wasn't. 

The last time we were together was also the last time I tasted the world outside the walls of Martin's Peak. We'd been on the run for a couple of weeks, hopping from city to city never staying longer than a few hours in any one place. Our last stop was Seattle where we decided to take a little break from the running and the hiding -- it was her idea but I was totally on board with it. We found a bowling alley and as if exposing ourselves so publicly wasn't dumb enough we decided to have a beer each. Well, to put a long story short, our foolishness was repaid with disaster. We were discovered by our pursuers and after our bowling game was over we were attacked right outside by three men. They must have been recruited locally because they were dressed like local street gang members, sporting baggie pants and overhanging shirts with bandanas blocking their faces, rather than the professional suit and tie assassins that had been chasing us all over the country up until that point.  

I can't remember everything that happened that night but I do recall fighting all three men. I must have gotten injured because at some point I collapsed, and the last thing I remember seeing right before my eyes shut closed was Sarah's body strewn on the ground a short distance from me.

I had to know if she'd somehow made it or if she was... dead, and if she was dead I had to avenge her death. I tried pushing on but after a little while I could no longer ignore the pain in my foot where the rat had bit me, and so I made the decision to stop and nurse the aching. It must have been a bigger rat this time because the bite it delivered burned worse than the others.

“Get away from me! Leave me alone! Shoo!” I slapped the the pipe but instead of getting a rat I sent splashes of the foulest-smelling sewage into the air. This was hopeless. I wasn't getting out of this maze, what was I thinking? I looked around in the darkness, wondering what I had gotten myself into. I had been crawling through endless tunnels for hours and I was ready to give up, and for a moment I felt like I’d be better off in the asylum than spent another second down here fending off rats. 

Suddenly I couldn't breathe, it felt like I was being held in someone's tight fist. I grabbed the top of my shirt and ripped all the buttons off, craned my neck to its limit and breathed in and out as deeply as I could. Yes, the tunnel stank but I didn’t care about that now. I was suffocating. The walls were closing in on me fast, squashing my lungs and squeezing the life out of me.

If I could I would have cried out to my maker right this moment but was too busy fighting for my breath, clinging on to the bit of life I had left in me. Maybe they were right about Martin’s Peak after all, once you get in, you don't leave. I was surely going to die here in this filth.