Whipped - Drake Merwin x OC

Audentes fortuna iuvat

Duck woke up. He was completely disoriented.
He was flat on his back. Wet.
Wearing nothing but a bathing suit.
In the dark. He was cold.
His fingertips were numb. He was shivering.

He felt something hard and sharp beneath his shoulder blades and he shifted to lessen the pain. He looked around, bewildered. There was a faint light from above. Sunlight bouncing weakly down a long dirt shaft.

Duck tried to make sense of it. He remembered everything: sinking to the bottom of the pool, then sinking through the bottom of the pool.

He remembered choking on water and his lungs burning. There were scrapes down his sides, and along the underside of his arms. And now, here he was, in a hole. A deep hole. At the bottom of a mud-sided shaft that he had somehow caused by falling into the earth.

Falling into the earth?

It was impossible to be sure how far down underground he was. But from the faraway look of the light, he had to be at least twenty feet down. Twenty feet. Underground. Fear stabbed at his heart.
He was buried alive.

There was no way he'd be able to clamber back up through that narrow muddy shaft to the surface. No way.

"Help!" he yelled.

The sound echoed faintly.
Duck realized that he was not in a confined space. There was air.

And the surface beneath him was too hard and too rough to be dirt. He got to his knees. Then, slowly, stood up. There was a ceiling just inches above his head. He stretched his arms to either side and touched a wall to his left, nothing to his right.

"It's a pipe,"Duck said to the darkness. "Or a tunnel."

It was also pitch black in both directions.

"Or a cave. How did this happen?"Duck demanded of the cave.

His teeth chattered from cold. From fear as well. There was a faint echo, but no answer.

He looked up toward the light and yelled, "Help! Help!" a couple more times.

But there was zero chance of anyone hearing. Unless of course Zil and the boys who'd been harassing him had gone for help.

That was possible, wasn't it?
They might be jerks, but surely they would go for help. They wouldn't just leave him down here.

And yet, there were no anxious faces peering down at him from above.

"Come on, Duck: Think."

He was in a tunnel, or whatever, far underground.
The tunnel floor was muddy and wet. Despite this, the tunnel did not feel particularly damp, not like it was a sewer. And he himself was far less muddy than he should have been.

"I fell down through the ground. Then I practically drowned and passed out and stopped. The water kept flowing past me and mostly cleaned me off."

He was pleased to have even figured that out.

Gingerly he took steps down the tunnel, holding his hands out ahead of him. He was scared. More scared than he had been in his life. More scared even than the day the FAYZ had happened, or the day of the big battle, when he had hidden in a closet with a flashlight and some comic books.

He was down here now, alone. No Iron Man. No Sandman. No Dark Knight. And it was cold.

Duck noticed the sound of his own sobbing, and was dismayed to realize he was crying. He tried to stop. It wasn't easy.

He wanted to cry.

He wanted to cry for his mother and father and grandmother and aunts and uncles and even his obnoxious big brother and the whole, whole, whole world that was gone and had abandoned him to this grave.