After 30 Days

Forty-Nine Day 61

The headlights from the car bounced off of the stained concrete walls of the tunnel. Shadows seemed to bounce wildly as the car jolted over a tree branch that had somehow ended up in the middle of the road. Once we had gone maybe fifty yards into the mountain, there were less abandoned cars, making it easier to navigate.

My breath sounded harsh even to my own ears.

The headlights could only pierce so far into the darkness. Shawn kept the car at a slow pace. When I glanced over at him, I thought that he had a white knuckled grip on the steering wheel, but it was hard to be sure. He watched the road ahead intensely as he guided us around the rotting corpse of a zombie that someone had killed.

The tunnel was two lanes wide with a narrow raised walkway on the right. Metal railing had been painted yellow. A solid looking metal door built into the side of the tunnel slowly went by my window as we crept along.

In the back seat, Rex let out another long whine and sniffed hard at the crack in the window. He exhaled so loudly that I could hear the air go. Nervously, he turned a tight circle in the back seat before going back to press his nose to the window. 

I faced forward again, trying to see an end to the darkness, a literal light at the end of the tunnel. But there was nothing in front of us except those concrete walls and yellow railing disappearing beyond the reach of the headlights. 

"Jesus, how long is this thing?" Shawn muttered to himself.

He was just venting some of the tension that the situation had caused, and I knew it. I didn't answer. I could feel my own nerves starting to fray as the darkness just kept going. I was starting to wish that we had turned back, even if it meant that we ran out of gas that much further away from home, when Rex suddenly snorted and sneezed at his back window. Exploding into motion, he whirled in the seat again, before going back to scratch at the cracked window. The dog raked at the glass with his nails and whined urgently, before turning to look at me. 

"What's the matter boy?" This was one of those moments where I desperately wished that the dog could speak. For an answer, he sneezed again and went back to noisily sniffing outside.

Shawn had slowed the car down to a crawl. He spared me a glance before going back to watching out the window. "What do you think?" he asked so quietly that I almost couldn't hear him.

"I don't know." 

I wanted to get out of the darkness and back into the light, where we would be able to see around us again. I wanted to turn back, but what if we were almost through to the other side? What if, if we just kept going for another minute, we would catch sight of the end? 

Sitting forward in my seat, I tried to look through the gloom and guess how much further. At first, I saw nothing, but then shapes emerged out of the darkness. 

 Ahead of us, the headlights glinted off of more cars. As we drew closer, I noticed something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The cars that we were slowly approaching were facing in the opposite direction of all of the others that we had passed, facing back the way that we had come. There were two of them, parked side by side, and nearly blocking the entire road. What looked like wooden pallets had been propped up between the vehicles and crammed into the little space between them and the walls.

It was an obvious barricade. 

Our car came to a stop. Outside, it was completely still and silent, nothing moving in the halo of light cast ahead of us. We waited, looking for some sign of the people who had blocked the tunnel. In the back seat, Rex continued to alternate between sucking in big gulps of the tunnel air and scratching almost frantically at the door. The commotion that he was causing behind us was the only thing that seemed to be moving anywhere around us. 

"I don't like it," Shawn said. He cursed, "We have to go back."

I nodded. He was right. There was no way to know if the people who had blocked the road were still around, and we had learned our lesson many times over about trusting strangers. There was no choice but to go back and find another way that didn't involve the tunnels. 

Sighing and scratching at his  jaw, Shawn looked around us one more time before he began to maneuver the car, attempting to turn around. I kept an eye on the blocked portion of the road, watching warily for any sign of a person. The car was small, and that fact worked in our favor for once. In a matter of seconds, we were facing back the way that we had come. We started to pick up speed as we headed back out of the tunnel.

I had turned around in my seat and was peering through the back window as we drove away, still watching the blockade. Without the light from our car, the shadowy form disappeared quickly into the black. Rex, still clawing at the door in the back seat, yelped once before he whipped his head around to mine. He nervously whined right in my face before going back to his scratching.

That's when it happened. The dog was big and strong, and had given up scratching at the glass to tear at the door itself. It might have been sheer dumb luck on his part, or maybe not, but in one sweeping movement the toes of his foot hooked behind the handle of the door and pulled it hard. At the same moment, he lunged forward and flung his weight into the door. 

The door popped open and the dog tumbled out. I yelled for Shawn to stop the car, but he had already hit the brakes. The red glow behind us illuminated the form of the dog as he rolled on the ground before bouncing to his feet. I didn't have time to register relief that Rex seemed to be ok before he bolted into the darkness behind us.