Under My Skin Ch. 02

A ladder! It was the most beautiful thing in the world to him at that moment. Unfortunately, in order to get to it, he would have to crawl across the pit of bodies over to the wall. Dustin gulped and tried to keep his lunch and his focus. Taking a few slow breaths, he began to crawl over the corpses a little at a time.

"Gross! Fucking Gross! Why did it have to be corpses?" He wailed as he made his way towards the ladder.

He gagged but forced his nausea away as his hand curled around the forth rung of the ladder and began a slow climb back up. Rung after rung, he climbed until he was out of the pit and away from the corpses. The ladder kept going up even after several feet. His ascent took him past the warm glow of torch light and back into darkness as Dustin's climb continued.

He stopped after awhile and rested against the metal rungs. He felt tired and his body ached all over from both the fall and the climb. his lungs cried out for fresh air. Tilting his head up, he could see far above him bits of Grey light coming down through a grate of some kind. Taking a deep breath and bolstering his resolve, he began to climb again.

When his hand rested on the last rung, he could go no further. He didn't't know how much time had passed but he was certain he had been climbing for hours. His feet hurt where the rungs had dug into the bottoms of his feet. His arms ached from pulling himself up every rung. He felt dizzy and tired from lack of food. His mouth and throat was dry with thirst.

The grate loomed over him. It taunted him. He did not have anything left on his weary, sore body and it knew it. Still he could not just lay on the ladder. If he lingered, he might pass out and risk falling back down to most likely his death.

"I don't want to die here," he whispered with a hoarse voice.

He kept repeating that in his mind over and over until it became a loud, deafening voice in his head. Slowly, his hands reached up and curled his fingers through the holes in the metal grate.

The metal screeched as it was pushed up out of its hole and pushed over onto the floor above. First a hand rested on the floor. Then an arm. Then Dustin's head peeked up through the hole followed by his other arm.

Carefully balancing his feet on the rungs, he pushed up with his arms and what little chest that hung over the onto the floor. Slowly the rest of his body slid out of the hole until he lay naked upon the cold tile floor.

He took in deep breaths of air as he lay on his back. The hum of mechanical motors filled his ears. He opened one eye and tilted his head to the side. There inches from his head was a pair of freezers. turning his head to look the other way, he saw an old fridge. He was in the kitchen, Dustin realized.

Then exhaustion took him and he passed out on the floor.