Digger 1.0 by Michael Bunker

Author:Michael Bunker
Language: eng
Format: epub

The End of Episode Two…

Texocalypse Now

Episode Three

A Whole New World

Chapter 17

Make friends with the dark, thought Ellis, his eyes staring into the black, headlight off. Hands stretched out to each side, palms down, he felt the blackness. Received it.

Make friends with it. It changed your world. It took everything from you. Maybe it’s time for the dark to give something back. That’s what he constantly told himself. That was his new mantra as he worked in the cool deep.

He felt his mind drift back into concerns about family and farm and he didn’t want to lose his mental contact with the tunnel, so he turned off his headlight and allowed the darkness to flow over him and through him. He allowed it to baptize him again. Only when his mind was centered and focused, embracing the down deep, did he flip his headlight back on and proceed, checking the tunnel carefully as he walked. Looking for weaknesses or anything else he might need to know. Learning the down deep.

Ellis was getting used to the new world of underground. The strange smells of dirt and wet and time. The stale air. The inexplicable chills or strange breezes that would circulate through the tunnels, almost as if the chambers and passages were some kind of respiratory system for the earth itself.

Most Americans—most Texans—had no concept of the subterranean. Ease, comfort, affluence… these first world realities had conspired to make westerners almost uniformly up-toppers. Groundlings. But Ellis was starting to learn that there were people, unique people, who were comfortable living and operating below the surface. People like that had built these tunnels.

Maybe he was one of those people. Maybe he could make friends with the dark. Striking hands with an enemy you might say. Despite all that had happened, it was hard for him to think of the dark as corporeal, as having motive and malevolent intent. But then there was the day of blindness. That day was a hard argument for this darkness being evil.

The dark almost certainly killed his dad at the Beginning and probably stole his brother’s life too. And his mother? Hard to care what happened to her. But that thought was for another day, so he put it away. Who knows, or could ever know, what had really happened to anyone he ever known or loved from the Before. He’d never really known his brother Kevin, ten years his senior, who’d left with his mother when Ellis was still in diapers. Ellis knew his dad, though. Knew him and still loved him and missed him dearly. His father, who’d been flying a plane to Kansas City when the darkness took the world. Who’d been his only real friend. Who’d raised him after his mom left, taking Kevin and whatever family life they’d ever had with them.

Despite all that, in the week since he’d found the tunnel, he’d grown accustomed to spending time underground. He’d come to embrace the absolute darkness and the cool unknown. He’d even developed some kind of uneasy peace with his own horrific memories of the day of blindness.

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