“You were swimming in her ocean, at the center of it all. Bile in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin.”

“Stop.”

“I saw you.”

“Stop.”

“You loved it!”

And even as I ran the quarter-mile away toward class, leaving her behind to shriek her words at people who wouldn’t listen, I knew she was right.

On some level, deep within me, I did love this.

Trigger Warning: blood, gore, existential horror, loss of memory and identity, parasites and infection

This story is a sequel to the 2017 story “The Tunnel Boy,” which you can read here.

There’s a set of tunnels underneath my school.

They stretch across the housing side of campus, elevators leading to each of the dorms. Stray pathways lead to small shops, my campus post office, the dining hall, and a few rooms dedicated to clubs. They’re not the tidiest, with pipes jutting out of walls and empty, greasy garbage carts smelling up the corridors, but the tunnels aren’t scary. Everything is well-lit and reasonably clean. There’s at least one map per corridor, keeping the labyrinth easy enough to navigate.

Usually.

Trigger Warning: nsfw (non-erotic sexual imagery), blood and gore