HELP!!! I'm Trapped in an Underground Parking Garage With No Exit! (Part 2)

Part 1

I’ve never liked confined spaces, especially underground. I’ve always been afraid of the dark, despite my thirty six years on this planet. My age has not cured me of this fear, as much as I’d like to pretend it has. Perhaps because I’ve discovered over time that there ARE things which lurk in the darkness - spiders, giant millipedes, rats, bats, and other things which move and rustle and make sounds which we try to rationalize and explain away but cannot. I prefer not to think about these things right now, though.

Being trapped in an underground parking structure with no discernable exit was not sitting well with me. Another fear, one which I didn’t even know I had, began to bloom within me, as I heard my brother’s teeth chattering and the sound of it mixed with my own.

A fear of freezing to death. That was a new one, at least for me.

It was cold down in the bowels of the parking garage that was not really a parking garage. We had gone down some two hundred levels, I guessed. I had lost track after a while. It was hard to imagine there was any benefit to exploring further. And regardless, our vehicle had died, and then it had run out of battery power as well as gasoline, leaving us blind and freezing, alone in the dark abyss.

At least it was marginally warmer inside the car than outside of it. But that didn’t help our morale - knowing we were going to freeze to death anyways, sooner or later.

“What are we doing, man? What are we d-d-d-doing?” my brother asked, his speech broken from the cold.

One thing was becoming more and more obvious to me. We couldn’t just sit there, waiting to die.

“L-l-l-let’s get out of this c-c-c-c-car. L-l-l-let’s keep going. That’s all w-w-w-we can do. Maybe there’s still some w-w-w-way out of this place. A big g-g-glowing exit sign somewhere that leads to an elevat-t-t-tor. You never know,” I managed to say through chattering teeth.

I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye. Similarly to a person stranded in the desert, seeing a shimmering oasis far off in the distance, I felt like I could see the glowing red letters hovering above a doorway just a few floors down, reading: E-X-I-T

Perhaps, if we just kept going, we could find it. Maybe it was just false hope, but I needed to at least try.

“Ah, to hell with it - let’s do it,” my brother said, opening his car door with a shaking hand.

“You couldn’t have picked a better way to say that?” I asked, but he was already outside.

Our eyes were now adjusted to the darkness and we could see just barely enough to walk towards the next ramp without feeling completely blind.

The movement got our blood pumping a bit, and we began to jog, feeling warmer from the exertion. Neither one of us mentioned the movements in the shadows we saw occasionally, things hiding behind cars and ducking out of sight as we passed by. The sounds of things scurrying and scuttling along the pavement behind us every so often. We didn’t want to think about those things, and pretended even to ourselves that they were not real. But in my mind I couldn't help imagining what they were.

Giant millipedes, huge spiders with hairy legs, and other things that walked with stilted strides using appendages that were unnaturally elongated. I didn’t want to think about these things, but I did. I pieced together the things from the shadows and added details where there were none, and I saw all of my worst fears in the blackness beneath the ground as we jogged, and then ran. I had a feeling Noel was seeing things too - things no human being should ever be forced to witness.

We kept running down the ramps from each level to the next one, basking in the occasional flickering glow of a dim fluorescent light, but then grudgingly moving on from it, feeling infinitely colder in its absence each time.

Each level became more abstract, progressively warped from what it had looked like at the top. It reminded me of stacking cards or pennies to make a pyramid. How every imperfection at the bottom becomes amplified on the next level - that’s what this place was like - a crumbling, uneven house of cards (not the Kevin Spacey kind), ready to collapse at any moment. Except instead of being built from the bottom up, this one had been engineered in reverse - as if things had been digging and excavating down here for a long, long time. Millenia. Eons.

Going down to the next level, I noticed that it was massive, far bigger than any of the previous levels - the distance between ramps had grown larger and larger until now we had a walk of several football fields’ length to get across “Level ╬Ù○═‗░∟▄Т㔠and it was going to take forever to get to the other side.

Unsure what else to do, we kept walking, our legs exhausted and our feet developing blisters.

On and on we went down each strange and uneven ramp, twisting and turning deeper and deeper into the dark abyss. Our stomachs began to rumble from hunger pains and I started to wonder just how long we had been down here for. With precious little battery left on my phone, though, I decided to save it for the time being.

The levels grew larger and larger. We could still hear things moving in the shadows, but they were far off now, distant and unbothered by us. Noel and I saved our words and kept quiet, afraid of drawing attention to ourselves.

Eventually there weren’t fluorescent lights anymore, there were simply holes in the pavement with fires burning from within them - the source of the flames was indeterminate. We stood in front of them to warm our hands when we saw them at first, but quickly realized they gave off no heat, so we moved on. The flames felt warm at first but then I realized that was just the sensation of my hands being scorched. They did nothing but burn our hands and left us feeling even colder than before.

We moved on and I struggled to process what was happening, to make any rational sense of it. It felt as if my brain could snap at any second. My thoughts raced around in unhinged circles, like dogs on a racetrack trying to catch a fake rabbit on a stick, my mind flying further and further off its axis with each loop of thought.

There’s no way out, there’s no way out, there’s no way out, my mind told me stubbornly. And yet we continued going down, deeper and deeper.

Suddenly the huge, cavernous room was cast in a dull glow of light from behind. I couldn’t resist the urge to look around in every direction, trying to make sense of our surroundings, and to see who or what was hunting us - we had heard them constantly but had never actually seen them.

Looking up at the ceiling, I saw creatures black as shadows in a midnight graveyard. They were climbing with sticky feet, like frogs, moving quickly along and following us. Watching us. Only they were hanging upside down from the top of the cavern. Their eyes glowed like cats in the night, reflecting back at us.

One dropped down suddenly, and was gone into the shadows. The rest dropped down as well, disappearing. They didn’t like to be seen.

“Is that… Is that a car?” my brother asked suddenly. I turned around and saw there were indeed a pair of headlights coming toward us from far off in the distance.

“I think it is…”

I was far past the point of feeling like we would be miraculously saved by such an occurrence - in fact the sight of someone else down here with us only brought me closer to the brink of a complete nervous breakdown. The walls were starting to crumble in places I saw now. Occasional tremors could be felt beneath our feet, as if giant primordial creatures were battling each other below, and if we just kept going down, we would surely meet them very soon. And they would stop their fight to take a brief reprieve - and a snack.

Trying to clear these images from my mind, I focused on the car pulling up to us. It felt like I was dreaming as I watched Noel flagging the driver down with a hopeful look on his face.

He was shouting something about us being trapped down here when the man rolled down his window and looked out at us, appearing just as frightened as we were. The whole thing felt surreal to me and I was becoming more and more convinced this was a trap - nothing down here had been as it seemed so far, after all. My paranoia was cranked up to eleven.

“Are you guys - are you THEM? The people running this place? I just want out. Please, just let me out!” The guy in the car was shouting out the window at us.

The man was about our age, wearing a Blue Jays shirt, and I guessed he was on his way to the game as well - he had just gotten lured down here with the promise of close proximity stadium parking - same as us.

“No, we’re not the people running this hell-hole. We got trapped down here too. Just ran outta gas a while back. It’s f-f-f-freezing out here, though.”

He looked hesitant for a minute, but then nodded.

“What the hell, hop in. I got nothing else to lose.”

We jumped in, thankful for the ride, and the car began to roll forward. I held my hands up to the heater immediately, rubbing them together against the blasting air and felt them getting toasty after a few long minutes.

Noel was doing the same, reaching up between the front seats to warn his frostbitten hands. After a few minutes he was warm enough and relaxed in the back seat. I was in the passenger seat up front. The vehicle had that nice, new car smell and I took a deep breath of it in. What a relief to be safe from whatever things were outside, stalking us, I thought, my paranoia beginning to settle slightly.

I introduced myself and so did Noel. The guy introduced himself as Steve, saying he was just as clueless about this place as we were. He told us he had been on his way to the baseball game as well, before all this happened. The Toronto traffic jam had driven him off the roads, same as us.

“Any idea what the hell this place is?” he asked.

“Nope. But by the looks of it, it’s ancient. Way older than the parking garage up near street-level.”

I asked the guy if I could plug in my phone, since it looked like he had the same charger as I did. It was plugged into the cigarette lighter and glowing a faint blue colour.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

I turned on my phone and took a look at my post here, wondering if anybody had ideas for how to escape. Damn, thanks for all the suggestions, everybody.

Oh, I should probably get this out of the way, since a few people were wondering why I didn’t just call the cops. Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear. There’s just a weird WIFI signal down here labeled “Ûñ”ˆ╠[ººo^¬┬Þµ↕⌂~½” and not actual cell service - so calling the cops was unfortunately out of the question. Any and all websites that could help provide emergency service were also blocked, so I was reduced to Reddit app and playing “Angry Birds” essentially. A good distraction - but not particularly helpful.

“Some people on here are saying we should just keep going down further,” I said to Steve and Nolan. “Somebody DM’d me and said they’ve been here before. You gotta go down to level 500 and that’s where the exit is.”

Steve said he doubted it, but we could try.

We rounded another corner and went down another level, deeper underground by another few storeys. Each floor was beginning to get a bit smaller again, not as enormous as before, and I wondered if the space would start getting tighter and tighter, more and more claustrophobia-inducing as we continued. I really hoped not.

In the dim light of the car, I noticed something suddenly. There were no symbols or logos on the steering wheel, or on the dashboard. There was no hood ornament, either. The black car was completely unadorned.

Just like the rows of identical cars we had seen all throughout this place.

I glanced over at Steve and he smiled with large incisors glinting. His eyes reflected back at me in the darkness.

Like a cat. Or maybe, a wolf.

Part 3

TCC