Talk turned, as it often does after beer has been abandoned for hard liquor, to dares of wild activities. They ranged from the embarrassingly absurd to the idiotically dangerous. Tom, the most popular guy in school and the resident jackass, would dare people to do things like moon a cop or jump off a roof. Jimmy, douche bag extraordinaire and lifelong crony, liked daring guys to drop their pants in public or girls to lift their shirts; even sober he wasn’t smart enough to think of anything besides those two things every time. Jared, roguish bad boy and “dreamboat,” had actually gotten a guy to slingshot himself in the face one night. That guy was, coincidentally, unable to smell anymore.

It was a combination of the activities of guys like these three, the fact that he had never been drunk before (and was in fact not at present because he hadn’t gotten past buzzed), and the fact that he was the new kid in town that made Martin exceedingly uneasy every time someone started to bring up the topic of daring someone else to do something.

Tom had already gotten one guy into a sprinting race with a cop on his beat; that guy wouldn’t be joining the party crowd again for a while. Jimmy, the one whom Martin considered the least dangerous of the three, had essentially dared himself to grope “broads.” But it was Jared who scared him the most.

Martin considered how he even ended up with that crowd. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” That was the blonde girl whose name slipped his mind. She had a nice face (read: body) and Martin couldn’t resist the invitation of a lady, even when he knew deep inside that, one, he stood no chance with her and, two, she was probably in on getting the new guy totally wrecked and embarrassed on his first night out.

Martin was pretty straight-laced but it was completely selfish. He cared most about looking good to others and that had meant being on the level where he came from. Here, it meant being “cool.” But he didn’t want to go to jail and he didn’t want to embarrass himself. Therefore, “cool” was a fine line, and with each dare that passed he felt his number slowly coming up. That number would require activity and that activity would be what revealed him to be either a prude or a numb-nuts.

Martin weighed his options. Jared was his last wish. If he got Tom, he thought he’d be the laughing stock of at least half the school tomorrow, but that was the lesser of two evils. As for Jimmy, there was a good chance he’d get dared to grope a girl who was already wasted, and he wouldn’t mind that much at all. Worst case, he thought he could get over flashing some random semi-sober group of people. So, Jimmy was his goal.

His strategy was to waver behind, slink, or look away when Jared got around to daring someone to do something. On the other hand, when Jimmy got on a kick, Martin would be standing right there trying to look like he wasn’t trying anything.

Night was technically morning when Jared took a turn. “Hey,” he started, pausing to down what was left of a bottle of vodka missing from insert-kid’s-family’s-name-here’s liquor cabinet. “We ought to dare some one to walk through the old West St. tunnel.”

The tunnel in question was a little over a mile long and twisted in a manner that the middle was completely hidden from light on either side. It had been in heavy use until about ten years ago when a twenty-car pileup coincided with the building of a bigger road through the city, and the tunnel had been abandoned. The story went that some people died in the accident, and Martin had written it off as schoolyard nonsense.

Jared let his eyes wander over the crowd a little before resting on his victim. “Hey, new kid. You feel like showing us if you have any balls or not?”

Shit.

Before Martin knew what else was going on, a chant of “new kid” had begun and he was being ushered over two blocks to the entrance of the tunnel.

“They left some of those cones on the other side of the tunnel. Bring one back to prove you made it. Don’t be a pansy.”

Jared had said something along those lines anyway, but Martin was too busy reminding himself that schoolyard nonsense was in fact just that; pictures of grotesque creatures and violent death screamed otherwise.

Be a man, he thought to himself. Don’t embarrass yourself. Do this, and you’ll be in their good graces for weeks. And with that thought, the youthful mind of Martin rationalized risking serious injury, not from monsters but from the real risks of walking a condemned tunnel at night, to impress a bunch of drunken assholes and girl with whom he didn’t stand a chance.

The walk began uneventfully. Martin’s hand hurt and he looked down. Oh yeah, he thought to himself. He was still holding a forty; he promptly downed the rest and chucked the bottle, instantly regretting it as the sound of glass shattering brought unwanted attention. He could still hear the drunken chants as they began to warble coming from behind him.

Martin reached the middle of the tunnel. The dim glow of the streetlights from behind him waned like a moon in fast motion. Suddenly, darkness was complete.

He froze.

His ears perked up.

Sound. But what? CLICK.

Something softer followed.

Martin tried to move on and found he couldn’t. His muscles simply refused.

CLICK.

The sound was closer now.

Martin willed his legs to move. He walked stiffly through the tunnel. The end in front of him emerged lazily.

CLICK.

What the hell is that? The sound was practically on top of him.

Martin moved a little faster.

The click did not, coming at exact intervals, but it remained on top of him.

Martin emerged from the tunnel, nearly tripping on a cone, and spun expecting to see his fate. There was nothing.

CLICK.

Martin looked down. His wristwatch glared back at him. He nearly smacked himself in the forehead, remembering how he had read that adrenaline can focus the senses. He grabbed a cone and put it on his head, thinking the attempt at comedy would be reasonably successful taking the alcohol into account. He began his return trip, so relieved that he had not embarrassed himself with his watch endeavor that he felt no fear at all until he reached the center of the tunnel.

And it was right there, just as he was in complete darkness, that the most horrible sound Martin would ever hear pierced his ears. It was low and gradual at first. Martin thought of a bear waking from a deep sleep to see an intruder. It began with a low growl and slowly grew into a scream. Then the scream became a squeal as the bear became a hawk. The scream was joined by others. The bear-hawk had spawned many more and they all came roaring down the tunnel at Martin. He slapped his hands over his ears and the sound still deafened him. Then, all at once, there was a loud bang and Martin thought the tunnel was coming down on him. But it didn’t

Time passed. Maybe fifteen seconds, maybe fifteen minutes. Martin didn’t know. All he knew is that eventually, he mustered up the courage to move and he moved forward. He turned the corner and the light appeared. It was dull and different. He kept going. Soon, he made out the shaped of a large object at the end of the tunnel.

It’s a monster, he thought. It’s waiting for me and it’s too late. If I turn and run, it’ll just catch me and eat me.

But it wasn’t a monster. Martin came closer as his mind wrapped itself around the true identity of the shape and the horrible event that was necessitated by its existence.

Martin imagined troops walking into war-torn villages in third world countries and seeing things similar to what he was seeing.

The truck had swerved out of control and tipped, crashing into the corner of the tunnel. The drunken teens, kids really, had been no match for it in their state and the best of them probably got a step in before being rundown.

None of them had survived. Martin looked at what he guessed was Jimmy. There were the rags of a shirt mixed the tangles of flesh and organ. Martin felt like he had been uncorked and the sanity was slowly draining out of him like molasses. There was a mass of something that he was sure was Jimmy, yet he couldn’t make out more than an arm and part of a torso. The rest of the body was there, but it was unrecognizable.

Just past Jimmy, Martin saw the girl whose name he didn’t remember. She was still pretty, he thought. Not totally in one piece but her face had been miraculously unharmed and she was still pretty. Her head cocked to one side and her eyes were tiny slits, just barely open. Martin ran dry as he said to himself out loud, smiling, “I guess I really don’t stand a chance with her.”