Chapter 66: Ch. 066 – (Then) Hopelessly Lost

Jonathan woke up in near complete darkness, with only the ticking of cooling metal and the slow drip of water from somewhere to keep him company. He would have assumed he was dead if not for the terrible pain from his head where he’d bashed it against the door. 

He reached up to touch the tender area, and found warm, sticky blood at his temple. He’d definitely done it now. He’d managed to escape, but only at the cost of burying himself alive. 

“As divine intervention, does this count as reward or punishment,” he asked himself quietly as he struggled to sit up. His body was stiff from lying on the door handle for who knew how long, and everything hurt, but eventually he managed to work himself free of the debris that he was partially buried in.

Jonathan tried to figure out which god he should pray to, and what exactly that prayer should be with everything that had happened, but those thoughts led immediately back to what he’d just done. He’d blown up the whole powder mill in his struggle to get free, and everyone in it was dead. When he thought back to the terrible explosions that wracked the final moments of the mill, Jonathan was surprised that he hadn’t been burned alive along with everyone else. That train of thought immediately lead to the amount of dwarves that had burned to ashes or crushed to death, though.

“No, they didn’t just die in there, I killed them,” he whispered to himself, unwilling to let himself off the hook that easily. 

How many had died because of him, he wondered, as he was overwhelmed by a sudden wave of guilt. He tried to do the math, and add up the guards and all the barracks full of prisoners, but he couldn’t come up with a firm number. With the ringing in his head, math wasn’t his strong suit just now. It was a lot, though. He was sure of that. The blood of perhaps a hundred dwarves were on his hands now. 

For a moment, he tried to make the case to himself that those deaths were justified. That it was him or them, but he couldn’t, and the argument crumpled immediately. They’d stolen years of his life and sent him somewhere to die. Even if he’d wanted every last one of them dead, he still felt terrible about being the one to do it. 

Jonathan forced himself to sit up and look around, despite the dizziness. 

The only light in the room was barely enough to see the darkened silhouettes of his hands, but it was enough for him to have some idea of what had happened. The train had landed hard on its left side, and when that happened, everything else in the cab that hadn’t been bolted down was flung around as hard as he was. In the process, the light stone he’d been using had shattered, but each of the smaller pieces still gave off some light. 

Jonathan’s first impulse had been to try to scavenge what he could, but that could wait. What he really needed to do was figure out if he’d really been buried alive. The answer, it turned out, was a definitive, maybe. 

In a locomotive cab, there was really only three ways out: the doors on either side, and the windscreen in the front. It was made of glass, but he was sure he could bash it out with enough force. In this case, that wouldn’t do him any good. The windscreen was broken, but not quite shattered, and on the other side was a wall of dust and rocks that started at the size of his head and just kept getting bigger, indicating that the tunnel in front of him was probably completely collapsed. 

If that was the case, he’d die in here when he ran out of air, of course, but he gritted his teeth in determination. He hadn’t survived months of literal hell only to give up because of a small setback like this. There had to be a way forward, and he would find it. 

There was a ray of hope from the third possible exit, though. Not a literal ray of light, of course. That would have been too easy, but as he grabbed one of the larger light shards and held it up, he couldn’t see anything blocking the window. There were apparently no rocks on what was now the top part of the train in that area. None that Jonathan could see, at least, even if he couldn’t quite see the tunnel roof from here. 

The door wouldn’t open, though. Feeling around, it was easy to figure out why: it had taken a heavy blow when everything had gone to hell, and it was bent into the frame so forcefully that it wasn’t going to move again without more strength than Jon could hope to bring to bear.

There was still hope, though. Other than a few dents from the hail of bullets that had been fired in his direction in the final moments, the steel blast shutters that covered the window were in perfect shape, and he was able to slide them fully to the side. 

That created a big enough hole that he should be able to climb out at least, but once he did, there was no way he was getting back in here, so he looked around trying to find anything that could be useful. 

At first, Jonathan thought there wasn’t much worth taking. There was the conductor’s brand, along with a powder flask and some extra shot behind the seat along with a knife, but there didn’t seem to be a map, and there was nothing in the way of food or water until he found the dwarf’s lunch wedged in a rucksack under the seat. 

Jonathan pulled it out and went through it, thankful for the blessing of the half-eaten sandwich, a couple of rubbery pickles, and a half a skin of warm beer. It wasn’t much, but he took at as a sign. Hopefully it would be just enough to get him to the surface. 

Once everything worth carrying was packed away, he climbed up and out of the window. For the first time, he was grateful that he was half starved to death, because there was no way he would have fit out of this tiny hole otherwise. As it was, he had to climb out with his arms first, because his shoulders were too wide to fit through the opening. After a few desperate minutes of wiggling and gasping, though, he was finally through. 

That wasn’t much of an accomplishment, though, because he was surrounded by broken boulders that had wedged themselves in a way when they’d fallen to create a slight air pocket. 

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He only had a few feet of space in any direction, and at first there didn’t seem to be any way out into the tunnel proper. 

After several minutes of searching in the stale, gritty air using the largest fragment of glow stone he’d been able to find, Jonathan found a crevice that went further back into the collapsed tunnel before allowing him to climb down the side of the train. This in turn led to several more dead ends, but eventually he found a series of gaps that let him crawl along the path where the old roof of the engine met the ground. 

It was a terrifying ordeal, and every time one of the boulders moved when he touched it, he feared that was the end. It wasn’t though. Part way through, he had to crawl through a warm pool of water that was leaking from the ruptured boiler. Jonathan took that moment to finish off the beer that the conductor had left behind, before refilling the skin and emptying it again. 

The water tasted awful, but he could only carry so much with him, and while old boiler water might make him sick, dehydration would definitely kill him if he was very far from the surface. 

Only after he could drink no more did Jonathan keep crawling towards the front of the train. No new collapses occurred, and eventually he was able to climb his way free into a tunnel that looked free and clear. 

“I was only a few yards from getting the engine away,” Jonathan said glumly before his inner voice added, ‘but you were only a few feet away from being crushed to death. Seems like a fair trade.’ 

Once he was ready, he started walking. There were a few false starts as he tried to deal with the dizziness from his head wound, but once he worked past the pain and really got going, he walked for the better part of a day before he stopped to rest. He had no way to keep track of time, so instead he kept track of his water consumption, which meager as it was, was emptying his skin frighteningly quickly. 

By the time his skin was half empty, he still hadn’t found a fork in the road, but he had found a frighteningly long bridge over a dark chasm. The small light stone he had was barely enough to let him see the ground beneath his feet, so very little changed visually, but Jonathan could see the girders that rose up on either side of him as he walked forward, and he knew what they meant. Those steel beams were as thick as tree trunks, and the dwarves wouldn’t have used so much steel unless they were building something very big and very strong. 

Jon tried to count the steps across it, but gave up before he got halfway because of how unnerving he found the gaps between the ties. He was acutely aware that one single slip would result in him falling away into the endless darkness below. Still, even though he didn’t count, he was sure it was over two hundred paces long by the time he reached the end of it. 

He slept that day in a niche just inside the tunnel on the far side, because of the cool draft that the chasm carried from somewhere above or below him. Despite waking up several times that night because of dreams that a train was bearing down on him or a tunnel was collapsing, it was one of the better nights of sleep he had in a long time. 

Not that he really knew if it was night or not. 

All he really knew was that there was only one way to go, that it seemed to be going very slightly up, and that he had a few days to get to the surface, or he’d die from a lack of water. They were a stark, simple set of facts that made his pace both unhurried and relentless. Too fast, and he would sweat more than he needed to. Too slow and he’d just be wasting time. 

Occasionally he found a bricked off fissure or side passage like he’d seen in the abandoned section of the salt mines. Some of these were in excellent condition, and some had serious cracks, but none of them were damage enough for him to explore the other side. Ekrom had said they were there to keep goblins out, so Jonathan was glad the barriers were there, but he was still curious. 

That curiosity was tested later, when he was down to less than a quarter of his water skin. After the better part of two days of travel, he finally came to his first fork in the road. It was just a switch, and apparently one that wasn’t important enough to justify a station of its own, but it was the first decision that Jonathan could actually make that mattered, besides putting one foot in front of the other of course. 

He couldn’t see enough to really differentiate one path from the other at a glance. He might as well be flipping a coin, he thought at first. After he forced himself not to get frustrated and studied the situation a bit more, the choice became clear, though. 

The switch was currently set to divert a train coming from his direction to the left side of the track, and the rails on that side definitely had less corrosion, which according to Kaspov meant they were used more often. Jonathan wouldn’t be going that way though because after a few steps along that path he realized the most important detail of all: those rails were headed back down into the depths, which was not where Jonathan wanted to end up at all. A dwarf city, or at least a crossroads, probably wasn’t very far away. A place like that would definitely have food and beer, but it would also have questions, and Jonathan hadn’t gone through all this just to get locked back up by the stone men all over again. 

So, he went right. 

Not because it was definitely the right way or anything. If anything, it felt flat, but it was possible it was just a very shallow grade and was continuing up. Without a map, he wasn’t sure, of much, but he was sure that the last place he wanted to be ever again was down. Between the two choices, it was definitely the path to freedom.

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