She had been running for most of the night, the veil piece from her grandmother's bridal dress the only thing protecting her from the morning chill. For a computerized weather system and an upperclass that had taken comfort to extremes she had to wonder why even have chilly mornings at all. Her tipoff had said the hidden hole in the 9 foot thick alloyed wall was right at the upperleft corner of the ROS Industrial Artifact Park. She banged on it for most of the night going along its side, desperate to hear that hollow thud.
Nothing.
She sat up, naked as the moment she tore the rest of the ruined wedding dress when she ran into the park, harangued by relatives from both sides and the security personnel each had hired for her 'special day'. The panicked moment when she realized that A) She didn't love Humbert, B) She didn't want to be conscripted to the life marrying him would've bound her to C) She didn't want to live in the Upper Ring, suffocating on decadence led her up to this moment: Naked, dirtied with absolutely no options. A lifetime of highclass living wrestled with her inner monologue all at once terrified, indignant, despairing and stubborn. The media never even brushed on topics outside the Upper Ring, for all she knew what was 9 feet away was desolated wasteland with mutated beasts ready to suck the flesh off her bones.
She stood up, wrapping the antique veil around her out of sheer habit than any actual warmth it could have provided. "Better than humdrum with Humbert!" she told herself lamely, graduate studies in Journalism & Creative Writing were out to lunch in her own head... probably because her own situation was one her professors lectured against in warning of boring your audience. She paced in a circle, losing herself in frantic thought and the oddly cushy feeling of the peat soil squelching between her toes.
"... OW! Sonofabi--!" her second toe had caught in something and it felt like the toe was going to be ripped right off the end of her foot. She fell to one knee before adjusting herself to unhook her mangled toe. The offending protuberance was most definitely not one of those rare specimens ROS Industrial Park was fond of planting just to boast about them. She rolled over onto her rear, massaging her toe. In the face of past events she kicked at it with her other foot.
thud
"..." A very, very small voice in the back of her head said in caustic tone, I swear if that's where it's been all this time... She kicked at it a few more times.
thud ...thud... thudthudthudthudthudthud THUD!
"Ha... hahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAH!" Moving to her knees she began to hurriedly dig around the metal bit that was sticking out, eventually she had dug out an opening to a tunnel that seemed to have been sitting quietly underneath her.
Snap! Her head whipped around, she kept her eyes off in the distance where she heard it. Slowly, cat-like even she slipped herself into the tunnel crouching in it before thinking to sprinkle the peat soil onto the cover and sliding it back over on top of herself. She crawled in complete darkness for what seemed like hours. The thought she devised for herself, that absolutely anything and everything would be better than what she was crawling away from kept her soldiering on. She stopped a few times to rest, to goad herself, to convince herself, to assure herself that she was doing the right thing. It felt like a day had passed when she saw a soft light in the distance ahead. She was nearly galloping on all fours to the light, tumbling out of the hole a jumble of limbs and delicate lace. She heard and felt people around her probably wondering where she came from. She stayed still, frozen, the shock of actually escaping the Upper Ring and being acutely aware of her nudity starting to weigh on her. Someone was kneeling over her and the weight of more substantive fabric blanketed her more vulnerable bits. Before she could bring herself to open her eyes, her ears were the first to sense this new world.
"Hey... shh, it's fine. You've been crawling in there awhile, haven't you?" The voice was melodic, the type of voice people meant when they used mellifluous to describe an orator. It was warm, hearty and comforting. Opening her eyes little by little, taking in the bright lights she could see through the thin flesh of her eyelids. What she saw was a horribly twisted face, a hellish configuration that was just barely recognizable as human.
"Welcome to Hell."
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EPILOGUE:
"Jano, take that mask off! One of these days, you're going to give someone a heart attack with that schtick of yours!" A loud sound similar to an axe smartly biting into a treetrunk was heard shortly after that.
