He wasn't sure if it was the dripping water or the chill in the air that woke him, but when Charlie opened his eyes, he knew something was wrong.
It was black. Total blackness.
He sat up, then hit his head.
Where was he? The last thing Charlie remembered was going to bed. He had a long tedious day of selling insurance and just wanted to sleep it all off.
Instinctively, he reached into his pocket and grabbed his lighter. If there was ever a good thing about being a smoker, it was that you always had a lighter on you, just for these types of situations. But, of course, Charlie wasn't a smoker. Not anymore, at least. He was in the process of quitting. Having the lighter in his pocket was more habit than anything else.
As he gripped his lighter, a thought occurred to him. Why was he wearing a suit? He obviously wasn't wearing it when he went to bed.
He brought out the lighter and used it. The first thing he saw was a rock face, then his shoes, and then the rest of his body. It seemed that he was crammed in at the end of a very narrow tunnel. And by how cold it was, he figured that he was deep underground.
He looked at himself. It was one of his outfits that he usually wore on his sales runs. But he couldn't remember putting it on. Could it be that he had amnesia? If so, what caused it and how much memory had he lost? What if he had lost decades of memories? It scared him to think that maybe he wasn't in his thirties anymore. He could be an old man, for all he knew.
He shook his head, clearing it. The most important thing at the moment was getting out of the tunnel. He'd have to deal with his memory loss later.
So, he crawled, crawled, crawled. It seemed to last for hours. How did he even get to the end of the tunnel? Did he crawl there? What would make him crawl all that way?
Just when he thought that there would be no exit from this cramped tunnel, he saw a light. It was dim, but it was still light.
The exit. He found it.
As he crawled on, he expected to hear something from outside. Birds, people, something. But it was silent. Except for the dripping water, which he heard all the time during his long crawl.
As he got closer, the light was bright enough to see, so he put his lighter away. He couldn't wait to get out of this claustrophobic tunnel.
A few minutes later, he saw the exit. Beyond it he just saw more rock, but it was all bathed in sunlight. Freedom, at last.
He crawled towards it, faster than he crawled before.
Then he left the tunnel.
