Dingo Bingo II
You end up choosing to leave the cavern, because you don’t like the anxiety of not knowing what the hell to do with yourself - and while you may be annoyed that Erin opted to split up, you can’t shake the idea that sticking together is the wisest choice to do, especially when you still know so very little. You’ve had barely any experience in this madness, whereas she has said otherwise.
‘Please don’t run right into the jaws of death,’ you think.
You start to hop down the path you came from, and you end up in the same spot you had trouble moving through because the walls were smaller, and again, you have to work to move given how tightly compacted it is.
Yet you halt midway through this and look down - there are tracks there. Tracks that are shaped like a wild dog’s, or in this case, a dingo. So then the dingo HAD come after you, probably first, yet it ended up stopping and then turning around. You can tell from the tracks it did this. But what you can’t tell is if the tracks you’re staring at are bigger than normal dingo footprints or not.
They’re big, for sure, but you hesitate to think them too large.
‘Forget it for now,’ you think. ‘Focus.’
You push this aside and start moving again, trying to be quick and quiet and cautious all at once - quite the jumble of different things. It takes a few minutes again to push through the compacted portion of the path, then, it starts to open up more and more until, eventually, you reach the portion of the cave where you started from, where it split into three different tunnels to pick from.
Here is where you stop, because here is where you now have to figure out your next course of action.
You can see the footprints and claw marks on the ground that show the dingo went after you. And now, as you glance at the other two tunnels, you spot the same marks that lead down the path Erin took. You start to think that the dingo has decided to go after her next.
‘I wonder how far she got,’ you think. You prick your ears to the side and listen.
You don’t hear anything out of the ordinary down that path, although it does veer to the side, so you consider you’d probably have to go down it a bit to hear anything, anyways. With a heavy inward sigh, you hop down it a few times so that you’re angled more toward the direction it goes - the tunnel seems to be a straight shot once it’s gone to the one side, at the least.
Now, you listen again.
And you can indeed hear something further in, the padding of feet on the ground. It’s faint, and growing distant with every passing second, but it’s all you need to hear to know the dingo has decided to go after Erin. If anything, that means it’ll be preoccupied, yet you don’t want to abandon her to it if it’s something that wants to kill or hurt her. Stranger or not, you aren’t the sort to just turn the other way, not in this sort of situation.
You sigh internally and started to trail after the dingo, and in doing so, trail after Erin since she went down this path first. You keep your pace moving slow and cautious again, mindful of whatever is around or in front of you, since you don’t know what else could be lying ahead, or where Erin’s gone off to.
‘I hope this isn’t a stupid idea,’ you think as you bound onward, although you know it probably is. ‘Erin… so help me, please let this work out for the both of us. I don’t feel like falling down a massive hole or getting eaten by some dingo, real or hybrid.’
But on you go regardless.
Written by Hollowpages on 25 August 2020