Dingo Bingo
You shake your head, trying to decide. It’s not easy when you have three choices instead of two - that’s not even a fifty fifty split by then. But, you suck this down, and you end up choosing: center path for the time being.
“I guess center, then,” you say.
She nods. “Right. Okay, good. Then you go down the center path and see where it’ll take you. Me, I think we should split up to give the dingo two separate targets to chase rather than us both going down the same path together.”
You pause to stare at her. “Wait, wait, what? Split up?” You don’t like the sound of that one little bit. “Isn’t splitting up always a terrible idea in these kinds of situations?”
She sighs. “Normally, I wouldn’t suggest it, but, think. There’s one dingo, yeah? So one of them and two of us means if we go separate ways, then we can confuse it. Worst case scenario, it’ll chase one of us down, but you look like you’re plenty smart enough to handle it. Just be cautious and don’t do anything too stupid, yeah?”
You continue staring. ‘This feels like something stupid…’
“I’ll go the left path,” Erin says. “We’ll meet up again. If you really want, we can take about five minutes to trek in further, then wait to see what happens.”
“Yeah, but…”
She turns and starts to hop down the path before you can finish. You watch her go, and you can’t help but let out a huff of annoyance at this - perhaps doing this was a bad idea, and so was putting trust in someone you literally just met…
‘Damn it, you gotta be kidding me,’ you think.
You can hear something far back from you, though, and it sounds like movement. Heavy movement. You grimace and then start to bound down the central path, and you hope that doing this will work to your advantage.
You find that the small tunnel you’ve entered seems to teeter back and forth, winding to the right, then the left, then the right again, for no apparent rhyme or reason. But still you push on, keeping your pace brisk, yet still paying attention to everything ahead of you and around you. The path starts to shrink, however, as the seconds go by. You find yourself getting squished in to the point where mobility is almost impossible for you given the fact you move by jumping.
‘Figures,’ you think.
But still you squeeze on through, until after a good minute or two of this, the path opens up a bit more. You keep going, and then, at last, it opens up to a much larger ‘room’ for the cave. Here, you halt your jumping, and you glance around to take in the vicinity for anywhere you can safely hide and wait.
You spot a few nooks in the walls of the cave, and a small ledge to boot.
‘Bingo,’ you think.
You hop up to the ledge, which has nothing to its back beside the cave wall. From here, you turn and face the direction you come from, and now, you wait in silence. You wait to see if the dingo chasing you and Erin is coming after you, and if so, if it’s a person in a costume, or an actual wild dingo.
For a moment, you hear nothing.
Your heart is racing, of course, so you hear that thudding away in your chest, but you keep your eyes and ears peeled for the dingo - you don’t know exactly what to expect either way. If it’s a wild dingo, then you suppose you can use your human ‘ingenuity’ against it somehow. But if it’s a person in a costume? You’re less certain.
‘I mean, would a person want to, I dunno, kill me?’ you think. ‘I don’t know a normal person would, unless…’
You recall what Erin said earlier, but you don’t know if you fully believe what she’s said. She’s given you no reason to doubt her, mind, yet the fact she wanted to split up at a time like this really doesn’t settle well with you. Maybe she’s right to do it, maybe not; you don’t have to like the idea either way.
‘Maybe this is a game to them,’ you consider. ‘Damn. I don’t know. There’s so much being thrust at me, and I’ve only just started getting used to being in a female kangaroo body. Never mind having to run for my life and hide!’
Still, you remain in place, and you listen.
You hear something eventually, and it sounds like movement. Loud movement, too, until it stops. You try your best to listen as close as you can, and you swear you hear what sounds like sniffing, perhaps. There’s sniffing, followed by some sort of grunt - it sounds like a grunt of annoyance, but you can’t be certain. Then, the movement seems to… go the other way?
‘Did it get stuck in that area I was having a hard time with?’ you wonder.
That makes the most logical sense, especially when the sound of something moving grows quieter and quieter until you can’t hear it at all.
You feel your throat go dry.
‘Maybe it did,’ you think.
You leap down from where you were resting and very, very slowly, you trek toward the entrance to the cavern you’re in. You stand not quite near it and you put your ear closer, listening in. Either the dingo did start to come down this way and decided to go after Erin, or, something else was following you.
Nothing. No sound. Not the wind, not feet pads on the ground, not rocks.
It’s a little unnerving to hear nothing down the way you came, but, you consider the possibilities - either the dingo decided to go after Erin, or, it decided to go the other path, or it left. Or, hell, for all you know, the dingo could decide to try coming down the central path after you a second time. You don’t know, yet you do know that you don’t like being split up like this, not in this scenario.
‘Great,’ you think. ‘Well. Now what? I don’t think I want to stay here for too long, because something else could be lurking about. But, then…’
You consider that you could go back the same way and hope for the best. Or, you could stay here and wait a while longer, just to be safe. One way or another, you know you won’t be able to remain in this dark cave forever.
You close your eyes and suck in a deep breath. ‘Decisions…’
Written by Hollowpages on 23 August 2020
