Footsteps echoed loudly, quickly, down a long, lonely tunnel; the only background sound filling the empty space around each malevolent step was the constant dripping of a hundred sprung leaks - some dribbling oceanwater across the thick glass panes of darkened windows, others gushing vehemently into the stairwells and cracks of every blackened corner.
I saddled up to the darkness, back flush against the wall and felt the cold, unforgiving embrace of steel along my spine. I tried vainly to listen around the pounding rhythm of my own heartbeat exploding in my ears.
Manic laughter, giddy and insane with violence, floated lazily along a rushing current of stale air; its gnarled old fingers encircled my neck. I silenced a dry choke as it arose in my throat.
It, this freakish creature no longer human, suddenly ran screaming in my direction with the edge of a lead pipe screeching along the stone floor tiles. A white-hot plume of molten sparks fizzled in his eccentric wake.
I clutched the busted wrench at my side and inhaled sharply, waiting to die.
Alone.
I was all alone.
In a city of thousands.
Most of them were dead now… or half-alive, long past a shadow of their former selves. My skin crawls at the mindless tinny of every shriek - every sobbing, hysterical cry; the way they talk to themselves aloud, frantic and paranoid in the solitary hours of what could be midnight, could be fucking noon for all I know… not much sunlight reaches down here.
I have constant goosebumps, my mouth is always a desert; I will never get used to this place.
Yet I must ask myself: who doesn't secretly enjoy the metallic, bittersweet taste of dead dreams? The death of Rapture left such a deliciously tart flavor on my lips... but it never occurred to me that I was tasting my own blood.
Lights still glow from vacant rooms in abandoned high-rises; the thumping mechanical heart of the city still pumps in the industrial hell they call Hephaestus; trees still blossom, wither and die in the grassy fields of Arcadia; Dr. Steinman's forsaken patients paint a trilogy of sorrow, stigmata clogged with coagulated blood as his body rots aside their unholy altar; forty-seven murdered souls beg for their release behind masks of plaster in the mausoleum of Fort Frolic.
I, alone, look for a way out - but all I can find are dead ends.
All around me shakes - the walls, the floors, the ceiling - every beam and bolt and corpse in a quarter-mile radius shudders.
A massive mechanical groan slithers down one of Rapture's many spiral arms,...
I scream.