You decide to go with the safer, smarter option, and use your phone’s remaining battery power to call your friend Honza for help. He’s a nerdy professional clarinetist who doesn’t have the best people skills, but you’ve known him for a long time and can count on him when you’re in a pinch. You explain to him that you were out on your nightly bike ride and popped a tire, but leave out the skeleton. It’s been a long day, you’ve probably been hallucinating the entire thing.
You tell Honza how to find you and he promises to be there in half an hour. Just as he hangs up, your phone dies. Until Honza arrives, you have no way of contacting anyone.
You sit down on a rock facing the entrance to the mine so you can keep an eye on it. You are in no mood for surprises tonight. The temperature starts to drop and you begin to shiver, and the sky darkens.
As the evening turns into night, you hear strange sounds from the mineshaft. A low wailing floats through the air, broken every few minutes by a loud screech. The shuffling of footsteps puts you on edge, along with loud cracks, almost like breaks in bone.
It’s been about twenty minutes since you called Honza, and the noises have made you very jittery. You hear a loud bang from the mine and jump to your feet. You grab your bike and start dragging it behind you as you walk back up the road, hoping to run into Honza. You cannot stay by the mine for another second.
The noises follow you, prompting you to move faster. Despite your exhaustion, you force yourself to run, especially when you hear the thumping of feet behind you. You run for about five minutes when a new noise breaks through the woods. Tires crunch against the ground and an engine rumbles, and Honza’s SUV finally comes into view.
You want to weep with relief, but you can still hear the noises behind you, urging you into action. You shove your bike into the trunk of Honza’s car and scramble into the passenger’s seat.
“Drive,” you order him before he can say anything.
Honza frowns, his nose wrinkled and oily. His greasy brown hair falls in his eyes, but he can still see well enough to execute a careful U-turn and start back towards the main road.
You glance back, holding back a gasp when you see a cluster of skeletons racing after the car. They swerve back and forth, clumsy on their bare feet, but move with inhuman speed and keep pace with the car. A few of them run on all fours like animals, and it takes everything in you not to scream. Honza doesn’t know, and you would like to keep it that way. If he knows, he will freak out, and then you will both be doomed.
You break through the tree line and are finally back on the main road where you were biking earlier. You allow yourself a small sigh of relief, a seed of hope growing in your heart. But when you crane your neck behind you, the skeletons are still there.
You get closer to town and Honza asks, “Shortcut?”
There are two ways back home. One is the long way that most people take since the shortcut is hard to find. There would be more chances to lose the skeletons on that route.
The other option is the shortcut, unknown to many. It’s a straighter shot back to town, but most of it is in the barren desert and the skeletons could easily follow you.
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