Underbelly

The city I live in is one of those popular tourist destinations. It’s an old city, one with a rich history, full of beautiful architecture, and a plethora of sightseeing attractions. Most importantly, though, it’s a clean city. For the most part, at least. People always forget the dirty network of tunnels that make up the city’s underbelly: the sewers.

That’s where I work. Times have changed, of course. When people hear you’re working in the sewers, they presume you wade through shit and sewage all day, but they couldn’t be more wrong. These days, we’re mostly working with machinery and robots. It’s rare that we actually have to set foot in the tunnels ourselves.

About a week ago was one such day. Our equipment had shown us that there was a pressure issue in one of the tunnels. To find out what exactly was wrong, my colleague Andrew and I had to go down there for a manual check-up. I hated those days. You never got used to them. Wading through those dark, sticky tunnels is not only claustrophobic, but as disgusting as it sounds. What makes it even worse is the smell.

Most of what’s down there is shit, toilet paper, and fatbergs. Consider yourself lucky if you don’t know what the third one is. And yet, people flush all sorts of other things down their toilets. I’ve seen trash, dead animals, but also medicine, clothing, batteries and even an iPhone. The funniest thing I saw was a dildo that slowly swam past me.

On that day, things were different.

Our city’s old, and various types of sewage treatment facilities have been used throughout the decades. While some of the old systems have been modernized, others were simply abandoned. Because of this, there’s an entire second network of old, dilapidated tunnels.

Where we had to go that day was a tunnel right below one of the city’s major sightseeing attractions. Without even looking at the plans, I knew what it meant. There was no way we could enter the sewers right there. Our boss made one thing clear: tourists on their fancy sightseeing trips didn’t want to see dirty sewage workers. This meant we’d have to use an entrance a couple hundred meters away, and make our way to the problem area underground.

Our maps told us we’d have to circle the entire city center, which would take us almost an entire hour. Yet we soon found a different route, one that would lead us through some of the old sewer tunnels. They were declared off limits because of safety issues, but we couldn’t care less. It would cut our trip in half.

We’d barely entered the old tunnels when Andrew got quiet. He crouched down to pick something up.

“What’s up? You found something you like?” I asked jokingly.

For a moment, he was quiet. When he turned back to me, his face was serious, and I could see that he was holding a kid’s baseball cap in his hands.

“It’s probably been flushed down here somehow, but…”

His voice trailed off, but I nodded. We all knew these old, half-hidden tunnels held some sort of strange fascination with the local kids. It’s usually nothing serious; a bit of exploring here, leaving some graffiti there, that type of thing.

A few years ago, however, a kid went missing down here. At first, everyone thought the boy would turn up eventually, but he must’ve lost his way and wandered these tunnels for days. It was Andrew who found him, or rather… what was left of him. That day had changed him, and from then on, he was much more serious whenever we found hints of kids down here.

As we continued on, we kept our eyes open for clues.

A couple of minutes later, we ended up in front of a metal sewer gate that kept us from going any further. I was a bit confused. Why was it down here? I thought they’d stripped the old tunnels back in the day. Even stranger, it looked kind of… new. I went forward to have a closer look, but I’d only taken a few steps when something touched my leg. I jerked back.

 “Shit! There’s something down here,” I cursed.

 “What do you mean?” Andrew asked, instantly alarmed.

“No clue, bumped into something. Hold on,” I said, taking out my flashlight.

As I pointed the beam at the water in front of me, I finally saw what I’d bumped into. It was the bloated, half-rotten corpse of a child. I stumbled back, crashed right into Andrew, and brought us both down.

“The hell are you doing?!” he yelled at me.

“It’s… it’s a child,” I stammered. “The body of a child’s down there!”

I got back up and pointed the flashlight at the spot ahead of us. There it was, gently rocking back and forth in the sewage water before us.

“Jesus Christ,” Andrew whispered.

While I was still stunted, Andrew rushed forward, and carefully tried to lift the small body. He’d barely raised it above the water level when it broke apart and vanished again. For a moment, he stood there, looking at his hands in a mixture of shock and misery, before he retched and vomited.

Still grasping onto my flashlight, I set out for him, but stopped after only a single step. My eyes grew wide.

“There’s more,” I mumbled.

I slowly moved the beam of the flashlight further, and there, behind the gate, I saw dozens of other corpses.

“What the absolute fuck,” Andrew said, as he looked in the beam’s direction.

For a moment, he was frozen, just staring ahead, before he turned back to me, his face a mask of terror.

“Maybe a graveyard or something,” I whispered, struggling to make sense of what I was seeing.

I opened my mouth again, but closed it the instant I heard something from afar. Footsteps, and they were getting closer! Instantly, I motioned for Andrew to be quiet, and turned off my flashlight and my helmet’s headlight. A few moments later, he did the same thing.

As we stood there, in the darkness, my eyes darted around, trying to find some sort of hiding place, but I couldn’t see a damned thing. All the while, someone was getting closer to us from the other side of the gate. Eventually, not knowing what else to do, I did the same thing Andrew had done. I crouched down. The smell was almost unbearable, and I had to fight the urge to vomit as the disgusting sewage water splashed against my lips. I tried my hardest not to think about the corpses in the water ahead of us.

“… Rats should take care of them,” a deep voice ahead of us said, and then started laughing.

I noticed the distant beam of a flashlight, but it was too far away to make out anything.

“There’s too many, for fuck’s sake. You really think the rats will eat all this?” a second voice chimed in, followed by a splash.

“Well, we could always throw in a bit of that stuff and cook ‘em all up.”

“Nah, the boss told us not to use that shit down here. The sewer guys will notice, and then we’re in even bigger shit than we already are.”

Another splash.

“The boss can go fuck off for all I care! Takes no genius to know what will happen. With all that food down here, the rats will breed like crazy. We’ll be back at square one, only that it won’t be the hobos but the rats this time.”

“Shut up, you idiot! If anyone hears you talk like this-“

“No one will know if you keep your mouth shut!”

The two voices rattled on, their sick jokes echoing eerily through the dark sewer tunnel.

I crouched there in the water, frozen in shock and disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Jesus Christ, what the fuck?

I don’t know for how long we waited. Eventually, the light vanished, and the chatter of the two voices ebbed away. Yet for minutes we didn’t dare move. Then, slowly and quietly, we waded back in complete darkness. We were both quiet, both shocked and scared shitless, because we knew what we’d just witnessed.

Ours is a fancy city, a beautiful one, with a rich history, full of beautiful architecture, and a plethora of sightseeing attractions. Most importantly, though, it’s a clean city. But like any city, ours too has its problems, its hidden corners. In recent years, rent skyrocketed, leaving many barely scraping by and many others out in the streets. The homeless became an eyesore, a problem for the city’s pristine image. Wealthy tourists didn’t come here to see beggars on the sidewalk or huddled around the train stations. Something had to be done, the new mayor said. He promised to solve the city’s homeless problem, announced grand housing projects and new job opportunities.

Guess he found a simpler solution.

One might wonder how no one notices dozens or even hundreds of people going missing, but that’s just how people are, especially in a snobbish and vibrant city like ours. No one cares about the homeless. They are nothing but a nuisance. No one’s going to think twice about a missing beggar or a group of drunks. All they care about is that they’re gone.

We didn’t finish work that day. We both made excuses and left.

That evening, the two of us got together for a talk. We argued about what to do for the entire night. I still remember the frustration on Andrew’s face, the anger in his voice. He said we’d have to do something, to go to the cops and make this entire thing public. We couldn’t just let them get away with it. I told him to lie low for the time being. We had no clue who was involved, and without evidence, no one would believe us, anyway. In the end, he nodded and agreed with me.

Two days later, we were scheduled on a shift together, but he never showed up. I tried to convince myself that nothing had happened, and was still too traumatized by what we’d seen that day. Yet I had a strange feeling about it. After my shift was over, I called Andrew’s wife; she confirmed my suspicion. She’d no idea where her husband was. She’d gone to the police, but so far, they had no leads.

I’m so freaking scared right now; I don’t know what Andrew did. Maybe he really went to talk to the cops, or maybe he went down there again on his own. The only thing I know is that something happened to him. What makes it even worse is that whenever we have to go down there, we always do so in pairs. It’s common procedure.

Whoever took care of my colleague knows he wasn’t down there alone. And I’m sure, by now, they know I was with him that day.

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