[ IP ] Tunnels

These walls seem to always press in. I spend so much time down here that I have become unfamiliar with much of the world above. I was selected for this job, but I could n't really do much about it. At least I'm not one of the poor boys who had claustrophobia. They broke within days. After two weeks, we had to send them up, otherwise they would have done nothing but drag us down. Hunting these creatures is like a nightmare from hell. Sometimes the tunnels are flooded, sometimes, they are bone dry, and you can hear their movements around corners, and from hundreds of meters down the path. 
 
 They have the advantage. They have six limbs, and can crawl on the walls like insects. Their bites are riddles with bacteria, so much as a scratch can kill you. their tails are barbed, and they secrete their own poison. You can not fight them up close, you must kill them quickly, and at range. 
 
 That is what makes the tunnels hell. They ambush us, kill us in our sleep, pick us off one by one to demoralize the survivors. I am the only original Ratway soldier left. It is because I move fast, and never take off my armor. I live in it, sleep in it, fight in it. Even on the surface, I only take it off when cleaning it and my clothes. Every month, a new batch of freshly trained soldiers comes down. They have no idea what they are facing. Many break. Some kill themselves, others desert their post, and are shot if they are seen on the surface. Some are fools, and think that they can venture into the tunnels alone. The Crawlers always get them. The screams will wake us up, and when we realize what happened, we go back to sleep, and post an extra watch. 
 
 Every now and again, we have to collapse tunnels to block the Crawlers from spreading. It has played hell with the city's drainage, but construction on something new almost always is immediate. Protecting the workers is the hardest part. The crawlers come to the sound of the tunnel boring machines and the concrete mixers. They come in dozens, wave after wave, every single day of work. Most of the time, work is done around the clock in shifts, so that the tunnel can be finished as fast as possible, and the workers and equipment can be extracted. 
 
 Since the Crawlers appeared, there are new manholes, too. They are larger, heavier, and have four electronic deadbolt locks. But they have larger slots for light to filter through. The light keeps the tunnels relatively bright during the day, and scares off most of the Crawlers. Those that are n't scared off are spotted and killed easily. We have to send a team with carts up to the surface every twelve hours, to take the bodies of the dead on both sides up. The soldiers ( or what's left of them ) are buried, the Crawlers are burned after being drenched in Hydrofluoric Acid. It is the only way to make sure they are dead. 
 
 What we do is hard work, but we do it because we must. If we can keep them in these tunnels, then the surface is safe. But they are everywhere. It started here in London, but they're in Moscow, New York, Beijing, Tokyo ( which is a right mess ), even Rio De Janeiro. Every major country has Ratway Men. And all Ratway Men know only one thing: the tunnel, and the dark that comes with it.
