Chapter Two: “Pipe Dream”. 11. 10. 2016

“What a boring way to die.” As Darren succumbed to the sticky sweet tomb this was his predominant thought. Upon recovering from the impact to his head, he had tried to swim, wade, dig and climb through the thick fudge mass that had enveloped him but aside from it being an unforgivingly heavy and inflexible substance, Darren, nor likely anyone had any experience escaping from within chocolate...Except maybe the air in Marlon Brando's lungs.

With no way of physically escaping and no one noticing his fall or the moving machinery, Darren appeared entirely lost to the unusual but still somehow peculiarly drab fate of drowning in fudge. He almost wished the swirling fan blades had cut him up but when he regained consciousness he had already sunk beneath them into the surprisingly deep vat of delicious death. Darren could no longer see the surface or the fan blades and the muffled sounds of the latter were fading quickly as his ears clogged with gooey cocoa slop.

Pretty soon he would run out of breath and inhaling gallons of viscous liquid chocolate could actually be really painful but so far Darren had felt oddly calm and resigned to the whole unfortunate experience. It almost seemed fitting for his dead-end existence to be snuffed out without a whimper by the very trappings of his lacklustre life...Or maybe he was just delirious from hitting his head.

The aforementioned death overtook him with an unexpected urgency. Whilst much of the matter seemed to just stick to him and flow only slightly from the movement produced by the fans above, once he finally gasped for air the mixture rushed down his throat and seemed to immediately flood him from the inside out. The following suffocating seisure was like someone grabbing a fistful of your internal organs and twisting you but no sooner did the crippling pain overtake him did Darren feel his mind slipping into darkness. It was as though the fudge had clamped a giant sticky mitten over his brain and was pushing him both physically and psychologically into a featureless umber abyss.

Only for him to wake up, his eyelids juddering open like a malfunctioning garage door. He wasn't immediately sure if he had, in fact woken up dead but it seemed unlikely that heaven or hell held the appearance of a dusty old factory pipe with a sepia overlay. The prospect of him having survived more chocolate intake than a brain-damaged charity challenged diabetic David Blaine was also an unbelievable eventuality, yet here he was staring at the inside of a pipe somewhere below his section and the vat previously full to the brim with fudge mixture.

At least that was his best guess for his whereabouts. The acute ache in all his limbs and organs struck him as a symptom of death better suited to before his blackout. If he was actually still dying and had for some reason regained consciousness just long enough to see an inquisitive rat nibble at his fingernails, that would be a particularly cruel move by life even for someone as unlucky as he, Darren pondered.

With considerable effort Darren tried to sweep his arms forward, unclear of what bent or possibly broken shape exactly they were in. The stinging ache felt like it throbbed from the very core of his bones but to his surprise, unlike in the midst of the vat, he could cut a swathe through the far less rigid substance surrounding him. As cognitive function slowly returned it struck him that his hand was partially outside of the fudgey coffin, hence the rat's interest in his alarmingly long fingernails.

The block encasing him must have thinned over time for him to even be seeing through it and to the uninviting interior of the pipe. Darren tried to move his legs and with a painful strain the mixture stretched and eventually snapped off his thighs. Oddly the rat did not seem dissuaded by his meal writhing around in front of him. Darren considered that his face or at least his mouth must be clear of the fudge for him to be breathing.

He dragged his arms further forward into eyesight and to his relief they weren't mangled by whatever machinery lurked further down the pipes. He finally wiped away the globs of now lime yellow fudge mixture from his eyes and face. As he summoned the strength to heave himself up off the floor of the pipe, several other rats suddenly scurried from behind him and away down the length of pipe.

It took several minutes to fully wipe the rotten old yellowed fudge clumps from his person with Darren finding the amount ingested must have eventually been digested somehow. He awkwardly clambered around in the pipe until he was facing the opposite direction. Above him was a towering cylindrical steel chamber where presumably he had flowed in from when mixture was still being pumped through it. This brought forward a pertinent question, why had the mixture stopped flowing?

In the five years Darren had worked there, the factory had never ceased production for a single day. Any maintenance was always under a rampant whip cracking Martin Hackett who would ensure any problems were fixed within the day even if it meant using employee's heads as hammers and their jaws as wrenches.

So Darren considered, had he only been unconscious for a few hours? Was a torrent of toffee about to come raining down upon him and engulf him again? If this was the case, how had the fudge blanket over him turned a pukeish yellow tinge that he had also never seen in his long working relationship with the stuff?

There was also no residue of chocolate of any kind lining the pipes or the large chamber behind him suggesting the inner workings of the factory had lain dormant for some time. If that was the case however shouldn't he have long since starved to death? Even if the excess fudge in his stomach acted as a stockpile, like for a fattened up rodent in hibernation, he could have only subsisted on this for maybe a week at most.

With every passing second more questions stampeded into Darren's head and almost none of them could be coupled with a plausible answer. Failing to rationalise his fortuitous survival he decides to start progressing towards an exit but after reaching a split at the end of the initial pipe he is disheartened to see nothing but more grey rusty pipe stretching off to either side.

No hint of daylight or even the artificial decades-old blinking light strips of the factory interior are present to help Darren make an escape. As he crawls randomly through the dingy dark pipes it occurs to him that he can hear no hint of machinery whirring or clanking in the distance, no footsteps or muffled chatter of people, absolutely no noise at all besides his own breathing and thudding cramped footsteps.

With no other stimuli Darren latches onto the rats as his guide, hoping they would be returning to a nest outside of the piping. He reflects that he knows practically nothing about rats and their habitat but perhaps it makes sense that a cold steel cylinder would be inferior to a ditch or river bank for them. Darren sighs at his blind guesswork and equally unknown route of travel. He taps his elongated fingernails against the metal beneath him.

He used to think that time became nebulous in the long monotonous shifts at work but he found crawling through identical pipes one after another ultimately surpassed it. He began trying to distinguish the rats from each other to determine whether he was seeing the same ones and potentially going in circles.

“The Colonel” had the longest whiskers of the group and were he a man Darren imagined a huge bushy moustache hanging from the sides of his face. “Van Gogh” had lost part of his ear in some kind of altercation, “Hairy Lee” was quite simply the rat with the longest fur and inversely “Short Rat and Sides” had the shortest and also appeared to be quite smaller than the others. Darren prepared the name “Ratterbox” for the most vocal of the group but this was difficult to pinpoint to a single individual. A seemingly paranoid rat that kept very close to the ground, almost slithering along with its tail always kept stuck to the floor was about to be dubbed “Sticky Rat Plastic” when it dawned upon Darren that he was probably losing his mind inside the never-ending labyrinth of pipework.

Exasperated, Darren collapses onto his back, staring at the top of his current imprisoning metal tube. Would he now die traversing these infernal pipes forever? How were they continuing on for so long? Darren had never researched the architecture of the factory because...well, who would? But he felt that even if these pipes were to lead outside of the city to some sewage plant or more likely an inconspicuous ditch, it was taking far too long to get there.

He wished he had his watch with him but the hygiene regulations commanded all jewellery remain in the communal lockers, where any immoral dickweed could steal them but as long as your wrist doesn't sweat near the fudge, that's the most important thing. Darren wondered if anyone had even noticed his disappearance. Were his barely acquainted colleagues bothered enough to be searching for him? Or had it been so long that his family and the police would now be involved?

His eyes slowly fluttered open to see the top of the pipe again. Darren sits up with a jolt and smacks his head on the ceiling as The Colonel and Sticky Rat Plastic scamper away from somewhere under or behind him. He was shocked at having fallen asleep but evidently the pipes had not come back into use nor had any search party located and rescued him. Rubbing the bruise on his scalp and trying to stretch his aching back in the cramped space, Darren wearily returns to scuffling through the pipes.

An indeterminable number of hours and pipes later and a short sharp breeze suddenly pricks Darren's senses into focus. The promise of the outside world blasts adrenaline through his body and he clambers forward as quickly as possible towards the fresh air. Never before having been so overjoyed to see a muddy ditch and a gloomy overcast sky, upon turning the final corner Darren hurls himself forward towards the relatively blinding light and pulls himself out of the pipe to bellyflop onto a murky shallow puddle below.

Slightly winded by the fall Darren flounders around gasping like a beached fish for a few moments before dragging himself up the bank and taking in his surroundings. The unfamiliar ditch appears nowhere near the factory and he is likely on the outskirts of the city. He rolls onto his stomach and sees a scattering of tall buildings in the distance amidst what looks like another neighbouring city or district. Amongst the many things Darren didn't excel at, Geography was one of them so he couldn't recall the name of the city before him, nor where it would be in relation to his home or the factory.

Regardless Darren pushes himself up and to his feet, stretching his back, arms and legs fully with an audible crack. He takes a step forward but hesitates. He glances behind him as if to give a wistful farewell glance to his only companions for the last who-knows-how-long. Perhaps a flicker of Hairy Lee's tail or a faint goodbye squeak from whichever one Ratterbox was...But alas, none of his friends were waiting at the end of the pipe to send him off because they were just rats and have no concept of friendship plus would have happily eaten Darren alive had he only stayed still long enough...