Free Lizard World by Terry Richard Bazes

felt the stupid sting of his own slap, he saw the insect buzz away -- a meaty horsefly which even now paused on the livid white lip of the seatless crapper.
           For a few moments, as a distraction from his misery, he watched it: its hind legs brushing off its wings, its antennae twitching, its two big eyes agog, its bulbous bristly abdomen all bloated with its meal. Smedlow felt a powerful urge to squish it, but remembering that he was in danger of losing more than blood, decided instead to see if even the smallest and most desperate hope lay waiting in the hidden tunnel.

    He found himself, moments later, gasping for air and scraping his hands and knees in stuffy twilight. There was hardly any space to move. The walls were scratching at his sides. And something definitely smelled bad. Within minutes his gasping had become desperation -- and he tried to reassure himself that he was getting all the air he needed. Since his own hulk blocked out any possibility of light coming from his prison cell behind him, it was reasonable to conclude that the dingy light illuminating the bricks, mud, and upright timbers of his passage must be coming from somewhere in the tunnel up ahead. Why, the very fact that there was any light at all was more than ample reason to be hopeful.
           He crawled forward, twisting around corners -- but before long found himself lowering his head, bending at his elbows and leaning forward from his knees in order to accommodate himself to the apparent lowering of the ceiling. With some difficulty he reached backward into his left pants-pocket, pulled out the lighter, flicked it open, thumbed the wheel -- and saw the upturned carcass of a rat. Beyond the rat there was no doubt whatsoever that the tunnel became significantly lower.
           Smedlow now attempted to crawl backward and found, unfortunately, that he could not: although eyesight had told him where to twist and how to duck and squeeze, he did not have this benefit in reverse. An atrocious panic gripped him, which -- after a period of frantic and quite futile wriggling -- he tried to quell by measured breathing and by reminding himself that this was, after all, a tunnel which some poor dead bastard had managed to travel through.
           Lowering his head, flattening his belly to the floor, he wormed his way forward. But despite his best effort, crushing his rump against the opposite wall, he still couldn’t avoid touching the rat -- the tickle of its claw, the odor of its death, its eyes like tiny raisins.
           It was only after another eternity of muffled screams and squeezing suffocation that he emerged -- not into a room exactly -- but onto a tiny floor of wooden planks bridging what seemed to be the narrow vertical shaft of a brick chimney. Daylight streamed down from a distant oblong overhead: but no, scaling the sheer surface of those walls was obvious insanity. And yet the horrors of the tunnel, which resumed across the small expanse of floor, were equally unthinkable.
           Someone, with whom Smedlow now began to feel a disagreeable intimacy, had been stranded here before him: a pair of ancient underwear huddled in the dust. A laceless shoe was sticking out its tongue. He also saw a clogged comb, a chewed-off slice of beef jerky, several empty bottles, an old hammer -- and a heap of fallen bricks. But where, exactly, had they fallen from? Looking up, then behind and above him, he saw, half covered with vines, the darkness of a jagged opening.
           Jumping up, he repeatedly failed, but finally managed to grab this broken wall: hanging by his hands, his flimsy arms straining to lift the dead-weight of his ass, he now somehow pulled himself up -- and into the dusty darkness of a wider tunnel. He had no sooner relit his lighter, forced himself to ignore a particularly nasty spider, and resumed his crawl than a muffled howling, followed by the piercing shriek of something fighting for its life