It was a typical sunny Monday afternoon. I was walking home from school with my two best friends, Benny and Bill. A long day of high school had just ended, and we were all tired from the boring lectures we received every single hour, and it was raining, which didn’t help our situation at all.

Benny is a tall, lanky basketball player that really loves everything about the sport. Whenever he has free time, he will shoot a basketball, even if it is snowing outside. He’s athletic and has short, brown hair that barely sticks off of the top of his head, light blue eyes, long legs, and enormous hands. I swear he can palm a boulder with barely any effort at all. Benny also likes to be loud and to be noticed. He’s always the one leading group conversations and the one at the center of a huge crowd.

Bill is almost his exact opposite. He doesn’t play any sports (although he used to play baseball, but he wasn’t very good at it) and generally likes to keep to himself. He really only talks and hangs out with Benny and me, but that doesn’t affect our opinion of him at all. I can confidently call him the nicest person I’ve ever met. Seriously. Even if people make fun of him or tease him, Bill just does every one favors and never gets noticed. He loves to shoot a bow and arrow in his free time (he has a bow at his house) and is short, stocky, and absolutely hilarious. Every time words leave his mouth I’m already laughing. He just was given the ability to make people like Benny and myself laugh all of the time.

So I was walking home with my two best buddies, in the rain, and there were worms all over the sidewalk. We took pleasure in stepping on them or throwing them onto the road for cars to run over them, which probably wasn’t the best decision in the first place, considering these worms were about as thick as pythons and weighed around 10 pounds.

We were laughing and enjoying ourselves when all of a sudden, there was a deep tremor from the earth.

“Guys…?” Bill had jumped sound of the tremors and was trembling fearfully.

“That probably wasn’t good,” Benny sarcastically stated.

“Ya think?” I snapped. I was scared, too.

The tremor wasn’t just a small shaking you sometimes get. No, this one was massive. It cracked the sidewalk in front of us and knocked trees over. When you get an earthquake that big (if you have common sense) you’re going to run to shelter. That’s exactly what we didn’t do.

“Whoa, look! There’s a giant hole in the ground!” Benny exclaimed, pointing towards a huge hole in the ground.

“Don’t even think about it…” I threatened. It was too late. Benny was already racing towards the hole without a thought about us or about how dangerous it could possibly be.

Bill had passed out on the ground and I really only had one choice to make, considering we were going to hang out at Bill’s house, which was a mile away.

“Why am I friends with an idiot,” I muttered, and chased after Benny into the forbidding darkness of the hole.

The first thought that came to my mind when I entered the hole: worms. There were possibly thousands of dead worms sprawled across the walls and floor of the tunnel and the occasional living worm.

“B-Benny…?” I called out fearfully. Silence met my words.

I precariously stepped forwards at about the speed molasses moves, when I hear squishy footsteps.

“BOO!” Benny shouted, making me jump and spin around.

“I really hate you,” I glared at him.

“Love you too!” He winked at me and I stomped off, further into the tunnel.

Benny caught up to me and we each carefully took a few steps forwards, each with the unspoken vow that if anything happened, we had each other’s back. We crept along nervously as the tunnel became bigger, wider, darker, and kept plunging into the depths of the earth. It eventually got to the point where we could barely see each other, though we were only a few feet apart, and we couldn’t see the floor and walls at all. I’d rather not have been able to see the floor, though, because the one time I tripped the floor felt as slimy and slippery as the worms we were throwing off the very sidewalk we were just walking on half an hour ago.

Benny and I continued into the depths of the earth until we heard the roar of a beast, and no ordinary beast. This sounded like a roar of a monster from mythology. If you have been educated properly, as soon as you hear something as scary as that you run, which is exactly what we did.

The problem is, you can’t really run very far if there’s a wall in your way, which is exactly what was in front of us when we ran, and we fell flat on our faces.

Benny was gasping. “What now?”

“I don’t know,” I breathed. “We wait for something to happen.”

And that something did happen. The roof that we had been under moments before was collapsing and the daylight was streaming in, allowing us to see exactly what Benny and I were facing. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I started cracking up.

It was a giant worm.

Mr. Giant Worm didn’t have any terrifying features like you’d think. No vicious eyes, fangs, none of that stuff. It really just looked like someone put a magnifying glass up to a night crawler and copy and pasted that image into reality. The giant worm looked exactly like a worm you find in the dirt, except enormous. And it was about to crush us with its head (I was still laughing at this point in time).

When I looked up at the perilous overhangs of the infrastructure in the suburbs I noticed that we just happened to be right underneath where we had been when the earthquake had happened. A sudden realization came to my mind, and I yelled at the hole in the ceiling, “Bill!”

There was no need for my yell. Bill was already on the job, hundreds of feet above, and had a rock. A big rock that was bigger than the size of my torso.

“That’s a big rock…” Benny stared in awe at Bill.

“Shut up, Benny.” I slapped him to knock the sense back into him. He shook his head and was attentive again.

There was no real need to be attentive after that point, though, mainly because Bill coincidentally dropped the rock right onto the worm’s head, which then proceeded to explode and release a layer of slime from its head. Benny and I got soaked with it.

“That’s nasty,” I complained. We both got up and ran out of that tunnel. I never wanted to go in any cave or tunnel again. We reached the surface only to find Bill passed out again. Benny and I (mainly Benny though) carried Bill to his house and we had him properly treated for head injuries.

We’ll never know if Bill dropped that rock on purpose. Of course he said he did after he woke up, but he had a smirk on his face while saying that. I never believe anything anyone says if they have a smirk on their face, especially Bill.
Benny was explaining to Bill’s mom was happened, and she looked at him like a little child was reading a fantasy book to her. She didn’t believe a word he said. I wouldn’t either, but it had happened, whether you wanted to believe it or not.
As I was walking out the door to Bill’s house, Benny called after me.
“Gavin!”
I turned around. “What do you want?” I said impatiently.
Benny cleared his throat. “Today, you have witnessed an event that will be in the history books of the generation after us. Treasure this day, and make sure to make this day a good day, because on this day you-“
“Shut up!” I laughed, closed the door on him, and ran home.