Strength

   The pipe had been there all along. It was make of some metal, maybe lead or something similar. I’m not an expert on things like that. I just grabbed it when I had the chance and used it fast against my aggressors. The first one got the blow right in his face. Blood came running down his nose fast and I took advantage of that by hitting him again, this time on the top of his head. He crumbled to the floor, his face rolling backwards and now his head also bleeding profusely. All in a few seconds.

 As for the other guy, he had been somewhere else. After all, he thought his friend was going to have his way with me for a while, so he had gone out and probably smoke a cigarette or have something to eat. He wasn’t worried at all because he knew no one would ever go near that abandoned warehouse. It was a huge thing, with several floors and a lot of rats running around. No decent person would ever enter that place, so it was an obvious hideout for the kind of scum they were. It was their natural habitat.

 However, when he came back, I was waiting besides a hole where a door used to stand. I grabbed the pipe with both hands and struck him several times, until I destroyed his hands. Then, I moved on to his legs and I would have killed him if I hadn’t noticed he had lost consciousness a few moments before I stopped. I didn’t drop my weapon and I didn’t run out instantly. I was still in shock, without any pants on and my underwear tainted in a color I have never liked to see. I started trembling and then the tears came running down.

 I had no control over anything. The pipe finally fell out of my hands and made a tremendous noise but there was no one in the vicinity to notice it. I cried for a while but then realized I needed to get my shit together fast. I checked on the men and they were apparently only knocked out. That was good because if people ever learned about all that had happened there, I wouldn’t want any of them to think I had killed someone. They deserved it though. I wanted to grab that pipe and smash their heads many times.

 But I didn’t. I grabbed my pants and shoes. My socks were so wet from all the puddles on the concrete floor that I had to remove them and put them in one of my jacket’s pockets. I put on the pants, slowly, as it hurt more than I had imagined. I cried a little more, this time because of the pain, and then put on my shoes without tying the laces correctly. I walked towards the exit, coming out of the building into a large courtyard. There were weeds all over, even some bushes. It didn’t take me a long time to find the proper exit from that place. I was soon walking among other citizens, down a commercial street.

 I couldn’t go fast. There was a lot of pain and I was afraid that my pants had already been tainted with blood. So I decided to take off my jacket and put it around my waist. It was a very odd thing to do, because it was morning and it was very cold. But I had no choice. I’d rather freeze to death that let anyone wander what had happened to me. A cop actually crossed my path as I tried to pretend I was just taking a morning stroll. He looked at me, straight into my eyes, but he apparently didn’t see anything of interest.

 I checked my pockets several times but I couldn’t find my wallet, my cellphone or anything that had been there the night before. It was then when I realized that I had no recollection of the events of the preceding night. I probably went out for a drink or something but couldn’t really remember a thing. That neighborhood didn’t look familiar at all and it wasn’t the kind to be close to the place I had recently rented. I mean, my neighborhood was awful but this one was… the opposite.

 There were nice stores and old little ladies buying bread for breakfast. There were happy families walking around and old men having a walk with their dogs. It was all very peaceful and even beautiful in a way. I have to say it scared me even more to be in such a place than in a district as dangerous and filled with scum than mine. And it was weird that those men had taken me near such a place. Maybe they thought no one would think to check on old factories near posh neighborhoods. That could be it.

 I finally found a bus stop that had a small city map on the side. It was very helpful to make me understand that I was practically on the opposite side of the city. No wonder I had never known of such a place. In order to make it to my apartment though, I would have to take a bus or the train but I had no money for that. I saw several people waiting for the bus and the thought of robbing them crossed my mind. I had never been that kind of person but you change a little bit when awful things happen to you.

 It was then when a nice old lady talked to me. I hadn’t even seen her getting close. She asked me if I was feeling okay, because I had a “paper look”, as she said. I assured her I was doing great and that I only needed my bus card but had lost it somewhere. I pretended to check my pockets, which was apparently everything the old lady needed. She told me she could lend me her card and pay for the trip. She said she liked helping people, because so many people used to help her everyday, especially when she went to the supermarket for groceries. She wanted me to be her good action of the day.

 Of course, I didn’t complain. I got in the bus with her, not even knowing if the route would take me anywhere near my home. I forced myself to talk to her all along the ride, even if I had no real interest in doing so. She was very nice but the pain I felt was increasing. For some reason, I felt worse that I had a few moments ago. Maybe those men had done something else to me, something that wasn’t as obvious as what I had noticed from the start. Maybe there was something else that was making me feel ill.

 The lady finally got to her stop and I made myself help her down the bus, only to get back into it. She waved to me as the bus pulled away and I did the same. I was surprised to see such a kind person the very same day I had almost killed two people for doing something awful to me. The world felt insane and I was in the middle of all of it. I was going to sit down in the same seat when I noticed the place I had been was tainted with blood. It wasn’t a lot but it was visible enough. I touched the jacket and it was wet.

 I rang for the bus to stop. Luckily, the next stop was very near and I had to wait only for a moment, which seemed to last forever. When the doors open, I almost burst out of there. I was so fast though, that I tripped in the last step and fell hands first into the ground. Every single person on the bus and around the stop looked at me. It was exactly the thing I had no need for. I stood up as fast as I could and ran away as many people tried to ask how I was feeling and as some were wandering what was all that blood about.

 I walked away as fast as I could, finally stopping in front of a large supermarket. There was a breeze there that made me feel a little bit better. I had no idea where I was but there was no point in staying on that bus with my body leaking blood like crazy. It had finally taken its toll on me, as my body felt completely tired. Using my arms and legs was painful and even thinking about all that was happening was tiring. I tried to move from the railing I was leaning against, but I couldn’t.

 Everything went black in a moment. I had glimpses to people gathering around me and voices saying things I didn’t understand. My body did not respond to me. My brain was working but everything else was going away. Darkness came and it lasted for a while, until I had another glimpse, in a hospital.

 A doctor was pointing at me with a flashlight but I didn’t react to it, as I should. I was too tired to do so. The face on that man looked scared, even a bit surprised. But I wasn’t able to ask why he looked like that. I fell back into the darkness and wouldn’t come out of it for quite a while.

Green cave

   The cave was covered in the same slimy kind of substance we had seen in the trail going up the mountain. It was very sticky and had a dark color to it, which we had identified as a very deep green. Someone argued that, maybe, the creatures inside the mountain used that goo to attack predators and be able to escape. Another person said it was very likely that they were the predators and that they used the substance to actively hunt for food. The third opinion was simpler but more confusing: the substance could be blood.

 In trees, sap is green and it acts, in a very basic way, as the blood of a tree. But it never gets that thick or dark. Susan, who was the botanist in the expedition, analyzed a sample and assured everyone that green thing was not sap from any tree she had ever seen or that had ever been recorded by any human being. It did pass some of the tests that Marcus, a biologist, did for several other animals we had found earlier in our journey through the mountains. So it was blood but it was impossible to know why it was all over the place.

 Maybe they did use it as a weapon, like those lizards in the desert that squirt blood in order to scare their enemies. Something like that could be at play with these creatures, which we hadn’t had the opportunity to actually see with our own two eyes. Some of the tribes living around the mountains talked to us about creatures living under the mountains, creatures that would come at night into the town and kidnap children. We didn’t believe that story but it was repeated to us in various occasions.

 Alex and Richard stood at the entrance of the cave. They were geologists and wanted to have time to analyze the mountain itself so they asked to stay there as lookouts if anything went wrong. It wouldn’t have been a very smart idea if we would all enter the cave at the same time. Samantha and Sergei were the last two to enter the cave, just after I get stepped on a rather large mound of the gooey substance. I had to be helped by Sergei and Marcus in order to get my foot out of there. It was very scary for a minute.

 The cave was rather large and our voices seemed to run wild inside, so we decided to stop talking in order not to scare any potential new findings. We had helmets with soft lights on them and all the equipment necessary if we had needed to go down a very dangerous wall or even jump over a crevasse. It was normal for such cavernous systems to have different features that would play as obstacles for groups of people such as ourselves. But, strangely, after walking for twenty minutes, we realized that the cave wasn’t shrinking in any way, rather it was descending gently but steadily.

 I think we all thought the exact same thing at the same time: whatever creatures inhabited this world; they had modeled the cave in order to accommodate them and not the other way around. What that meant was that the creatures had to be able to use tools of some sort and had various abilities to carve stone. They would even be able to do a certain degree of calculations, which was only possible if they’re brain was evolved enough. We weren’t looking for some little creatures in the dark.

 After another twenty minutes, we finally arrived at a larger chamber. The ceiling on it was huge, covered in what seemed to be bats in a deep slumber. We fixed our lights in order not to disturb them and kept on walking until we weren’t able to. The ground stopped dead in the middle of the room to give way to a rather large body of water. The liquid look as gooey as the green substance in the entrance. We actually looked around for it but realized there were no traces of it in that chamber. There had to be a reason why.

 Samantha and Marcus walked and kneeled in front of the body of water, as Susan walked closer to me. It was obvious that, as a botanist, she had not being in such a situation before. She wasn’t hyperventilating or anything, but she was clearly not comfortable being in the underside of a mountain. Sergei stood right behind us, looking at the path we had used to come down to the chamber. It looked like he had heard something but, when I asked, he said it was nothing and tried to seem unperturbed, which he failed at.

Samantha filled three large syringes with water from the pond and Marcus grabbed some in his hands. He first smelled it, very thoroughly, and then drank some, to everyone’s amazement. But none of us said a single word, because we didn’t want to wake up the whole bat infested roof. When Marcus stood up, we asked in a whisper if there was anything wrong with it and he just did a negative movement of his head to answer. We all went back to breathing normally then. For a second, it had been very scary.

 However, we had failed to notice that Sergei was looking at the path we had come down through and there was something wrong with it. Sergei did not answer so I turned him around with one hand. His face was livid, whiter than ever, blood completely drained from his features. He was breathing heavily and it was only when I saw what he had seen that I realized why he was behaving in such a strange way. Out of nowhere, a rock had been put to block the path. We were trapped in the chamber. It was a trap and we had fallen into it without even a glimpse of doubt.

I wanted to tell them what was going on but then the water from the pond started making sounds, as if it was boiling. But that did not make sense. We only had time to look at each other once more before we saw something coming out of the water and then our lights failed and the bats flew over our heads, filling the place with confusion. Then, we felt them and it all went black.

Encounters

   The creature had disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again. Its awful grimace was imprinted in their brains, a horrible smile that awoke their biggest fears and darkest nightmares. The only thing that it had told them was that the planet they were in was called something he couldn’t repeat in their language but that they could easily relate that word with something like “Somber”. So that was the dreary name of the tree filled planet they had appeared in, only a few days ago.

 The taller guy touched his chest, uncomfortable. He had failed to notice a small pain, for the last hours. They had been running and walking for so long, he had prioritize survival and had not really paid attention to himself or the news he had received fairly recently. It was kind of strange to see a man that had received news so devastating, just walking through a forest, thinking of what animal to catch next. The fact that he had a heart problem was the least of his issues.

 The smaller guy, on the other side, had been thinking about it all the way since they had appeared in the planet. He didn’t wanted to talk about it if his partner didn’t want to, and he had made it clear he didn’t want to talk about such an important matter, but it bothered him. The fact that something might happen and he would lose the only other person nearby was very difficult to accept. Besides, he felt something different from the times they were in the resistance and thinking about it didn’t help.

 Finally, they stopped walking when the sun set behind a snow-capped mountain. They had been following a path through a valley and now they were on the slopes of a big mountain. The good thing was the trees were shorter, so they could see more of the place they were in. The tall guy was the hunter that night, catching some kind of big bird, very similar to a turkey but with the capacity of flying. They ate it in silence and when the time came to sleep, they did it separately.

 They couldn’t really sleep though. Both of them felt they needed to talk to the other. But when one of them decided to open his mouth, an explosion could be heard across the valley. They stood up right away, grabbed their stuff and run up to the top of the mountain. It was very cold there but it was pretty nearby and it was the only way to get away from the explosion and, at the same time, knowing what exactly had happened. When they reached the top, the flames across the valley were easily visible. The wind seemed to be making it worse: the flames were as tall as trees.

 The two men looked at each other, but they didn’t know what to do. They could run away from the fire but something told them they should be right there to watch. After all, an explosion had ignited the fire and there was very little chance that it had occurred naturally. They stayed put and waited. The fire jumped from one tree to the other. Watching it was mesmerizing, as if the fire was alive somehow. It really looked alive, engulfing a tree and then consuming it in seconds.

 Then, the wind blew harder and it brought cold with it. The short guy caressed his arms, trying to stay warm. When they had disappeared from Earth, they had no clothes proper for such an environment. Only the taller guy had his backpack with him and, luckily, it had many of the weapons they had recently used to put up traps for the enemy. It had come in handy for hunting and igniting fires to roast the food. Then they both realized something about the flames consuming the forest.

 The short guy looked in the backpack and took out a pair of binoculars to check out the place the flames were consuming. Instantly, he grabbed the hand of his partner and look at him directly into his eyes. Slowly, he told him they had been eating breakfast there that same morning, on the other side of the valley. He said he recognized a tree so tall that it was a bit bent at the tip. The taller guy verified that himself and realized that couldn’t be a coincidence. Something else was wrong.

 They agreed to walk along the top of the mountain. That side of the valley had no snow but a very fast and chilly wind, as well as rocks that kept rolling down to the lower part of the valley. It was very tricky to walk, so they had to grab each other by the hand and try not to kill themselves while doing it. Sometimes they looked at each other, but they preferred not to do so because it made them think too much of home and those feelings and memories hurt more than any rock or cold wind.

 Suddenly, another explosion made them lost their balance. One of them had to grab the other harder by the hand. It was difficult to pull someone else up after walking so much but it was harder to think that they would be alone. As the flames seemed to be getting closer, they both regained flat land and ran as much as they could. None of them had no idea of why they were doing that but it seemed like the best thing to do was to get away fast. Eventually, they reached a cliff and they had to stop running. They started sweating even more when they stopped.

 The flames were close to them but now it seemed to be a single huge flame. The heat emanating from it was almost burning their skin but, for some reason, it stopped moving towards them, as if it had noticed that its heat was hurting them. The moment seemed to last forever. In their eyes, they could only see the red and orange flames, as if they were absolutely enthralled by fire. But, if they were to be honest, they had no intention of running anymore. They felt they had to be there.

 Suddenly, the flames seemed to be reducing their size. But as that happened, a creature emerged from the inside of the fire. It seemed to be very tall, taller than any human being anyone had ever seen. It was very difficult to know if it had any gender or what kind of creature it could be: aggressive or pacifist? Its skin seemed to be made of a material similar to rocks, the kind you find near a volcano. It was dark and seemed to be covered with as. Its eyes were red as fire.

 The creature got closer and just looker at them. It had a human form but maybe it was doing that to imitate them or to be less intimidating. If that was the case, it was failing miserably because the two humans it had in front of it were very scared. So scared actually, that they hadn’t stopped grabbing each other’s hand since the moment they had started running. They only realized this when the creature created a hand out of its own body and, with one dark finger, it pointed at their hands holding.

 They could have screamed or said something to the creature but they didn’t. The creature kept pointing at them, opening its eyes wider. Then, it pulled back, turned back into a gigantic flame and launched itself into the sky. From their point of view, it looked like a comet crossing the night sky. Eventually, it disappeared but it left a line in the sky and a certain sweet smell all around the forest. The place that had burned grew over night, as if nothing had ever happened.

 They woke up the next day, thinking about the creature they had just seen. At first, it seemed as if nothing had changed after they had encountered it. However, they started holding hands more and more, and they didn’t think about it for a second.

 Furthermore, they started talking more to each other as they walked across Somber, laughing some times and sharing their personal stories as they ate or cleaned themselves in rivers or lakes. Eventually, they fell in love. But that’s another story that I won’t tell right now.

Experiment

   Suddenly, it was as if all the oxygen in the room had been extracted. David started coughing and then his knees made his body collapsed to the floor, unable to hold him any longer. He felt as if his weight was three times as much. The room around him, well lit only seconds before, suddenly became a dark place, more like a cave than a normal hotel bedroom. He tried to inhale through the nose but it didn’t work. He opened his mouth wide but that didn’t do anything either.

 If that was possible, his brain was hurting. It was as if someone was burning it inside of his skull. The coughing continued, with his hands against the floor, trying to breather once again. But nothing happened. That was what people in space must feel like when they have a bad space suit or when the ship is not working properly. His head started spinning and, in a matter of a few more seconds, David fell completely to one side, closing his eyes, stopping his attempts to breath.

 Hours later, he woke up. He wasn’t dead, which was good. He had a mask over his face, apparently supplying him all the oxygen he needed. His head was still spinning, but David tried to make sense of where he was. He looked to the right and saw nothing more than a table full of operating tools. The wall was made of metal and there didn’t seem to be any windows in the room. To the left, there was a door, also made of metal, in the middle of the wall. There was some sort of sound coming from the other side.

 In the right moment, David closed his eyes and tried to breath normally. The sounds he had heard were voices and they were apparently discussing him. As they entered the room, they commented on the health of the subject, that probably meaning him. For their tones, he could infer one of them was a woman and the other a man. They walked around him, probably staring at his body, sometimes saying something interesting and some other times just walking.

 One of them touched David in the head and it had required a lot from him in order not to scream. He didn’t really know why, but the touch of that person had triggered a horrible headache. It was as if he or she had fire on the tip of the chosen finger. They left after doing that, probably expecting to have an instant reaction and instead not getting anything. But as soon as they left, David opened his eyes, touched his head and realized it was still burning. Or at least that’s how it felt, as if he had been marked like cattle by however those people were.

 The point was, he didn’t want to know what else they had prepared for him. He stood up, got down the table he had been laid on and walked to the door. No sounds were coming from the other side so he opened it and ran out. There was a very long corridor but he just chose a direction in the moment and started running. Soon, he had to stop. All of a sudden, he felt very tired and the headache threatened to make a comeback, which wouldn’t help him at all right then.

 He was then more careful, walking along the hallway until he saw another door, which he opened. It was a closet. He was a about to close it when he realized there were several robes there, the kind doctors use. He hadn’t seen the people that had entered the room he was in, but they possibly had those robes on. So he entered the closet and put one over his body. He then realized that he wasn’t wearing his shirt, only his pants and shoes. It was very strange but he didn’t have an answer for that.

 David came out of the closet and started walking again, this time with a faster pace but without really running. He finally found a crossroads and it was there, from the distance, where he saw other people in robes, checking on some papers. The hallway they were standing on was much shorter, as on the other side there was a massive room, very white and bright. He would have wanted to know what that was all about but the real goal was to get out of there fast, before they noticed he had escaped.

 He checked at least five more doors along the way, finding only rooms just like the one he had been in and more closets. Finally, he ended up in a tiny open space, that had a very different door, this one made of glass, with one of those machines on the side were you put a card for the door to open. Obviously he had no card and he had no idea how to make the door open. His breathing started accelerating and, even as he tried to calm down, it didn’t work at all. It was as if something was inside of him.

 Suddenly, several men and women with robes surrounded David, as he collapsed on the floor completely. The headache was getting stronger. But instead of helping him to a bed or something, the people were just watching and using instruments to measure something over his body. They waved those things over him but then someone else appeared. Someone who’s voiced he recognized. But he couldn’t raise his head to look at the person, as the pain had grown too strong. David finally collapsed and the last thing he heard were the words “It was a success”.