Chapter IX

I am not too sure for how long I had been out for but the point’s that I slept a good while. I fainted, I suppose. This turn of events in my life made me think about all sorts of things that, really, didn’t matter much at this point in time. Or probably at any future time from now on. When I opened my eyes, I heard Ignis singing in a husky, low voice that filled the room with a thin, warm and cozy atmosphere. I listened for a little longer and realized that Damien was silent, and that preoccupied me a tad, so I looked up at Ignis who didn’t seem to notice me. He probably hadn’t realized that I was awake. Or was I not? I didn’t really feel like it… I felt as if I was floating. Oh!! I was! Then, it hit me. I remembered everything that had happened up to this point: the truck, the forest, the ship, the soldiers, the cells… I remembered now everything that had been happening and I still didn’t get half of it. But I was truly excited! I was about to live the adventure of my life, the things I had been waiting for all the while came to me in a pickup truck, accompanied with two good friends.

It was really, really dark in the room, except for the green laser bars that trapped us inside the cells; their shine varied in different intensities of green that dimly reflected themselves over the metal walls. I wondered for a second if it was really metal. I wondered where were we going and how were we going to deal with the situation. I expected the best out of it and tried to pull up a smile and shake off any grim thoughts; after all, adventurers were brave and had nothing restraining them from going off to their journeys. Just then I heard a lazy groan from somewhere in the room and I raised myself from the corner I was at after unwrapping my arms from a metal pole that belonged to a tight berth. I stretched my arms; they were sore and numb. I figured out that I had fainted while holding tight to the pole. I looked at Ignis, ashamed to myself, but he gave me a dazzling smile without holding back so I grinned in return to let him know I was okay.

“Hey!” I dared to break the silence.

“Hey, Sebastian! How’re you holding up?” he asked, obviously concerned.

“I’m good, just an itty-bitty, tiny bit hungry,” I answered, feeling the calmness of his voice reaching me.

“That’s ok, I’m sure we can figure something out. They will probably feed us with something in a bit,” he meditated, hopeful.

“How’s Damien?” I inquired, not having seen or heard of him since the blast-off.

“I’d say he’s doing just alright. He doesn’t need to be babysat,” he chuckled smoothly, almost as if doing it for his own pleasure.

“You might be just right.” I felt the need to yell out to check on him but I desisted from the idea. He had always been a character that did things in his own way and if he had the necessity to reach us, he would have done so already.

Minutes elapsed silently without any of us pronouncing a single word. I floated up and about, reluctant to accept that I was in outer space. The zero-G made me feel really, really weird but it was extremely fun. Eventually, I got a little bit used to it, although it still made me a little sick. After what I’d say was about another extra hour, maybe more, a more-or-less loud noise was heard from whatever was above our room. It sounded as if a big and heavy body had hit the other side of the metal ceiling but had not bounced off. Also, also, it sounded like… uh… it didn’t sound like two hard things clashing but like something hard wrapped with something soft had bumped against the hard ceiling. I thought that, whatever it was, had attached to the wall. For the life of me, I couldn’t start to get an idea of what it had been but my curiosity was immediately excited by that particular sound. I looked at Ignis and inquired about it.

“Ignis, did you hear that just now?” As if he could even miss something like that. I floated towards him, cutting a short distance between us.

“Yeah, that was pretty odd. I have been trying to sketch a mental map of the ship, but I’m not too sure of what’s above us just yet. We’ve barely seen the entrance, a hallway and this sucky storage room,” he spoke out his deal of ideas about the situation.

“However, we could deduct that there could hardly be anything up there other than the outside vacuum due to the size and shape of this ship. This is most probably nothing but an auxiliary cargo or transport ship,” a familiar voice said from the adjacent cell.

“Good call Damien,” Ignis said, sounding more than relieved. “Then, where does that leave us? Does that mean that something hit the ship?” he stared up into the ceiling as if he could see through it.

“Most probably yes, although I think it sounded somewhat odd as to be an impact from a foreign object,” Damien stated flatly “and, yet, I might risk a couple of guesses about what that sound was.”

Then, the ship shook in one single movement, pushing us in the opposite direction. We were… stopping? I held on to whatever was around me for that very second.

‘Initiating extraction sequence.’

“I knew it,” said Damien in a willing tone, almost trailing off into his own thoughts.

“Does that mean we are…?” I heard myself speak, while picturing the typical, disc-shaped, alien saucer floating on top of the ship.

“Get ready guys. We’ll experience something completely different to anything we’ve seen before.” Ignis held on to some bars on the ceiling as the ship started to shake again in short pulsations which continued for a few seconds. And after that, there was a last shake followed by a very faint sound that was very similar to when a gas pipe is pierced and starts to release gas. Light movements could be heard edging away; heavier ones could be discerned closing in. They seemed to multiply in the entrance… the clatter became louder, approaching our way, faster and faster. For a second I imagined an entire army coming after us.

I looked all about me, growing nervous with the approaching blare. Ignis had taken himself to a corner of the cell, both of his feet planted in the wall while Damien had grown really still. At this point there was really nothing we could do other than to wait. I held on bravely and took a deep breath.

The noises stopped in front of the door and everything was very still for a few seconds that felt like an eternity. Immediately after, something like eight soldiers stormed into the room, flashing lights directly into the cells and filling us with targeting lasers that shaped small triangles with three green dots. I guessed that was equivalent to a red laser dot from a gun in Earth. I looked down at the dots and trembled quietly… I didn’t like to have a gun pointed at me. It was a sensation that I had never experienced before. Once again, one of those mutated voices that I had heard back home, commanded firmly: “Stand away from the lasers and pull your hands where we can see them. Follow our orders.” I grasped myself, waiting for the part where they normally said “and everything will be alright,” but nothing like that came.

We were obliged to raise our hands more than to put them behind our heads, as I had always heard cops demand in movies, because we needed them to drift away from the lasers or to settle ourselves and not float away freely. I became conscious that the flashlights were the only objects that produced any light at all in the room, because the laser barriers had been dispelled. I looked out at the hallway and, certainly, those lights were off too. The guards had one arm extended toward us, which produced the green triple dots, and the other folded in order to hold the wrist of the extended arm, as if to reinforce the precision of the aim in the wrist. The soldiers also had those weird glassy helmets on and I saw that the light was coming from them; it was as if the helmets were producing the light which came from the patterns that were underneath the glassy surface. The shapes that the light made over the helmets made them kind of intimidating to stare at…

“Turn around,” they commanded, and so we did. Two soldiers came into our room and two went into Damien’s so four remained with lasers pointed at us. ‘Yeah, they are definitely eight,’ I confirmed to myself. Before I knew what they were doing, one of them put these handcuffs on me that were weird. I knew the normal metal ones in Earth were very uncomfortable to have on but these ones were made of a rubbery material on the inside that seemed pretty resistant and of some metal on the outside. I also noticed I could pull apart my hands just a little bit but not too much. They were like magnets or something but they didn’t exactly hold my hands tightly together which was a bit of a relief. Almost instantly after that person was done, he or she spun me back by pulling on my shoulders and pushed me forward roughly, out of the cell. I found myself standing beside Ignis and… what??

I looked at Damien and realized his handcuffs had been placed in front, opposed to mine which were behind, but that was not the most surprising part. The most surprising part was that he was carrying someone in his arms who had been handcuffed as well. Thank god there was no gravity or he would not have been able to balance her with handcuffs on. But who was she? I raised my eyes and saw the four soldiers still holding us at gunpoint… I mean, laser-point, so I twisted my head and noticed the other four behind us. I looked beside me to Ignis for some comfort and he smiled with security and that made me feel a little better.

The four soldiers moved out to the dark hallway first and they stayed turned around, pointing their weapons at us. A voice behind us ordered “Move to the hallway. Stroll after the soldiers slowly,” and so we did. We came out of the room and moved through the hallway in the same order that we had been lined: me first, Ignis behind me and Damien with the girl last. ‘Why do I have to go first?’ I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling intimidated by the darkness and the lasers. We moved very slowly, seeing that our speed was controlled by the soldiers in front and the ones in the back, and we drifted in a single line because the hallway was so small. I finally saw the main room over the soldiers’ shoulders. “Hold on to something,” one in front said sharply and so I looked everywhere in the plain hallway but I found nothing. I curled up and spread my elbows a bit. The ship vibrated decisively once more and I felt that I was becoming heavier. And heavier. And I fell. “Gravity,” I whispered surprised. Were we on another planet already? Did we land back on Earth? And before any question could be answered, I looked up from the floor and saw a very bright light coming from the opening ramp.