Date: Unknown
Place: Unknown
Oliver woke up but he was tied to a bed with his face buried in the pillow. He couldn’t remember what had happened. After a few seconds, he started remembering. He recalled his room in the hospital and grey faces with black eyes as well. He got scared and started to look around. He panicked. Beside him was another bed where Sophia was lying. She was tied to her bed just like him and he saw an uncontrolled panic in her eyes. Tears were running down her cheeks and it seemed she was near a collapse. “Oliver, what is happening?”
Her voice full of angst was the only thing stopping him from panic. He looked around, he wanted to have as much information as he could.
The walls of the room were white. Dipped light falling on them wasn’t the same as it was in the hospital. Oliver didn’t know where it was coming from as he was lying on his belly. He saw several metal tables. On each of them, there were test tubes with different colored content. There wasn’t anyone else in the room with them. He didn’t see any people, any creatures that attacked them in the hospital. On the right side from him, he saw some grooves in the wall which seemed like a big rectangle window that was bricked in.
He looked at Sophia again. She was still crying. He was thinking about what to say to her to calm her down, but he didn’t come to say anything. They were kidnapped for sure. Oliver didn’t know, if they would let them go or how they can run away. He didn’t have any information to make a plan. So, he only said: “Everything’s will be fine.” And he tried to smile at Sophia as optimistic as he could. “Oliver, what will happen to us now?”
Oliver wanted to answer but they heard a noise over their heads, which reminded him of the move of mechanical hands in a car factory, he was once in. He tried to look there but he wasn’t able to do it because of his handcuffs. “Listen, please. Whatever will happen to us, please, hang on. I will come up with a plan how to escape from here. Please, just wait.”
It didn’t seem to calm Sophia down. There was still the panic in her eyes but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. She nodded, that’s what Oliver thought he saw.
Suddenly Oliver felt a huge pain in his left arm. As if somebody or something was cutting him alive. After a while that pain merged with the pain from all his injuries. He couldn’t stand it and fainted.
Oliver recoiled and woke up. He sat down and realized he wasn’t handcuffed anymore. He was lying on a small mattress in the corner of a white room. He looked around, but he was alone. A dipped light was coming out of the ceiling. The mattress was the only thing in the whole room. Oliver was dressed in a white shirt and white trousers. When he stood on the ground, he felt a coldness on his bare food.
He started to walk through the room and realized nothing hurt him anymore. He tore his shirt off and checked his injuries from the last night. The bruises were gone. Did it really happen last night? How long have I been lying here?
He checked his left arm, it didn’t feel like being cut or sutured. But he found a bump, he surely didn’t have before.
Although the room was empty, he looked it over. There was no door. He looked at the ceiling, if there was any entry, but the lights were the only thing he could see. He looked over the walls as well. They were perfectly smooth-surfaced. He went through it slowly with his fingers and explored it with his eyes. He went through the whole room and found a small almost invisible groove in the wall. When Oliver looked at it, he saw it had a shape of a symmetric rectangular. He concluded that it had to be the door. He pushed it and…nothing happened. He tried to stick his nail in that groove, but it was too narrow. He explored the rectangle and searched for any kind of a mechanism. When Oliver put his hand in the middle of it, an electric current went through his body, threw him away from the door and he ended up on the floor in cramps. The current wasn’t strong enough to kill him, but it caused him cramps in all his muscles.
When the pain eased, Oliver got back to the mattress and laid down. He didn’t know what to do. This whole situation was absurd and scary, too.
They have kidnapped Sophia and him from their hospital room. The creature, they saw, looked like an alien from a sci-fi movie. Sophia saw the only living being he saw. He didn’t know how to get out of there.
For a long time, Oliver was lying there thinking about what to do. He didn’t know how long it was because he didn’t have any watches. But he had a feeling he had been lying there for many hours. He heard a voice coming from the door. He looked towards it very quickly to see how that small gap, which worked as door, closed. A small metal bowl and a glass were lying in front of them.
Oliver stood up and looked at the thing, that should have been his food, closely. In the glass there was water, at least that was what he supposed it was, because it didn’t have any scent. And in the small bowl there was a grey slimy mass. Oliver put his finger in it, smelled it, but didn’t scent anything. He was really very hungry, so he decided to risk it with that slimy thing. He scooped it up and put it in his mouth. It was like eating a paper. He waited several minutes and when it didn’t have any negative effect on his body, he continued eating. He was so hungry, he ate the whole bowl in a few seconds. It was the most disgusting food he has ever eaten. He washed it down with the glass of water.
He wiped his hand in his trousers as he didn’t have anything else to clean it with and lied down on the mattress again. He was waiting. After a while he realized, although the mass was absolutely disgusting, he was feeling better. Suddenly he was full of energy and his weakness just disappeared. He stood up, explored the whole room one more time, but didn’t find anything new.
Oliver was sitting on the mattress and thinking. He wanted to know, what was with Sophia, if she wasn’t in a worse situation as he was. He felt guilty of what happened. If she didn’t stay with him in the hospital, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped.
Suddenly he felt a sting in this left arm and had a weird feeling in his whole body. He stopped feeling his body. In that stress, Oliver tried to stand up, but his legs were paralyzed and he fell lifelessly on the floor. He couldn’t move a finger. As he was lying on the floor he could see the door. It opened and a grey creature came in. The same one as it was in the hospital. The door closed immediately after it came in. The creature had a black metal glove on its right hand. It was dressed in a white overall, had yellow glasses on its eyes and something that looked like a collar in its left hand.
The creature walked closer to Oliver and put the collar on his neck. It locked up with the sound of an electronic click. It tied his hands behind his back with some big handcuffs, pushed something on its glove and ejected a metallic rope. It flew like a metallic snake right to Oliver’s neck, where it plugged itself into the collar. Afterwards he felt a sting in his neck and a huge warmth flew through his body. He was able to move and feel his own body again. The creature pulled with the collar and motioned Oliver to start moving.
He gathered all his energy and strength to stand up. Even though he was much higher than the grey creature in front of him, it showed him it had him under its control. It dragged his collar but Oliver didn’t move. “Where am I? Who are you? What do you want? Where is Sophia?” No answer, just another drag. And he also felt another electric shock going through his body. That was a warning. He followed the creature.
The door opened when it put the hand with the glove in the middle of it. Oliver got out of his cell. He was looking around himself as they were walking along a long white hallway. There were no doors on the walls. He deduced, that in fact there were some doors, but they were just hidden. He was thinking about how could that thing knew where they were going. The hallway was, as Oliver’s room, empty. They went through several crossroads, but they were still going straight on. After several minutes of walking they turned right and walked along another long white hallway. Finally, they stopped by a white wall. They all looked the same. Oliver looked closer and saw hidden door. The creature put its hand in the middle of it and it opened.
They entered something like a laboratory. Oliver’s handcuffs got opened but its wristbands stayed on his wrists. Maybe they were connected magnetically. The creature showed Oliver to undress and, as a warning, it hit Oliver with another electric shock. He took off his shirt and trousers. Oliver was standing there naked and wanted to look around, but the thing pushed him further. It brought him to a metal bed. He was taken to it and the metal rope tightened to the creature’s glove unplugged and connected itself to the bed.
The rope pushed Oliver to the bed and he couldn’t do anything else except for lying on that bed. As he was lying on his back, the wristbands on his hands tightened and tied him to the bed. Then another pair of shackles were ejected from his bed and bond his feet to it, too. Because of the metal, bed was so unbelievably cold and he wasn’t able to think about the whole situation.
Oliver tried to put his thoughts in order. He couldn’t do it. If he said, he wasn’t afraid, he would be lying. He would hit the ceiling, if he could. As he was looking around the laboratory, he started to panic. The metal rope, he was tied to the bed with, was moveable and he could move his head in it. On the left, there was a table with a lot of unknown equipment and behind it he saw tops of the grey creatures’ heads.
When Oliver looked to the right, he saw another metal bed just like the one he was lying on. He realized, he wasn’t the only human being in that room. A girl was lying on the other bed. Apparently, she wasn’t from Europe. She was a Japanese, according to her eyes and skin color. She had short black hair, small nose and a curious look. She looked at him and smiled. “A new addition to our family? Welcome,” she spoke in fluent English. Oliver understood her thanks to the games he was playing.
“To our family? What do you mean by that? Where are we? What do they want?”
“I don’t know the answer to this. I don’t know the answer to any of your questions. Well, by the family I mean us, humans, being held here. And for the rest, I have no idea. The only one you can talk to, is us. And even that lasts just for a minute. If you try to talk to the Greys, they’ll ignore you and if you are importunate, they’ll punish you. If you try to run away, you’ll disappear. If you make problems, you’ll disappear. These are the main rules that work.”
“The Greys?” This word was weird to him, when she said it. “You mean those creatures?” “That’s how we call them. I don’t know who made it up, old prisoners were calling them this way and they told it to the new ones.”
“How many prisoners are in here?” “I have done five periods so far, so there are six of us with me. And with you, it’s seven.”
“Periods?” Another word he didn’t understand. “They brought me here with a girl, her name is Sophia, have you seen her?” “So, it’s eight of us. And no, I haven’t seen her. That reminds me of…I’m Yuna. And you?” “I’m Oliver. What are they going to do with us now?” “When they’re ready, we’ll pass out and you’ll wake up in your room.”
That meant he didn’t have a lot of time. Yuna didn’t calm Oliver down, he needed as many information as possible.
“What did you mean by periods?” “That’s how we measure the time here. No one knows how long it took to get him here or how long he has been here. That’s why dates don’t mean anything here. Every time you meet somebody in the lab, you have to meet everyone else before you meet him again. This is how it works here. One period is wake up, feeding and the laboratory. This is my fifty-fourth period.” She said it with such a calm voice. Oliver shivered.
“How can you go with i…” “And it’s here again, see you later,” Yuna interrupted him. Then he felt a sting in his left arm and, in a second, he passed out.