Chapter Text
“Oh, hello, John! I have been expecting you. Please, sit down. And close the door behind you.”
Slowly, I pulled the doorknob behind me until it was securely closed. I stepped forward, sitting down on the padded chair before the big mahogany desk, where a man wearing a black suit with a red tie – a man that I have never seen before in my life, not even in the base – rested his folded hands atop a neat pile of documents. He had a soft smile, and I couldn’t help but smile back, trying to be nice. I was extremely eager to know what he wanted with me.
“So. John. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Um… I was told you wanted to offer me a new task in the base, is that right?”
The man’s smiled widened and he nodded.
“Yes, yes, exactly, my young boy! See, I was told you were very bright, but above bright, you were trustable. Your superiors have found you capable of keeping your mouth zipped if you are required to. Am I right, John?”
I nodded, feeling my stomach twist up an uncomfortable knot.
“Yes, sir. I’m not the kind of person to go around telling other people’s secrets.”
“Hmm, good, good, exactly what I wanted to hear. Now, tell me, John. How would you like…” the man grabbed a pen sitting by the desk and pointed directly at my chest with it; I flinched, and he grinned, raising a brow. “…to be responsible for a top-secret job? A very important one, as a matter of fact?” he wiggled said eyebrow, placing the pen atop the pile of documents. “It would also mean a big, fat raise in your internship salary.”
I widened my eyes. I was pretty sure he could see a spark of glee in them by the look on his face. Being able to be a part of a very tight circle of a top secret inside the base, and also getting a raise? I started to wonder just how much they were talking about, and all the movies and all the better food I could buy with said raise. The man stood there for those three seconds I took between staring at him, trying to take in what he had just told me, trying to believe my own ears; I slowly bared my teeth in an honest smile and straightened my back on the chair.
“Oh, that sounds really nice, actually! I’m totally in for it!”
“Great! I knew you wouldn’t pass this life-time opportunity, John!” The man exclaimed, leaning closer to me and pushing my shoulder with the tip of his fingers playfully. I giggled and pulled my wheeled chair closer to the table as the man started to rummage through his papers. “Now, here’s the thing. The place where you’ll be working at is a really top secret place. Only fifteen persons in this building know about it – and it is soon to become sixteen.”
The man pulled a white sheet of paper, still warm from the printer, and handed it to me.
“This is your contract. If you accept this job, John, you can’t give up on it halfway. You will have to keep doing it until your services are no longer necessary.”
“Um, but what the job is about? I mean, what will I have to do?”
“See, John, that’s the tricky part. I can’t tell you anything about it until you’re in. But rest assured that it is completely safe, and that it’s nothing complicated either. Evenfive years-old could do it.” He raised his head to look at me; my smile was long gone; I sure didn’t like the idea of agreeing to do something I had no clue of. I was concerned and seriously having second thoughts. “Don’t worry about it, John.” He told me softly, and I looked right into his eyes.“As long as you can keep it a secret, you’ll do just fine.”
He used his huge hairy hand to push the blue pen towards me. I stared at it and glanced at the contract in my hands. It was pretty fucking long, written with a size eight font, most probably, and filled with fine lines. “Take your time, my boy. Read the contract carefully; I am, if nothing, a very patient person.”
And so I did. I placed the paper over the desk and leaned in closer, carefully reading and re-reading every single paragraph and registering the words in the back of my mind as if they were being carved in stone. It all sounded very serious – way too serious, actually. Whatever they were going to tell me, I realized I would be in deeper than deep trouble if I ever told anyone about it, and the contract made it look like I wouldn’t just get away with a slap on the wrist. The last line, however, mentioned the addition to my monthly salary, which almost made me fall back on my seat. I glanced at the man, who was scribbling in a crossword book.
“Um…”
“Yes, John?” he asked, raising his brown eyes from behind his small reading glasses.
“…what if I can’t do the job properly?”
The man shook his head and took his glasses off, placing his book down.
“Rest assured that when I say that this job is way too simple, I am telling the truth, John. You couldn’t find yourself an easier job even if you looked all around for it.”
“But…” I looked back at the contract, then again at the suited man. It didn’t make any sense. “If it’s something that easy, then why are you willing to pay me this much to do it? Couldn’t, you know, anyone else do it instead of me?”
The man smiled an almost evil grin. For some reason, that smile sent cold shivers up my spine. I didn’t like it.
“We have our reasons, mister Egbert. It is up to you to get to know them.”
——
My initial apprehensiveness was slowly fading away with each step we took, but my nerves were a mile per hour.
As we walked down the long, white corridor on an underground area of the base, I started feeling lightheaded. I could barely hold back my excitement of being the holder of a top secret, and this whole thing just looked too much like a sci-fi movie. It was as if I was walking down a hallway to meet with the Matrix’s oracle, and she was about to tell me that I’m still asleep and I have to wake up. But I knew I was wide awake, and this was definitely real.
As we approached the end of said hallway, the only sound besides my loud heart beat and my heavy breathing were the clack, clack, clack of his shiny black shoes and the thump, thump, thump of my running sneakers; when we were halfway through, the suited men turned to face me and slowed down his own pace.
“Tell me, John. Do you believe in life outside earth?”
Jackpot.
“Yeah, actually, I do!” I answered, smiling widely and sounding too much like a young child who just got offered a tasty treat. I cursed my own silliness in the back of my head, but the man just chuckled and kept talking.
“Good, so this won’t be too hard for you to process, hopefully.” He said, facing the end of the corridor; covering the whole wall was a huge dark window, which allowed us to see the inside of the room behind it. I noticed a few people, all dressed in white lab coats and wearing masks over their mouths, walking around and doing their chores. And I could also see what seemed to be four tables with huge and long dark things on top of them.
It was official. My heart was making its way towards the back of my throat, and that’s how I’d die. I could even see the writing they’d make on my stone: John Egbert. Chocked with his own heart. Try not to be so overjoyed next time, kiddo.
One of the men inside the room noticed our presence and opened the door to what seemed to be a biology lab mixed with a surgery room; he raised the hand that wasn’t holding the doorknob at the two of us.
“Mister Hikes! Welcome!” came his muffed voice from behind the mask. We stopped right in front of him and he removed his transparent glove, smeared with a dark blue liquid, to shake mister Hikes’ hand.
“Ah, hello, Joshua. I knew you would be here today. So, this-” and he placed a heavy hand upon my right shoulder; Joshua looked at me, examining my body from head to toes. “-is the young boy I told you about. Very enthusiastic about all of this, if I may add.” He leaned in closer to the man, a playful grin upon his lips. “Believes in aliens too.”
“Haha, I see, I see. Hi there! You’re John, right? John Egbert?” he asked, and we shook hands as well.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I heard quite a bit about you, man. Only good things, too. Are you liking your internship?”
“Uhhh… yeah, I, um. I’m really liking it, I really am. It’s, uh, pretty cool. I mean, it’s a real good opportunity, and, uh…” I stuttered, and the guy laughed at my awkwardness.
“Hahaha, no need to be shy, John! Come on, come on in, come take a look at what’s awaiting you. These specimens are so great, you will not believe your eyes. I barely believed my own the first time I saw them.”
He stepped out of the way so I could get inside, and I looked around in awe. The place smelled like a hospital; clean and sterilized… and also something else I couldn’t quite make out. Divided in four parts of the room were four metal tables, each one of them with what looked like grey people with shiny black hair lying down on top of them – no, scratch that. They were strappedto the tables from every possible limb by metal restrains: onto their foreheads, wrists, forearms, thighs, ankles, chest, everywhere, but one of them had restrains only on his chest, wrists and ankles, for some odd reason. The grey aliens, I noticed with awe, had horns. Yellow and orange shaded horns, long and short and weirdly shaped, and their long fingers had sharp looking claws the exact same shade of yellow. The four horned alien with little restrains was tightly blindfolded with what seemed like a modified diving mask, just like the female one lying in the table in the far right corner of the room. They weren’t wearing any clothes, completely naked from head to toes, and their bodies showed what seemed to be nasty cuts and bruises all over, each specimen with wounds of a different color. The blindfolded ones even had stitches. I frowned, wondering why the specimens needed stitching in the first place.
There was a weird dark blue liquid, identical to the one on Joshua’s glove, dripping down from the table behind the one right in front of me; the skin of the bulky alien with long horns glistened in the dim light with what seemed to be water, and a young woman walked away from the wall cabinet she was roaming through to stop beside said alien, leaning down to keep working on the open cut on the creature’s side. A third man stood next to her, holding a small tray with surgical tools, all smeared in that same blue fluid – I noticed with a shiver that it was blood –, but nothing, nothingprepared me for what was about to happen.
When the woman’s instrument touched the inside of the alien’s flesh, I saw him flinch as he silently cried out, a sound filled with pure pain and despair.
I widened my eyes with shock and glanced at the creature on the table before me.
Slowly but surely, the nubby horned alien was breathing; his chest rose and fell with every shallow breath he took, and I could see his brows move behind the messy tangle of his black locks every time the blue blooded alien let out another whimper.
I froze; he noticed my gasp, and I cursed myself for it. The alien opened his eyes just a little, the white in his eyes as yellow as the nails on his hands, and his iris a dark red, almost black even, nearly indistinguishable from his dark black pupils; he watched me closely from his half lidded eyes.
He looked tired. Defeated. A little annoyed, even. But mostly tired and beaten up. Like he just wanted to give up.
My look must’ve been of pure horror right then.
These people weren’t simply autopsying specimens like I originally thought they were.
They were experimenting with living and breathing creatures.
Mister Hikes came from behind me and hugged me by my shoulders, as if one would do to their loving nephew. “Eh? What do you think?” he asked, shaking me a little bit too enthusiastically. I didn’t dare to look at him in the eyes, and instead kept staring at the alien’s. “Isn’t this exciting?”
“They’re alive.” I whispered, more to myself than to him. He laughed and let go of me, taking a few steps forward until he was standing next to nubby horns’ table.
“Of course they’re alive! Alive and kicking, if I may add! Mostly kicking than alive, too.” The man exclaimed, chuckling with gusto of his own twisted joke, and the sound of his laughter mixed with the blue blooded alien’s cries of pain made my stomach do an uncomfortable flip. I felt bile rising up to the back of my mouth. Was the creature feeling the woman poking his insides? It sure sounded like it, and the red eyed alien glared at mister Hikes, a low, threatening growl escaping his throat. I shivered with the animalistic sound, but nobody else in the room seemed to mind him. “Oh, shut up!” the suited man exclaimed, glaring back at the alien. In response, he stopped his growling, but I could hear him murmur something. It sounded a lot like “fuckass”. I widened my eyes at him, but he simply closed his own and pretended to be asleep.
“Amazing, isn’t it, John?” Joshua exclaimed, putting on a new glove on his bare hand. “They’re truly remarkable, these aliens. We’ve been trying to learn just how exactly they work since the day we captured them, but our anesthetics don’t work on their systems. We didn’t want to risk having one of them dying on us, so we were researching a new substance that might work with these things. We did snoop around a little, though; the little fuckers deserved after they killed half of our men on the mission.”
I felt my legs shake underneath my weight, and it took all I had to not fall over.
They really were examining the creatures in cold blood.
“W-what…” I stuttered, realizing that my mouth had gone dry. I gulped and licked my lips, trying to form the words a second time. “…what will I have to do?”
“Hey, don’t worry, man.” Joshua exclaimed, placing his clean hand on my shoulder. “No need to be scared; they haven’t tried to escape for a few months now. They’re stranded real hard to these tables, so they’re not going to hurt you or anything; they’re harmless.”
“Mostly harmless, Joshua.” The girl in the back of the room corrected him, not diverting her eyes from her work. He snickered and nodded in agreement.
“Yes, yes, mostly. Just… try to keep your limbs as far away from their mouth and hands as possible, and you’re good.”
And that’s when it hit me: the man thought I was scared of the aliens. Well, I mean, who could blame him. I bet that these things probably looked pretty damn scary when up and snarling, baring their pointy teeth at us. But like this? They were pitiful. The looked like wild animals who didn’t know what they had done to deserve this horrible fate. All I wanted was to let them go of their restrains and set them loose in the wild or something, so they wouldn’t suffer the way they were anymore.
In a way, Joshua was right. I was pretty fucking scared.
But not of the aliens.
“So, John. All you’ll have to do is clean the aliens up after our doctors”, mister Hikes told me, and I saw the nubby horned alien slightly opening his eyes and glaring at him from between his thick eyelashes. “There’s a plastic basin in the counter underneath the sink, and a pile of clean cloths. Every single day they’ll come here to work on these creatures, and after they’re done, well, that’s when you come in.” he placed a hand on the inside of his jacket and pulled out a small device. “They’re going to beep you as soon as they’re getting ready to leave, so you can come here and do your thing. Your access card is already allowed to unlock these doors.”
“Also,” Joshua added, “if you’re free, you can come down here whenever and watch us do your job, if you like. It’s pretty interesting, if you don’t mind a little blood.”
In the back of my mind, something told me I should thank the guy, but the words got stuck somewhere deep inside me, along with my breath. I nodded, taking the pager from mister Hikes’ hand and I examined the small device with a blank look.
I remembered the man’s words just before I signed the contract. I was in this for good. I couldn’t change my mind, even if I wanted to. But then again, if I gave up on this task, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore, thinking about these aliens.
Somehow, in the back of my mind, I knew that they were my responsibility from now on, since these guys didn’t care about their safety or well being at all.
“I’ll be paging you for your first chore tomorrow night, John. Don’t be late.”
Somehow, I knew I had to get them all out of here. And fast.
—-
To say that I couldn’t sleep was an understatement. Maybe I dozed off a few times, but I was still aware of my surroundings, so I didn’t really rest at all. I stared at the ceiling of my apartment, sighing and letting every single bit of information that was revealed to me this afternoon sink into my system.
It was hard. It was hard, and these people talked about the poor aliens trapped inside the cold lab as if they were nothing but puppets meant to entertain them. Puzzles to be solved. A new land to be conquered and explored. Not living creatures being tortured and violated. These people seemed to believe they were above all, that they were doing nothing wrong; that as long as these creatures didn’t belong to this planet, their actions were justified.
I glanced at the small pager on my nightstand and it all came back to me. The cold grin mister Hikes gave me when I asked him about what kind of service I would be doing; the laugh he made when he joked about how the creatures were struggling to remain alive.
I shut my eyes closed and decided to try and concentrate real hard in falling asleep for at least an hour before the sunrise; but whenever I did, all I could see were the sad yellow and red eyes of the alien staring back at me.
Fuck.
I’m going to need a lot of coffee tomorrow.
—-
When I least expected, I was facing the white door to the lab once again.
I’m pretty sure Joshua and his assistants passed by me and said something that my brain couldn’t really process. Already inside it, I walked rapidly towards the cabinets without taking so much as a glance at the aliens, convincing myself to not look directly at them, to just wipe their skin and the table and that would be it and he I’d be done and maybe tonight I’d get some well deserved rest.
Holding the white soft cloth with more strength than needed, I turned the tap open, filling half the basin with clear water. I turned around, deciding to clean the muscled alien first, and froze in place when I realized that he wasn’t there. Only the three other tables remained, the creatures in them looking the same as they did the night before, and my heart thumped a little louder. I wondered if he was in the room five, like they asked me to clean up earlier.
The nubby horned troll was looking at me again. At least the best way he could without moving his head, still trapped in the hard surface of the table. I asked myself just for how long he was stranded like that, and I realized the horrible extent of the torture they were enduring. Holding the heavy water filled basin with all the strength I could muster, I felt my hands shake a little and my heart beat accelerate as I thought of what I was about to do. I didn’t think too much about it, because I knew that if I did, I probably would give up. The creature followed me with wary eyes as I approached him and kneeled down beside his head, quickly finding the clip for his restrains underneath the table. Within a few seconds, the metallic straps were open.
“I hope this feels a little better.” I told him, slowly getting up and making sure I was as far away from the partially free troll as possible. His eyes, threatening and suspicious before, were wide with shock and befuddlement. He tried moving his head, testing the sore muscles of his neck, and groaned, probably because they felt sore and stiff. But soon he was able to completely turn his head side to side, and I smiled with relief. After the initial glee of being partially free, the troll looked back at me, his look able to burn a hole through my head. I sighed.
“…Look, I’m sorry. For everything. For everything that was done to you guys here. For what they did to you. For what we did to you.”
The troll simply stared at me, and I bowed my head. Slowly, I reached for the damp cloth and made my way to his torso, slowly wiping off any signs of dried blood over his skin. The creature flinched whenever I rubbed too hard at a particular sore spot, and I profusely apologized every time, which made him stare at me all the while with a puzzled and mean expression.
When I finished with his legs, arms and torso, I glanced at his face and noticed a few blotches of red blood on his neck and cheek, some of them from probably struggling with his restrains, and I hesitated.
“Is it okay if I wipe your face too?”
The alien bared his fangs at me, and growled low and deep as I tried to approach him with the cloth. Immediately, I pulled my hand back, and he began shouting incomprehensible words in what seemed to be his native language. I widened my eyes as I heard the mix of growls and clicks and chippers, his grey tongue furiously dancing and twirling behind the sharp fangs, and I jumped when I heard a mean and loud cackle coming from behind me. The alien girl was laughing, laughing with enthusiasm, loud and scandalous, her mouth wide open as her chest and belly shook in the rhythm of her laughter. When red eyes became silent, she added a few weird growls to her laughter as well, her chest rising and falling as she practically spit out hateful words towards him. When she was done, he snarled back at her, and this went on for about a minute, one shouting and snapping at the other, the girl slowly losing her cocky grin, and when her expression was about half serious, her smile only a soft upturn of her lips, she sighed, her laughter finally subsiding.
I felt cold water drip down on my feet from holding the damp cloth too tightly against my chest. I was horrified. It was like they were going to jump off from the tables and attack each other, such was the bitterness in their undistinguishable words. After a minute of dead silence, the four horned troll spoke up. This time I really yelped, startled about the fact that he could actually speak and move at all, but the three of them promptly ignored me as if I wasn’t even there. He turned his head towards nubby horns, his voice low and his speech dragged, and whatever he had said, it didn’t please the other alien. He furrowed his brows in deep thought and, after a minute, turned his head to look at me.
His once thoughtful expression turned to a full glare, and the alien snarled at me, showing me the full extent of his pointy fangs. Slowly, the worst chill I have ever felt in my life ran down my spine as I thought about how sharp these things were, and how would it feel like to have one of my fingers ripped off from between these white daggers.
“I, uh, okay, I’ll… I’ll just go do something else while you talk to each other, okay? I’ll-I’ll be right back.” I stuttered, slowly walking backwards towards the door; when I turned around, trying to run off as quickly as possible, my nose was an inch away from the solid wall of the lab; I yelped, getting a mocking laugh from the female alien, and made my way to the open door, feeling a blush spreading to the tip of my ears.
Facing the empty white hallway again, completely silent and lit by the artificial lights in the ceiling, I noticed how fucking creepy the whole scenario was. There I was, all alone with four aliens, who were threatening and dangerous and who obviously disliked me, in a secret level of an almost empty building in the middle of the night. Oh, and one of them was missing, too! So cliché. Looked around; it was hard to decide whether the lack of windows was a good or bad thing. I felt like I was inside a bad horror movie, which was probably the worse of all, because there I was, breaking the first essential rule of horror movies: never, ever be left alone, or go inside empty rooms on your own. I gulped, shaking a bit, trying to gather enough courage to move my feet and see if I could find the room number five.
It wasn’t hard to find it; each door had a number. The number five was only two doors away from the main lab, and I slid my access card on the pad to unlock it.
And, surely, there he was, just like I imagined he’d be. The missing alien was on his metal table in the middle of what seemed to be a complete surgical room. A smaller table, exactly like the ones from ER or something, was right next to him, and it had a few different looking tools; they were all dirty too, which indicated that people had poked and prodded the alien yet again today; the thought made my stomach churn uncomfortably. Without bothering to turn the lights on, since the lights coming from the hallway seemed good enough for me, I carefully approached the creature.
He was too still. This frightened me. My first thought was to touch his thick neck and check for a pulse, but my eyes darted down to the black cloth covering him from his shoulders all the way down to his knees. It wasn’t much the cloth that baffled me, but its color; why would anything in a surgery room not be white? Slowly, I reached for it and uncovered the alien’s chest, to see-
Oh, shit.
Oh, shit.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit shit shit!!!
Nothing – nothing could ever prepare me for what I saw. The troll’s chest was cut open, the muscles once there nowhere to be seen, and the brief sight of his ribs and guts made me sick in a way I had never felt before. I could feel the tangy taste of bile and the noodles I had for dinner on the back of my mouth; I gagged, turned my head away and stumbled backwards, trying to walk out of the room as fast as I possibly could.
I hit the table with the tools on my frantic escape, and it made a horribly strident clanging noise when the back of my legs dropped the whole thing down. When I turned around, startled by the loud sound, my feet slipped on something slick and I fell on my side against the cold floor.
The floor, only now I realized, wasn’t white near the alien’s table.
It was coated in dark blue.
And now, so was my right arm and my hands and my hair and my clothes—
My brain went into full panic mode. Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and run towards the lab where the other trolls waited for my return. I flung the door open, never unlocking my gaze from the sink, and I practically threw myself at it, clutching to the counter as if my life depended on that tight grip. Immediately, I threw up the few contents of my sick stomach inside it, feeling the rusty taste of blood on the back of my sore throat whenever I coughed, and now my whole body was shaking violently with pure horror and nausea. I stared at my hands; my pale fingers were coated in that dark, dark blue, the alien’s blood now smeared all over the smooth rocky surface of the furniture, the thin coat of liquid slowly drying in my fingers and dripping down from the arm that broke my fall. I gagged again, spitting red blood onto the sink, and gasped for much needed air that just didn’t seem to be going through my lungs in enough quantities.
When I was sure that there was nothing more on my stomach to be puked, I walked away from the sink and slumped against the wall opposite to the red eyed troll, right behind where the blue blooded alien’s table used to stay. When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t at all surprised to find that he was staring at me, a look of shock mixed with maddening anger. A clear red liquid was pouring down in thick droplets from his widened eyes; I assumed they were tears from the expression on his face, and he shook his head, still not looking away from me.
“NO!” He yelled, and I closed my eyes. My own tears dripped down from my face, and I dropped my head.
“I’m sorry…” I sobbed, waving my head in denial. As a response, the troll simply growled and started another long rant of incomprehensible words, the despair clearly noticeable in his voice. “I’m so sorry, oh my god… I’m so sorry…”
Slowly, I slid down the wall, crouching on the disgustingly clean floor of the lab and hugging myself tightly.
And as I sobbed quietly against my knees, mourning the death of the defenseless creature, I could hear the other two trolls doing the exact same thing.
In twenty minutes, I ended up adding about ten more reasons to not be able to sleep again.
Tonight is going to be one heck of a long night.