Shades of Crimson

Shades of Crimson

Chapter Two

edited a spelling mistake

Whether I was also being targeted all along, or whether not going into that dark street and picking up that earring could have allowed me to continue living a normal life, I suppose I’ll never know.
When I woke up, I felt like I had the worst hangover ever. My head was pounding, I had a dizzy, drugged sort of feeling, and just wanted to go back to sleep. I don’t know whether I had been sleeping for hours or for days, but evidently it had had been a significant amount of time. Recalling how I’d suddenly passed out, my natural reaction was to wonder where the fuck I was and what was going on.

The first thing I noticed was that I was resting on my hands and knees. Reflexively, I tried to get up, only to have my head and back come into contact with something hard and cold. There wasn’t even enough room to bring my hand up to rub my poor head, and focusing my blurry, sleepy eyes, I saw the reason why.
I was in a tiny little metal cage.

Becoming more aware, I was able to see that there were many of these tiny little cages in the large room I was in, and each of them contained a person. They were making quite a racket; some were crying, some were talking, a few were yelling.
It’s strange, you’d imagine that in this kind of situation, you’d feel an incredible amount of terror, but I was relatively calm. Maybe it was the shock, maybe it was the effect of whatever I’d been drugged with, how am I supposed to know? Anyway, there was a single door in the wall to my left, and apart from that, the strange, shiny-metal walled room was completely enclosed; no windows, nothing else of any kind. And along each wall, these awful cages containing people were stacked, about three high.

Everyone was naked, including myself, and it seemed most of them had been there longer than me. I could smell human waste; clearly nobody was coming to let us out to use a toilet or shower. God! I still had no idea what was going on, but I could tell the situation was very, very bad. I began to listen into the talk going on around me. The conversations were somewhat obscured by the yelling and crying, but I was able to make out a fair bit of what was being said.

What I heard only confused and frightened me further. Had I been aware of the full reality of my situation at that point, I can say with certainty that I would have passed out. Probably have had a heart attack or something as well. Most of the people were just as confused as I was, but it sounded like some of them had at least seen our captors, and that food and drink was shoved occasionally in little bowls through the little sliding door thing in the front of our cages where our heads were. I’d been wondering what that as there for. It sounded like these captors were also creepy, and I heard somebody say they’d referred to us as ‘humans’…the craziness of thinking that meant something strange was currently being debated by a young man and a 14 or so year old girl near me.
Somebody asked somebody else how long they’d been there, and I heard a reply of ‘two days, I think’. I guess it would be worthy to mention the kind of people stuck alongside me in these cages; there were all kinds, male and female, but none of them looked over twenty five. At twenty two, I could be called one of the eldest, since most of them looked to be in their mid teens. I’d at first wondered if maybe one of the perverted fantasies I didn’t like to admit that I had about being captured and sold as someone’s sex slave was coming true. It now seemed more likely we were hostages of terrorists, or some strange cult or something.

My thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the door. Into the room strode a pair of men which had me leaning heavily toward my theory that this might have something to do with some crazy cult.
Both of them looked to be about thirty, though their ages were hard to tell. The first one was shorter, and wore dark glasses, and his long brown hair was in a ponytail. He carried a clipboard. The second, taller, had even paler skin than the first, his long, curly black hair was gelled back, and there was something scary about his dark eyes I couldn’t put my finger on. It was the clothes that really made them look weird.

The first guy, the brown hair one, wore pretty normal looking black pants and a crisp white shirt, but with a red bow-tie. A bow-tie! And his shoes had buckles on them, you know, like a leprechaun, kind of buckles. The shirt he wore wasn’t really normal either; their was a weird, symbolic looking pattern in beige faintly going up one side of it…

And the second guy? Weirder still. His outfit was this weird loose black robe thing, over matching pants and shirt printed with red and white tiny checkers on them. Heavy black boots peered out from under the odd looking pants, and a thing that might pass for a sash held the robe thing loosely together around his waist. That’s a pretty poor conveyance of the absolute bizarreness of this guy; I can only say that he could very easily have passed for a demented, rich cult leader. He looked over us all passively, like a farmer might look over a herd of cattle. Well, that’s what it felt like- I haven’t ever actually visited a farm.

Then, they started talking. In Latin. Latin!
Who speaks fucking Latin?!
Some of the people around me were yelling things at them, like ‘let us go!’, or ‘what are you going to do with me?!’ that kind of stuff. No attention was paid to any of it.
The second guy took a closer look at some of us, including me. He’d stare for a few seconds, then he’d sound like he was asking something, or the second guy would seem to make some kind of comment. Occasionally the first guy would look down at his clip board or show it to the second guy. At one point, they stood at such an angle as to give me a glimpse of what was on the clip board. There were a lot of sheets of paper, and the top one looked like some sort of form. There were a couple of photos of someone naked; no doubt one of us! And a lot of writing too far away for me to read, and I couldn’t even tell if it was in English or not.

After a few minutes, they left again. The young girl next to me, who previously had been crying and refused to talk, asked if I knew any Latin. Hey, I don’t look that old! They stopped teaching Latin years ago! I shook my head. Everyone was asking each other if they knew any Latin. One guy claimed he’d heard them mention something about ‘good weight’ and something about ‘progress’.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one thinking this might be the work of some cult. Lots of us had theories, some even stranger than mine. The most outlandish was maybe this red-haired girl’s idea that this was part of a government conspiracy involving area fifty one and some aliens they had trapped there, and we were to be offered to another race as research material. I didn’t suspect at that time that the truth was actually just as strange and unbelievable as her demented theory.


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