Shades of Crimson

Shades of Crimson

Chapter Three

A few hours after the weird cult leader looking people had left, a couple of slightly more normal looking guys came in with a trolley bearing many little bowls.
Our yelling and questioning was ignored…they might as well have been totally deaf for all the response they gave us. Like a room full of caged and frightened people was an everyday occurrence for them.

The little doors in the front of our cages were slid open, and before each of us was placed a bowl of water, and a bowl of some shitty mashed up vegetable stuff. In the cramped little cage, it was difficult to eat, and the only way to drink the water was to lap it up from the bowl like an animal, since there wasn’t enough room to manoeuvre my head into a position where I could tilt the bowl to drink from it.

For the next three days, every meal was exactly the same as that one. A few times, more weirdly dressed people came into the room, but apart from that and the feeding, we were left alone in the room. I won’t go into detail about the rest of my unpleasant time there. Needless to say, by the end of it, I was traumatised, scared shitless, filthy and in a lot of pain from the cramped conditions.

The end of my miserable stay in the room came not a moment to soon. A bunch of people wearing white and red uniforms with gold trimmings came in and started moving some cages around. Nine girls, including myself, were carried off [still in the miserable little cages!] out of the room and down a long, somewhat bleak hallway. I noted that there were a lot of doors along it, most of which had what seemed to be complex electronic security devices on them. Some of the doors had signs on them, but they were all written in Latin. The walls everywhere were made of a light colored, very shiny metal, with bright little lights dotting the roof and floor, giving it the appearance of some ultra-modern, high tech facility of some kind.

I was taken out through a large door at the very end of the hallway.
After spending days inside that room, the bright sunlight outdoors hurt my eyes at first, making me squint. For a few seconds, I had a view of a large, fenced in car park of sorts.
A little way out there was a small truck parked. It was really…fancy like, a deep black colour, with some Latin writing logo on it, and these shiny panels on top. Maybe they were solar panels or something, I don’t know about that stuff. Anyway, the back of it was already open, and I was carried inside. My cage was put down amongst the other cages, and we were left alone in there.

“Where are they taking us?” Asked a girl beside me. Her voice was trembling, and she looked only about sixteen or so. I felt bad for her.
“I don’t know, but it couldn’t be anywhere worse than that room we were in, huh?” I said.
“What if it is though?!” Said someone in a cage behind us, “They could be taking us off to be killed, or tortured or something!”
The first girl started to cry.
“Look, wherever we’re going, it’s only a matter of time before we get rescued. Considering how many days it’s been since we went missing, I’m sure we’re going to be rescued really soon, don’t you think?” I asked.
“Yeah, unless this is the government’s doing!” That was the voice of Sonia, the girl with the government-and-aliens theory. She’d been freaking everyone out for days with it. The girl just doesn’t know when to shut up. Someone started arguing with her, which was what always happened when she opened her mouth.

The door opened up again, and to our surprise more caged women were carried in.
There were about ten of them. From their caged and dirty state, it seemed they’d been stuck in a room for days just like the rest of us, but none of us had seen them before. More interestingly, they were all Korean. Everyone in the room with me had been American.

Once all the cages had been packed onto the floor of the truck, the door was shut again. Two of the weird people who’d been carrying our cages in remained in the back with us. They seemed to be happily chatting together in Latin. By now, few of us even bothered to yell or ask questions; it was obviously futile.

The truck started. I could feel it gathering speed, and making various turns. Where the fuck were we going?! As you can imagine, we were all very frightened. The girl next to me wasn’t the only one crying. Thinking of the various terrifying destinations we could be headed for, and the possibility that my little sister may also have been captured by these freaks, I felt tears begin to slide down my cheeks.

None of us could speak Korean, but one of the Korean girls could speak English [or rather, extremely poor engrish] and from her we learnt that there was indeed another room just like our, only it was full of Korean people. I wondered, what if there were a lot of those rooms, with people from various countries? And what was going to happen to the people who weren’t in the truck with us? I’d made friends with the girl who’d been in the cage to my left in there…would I ever find out what had happened to her?

What was going to happen to me? Obviously, all of us had been specifically selected from the rest of the people for some sort of purpose…we were all female, and generally better looking than some of the other girls that had been there, and none of us looked below about sixteen years. A couple of others had noticed this as well, and the idea that they might be going to sell us as sex slaves was brought up.
“No, because then they would’ve just collected a bunch of runaways or prostitutes or something, rather than gone through all this trouble.” Said Sonia. Of course, in Sonia’s opinion, the only possible explanation for any of this was a government and alien conspiracy.
“Well it sounds a hell of a lot nicer than being alien research material!” Somebody snapped at her.
“Yeah, you look the type who would have had some weird fantasies about this sort of thing!” Spat Sonia.
“You’re one to talk.” I couldn’t resist saying it. The girl was so obsessed with the idea, I’d been wondering if there was something wrong in her head.

Our conversation was cut short by a small laugh from one of the men guarding us. They were watching, listening with amused looks. It made my skin crawl.
It’s hard to describe, but these people, all of them, when you look them in the eyes, there’s something creepy about it I can’t put my finger on. The eyes look exactly the same as any normal person’s, but somehow, there’s something there that’s just not right.

The next two hours passed without anything really noteworthy happening, and then the truck finally came to a stop. The two guards hopped out, and before the back of the truck was closed again, I got a quick glimpse of outside. A large, dim empty space, like an underground car park after hours.

A few minutes later, were being carried out of the truck. The space was indeed a lot like an empty car park. We were taken through a large set of sliding, security card opened doors which led into a plain white room, the through another set of doors into a long, white tiled room. This one was sort of like a very clinical version of a women’s shower area at a public swimming pool, only there were no little cubicles, just a long rack and some hoses.

Our cages were lined up along the rack, and the men went along the line, squirting the hoses at us through the bars until all the filth was washed off. It was mildly warm water, and the room temperature was warm, so I didn’t freeze to death, but the water was turned on hard and kind of hurt, and it was definitely degrading experience. But after having been covered in human waste for several days, I wasn’t about to complain.

When that little ordeal was over, we were once again carried off in our cages. Outside of the shower typed room, there was a hallway. It was much like the one from when we were taken out of the room we’d been in, only wider and decorated with paintings and pot plants here and there. There were a lot of other halls and big sets of doors with large signs on this one too. At one point I got a glimpse of a large, cafeteria sort of room with a lot of weirdly dressed people standing around.

We were taken into a room that was carpeted, and had a couple of doors leading out. One wall was glass, and behind the glass, there was a little bit of space, and then a massive plasma screen and some speakers. What, had we been abducted so they could force us to watch movies or something? Also, it didn’t escape my attention that there were security cameras in each corner of the ceiling…very high tech looking ones.
When we were all in there, I noticed the Korean girls weren’t there. The door was closed behind us, and the four guards went around and opened all of our cages up. It was truly a happy moment for me when I realised I would finally be getting out of the accursed thing. Looking up, I saw that the guards now had these white stick like things, undoubtedly some kind of weapon. None of us tried to attack them or get out of the doors. Actually, most of us were still trying to get out of our cages when they were leaving the room and shutting the door behind them again. Having been cramped into that position, hands and knees pressed down against the metal bars for so long, I found moving to be extremely painful at first.

Slowly, we emerged from the hated metal contraptions, and out onto the lovely, soft, carpeted floor. Sonia immediately started a close examination of everything in sight, probably checking for signs of alien technology. Another girl slammed her cage against the doors, trying to break them open, unsuccessfully, for a while. Sonia took an interest in the fact she’d been unable to even scratch them, and claimed they were surely made of some special alloy or something…nobody really cared what she was saying anymore. The rest of us shoved our cages to the back of the room, then sat together on the floor.
Some of us were crying, myself and some others talked, trying to console each other and figure out what was happening, or if there was anything we could possibly do about it. One girl had some sort of panic attack, and hid in a corner of the room hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably. We tried to help her for a while, then suddenly, the plasma screen came to life.

***~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~***~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~***

Thankyou to the people who reviewed! I love reviews! Thankyou to everyone for reading!