I have always been an outsider. An outlier among my peers. I could never fit into their discussions and talks. They were always so childish and boring.
I was forced to grow up young. I had to be the parent around the house for my sister when my mom was away. Responsibility has always been idolized as a gold standard by parents for their children to learn so they can eventually become independent and take charge of their own actions. But I learned responsibility too young. Adults never teach you the dark side and hardships of responsibility.
Here I found myself once again. An outsider. The four younger people had been taken away and I was with a psychopath, his two underlings, two female adults, and a couple of corpses. The closest person to my current condition was the two rotting green dyed corpses across the room. The other five remaining people could coexist and relate with one another based on mutual understanding, survival, age, attraction, etc.
But then there is me. How do I fit in this equation?
The death of the caring old woman and the potential deaths of my family and soon-to-be girlfriend still weighed heavily on my mind. The emptiness brought from their deaths consumed the pain of my current condition. I never knew emptiness could feel so deep and be so vast. The unbearable silence, which I still had not come to terms with, had only become more deafening.
Images of the giant wave crashing into my helpless body and the psychopath stabbing the old woman kept flashing through my mind. The play button had been set to repeat and the scenes kept flashing by faster and faster. My mind could barely function and the emptiness in my heart gave no relief to this growing instability.
Someone help me. Anybody. Don't just look at me like a piece of useless trash. I'm still a human just like you. I didn't choose to lose my leg and have my hearing taken away from me. I didn't choose to become one of the victims to the psychopath.
Why can't anything in my life ever go right.
After the group of younger people were taken away by the pale blue man, the five individuals left gathered and spoke to one another. The silver diamond object still remained in the air in the center of the cave and people gave it the occasional curious glance before continuing to speak within the group.
Glances fell on my once the discussion ended and Mr. Gangster approached me with an unapologetic expression, gripped me by the collar of my shirt, and dragged me towards the faint blue semi-pulsing light at the opposite end of the cave from the black pond. My body gave no response to the action and the pain I had previously felt did not intensify despite the rough way which I was handled. My mind only continued to spiral out of control with no end in sight.
We reached the narrow gap and Mr. Gangster threw me into the room without a morsel of emotion. My face landed against the floor of this new area and I began choking on a mouthful of dirt.
Dazedly, I attempted to sit up and started inspecting my new environment around me. The room was in a spherical shape and had a diameter of five meters horizontally and vertically. The walls were extremely similar to the walls of the rest of the cave I had seen except for the roof where the crossed pulsing green pattern had been. Instead of a green cross, there was a large fissure in the center of the roof and green dust was scattered around on the dirt floor.
Cracks seemed to spiderweb off the large fissure more often than when I had seen the green light originally as well. The green light had been replaced with a faint blue light which barely pulsed and blue veins of moving substance seemed to be moving through the cracks and swelling inside the fissure in the center of the roof. The blue light was the most concentrated in the center and was dazzling to look at with the naked eye.
When my mind settled from the sudden crash into the dirt and my spiraling thoughts started to slow down, a wave of nausea hit me once again; however, this wave was less impactful than the last wave I had experienced when the blue man had walked past me. After a few minutes, the nausea died down until it was only a constant small feeling in the back of my head and throat. The center of my sternum also seemed to slightly vibrate like a muscle spasm every few moments or so under the faint blue light.
Two small fist sized holes were also in the ground next to the entrance on the inside of the spherical room. Both of the holes seemed to have water sources similar to the pond at the opposite side of the cave. Looking down from my position on the ground, I could only see two meters into each hole before the visibility became completely black.
After a few minutes of Mr. Gangster staring me down, the thicker underling came into view carrying two of the compact squares of green. Mr. Gangster nodded at the other man and the underling stepped between the meter gap and dropped one box on either side of me.
The thicker man then left the room and returned with a small rusty shovel. On the left and right side of the room, the man began to dig two shallow holes into the ground. As my eyes began to wonder, Mr. Gangster stepped forward into the crevice and smacked me while pointing back towards the thicker man. The smack took me by surprise and the spinning in my mind began to resume, but I still didn't feel any pain.
Mr. Gangster remained nearby as I put all my energy towards watching this beefy man dig holes for who knows how long. Over time, the wounds on my body began to ache again and my breathing began to become unstable as my ribs felt slightly bruised and fractured in a few places. My eyes struggled to stay open but Mr. Gangster's stare only promoted my undivided attention.
Once both the holes on either side were dug, the thicker man hopped out and approached one of the two wrapped materials and began undoing the black rope keeping it together. After it was undone, the dark green seaweed-like leaves slid over the floor. The thicker man gestured at me to do the same with the other box.
I gently pulled myself up with my right arm and dragged myself towards the right wrapped material and slowly undid the rope. Mr. Gangster grew impatient and kicked me out of the way before untying the rope himself. He looked down at me with a look of utter disappointment and pointed yet again at the thicker man.
The thicker man had grabbed a handful of strands of the green leaves and jumped back into the left hole. He planted each strand vertically in a row of 50 and repeated the process while grabbing more strands of green until there were 8 rows of the plant. Each plant had approximately a 20 cm gap. After the thicker man was done he inspected his work for a few moments and then shoveled the used dirt back over the plants. After patting the area down for a bit to compact it and to make the floor as straight as possible, he turned around and looked at me.
Mr. Gangster elbowed my shoulder and directed my attention towards the other stash of unplanted green leaves. Am I supposed to do what the thicker man had done in my current condition? Well, I didn't call him a psychopath for nothing I guess.
Hours went by while I painstakingly planted a total of 400 strands of this mysterious plant. The most surprising aspect of those few hours was how patient both the thicker man and Mr. Gangster was until I planted the 400th strand of green leaf. Once I made my way out of the hole, the thicker man picked the shovel up once again and tossed dirt over the plants and evened out the surface.
Mr. Gangster elbowed my shoulder quite forcefully once again and made a scissors symbol with his right hand and with his left he measured a meter above the ground. His right hand made an invisible snip at the base of the dirt once both of his hands were parallel.
That day I had earned the promotion from injured survivor to injured farmer.
The first few days after the promotion went pretty smoothly. I felt elated that Mr. Gangster didn't decide to end my life the moment the blue individual had left the cave. Eventually a pair of makeshift shears and torn parchment big enough for a sleeping area were thrown at my little cubby. Luckily I wasn't stabbed in the eye by those shears when those shears had been thrown, but it did leave a small sharp indent in the back wall behind me.
The skinnier underling of Mr. Gangster had also formed a small post at the crevice entrance with some old milk cartons and blocks of stone. The skinny man barely made eye contact with me and had even blockaded a majority of the crevice with stone and other various materials till only a small 100 cm squared window remained for me to look out.
Smashed green mush served as my meal delivered once per day by the skinny man. The meal was most definitely a crushed form of the seaweed lead I had planted. The people were probably using the reserves of third bundle of leaves which hadn't been planted.
The two holes near the entrance became my source of impure water as well as an area to empty my bowels. The water tasted strange and gave me bad digestion; however, it was still drinkable.
What put me off most about the water was the the difference between what I drank and what the people outside the crevice drank. The five individuals would gather water from the black pond at the dark end of the cave with a large container from the debris and bring it towards the floating object in the center of the cave. Once the silver end of the object touched the water, the blue light in the center of the diamond would shine brighter for a split second before returning to normal. I have no way to prove it, but I'm sure the water was being purified in some way by the mysterious item.
This unequal treatment between me and the other five people in the cave could be seen in various ways as the time continued to tick by. Time became irrelevant as there was no way to determine when day was day and night was night. I simply counted the days based on my internal clock and when my body needed to sleep. My sleeping patterns tended to vary slightly from the people on the outside.
After a few weeks had passed, my wounds began to heal up and I could move without too much pain. Some of my injuries became infected and made me quite sick for some time before eventually getting better, especially the wound from my missing leg. A few of my fractured and broken bones would need some time to heal and also some of the injuries had already begun to set incorrectly and my body needed to adapt its movement. The nauseas feelings and vibrations in my sternum I felt when I first entered the hole also gradually faded until after around a month it was completely gone.
The worst part of being in this hole alone without any human interaction was being stuck with my thoughts. Nobody other than the old woman had been able to console me over the traumatic events which occurred back to back, and even she was taken away from me.
I could never fully adjust to the silence and imaginary noises created by my brain began to sound every so often. Sometimes those sounds even took on voices and reminded about how lonely I was. It only took a month before I felt my morals and judgement begin to shudder and crumble as insanity placed down its welcome matt and invited me into its home.
I couldn't see the people outside my window as companions or even as humans. No gracious action towards me had been done other than delivering me one single meal that tasted like paper every day. Even that was too much for them sometimes and they would even forget to give me a meal or would ignore me when I pleaded and begged through the makeshift window.
Only monsters lived in the cave outside my hole.
I am an outsider. I am a prisoner to not only the people around me, but also a prisoner to the silence. A prisoner to the emptiness inside me. A prisoner to myself.