"So how did you get to the island?" the military man asked.
Arlan swallowed the tuna in his mouth and took a sip of water before answering.
"I think it's a bit obvious..."
The woman standing a few meters away from them could not hide her smile at Arlan's little teasing of the man.
"Tristan, a child making fun of you"
Tristan's eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly at the woman's comment, but thanks to his patience he managed to remain calm before asking again, this time with more precision.
"I know you came by plane, I mean how did you get on the island? It should be impossible..."
Arlan, still eating like a pig, swallowed before answering.
"I don't know...the only thing I remember is that suddenly there was turbulence in the air and from one moment to the next the sky changed color. Then we lost control of the plane...and here I am"
A few minutes ago, they had caught Arlan eavesdropping on the conversation, and while they didn't buy his lie, they didn't put him in a bad light either.
Maybe it was his age or just the growl in his stomach that made them think better of him. But it helped when they came to an agreement that they would forget everything that had happened if Arlan answered their questions truthfully.
Arlan had nothing to hide and was very hungry, so he readily agreed. Not without asking for food first.
So now Tristan, the woman and Arlan were in the kitchen talking while he ate. The old man had left with the excuse of being tired, it was around 3 in the morning, and it was obvious that none of them had slept well in the last few days.
Tristan was pensive after listening to Arlan, he had been on the island for several months for work and he had seen how it all started a few days ago.
Arlan, along with Allete and the two pilots, had been the first to arrive on the island after everything had turned into an inferno...although only two of them managed to survive.
Arlan finished cleaning every last bit of food from the can with the spoon and licked it before asking.
"What's going on here?"
Tristan looked at the woman and she looked back at him. They both came to a silent agreement, then the woman walked over and sat down in the chair at the end of the table.
"It all started 10 days ago, suddenly the sky got darker, and the air got thicker. Many people who already had breathing problems started to lose consciousness from lack of oxygen, while the others adapted after a day or two"
Arlan put the spoon down in the empty tuna can and focused on the woman's words again.
"Although it was quite disturbing, it didn't escalate. Little did we know that this would be the least of our problems. Suddenly, on the third day, some locals did not return home at night, we heard complaints from their relatives, but we did not investigate deeply, it was only when there were more than 10 cases that we knew something was wrong, but by then it was too late"
Before the events of 7 years ago, this was a tourist island in the middle of the sea, where the inhabitants lived mostly from tourist money, but there were still some farmers and more traditional people who worked in the forests and jungles of the island.
Now that the island was full of military, tourism was over. At first the locals complained, but as time went on everything went back to normal, after all the military were spending their money too.
The point was that it was normal for a disappearance to occur on the island, it was large and had a lot of fauna and flora. In general, there were a lot of animals that could be dangerous to the locals who worked in the mountains. That's why some disappearances were not unusual for them.
"On the night of the fourth day, the things that caused the disappearances came down to the city. Hundreds of strange creatures...no, monsters, attacked in packs, destroying homes and murdering anything that came near them"
The woman clasped her hands together and squeezed them painfully, remembering the events of that day.
"Our guns were not strong enough to finish them off, each magazine was needed to finish one monster. There were more than a hundred of them and our magazines were limited" Tristan explained, also with some resentment in his voice.
It was normal that the military was not prepared to face such a threat, the soldiers present only carried a few magazines at most. Not to mention that most of them were not stationed in the city.
Arlan listened to the story with a frown, he didn't know if the woman whose name he didn't know, and Tristan knew what had happened 7 years ago and the strange arm that had come out of the volcano.
But one thing was clear, the strange arm and the monsters were connected. Both things were simply strange and impossible for a person of this world to imagine. They were things that should not exist, and yet they were all over the island, killing left and right.
"What were they like? the monsters I mean" asked Arlan with some curiosity.
Tristan looked back at the woman, and she looked back at him with obvious concern.
"That's the problem, we don't know what they look like" the woman replied.
Arlan frowned.
"What do you mean?"
Tristan took the woman's place and answered instead.
"We don't know what they look like because we can't see them. They are invisible"