The Trappist Adventure: Chapter 4

Darkness surrounded him as he lay on the cold floor and let the sensation ease the pain of his wounds. Johnny didn’t know how long it had been since their capture. He only knew that it felt like an eternity in hell. Even worse, Johnny had no idea what they did with the doctor.

The last time he saw her was on that first day. They both woke up the same way, with a bucket of water thrown on them in the middle of the throne room. It was all a public spectacle that taught Johnny they weren’t escaping the planet as planned.

When he first opened his eyes, there was a familiarity in the room that his ears detected. Their language wasn’t discernable, but something about it rang in his ears. He still had yet to figure out why.

He remembered squinting, looking over at Elizabeth, and trying to figure out what was happening. Two soldiers pushed Elizabeth to the ground at the feet of one of the troopers. He struggled to get free, but the butt of a weapon struck his spine and rendered him useless.

Elizabeth screamed while Johnny felt a burning sensation behind his right ear. They both received a searingly painful injection. For moments, their human systems were in shock. They both lay there, their bodies contorting painfully as every muscle seized.

When it was over, the garbled sounds of their captors began to change. Suddenly, Johnny could hear them speaking. Still staring at his companion, she had her childlike grin back as she understood what the aliens did.

On Trappist, they developed an interpreter system they could link to their captives. A nano-tech interpreter device to bridge the gap between worlds was genius, even if it was incredibly painful to the hosts. An advanced race that understood the importance of communicating would be promising had they not been hostile.

When they managed to climb to their knees, a large doorway opened. From the shadows, one of their leaders strolled into the chamber. He was tall. Johnny guessed nearly eight feet.

This one wasn’t dressed in the military gear the rest of their people wore. As the new alien entering the chamber emerged from the shadows, his long billowing robe and regal appearance set him apart. Who, or whatever this one was, was obviously of importance in the hierarchical design of the culture.

“Terrains?” the leader questioned.

One of the troopers referred to the tall one as “my lord.” A discussion in the distance centered around Johnny and the doctor. Even though they were whispering, Johnny knew it wasn’t good.

“They came through the rift, my lord,” the trooper told his superior.

When the superior turned to face Johnny and Elizabeth, Johnny’s mouth hung agape. The features he could see weren’t what he expected. The leader, or their superior, was humanoid. He was so human that Johnny momentarily forgot they were prisoners.

“Do I look so strange to you?”

The leader put a finger on Johnny’s face. He ran it down his cheek, around his eyes, and across his forehead before turning his attention to Elizabeth. When he moved toward her, he introduced himself as Kalbrek.

“This one, this one shows promise. But test both. If one or both are Hunaphu, I want to know,” instructed their lord.

“Yes, my lord.”

Johnny was quickly hoisted to his feet by the troopers and forced out of the chamber. There was a foreboding sense of doom in front of him. He feared for the doctor, who he hadn’t seen since.

That was weeks ago. It could be longer. Johnny was unsure how long it had been since being in the chamber since their leaders deemed them test subjects. After weeks of testing, he prayed that the doctor was faring better than he. Johnny believed in his heart they were dead. They were in Hell.

After being in that chamber, the troopers threw him into a cold, steel, magnetically sealed cell. The only light he saw was from beneath the steel-reinforced door or through a hole they opened to throw food to him. The confinement was less harsh on Earth for animals. These creatures knew little about humanity and showed less.

Johnny would sit in between rounds of feedings and the rounds of testing, imagining that Elizabeth was in a cell next to his. He would talk to her. It helped to keep him sane in the isolation of that steely box.

Johnny knew horror after the years spent fighting in the West. The box was an entirely different horror. There was the horror of being in the box, trapped in the darkness, only his imagination for comfort. Then, there was the horror of being taken out of the box.

Johnny knew the screams. They were blood-curdling and from tortured souls. He remembered screaming the first time they took him to the testing room. Nobody that went there didn’t scream out.

Whatever the people of Trappist were doing, they were doing it to all of their prisoners. Their methods lacked reason. The randomness and repetition of the tests all pointed to them hoping for a result they weren’t getting.

The worst part of the testing was the indignity of their approach. Each time Johnny went to the testing room, he was strapped to a table and stripped nude. The vulnerability of the testing made it scarier.

The ones doing the tests remained behind their masks. They were similar to the troopers, covered from head to toe. The neurolink they stuffed in his ear forced him to listen to them. He always knew what was coming.

Johnny never spoke a word during the testing. He refused. With all their questions, he hoped they’d tip their hand. Yet, all they ever repeated was Hunaphu. He didn’t know what it meant, only that the leader wanted to find a Hunaphu.

Cola Nar was their Minister of Science. Johnny cringed each time Cola Nar bent over, looking into his eyes. The scientist was unlike their leader. His eyes weren’t like that of a human and were a blood-red color when the light caught his mask at the right angle.

Cola Nar put things on his victims. His implant read the word as “boreites,” and that was what they did, bore.

Boreites bored into the skin, working through the muscle fibers and then into the softer fatty tissue before exploring the organs. The things would invade the brain through the ears, the nostrils, and the mouth. They locked onto a victim’s memories, forcing them to remember things from their pasts.

Johnny’s mind wandered during the experiences. It wandered to home, his glory days as a firefighter. He remembered the first time he saw the doctor and how he developed an affection for her. Then, he would wonder if they were torturing her the same way.

He lost count in the teens. Sixteen or seventeen times, he was in the testing room. It happened so many times he knew Cola Nar’s smell, even from behind his uniform. He recognized Cola Nar’s footsteps. The creature’s walk was easy to remember.

After the first tests, the creatures took a break. They needed time to prepare for what came next. What came next was Cola Nar’s specialty. That was presuming he had such a thing.

With his arms outstretched, his legs slightly parted, and a device keeping him from closing his mouth or hiding his eyes, Johnny feared each session would be his last. Each session took more out of him than the last one. Each, on some level, served as a personal trip to hell.

The experiments were cruel and bizarre. On Earth, they would be death sentences. Here, science allows for more stress on the human body than Johnny imagined possible. It was the trauma and the pain he lived through that made him return to his cell and pray. Some days, when thrown into his cell, he just lay there and prayed to die.

On one of those days, he remembered seeing the blade in Cola Nar’s gloved hand. Johnny tried to fight against his restraints, but it was fruitless. There was no escaping the table once strapped to it, and the scientific team knew as much.

Then came the carving. Johnny watched in horror as the flesh from his body was fileted from him, his fingers cut from his hands, and then they would repair him. Each time, more cutting and in more creative ways. At one test, he still had nightmares as they cut his arm from him with a laser saw.

The searing pain as they violated his flesh caused him to pass out. The nerves that they severed, the bones that they cut, all done to see what the human pain tolerance was. They believed that the Hunaphu could withstand such pain without death, that only the Hunaphu could control their minds enough to keep from dying.

What Johnny didn’t know was how he survived any of their tests. The tests to torture and mame were something that humans didn’t typically survive. Why he kept surviving them, Johnny didn’t understand.

There were sounds from the outer corridor, a place of blinding white light to those locked in the isolation cells. They stopped in front of the entry to Johnny’s cell. He instinctively pulled back, crouching into the corner.

“In,’ yelled one of the troopers from the corridor.

Johnny watched the door as the silhouette of a woman in a white cotton dress was pushed inside with him. It was the doctor. She looked like she was faring better than he was in this strange world.

For the first time since being put in that box, lights around the wall lit up. As the door swooshed shut, Johnny struggled to get to his feet. Johnny walked to Elizabeth, his arms outstretched.

“I thought you might be dead,” she admitted.

“Why aren’t we?” he asked. “If they want to kill us, why don’t they just do it?”

“They don’t want us dead,” she announced.

Elizabeth knew more about their captors. They were once Hunaphu before the gene pool was diluted. Now, their only tie to the Hunaphu was that most of the planet had a dormant gene.

“The energy wave, or transport wave as the leader called it, it was programmed to pick up human’s possessing the Hunaphu gene,” she explained. “Potentially, those with a strong connection to their god.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They’re trying to reconnect with the ancients of this world. Johnny, these people may be the decendants of an ancient race that once came to Earth. Some of them, they may even have come from our own system,” she announced.

Johnny didn’t believe what he was hearing. More importantly, he didn’t know why she was there. He stopped her and asked what they did to her.

“Tests,” she said. “Test after test. Then, after one of the tests, I was taken to Kalbrek. It was then that I learned I have the gene they’re looking for.”

“Why did they bring you here? What do they want?” asked Johnny.

Elizabeth didn’t know what the ultimate goal of holding them captive was. She knew only that they pulled them from their world and to theirs, along with thousands of others over the years. Kalbreaks interest in her seemed deeper than their interest in Johnny.

“We’ve got to escape,” Johnny sighed.

“It’s not possible,” she sighed.

There was no way they could reverse the effect of the transport wave. It was a one-way ticket to hell, and they already took their trip. No, they couldn’t just escape. Their only refuge would be the wilds of Trappist.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “We have to try. Maybe we can take a ship.”

Elizabeth knelt, taking a seat against the wall. She started to cry. She knew the truth about the world they were in. She had learned through her time with Kalbrek that they were unlikely to return to Earth without help.

“Why?”

“We're over 40 light years away from earth.”

To be continued…