The sample

"We have to find a way out of here, NOW!"

"Shh, keep your voice down. We don't know what we're dealing with."

I beg Jeanie to stay calm and snuggled up close as we inch our way forward, but my grogginess clouds my confused thoughts. Neither of us knows how we came to be in this cave beneath the earth. I have this feeling that we're underwater. Perhaps it's only the long, porous, dimly lit tunnels with their echoing drips that have an unnatural sound dynamic.

Or maybe it's the smell of rotten fish that's seeping into my nostrils with each breath, coating the back of my throat with some sort of slimy film. That's disgusting! But I am positive we're underwater. Just like the murky recollection I had of being kidnapped with Jeanie by an unseen attacker, or attackers, I'm not sure.

But it's not just us.

We continue on, finding our way out through a cavernous room filled with row upon row of glass tubes. Each has a nude corpse floating in fluorescing pink fluid; reminds me of dead fetal pigs in mason jars. The frozen stares on their faces could only be matched by a zombie apocalypse. I can only assume they're all dead and died with their eyes open. Did we escape being thrown in one? I don't know. My brain feels highjacked.

"Kara? My shirt's on backward." She hisses, appearing mortified.

Her discovery shocks me to examine my own. She's right! Not only are they on backwards, the front, which is the back of my shirt, is sopping wet. with blood!

I don't hesitate and pull the purple blouse over my head and off. Jeanie quickly unbuttons hers. The awful sight of newly sutured, horizontal scars on our abdomens nearly arrests my heart. The scars are painless.

Instinctively, I run my fingers over the length of the coarse trail of black threads. I fear more, thinking what may have been stolen from our bodies. A question that will have to wait. Right before our eyes, the stitches themselves come unstitched and rearrange, rapidly cinching tight as if some malignant surgeon were in control. Skin begins to wrinkle under the tension of the stretching. We both choke back our screams, listening to them echo faintly off the cave walls. We hurt that instant.

"Kara! Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?" I whisper back.

"Exactly! I don't hear a thing. Where's the dripping?" Putting my ears to listen to any noise, nothing can be heard. But I see a long shadow getting nigher to one of the cave's intersections we are at.

"We have to hide!" I whisper, as quiet as I can be.

I pull my shirt back on and crouch down beside him, into the darkness of the cave's twisted walls. Whatever emerges from the darkness is not human.

Jeanie instantly buries her face in my shoulder and starts hyperventilating. I could not take my eyes off it. Its head was narrow. It did not have eyelids. Its teeth were visible, slimy, and sharp. Its gray skin was dark and had big, deep pockmarks that looked sick, so my skin crawled with loathing.

I don't like what I see!

This is unnatural! It's wicked!

It knows were here. As it's dragging what looks like a dead man by the hair, it stops in its tracks and starts twitching its nose. I tighten my hold on Jeanie, hoping it keeps on going where it's headed.

Its eyes burn with white light, casting a glow over everything around it. It spins toward us, snarling as it lets go of the victim. It's coming at us with growing speed!

Fear then becomes something I have never felt before. It's like I am floating out of my body to view an inevitable image ending in your terrible death. Jeanie screams reflexively. She jumps up to run, and I just freeze there, terror stricken. She shakes me senseless to snap me out of it.

"Kara, Kara. It's all right! You are safe. You are here with us, remember? This is a hypno-session by Doctor Contreras to find out what happened to you and your buddy, but you have gone into panic mode and lost control. It's all right, it's over," the panicked woman doctor says.

I look around in shock at the dozens of other doctors, my mother sitting in the corner crying in the immense office. I have no memory of this. But where's Jeanie? The memory is still vivid. I start to panic all over again.

"Where's Jeanie? We must find her! That beast.that fiend is going to kill her! "We understand your concerns, Kara! If you will just relax, we can work through your mind some more to find solutions." Dr. Contreras says, hardly convincingly. "I. I have to go back for her!" "We think she drowned in deep water. You were found unconscious on the beach a week ago holding her necklace, remember? Just please calm down." I look at each of them individually as I slowly move myself off the leather couch, making sure not to make any sudden movements. They catch my eye on the door and look at one another worriedly. I needed to get out of there. I didn't trust them.

"You're lying! Where is this place? My mother would never be caught alive wearing such terrible outfit! And this scar is still sopping wet!"

I hike up my shirt for them to see the red-soaked stitches and make a break for the door. I stop dead-front of my mother's impostor. With an unnerving grin, she's blocking the door! Its eyes, and all of them, blaze with that same white fire I saw before and my lungs feed the shrill shriek. The man-made world disintegrates downhill before my eyes to show the cave and their true form. I'm trapped suddenly! I beat on the glass tube from inside it as it is filling up with a warm pink liquid. Starting with their disgusting eyes, they watch placidly as it engulfs my head. I fight against the breath with every fiber of my body until bubbles are ripped violently from between my lips in a last scream. that can't be heard.

Consciousness fades…