I reviewed this smoldering memory many times, looking for details about who or what attacked me. I found them, but I’m still coming to terms with what I saw. Every night I replay the scene, trying to increase my exposure through attrition. It’s done little to reduce my fear, but for now, let’s continue through the sequence of events.

I didn’t know how much time had passed during the subconscious pull of eternal return. Not the return to the afterlife, not yet, but to the vehicle I knew best.

Thanks to the blindfold, my vision stayed black even if the rest of me snapped back. I heard a deep, lisped voice complain about how ‘this one is dead’ and ‘we will take you to recover the losses.’

I couldn’t get past the tonality, the prosody — the delivery of words. This accent went beyond familiarity, it beyond fantasy or entertainment mediums. The closest cousin might be a digital text-to-voice, if the audio corrupted and the speakers were swamped with slime.

It made my skin crawl. Even the mardekkle’s chimeric calls were more relatable than this foreign force of sound.

As my other senses expanded, my body, like all other bodies, remained caged. The only recent addition was the mist I could taste in the air. It descended from above, its nature more supernatural than meteorological.

Female voices continued their chant, and I tried to assess my lost time. Seconds, perhaps?

Unsure of how I lost ol’Bigfoot, my greater concern became my searing and soaking wet left arm. In my current condition — of bleeding profusely — if I tried another OBE, my human body would fail. And even then, the chances of finding another controllable beast to contest the night’s darkest reinforcements…

I spit out air.

So this is it.

I don’t even know what the fuck this is.

Suddenly, others started screaming, drowning out the measured chants all around me. I didn’t know if they were getting injured or just playing a tune fit for tonight’s terrors. More yelps of pain followed, and I knew the few slaves who escaped my hole failed to escape their deaths.

Apparently the buyers rewarded freedom with death.

And bad got worse as the vocal expressions of alarm made a trail in my direction. The around me herd parted somehow.

Were the buyers moving towards me?

Blindfolded, I braced myself for the next wild ride.

Would I get a head start on hard labor?

Or was I tonight’s bohemian boy?

With my hands bound and my eyes blind, my only retreat was my mental temple — the last line of defense. The ticking temple is my oldest trick, a classic that always calmed me.

I started counting down from 1,000 as each number transformed into another brick laid.

Nine hundred ninety-nine.

Nine hundred ninety-eight.

The thumping of heavy creatures grew close, close enough to have my body harmonize with their beat.

Nine hundred ninety… ninety — fuck — nine hundred ninety…

My blood chilled as a cold and clawed appendage seized my arm.

‘NINE HUNDRED NINETY-SEVEN,’ I calmly shouted in my head.

Nine hundred — I was being pulled out by staggering strength. The calloused designs of the buyer’s — palm? — drove my skin up the wall. But no further. I would die before I’d let panic take me.

— ninety-six.

It’s voice, now very close, commanded in a new language I didn’t recognize. A cold fusion of Latin and Arabic phonology, my best guess.

My foolishly eager imagination tried to create a visual of the inhuman buyer, but in my grounded temple I saw only the number — nine hundred ninety-five.

As I walked with the pull of forces beyond my understanding, my feet left the metallic mobile prison and returned to the tactile crunch of natural flooring.

The oppressive coat of humidity left my skin after a few more steps. The mystery mist and the airborne sweat of terrorized slaves had unnaturally dissipated from my perception.

The buyer and his smooth but cratered touch held my arm like a snake wrapped around its prey. I inferred they wanted to evaluate me, as if I was a product from a shelf.

Nine hundred ninety-four.

A labored voice made its plea. “He’s not scourged. I swear.”

The newsboy trafficker survived?

“Take off the blindfold,” he continued weakly. “If he reacts, then you know.”

“I prefer it on,” I interjected. “Gotta protect my eyes from this freak show.”

My throat went dry as soon as I stood up for myself. No one spoke again, but their grip tightened in enough of a response. I sensed the lack of familiar blood flow in the cruel embrace. Did they come from a freezer?

The air shifted as my blindfold adjusted. Light came in and the cloth showed life, but the slaves in front did not. Clear as a daydream, they stared at me motionlessly. The sight gave me shivers, as if I was caught in a horror scene. And yet, I saw only them.

Somehow, all evil gracefully stood behind me.

But then I blinked and the blank faces took on color. I detected a new desperation from my fellow enslaved. Their subtle chanting had ceased, and I heard a shout.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

The French word for run?

They dramatically gestured at me as the word was thrown my way. My blindfold settled back down before I earned the right to see any further.

Then a commotion followed from the buyers, of which I guessed there were two. They spoke quickly, with agitation. The refrigerating grip left my right arm as I heard thumps move towards the mass of slaves.

They banged on the cages, perhaps out of frustration. I’m so confused.

Gracefully, they left me back in the dark world of a blindfold, but what I witnessed before stayed in mind. That mist descending over the cage is definitely not natural. Whatever it was, the tides had turned. Whatever was happening concerned the buyers dearly.

One of them growled a warcry before I heard the snap of a tree. And then — a monstrous crash.

Thuds from the forest emanated towards me in a decreasing tempo and volume.

Was it over? Did they leap away?

“I should’ve brought the — the gagging medallion,” a trafficker said with a painful laugh. “Looks like we’re all screwed now, chuckaboo.” I felt a hand pat my foot. The newsboy was somewhere below, perhaps crawling on the ground. He tried to speak again but failed because of a big cough.

I had no more patience to watch — to listen to the world pass me by.

Pressing my face to the ground and tugging away, I abrasively removed my blindfold in the only way I could. I was no longer worried about the reactions of my captors. If I wanted to run, I needed to see.

The dramatics of the slaves continued, especially those squished into the deep end of the shipping container-sized prison.

Something must be coming.

And it’s not mardekkles… After all, besides the pebble-chucking and massive arms, they seemed harmless.

With my eyes now freed from their stitched prison, I spied the corpse of my last costume. Bigfoot lay spread eagle with a big hole in his chest.

Yeah, that harmlessness might change if they see this.

Newsboy had stabbed a steak knife into it’s hairy arm, as if it constituted some kind of comical revenge.

I looked to the other corpses, worming or otherwise. If newsboy was toast, then they were practically cremated. The lanterns my creature tossed blew through them like cannonballs. I knew I’d suffer the weight of taking their lives later, and whether or not they deserved it was a question that only bought me time in that mental accounting.

More importantly, that dinner knife would come in handy.

My hands were bound, but not enough. I was no one’s prisoner, and I proved it with a serrated separation. With my hands roughly freed from the poor knot work, I considered my options again.

I needed tools. To fight, for flight, for fortune, for freedom, for anything.

I glared at newsboy, the last living trafficker.

Decisions made, I reached into his pockets, the wool material course to the touch. “Y-you…” he protested my invasion with futility. “He-heal…”

Nothing in pocket A.

Pocket B… I pulled a nasty rag out. And then the clink of valuables followed. Actually, they flooded out; the bonfire allowing their meager shadows to dance frantically.

I don’t know what I expected, perhaps a pocket knife or some quarters, but I got the unexpected loot drop of a lifetime instead. These little round trinkets rolled across the campground, making an impressive escape from his pocket.

I grabbed one fast, like a frog to a fly. They weren’t metal. Not coins, but carved… and crystal?

About the size of a shrinkflated McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, their value gleamed self-evidently.

Specifically, I recalled the artificially rounded, medallion-shaped egg patty at the center of every sandwich.

Medallions…?

I grabbed as many medallion-sized crystal coins as I could, feeling like a lucky bystander in a bank heist gone wrong.

For the first time tonight, I had the biggest smile on my face.

A few rolled with slapstick flair. Lost to the moment, I was chasing tires off fast cars without another thought in the world. There might have been yelling in the background, but my memory didn’t record it during this review.

‘And where do you think you’re going little fella?’ I told the medallion that rolled the farthest. She was pretty, her smoky quartz figure filled with a golden core. I kissed her appropriately, like an Italian cousin. Gotta be worth someth—

A big waft of smelly mist broke my celebration. Damn, I almost forgot.

I turned to re-acclimate myself to my surroundings and the greater situation. The creeping fog had grown to encompass the entire cage, concealing it and the perimeter. But I wasn’t near its perimeter, I was across from it, tucked by a tent.

Strangely, all the slaves had snuck back inside the cage. Even the ones that slipped through my hole after the buyers fled.

I tasted the air the again, curious about its origin.

Irony…

Oh.

It wasn’t mist; it was blood. The air was damp with it.

My vision jittered from side to side as I scanned the whole damn camp. My radar returned more than a blip of fear. This was the Rorschach inkblot test from hell.

A withering blob took form before my eyes as my brain struggled to process the image.

It was a huge black bat perched on the back of poor newsboy. The statuesque creature noticed my gaze and met it with eyes so red they could be infrared.

I froze. It wasn’t just the sight, but the lack of any sound. This nightmare played out in dead silence. Until a shout finally reached my ears. “OPOBAWA. OPOBAWA.”

The prisoners got it across, but the word’s meaning was unknown to me, and knowing mattered little right now. That giant bat was a man-eater, I knew enough.

I didn’t have time to count down to calm, so I moved on instinct. It was a suitable replacement. Snapping back to the misty prison, my first instinct was to free them and flee.

The winged devil screeched all hell at me, sending my side to the floor and my head into a daze. From what my eyes recorded, it rose without a flap of its taut black wings.

It levitated?

Then, with even more confusion, I watched as it flapped for the first time, blasting the bloody fog away with an inundation of fresh air.

The prisoners screamed in response. Was the mist protecting them?

The batwinged beast, the opobawa, had a new fixation and it came in a densely packed delivery. I have no way to stop this thing, not without a new costume and my left arm is already halfway to numb. With no OBE option to save my ass, my heart rate challenged me in unearthly ways I hadn’t experienced before.

This scenario crashed into me with all the familiarity of a freak car accident. Only this time, the options were reversed. Do I flee and save myself or try to fight this real-life mothman… for strangers in a cage?

My troubled train of thought only added to the rising panic within me.

The fear of regret, of failure, of sin, of — I didn’t know exactly.

The fear of loss?

What would be worse? Sleepless nights of strange regrets, further burdening my body, or risking my terminal vehicle for a battle to save the many — the many who might live long healthy lives.

They were strangers that I’d never see again, but I didn’t want to be separated in this fashion.

TC guaranteed me a short lifespan, I’m screwed either way. But for everyone else… who wouldn’t want them to live long and prosper, even if you got nothing profitable out of it?

With no more time to decide, I went with what I knew, my meticulously honed talent born from a hundred deaths.

I took a confident step forward and absolved myself of fear. Tonight, I was willfully immune to its crippling curse. And my reward was freedom. With the bonfire over my shoulder and my tail firmly between my legs, I made chance eye contact with a purple-hair slave.

“Sorry,” was all the whisper I got out before I bravely retreated into the treeline.

And then burst back out, like an idiot.

Tonight sucks.

Stockholm syndrome didn’t bring me back to my fellow slaves. It was much simpler. I was tired of running from burning disasters. I decided I’d be the burning disaster.

The bat didn’t acknowledge my dramatic reappearance or heroic inner monologue. Unfortunately, it was busy using its unwarranted strength to pull a bar clean out of the prisoner container.

The same bar I worked on earlier.

Even with its visibly flimsy muscles, the cryptid bat was about to get in and pull the screaming sardines out.

On instinct, I ran to the tent. I had seconds to pull any free cloth I could find. Bedding it is, and I threw one end into the bonfire and the other into a tight wrap around my working arm. As the sacrificial end caught the flames, I pulled it out, satisfied with my burning bed sheet. I swung it around in a sad lasso before letting the painful end hit my unwanted guest. Like a wrangler with a whip, I’d show dominance. My confidence flowed with every flaming strike.

No matter what this thing was, I knew its counter.

Talon’s beat flesh, but fire was the descendent of celestial forces.

All living things fear fire.

It’s the ultimate monster.