The Cave Chapter 5
By Hades502
- 277 reads
The Cave Chapter 5
Shawn sighed as he came out into the large cavernous opening. “I’m going to sit down for a moment,” he said, grabbing a bench.
Tommy continued to scan the area ahead of him. It was a large opening in the usually smaller cave system. He had noticed when they had come through here before, several tents set up in this area. He hadn’t looked closely, but there were people working here, and it seemed that they had oxygen available to those who winded themselves too much on the hike through the cave to get this far. Another pavilion seemed to be selling souvenirs. Now, they mostly seemed abandoned and a large group of Chinese people were congregating several yards away from them.
“Have a seat,” said Shawn. “We might be waiting her a long time before we’re rescued.”
“You don’t think we should try to get back to the entrance?”
“No, we are close to an exit. We don’t know what damage has done throughout the cave. Maybe impassable damage. When we are rescued, it will be near an exit. There are only two here, right?
“It may be impassable, but we may be able to get through. We might be able to get out of here.” As far as we know, the entrance is still wide open.”
“As far as we know, it is impossible to get there.”
Tommy waited several moments to respond, examining the area, looking at the ceiling, not that he knew what he was looking for. He started to feel…good. “There’s people here…at least.”
*****
It seemed ridiculous to Shawn to walk back three kilometers through the cave. There could be massive cave-ins anywhere, in the roughly two-mile walk, that prevented them from going farther. There were employees here, they had probably already called with a landline, or radioed at least, to let people outside know the situation. “Why don’t we ask them what’s up? Or…you ask them, as I never bothered to learn the language.”
“Yeah, yeah, I will ask them, but if they suggest we go, then, we need to go, okay?”
“Fine, but don’t lie to me about what they say. I’m tired, man. The adrenaline is wearing off. I’m almost shaking.”
“Shawn…”
“What?”
“What the fuck are they doing?”
Shawn had seen some strange stuff in China. Once he had witnessed an elderly woman pull up her dress, drop her panties, and take a shit on the sidewalk in Wuhan. He had never seen anything like this. As he drew his gaze up from the ground, he noticed some bizarre behavior. A woman was repeatedly running her nails down her face, drawing blood. One man was eating another woman’s hair, just shoving as much of her long hair as he could, into his mouth while the woman groaned with sexual pleasure. Another woman was gyrating in a strange, never-before-seen sort of dance while she disrobed. A man, completely nude except for his shoes and socks, was staring at the earth and masturbating. Then Shawn noticed another figure running at top speed, full of aggression, toward the group with a large rock in his hand.
*****
Long was almost dragging Duoduo behind him, her inability to keep up with his pace infuriated him. Every time she lagged and offered even slight resistance, he pulled her arm…hard. Finally, he used more strength and a soft, almost wet, popping sound occurred as he pulled her arm out if its socket.
Duoduo screamed in pain, and was given a slap across the face for her trouble.
Long realized that he had his knife out. He almost felt like cutting her due to his complete lack of respect for her and the jarring effect her scream had had on his ears.
Why did he have his knife out? He wondered. What good would it do against falling stone? He wasn’t sure, but did not return it to his sheath.
*****
Misaki suddenly experienced a tremendous feeling of overwhelming foreboding. Usually when this happened, she would soon have something bad happen to her, usually something minor, like realizing she had forgotten something necessary like her keys or her phone or she would get too much work to accomplish in one day at the office. Once she felt this way quite strongly and found out later that her mother had been hospitalized. She always trusted this intuition.
She looked at the stalactites and stalagmites again, an eerie mouth seemed to be filled with unnatural teeth, just waiting to start gnashing and biting human prey. The boy’s parents were speaking to each other, but the boy continued to stare at her. The feeling of foreboding was stronger than it had ever been.
*****
As Wei held his wife, he also noticed the boy staring at her. It wasn’t so much the fact that he was looking at her that bothered him, it was the way he was looking at her. There was a certain madness evident in his gaze, the likes of which Wei had never encountered before.
*****
Something felt different. In all his imaginings Hongqi always had some sort of doubt that lingered somewhere in the back of his mind. Suddenly it was gone. He felt good. He took a deep breath and realized that he had never felt better in his life.
*****
Duoduo had had enough. She realized that a week or so prior. She was going to leave. She just couldn’t do this anymore. However, she knew not to cause any sort of trouble when Long was in a mood like this.
*****
Phil began to shake with cold…with pain? It didn’t matter.
*****
From the beginning of man’s existence he has sought to explain his world. He created gods to explain natural phenomena. He created myths to explain his nature. It is so prevalent in man to have answers to things that he might not comprehend, that he still does things to this day to explain what he perceives to be unexplainable.
Once a major religion was established, it was often difficult to contradict it, pain of death was not unheard of, to go against this holy construct, and still occurs to this day. If something unexplainable occurred, it was easier to somehow find fault with it, consider it to be evil, against the norm, against the status quo, against the dominant religion. Then, once it has been established to be some sort of blasphemy, eradicate it, often violently, full of zealous, religious fervor.
Yet, there were some who opted to consider things unexplainable, unknowable, to be magic. Magic was a simple way to explain things one did not understand. Supernatural forces. It was easy and convenient to explain away things with magic. Then, it became easy to fool people with magic. Often magic and religion became one in the same.
Science came, it started slowly, but it was a different way to explain things, a different way entirely to seek truths. Only a few were interested in this concept at first, separating themselves from the flock mentality in attempts to discover the causes of reality. Science, being quite different than religion, was slow to develop, as imagination didn’t play a key role…usually.
Science was easily corrupted, often used against the truth by the twisting of words and theories to essentially promote the gods. Science was used to discover what some conceived to be magic, and then the magic was often used to prove the religion. Some took a more direct route and attempted to use science to remove all doubt as to the existence of their gods.
With science came vanity, often superiority. This vanity in some ways was understandable as science proved itself to be a better way to examine the known universe. However, scientists often became too sure of their theories, too sure in their beliefs, too sure in their science. Some claimed to know all, claiming impossibilities where possibilities actually existed or claiming possibilities when there was no chance at all for such things to physically happen.
In truth there are many things that are known to the human race and its science, and still many things that the human race cannot fathom, that the science cannot explain. There exist elements that are not recorded on any chart. There exist compounds with effects that have yet to be imagined.
One such compound, a gaseous substance, can accumulate in the magmatic outer core of the planet. Shifts in the earth’s crust usually don’t usually affect the core, but occasionally there is created an escape route for the gas. Very rarely the gas accumulates, very rarely does it escape the core, and even much more rarely does it hit the surface. In the history of the planet, not just the human history, but the entire history, spanning billions of years, the gas has only reached the surface seven times. Usually it dissipates in the earth’s atmosphere shortly after it breaks through the lithosphere. Only twice it has made contact with animal life forms. The first time it immediately killed a small family of unnamed mammals, similar to what we call field mice today. The second time it made contact with animal life was very recently, in Taiji Cave.
The unnamed, because it has been undiscovered by man, gas is essentially a poison. If a massive dose is exposed to an air breathing animal it will immediately die. If smaller doses are ingested then the gas can be far more effective at pain-relief than morphine, far more hallucinogenic than strong LSD or peyote, and these effects can occur within tens of seconds of inhalation, although the effects can vary between individuals.
The gas was released in two places in the Taiji Cave. It didn’t dissipate as quickly as it could have because it had not quite reached the surface, but instead hit the stagnant, closed-off air of the cave. The dissipation process was slower.
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