The Feeding Season Page 8
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None of the Gatherers tried to stop him. They were thankful that someone else, instead of them, would do the task.
Magar had sensed his colleagues’ feelings of primal fear, which causes people to turn against each other. That's what helped him decide categorically to be the one. He also was scared, very scared, but if he had the chance to save at least one of his friends, it would be worth the risk. He had to try, otherwise, he would be alone without any experience in this wild wasteland among a group of frightened boys. In this situation, you could only depend on your true friends.
As he neared the zone of the descent, Magar stopped to have a look around. He tried to get his bearings on where he and his friends had landed, but it was proving to be unexpectedly difficult. Fragments that had fallen off the Fortress were strewn everywhere and the ground was trampled with several footprints, swerving here and there in countless intersecting directions. Amongst all of this gaped giant craters, whose dark interiors caused Magar to shiver. Upon remembering the monstrous tentacles his hair stood on end. His desire to get away from that place as fast as possible was starting to prevail, but he clenched his jaw and bit his tongue to get a hold of himself. Since he had come this far, there was no reason to give up.
Magar continued forward, giving the frightening holes as wide a berth as possible. No matter how hard he looked, he was unable to find even one survival suit, and he was sure that he had seen how several of the boys had fallen on the ground and had just stayed there. There should have been at least ten broken survival suits from his group alone, but now he found none. An eerie feeling began to creep into his mind and once again he felt hellishly uncomfortable.
Suddenly Magar heard a strange sound that was coming from far away. Something was rising from deep below his feet and he felt the ground vibrating, and the vibrations were getting stronger. It was too late to run, instead he just froze in place hoping that he would not be noticed. Then, only a few meters away, one of the craters erupted and out of the big cloud of dust flew all kinds of survival suit parts. The same thing happened at some of the other holes that were farther away. The ground was littered with metal pieces, covered in a disgusting slime.
Magar tightened his stomach and tried to remain calm. The creature wasn't making its next attack under the Fortress. He was lucky. The creature was no longer hungry. It had now been passing the indigestible parts.
“Disgusting filthy mess!” drawled out Magar as he neared one of the piles covered in ooze. He pushed it with his foot and after he was sure that it was safe, he worked up the nerve to dig around in it.
The creature unloaded itself once more of its unneeded cargo, causing it to rain reserve survival suit parts.
Magar decided not to waste any more time. He was already certain of his friends' fates. All of the fallen boys had been pulled underground and now nothing was left of them except their dismantled suits and Shells.
“They're all dead,” sighed Magar.
His Shell was well-constructed. It was stable and solid – he would be able to carry large amounts of metal in one trip. Some of the pieces needed to be broken down further in order to be hung on the hooks of his Shell. Magar took out his built in pair of pincers, whose powerful jaws could cut anything and got to work.
After several minutes of capable laboring with his tools, Magar's ears picked up another strange and far-away noise. However, this one wasn't coming from under the ground, but right above him. Magar looked up at the gigantic hanging hull of the Fortress and watched as some openings appeared in the hull. After a few seconds some kind of machines were coming out of the openings, and started to descend. While Magar wondered what they were, they opened up one after another and he understood that they were metal cranes. They were going to collect all the precious materials left behind from the boys' landing.
“That's how they had so much metal for the Shells in the hangar!”
Magar thought of them as an odd type of competition. He sped up his pace in order to get more metal before the cranes had gathered it all back up again into the Fortress.
“I should have been working faster from the beginning.” Magar said regretfully.
His Shell was already overloaded and he slowly headed toward his colleagues, who were yelling at him from the rocky rise. The screeching moving parts gave off a massive strain that was caused by the load. In spite of that, Magar was happy that he hadn't risked his life for nothing and now it would be possible for everyone to make repairs and improvements.
While he slowly made progress, one of the cranes that were hanging above the ground came within a few meters of him. It was opened as wide as it could be, it was like a huge rusty spider, ready to jump on its prey. Magar turned towards it and saw that an electrical cable was connected to its chain.
“Damn it!” was the only thing he said. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The magnetic crane switched to collection mode with a deafening sound. Before he could succeed in doing anything, Magar was pulled toward its open maw, which closed with such strength that it smashed Magar's mechanized survival suit in seconds.