Chapter 29

There were bars between them and the monkeys. Like they were at a zoo. Only one problem.

The monkeys were on the outside. They were on the inside.

Sticks of wood, three fingers thick, were lashed together with some fibrous material, creating a massive rectangular cage to hold all of the humans. There were over forty people packed inside of it.

When the System had arrived and the world had changed, Hannah hadn’t known what to think. She’d been at work, scanning items in checkout for the thousandth time that day. Then everything shook, she fell down, heard screams, pops, the lights went out, weird blue screens, and the next thing she knew, she was waking up in the dirt and the supermarket around her was gone.

Should’ve just called in sick.

Others had been with her. Anthony from maintenance, Sandra from produce, Prem the team lead, a whole bunch of customers. Nobody had known what was happening. Nobody could even have guessed.

At first, they’d tried to make sense of it. They tried coming together, checked their phones, a few people started walking in random directions hoping to find their way out of whatever cruel prank was being played, more than a few people had started crying. It had been like the weirdest trip of Hannah’s life.

Then the monkeys had come.

Hannah glanced through the wooden bars at the second wooden cage a dozen feet away. A woman was leaning against it, crying her eyes out. Only a few short days ago a man that, based on how the woman had screamed, Hannah assumed was the woman’s husband, had been taken from the cage and brought into the weird swirling ball of energy in the center of the monkey’s encampment.

He’d never returned.

She had no idea what that ball was. And she didn’t want to know.

It had been a couple days of captivity now and people were starting to get desperate. Like they hadn’t been before. Their stomachs turned and grumbled. Hannah felt like hers was starting to eat itself alive, a pain and hunger she’d never felt before. Starvation.

But there was a glimmer of hope.

“How’s it going,” she whispered, walking over and sitting down next to Anthony, doing her best to look as unsuspicious as possible.

“Having the time of my life,” Anthony whispered back. He watched the monkeys outside warily, seated on the ground, hands tucked behind his back. Hidden inside his palm was a tiny multi-tool. It had been in his pocket when the world had gone to shit. Currently, he was over halfway done with cutting the final tied bit of fiber that was holding several of the bars of the cage. Once finished, they would fall away with not but a stiff breeze.

“Almost done.”

Outside, though, was a swarm of the shrieking, hooting apes. They swung from the branches, built homes in the trees from wood and more lashings, communicated in a primitive language of clicks, screams, and crude gestures. It was terrifying. They were intelligent.

Several of the ones the blue screens described as Ripper Chimps – a name that made Hannah shudder – stood guard outside the cages. And every couple hours they’d take another person out, never to be seen again.

Hannah swallowed heavily, nodding her head toward Anthony. A pit of anxiety was building within her stomach and it felt ready to explode.

They’d have to fight their way out. Then blindly run through the forest, chased by animals much stronger and faster than themselves. Most wouldn’t make it. Hell, maybe none of them would.

But they had to try. They had to take the risk. Better to die fighting than do nothing and become enslaved by brutal animals.

Tears wet the corners of her eyes.

The others in the cage knew the plan already. They’d kept it as hushed as possible while Anthony subtly worked throughout the past days, but they were all ready now. From the children that had been shopping with their parents, to Earl the elderly greeter.

She locked eyes with a few of them as she scanned the cage. They all nodded back, gazes hard. Ready.

“It’s done,” Anthony said, rising to his feet. “The ties are cut. All it’ll take is a good push and the whole northern wall will fall.”

A large man in his forties named Trent clapped Anthony on the shoulder with a proud, fatherly smile. He was wearing army fatigues, a big strong jaw, and stubble from not shaving while in captivity. Then he looked around at everyone who’d all been thrown into this nightmare together.

Trent’s voice came out low and rough, but steady. “Good work, kid. Listen up, all of you.”

The cage quieted. All they could hear was the usual badgering sound of the apes outside. They sounded even more furious than normal.

“I’ll be the first out. I’ll run one direction and draw as many of those things toward me as I can. While they’re distracted, you get the other cage open. Help everyone you can. Then you run the other way. I don’t care where. Just away from here and toward a chance.

“We don’t know why this happened. We don’t know where our families are, or our homes, or our country. But I’ll tell you what I do know.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He jabbed a finger toward the bars, out into the forest.

“We are not meant to die in a cage. We are not prey. We are people. And people get back up. People find a way. Whatever the world looks like now… whatever monsters this System is throwing at us… it made one big mistake.”

He stepped forward, gripping the loosened bars.

“It messed with the wrong planet.”

Trent roared, shoving the bars, tearing it away from the cage. It crashed flat down onto the ground and he charged over it, waving his arms, screaming with his entire gut.

Hannha blinked.

Trent slowed down, then stopped completely. He looked around with a confused, dumbfounded expression.

The forest was silent. The monkeys were, inexplicably, gone.

“What the hell?” Trent scratched his head.

Far off in the distance, Hannah could see several of the ape’s swinging through the trees, moving away from the primitive city in the forest they’d been building and toward… something. What was going on?

A thundering crack echoed through the forest. One of the far-away trees groaned, cracked, then crashed to the ground.