Chapter 93

93 Weird Welcomes

We were now in the thick of the woods, safe from the vehicles that were chasing us for now. We needed to find a way out of this city though, but where could we go?

We were currently in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere! Not a single person around for miles. I didn’t even see anyone anywhere near us for at least ten miles.

“Hey um, someone got the pieces?” Greg asked. Tisiah raised the pieces of the Cybertron and Greg noddingly said, “Oh, nice work.” Then he gave us a thumbs up and walked away with his phone in his hand.

I wondered what he was doing with it at this moment but didn’t ask. He must’ve been checking some social media or something.

September said something into her watch, and the screen lit up and showed a map of the city with our location marked on it. We were right in the center of it, and there weren’t any buildings close to us other than this warehouse. “What’s this place?” I asked her.

She put her finger on it and said, “Abandoned warehouse.”

“What does that mean?” I asked her, not really knowing what she was talking about.

“Something I guess,” September returned. She then tapped on her watch again and said, “I think we should head inside.”

Nikki looked at her watch as well, and then looked back at us.

.....

“I’m not sure about that,” Nikki fumbled with her words. “It looks weird.” Malachi sighed, but I think he already knew that she wouldn’t want to go into it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Malachi said, looking at Nikki with wide eyes and a disgusted face. “You don’t want to go inside? What’s wrong with you?” He looked at her with shock and confusion, and his face became a mask of utter disbelief.

“Who would?” Nikki argued, “Why would I go inside? I mean, we’ve just seen a whole bunch of people trying to kill us. What makes you think they wouldn’t be in here?”

“We would’ve been dead already,” Malachi returned, but then he took a deep breath and sighed again before continuing. “We wouldn’t have made it here if we weren’t so lucky,” he said. “I’d prefer not to break that streak.”

Nikki looked at him as if he was insane, but it seemed as if he wasn’t going to budge. Then all of a sudden, agents rolled out from the trees like a wave of death, their guns raised and pointed directly at us.

“Don’t move!” they shouted, but something was different.

What’s going on, what’s going on? My heart started pounding like mad and my heart was racing with fear and anxiety. But then I looked at their vests, and that itself cleared up everything. “Whoa, we’re a part of the YMPA!” I shouted, as they all stopped moving and stared at me with surprise on their faces.

Then suddenly a man with a suit and a tie stepped out from the crowd and. He was a little shorter than six with black hair that was slicked back. He had a mustache that made him look like he had a walrus mustache, and he had black sunglasses on as well.

“Hmm,” he muttered thoughtfully, as his eyes focused on me for a few moments. Then he turned around, and gave a signal to the crowd behind him and they started walking back into the forest. “Thank you,” I said breathlessly. I was scared to death, so I didn’t know if he heard me or not.

But then he turned back around to me and nodded his head slowly in greeting, as if he knew I could see him but I didn’t say anything. My heart pulsated wildly in my chest as I watched him walk away and disappear back into the forest with the other agents.

But then he stopped and said, “Follow me please.”

He had a weird voice, and it sounded almost like he was talking through a speaker instead of talking normally, but I was sure that that was just my imagination. I looked at September, who looked at me, then Nikki, who was staring at me like she had no idea what was going on or who I was talking about.

We followed him through the thick trees that were surrounding the warehouse, and I could see that the inside of the building had been converted into some kind of living situation with bunk beds and couches that looked like they hadn’t been used in years.

The outside of the warehouse was quite... dingy, if I may use that word to describe it. There was graffiti everywhere and there were broken windows and boarded up doors everywhere that looked like they hadn’t been used for years.

“What in the. . .” Nikki muttered under her breath.

We all entered the building through a broken door, and we found ourselves standing on top of the metal staircase that went down into the basement. “So where are we going exactly?” I asked, but the man said nothing at all. He just started walking down the staircase and motioned for us to follow him down into the basement where there were three rooms that were closed off with thick metal doors, each with an iron keypad and an old-fashioned key that was stuck in the padlock of the door.

I wondered who had been locked up down here for all those years, but then I saw the names written in ink. “Is this a prison?” Malachi asked, and then he chuckled darkly as he read through the names.

Nikki looked at them too but she didn’t say anything for a long moment and she just stared at the name that was on the second door. Then the man turned to us and gave a smile. “Hello, I’m Captain Vance,” he said as he looked at each one of us in turn, as if memorizing our faces.

“You’ve somehow, in some dastardly way, found our secret base. It’s exactly finished, because we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with our internet connection difficulties. But being that you are an ally of EMO, I’d be more than happy to keep you guys here. If any problems are made with you, just tell me.”

“What do you mean by that?” Nikki asked.

“You see, when any other person from EMO comes, we treat you like students. The only difference is the classes you’ll be taking which we’ll see from your school history and we’ll figure things out,” he said, still grinning.

He then turned to September and said, “What’s your name?”

“September,” she replied in a voice so low it sounded like it was being whispered from the bottom of her voice itself. He nodded. He made us introduce our names, but I’ll spare you all of that because it was boring and really long. But he seemed to like our names anyway and gave us an even wider smile as he looked at us.

Then, a girl walked by and my eyes widened like saucers when I saw her. It was a young girl who had short light-red hair and she had a black shirt on with some sort of insignia on it that I didn’t recognize. Her face was masterfully constructed so that she had a straight nose and sharp cheekbones with a straight jawline. She had her eyes half-closed and she seemed like she was either tired or bored but I couldn’t tell which because she was walking so slow with her arms crossed behind her back.

Her form was lithe and athletic with legs that were tanned and toned from swimming or something like that. I wondered if she had been training for sports like gymnastics or something because she seemed so agile and graceful in her movements.

She walked up to Vance and gave a small salute with her hand to her forehead like she was a soldier or something.

“Thank you, um...guys, this is my partner and second in command, Sergeant Yvonne,” Vance said, pointing his thumb to her as he introduced her to us.

“Is she like your age?” Greg asked, being that the man looked forty.

“No, in fact, she’s about his age,” he said, pointing at me. Hope fluttered, and I thought it might burst from my chest at any second. But then again, Nikki and September also like me, so maybe they felt the same way?

Then Vance continued to talk to Sergeant Yvonne, “Yvonne, what’s going on here?”

Preview:

“Just a report,” she responded. Her voice was soft, and her tone was very low as well. It was hard to tell if she was tired or bored, but I figured it might have been the latter considering she was a soldier of some sorts.

I could listen to it all day.

“Alright, we’ll review it in my office. But for now, show them our underground base,” he said.

I looked outside, seeing the mellow trees. Clearly doesn’t look underground, unless there’s another building inside of it. But it doesn’t look like it’s big enough to have another building inside of it either.

“Underground, sir?” I asked, but Vance laughed as he responded to me.