Mitalee's Story

Strangers of the Park

At the late night party after their graduation Dante decides to play a prank on the school principal. Three of his minions join him in the vicious deed. They break into her car and cut a few wires. The car starts with a loud sound and was now ready to go.

Dante, now driving, half drunk, came across Maggie walking on one side of the road. This was a big surprise to him since she had a hunk of junk of a motorbike which belongs to her plumber father.

Dante slows the car to stop before Maggie’s next step frightening her to the ground. Jumping out, he offers her a hand and a smug smile. The smugness suddenly turns to curious concern as to why she’s already covered head to toe in dirt, and shaking with soft repressed sobs. She takes his hand and he gently guides her to the car, saying four words “Lets take you home…Mag” The fact that he knows her name comes as a bit of a surprise.

Their conversation soon gets personal when Maggie replies to his questions with a description of a tall hairy man, almost beastly, attacked her a while ago. She slips her dress above her knee to show him the bite marks. He doesn’t answer thinking she’s probably drunk or he’s the drunk misinterpreting what she is saying. “Iv seen you in the studio, you were all kung fu-y. How can anyone attack you and get away with it?” “Well, I didn’t exactly let him attack me that easy”

Suddenly he sees a deer walk across the road in front of him and the car screeches to a halt. Three minions still passed out in the back, passenger and driver lie stunned watching the animal watch them with abnormally small eyes for a deer. This bizarre encounter lasted for what felt like an hour. Dante, is extremely fascinated and jumps out to follow the creature. That’s when he realizes the car crash he just caused.

Behind them was Murdoch’s car, carrying a drunken Yu, who is screaming profanity out the backseat window. What brings two people from a different social circuits of school, is a drunk brother, a strict curfew, and a sister out of options but to ask Murdoch from chemistry. He who stares at cleavage while talking.

So after the fight of the short, stout nerd, and the tall, buff, school basketball team captain was done and over, the latter walked off into the woods along the road. Soon he noticed the rest were right behind him. Maggie first of them. No sooner do they reach the new strange unfolding of the evening, does Maggie reach for Dante’s firm grip on her hand. Murdoch rolls his eyes saying “That’s perfect. Not only do you get the popular ones but also the beautiful tortured artist types. Wow. Thanks man!” which was as usual ignored.

They approached a spot that looked like some sort of cleared out land for a park and found broken headlights surrounding it. The night gets weirder and weirder by the second. Minions still passed out in the car, and Yu has now urinated all the beer in the bushes. Sounds and hums coming out of the bushes make Zhui’s skin crawl and scream and run in the direction they came from. Stopped by the large man creature that attacked Maggie. The creature is disfigured in the face and has strangely stone like inexpressive eyes which frightened Zhui so much that she actually didn’t make a sound this time.

More like the beast came out the bushes and surrounded the outsiders watching with the same dead eyes..soon that changed to something more menacing. They sniffed the outsiders like fresh meat, touching and tasting their hair. One of them slowly moved in on Zhuis skin under her neck, smelling her scent and slowly applying his mouth and then the teeth. Her scream was extremely alarming to the creatures.

The beasts followed them as they fled injured and bleeding to the cars and stuffed into the principal’s car and are about to leave when they see the creatures notice the gas station and other cars and people in the distance. They begin to point and snarl and walk toward the gas station. This was only a matter of a few minutes and they went back into the woods again. Murdoch has a sick feeling that this was not the last they were to see of the strangers.

A few days later, Murdoch, whose father works for the government, formulates a plan with Yu to sneak into his office and see if they can find anything. Apparently there was a very old naval operations camp in that area. They carried out tests on human subjects and animals. The Dual core project was of Russian initiation and funded by the government and upcoming software companies. The project was nicknamed Project Warewolf.

This information is later whispered to everyone who had the same experience days before. Two days later newspapers report strange sightings with the beasts involved, attacking stores, parks, cars etc. Slowly these attacks escalated to full blown attacks in numbers of 20 or more.

Murdoch arranges a meeting for the others who encountered the strangers together. They decide to stop the creatures from attacking the rest of the town and killing people and more policemen. The daily attacks come to a curious and sudden stop. Zhui rounds up everyone and delivers an inspiring speech about how the task of stopping the beasts is their responsibility since they were the reason the town is exposed.

For weeks they train, using whatever basic resources and skills available to them.Maggie teaches the rest some moves. They decide to use the skills each individual possesses to defeat the creatures. Dantes basketball makes his tool to fight, Maggies obvious skills in martial combat take a fore frontal role. Murdoch uses his inventions and obsession with hover crafts to create gliders. Zhui uses her father’s M16 and Yu his boxing skills.

The night before the 31st of January 2010, they decide to sneak into the grounds and study the area, prepared for an attack. Stealth is key, and they move in the shadows till they find a metal dome sticking out of the ground. Dantes curious and strong kick somehow makes the dome to lift up slowly making a rusty metal sound. And a broken wood staircase leads them down to a large room with metal walls. Laying low and moving through empty rooms they stumble upon a locked door, which needed a code to be opened. Murdoch figures it out after multiple combinations followed by the word Bruzo, the president’s dog’s name, to be the date of the mass murder of subjects for experiments. His theory was that the deformed people living there at present were the test subjects.

Passing the security breach message they approach brightly lit room with nothing in it except a black box a note lying next to it and a few registers. The register has names of Jewish families and individuals who were tested on and details of an uprising and their escape. The letter reads:

He who opens the chest of destiny
Must bear on his back
The burdens of many
Hidden in black

The silence in the room with them trying to understand the riddle was broken with Dante’s swift knife on the lock. The lock fell to the floor and made the shrillest sound ever heard. The box contained black darkness which soon devoured the room around it and not they were inside the chest. Suddenly water engulfed and submerged them. Maggie thinking this is it joined her hands and closed her eyes as if she was meditating. The water began swirling around her and sooner than soon, they were thrown out of the box.

They returned from the journey to the chest tired and confused about their visions and what they meant. But sooner than too late, they hear the menace of their new neighbours approaching from behind the walls. They decide to run and start toward the way they came. On the way through the empty ground outside the beast wait for them armed with their smaller than small eyes and large pieces of metal.

The attack begins to unfold with the creatures surrounding the five. They surround and attack with the largest of them leading. At that moment Maggie begins to meditate like she did in the water. And for precisely fifteen seconds she stayed that way. Time stopped and the five became their destiny. They fight with courage they did not know before.

Leaving the grounds having won the battle, Maggie looks at the Document of Limited Power and then at Dante, “Whats plan B?”