I hid under the seat. I knew the steps would start making a sound sometime soon. It was completely silent. Only the dim reflection of the moonlight guided my eyes into the subtle rims of the plastic chair under which I was hidden. The floor was cold and the voices, oh, the voices. I had never heard this language.
It felt like that time when I travelled abroad and heard foreigners speak their tongue for the first time. They were so free but the sounds they made were like alien machines building battle ships to invade Earth. I crouched there, my head barely able to stay down under the chair. My face was warm, my hair insisted in hiding under my hands, making me pull it, making me almost fall.
I wanted to raise my hands, to stand for a bit, but I remembered the eyes that looked across the room. The ears that could amost hear my soft breathing. Luckily, it also breathed. This creature hid my frantic gasps with its own alert snores.
I stayed there for hours, and if karma existed, it would have rewarded my patience with escape, but instead, it brought the feeling of sharp needles on my head and on my knees. I wanted to scream, but I knew what fate awaited me if I did that. I tried not to scream, I tried as hard as I could, I swear. But then I just had to lift my knees. The chair moved on top of my head. The snores stopped. I was doomed. The shadow in the moonlight hit the corner of my eye.
I heard its slithering tail following each step. I could not wait. If I did, I'd seen what it had done with all the other beings of my kind, how mercilessly they had been ripped apart. No. I got up and left from the side of the tent. Perhaps if I escaped through the tiny tubes that held the luxurious roof together, it would stop.
I ran for a few seconds, prepared for a long sprint. I prepared for a hiding spot. I imagined a broken car under the white veil of the night. I hoped, at least, for a tiny rock under which I could hide. But as I came out from the other side of the tent, all I saw were thousands like me, standing there, watching me with surprise. I had broken into their space, their holding place.
I ran toward others that were just as tall as I am, maybe a bit more, just to hide in plain sight, but as I got to them, they grabbed me. They walked to the center and held me there. The bigger one used his knees to hold my arms and his hands to hold my head.
"Wait", he whispered. I almost could not hear it. The desperate breaths in the room, the quiet whispers, they all covered me with the heat of crowded warm-blooded humidity. I wanted to scream, but I did not want to alert a bloody reptile. These massive warmongers would come for sure. I knew it, I had seen it with my own eyes.
"Release me!" I whispered in a hopelessly high pitch. In this dire situation, why would he hold me? The creature had seen me, I needed to run!
All light was extinguished. Suddenly, everything became black. All breaths stopped, including mine, and no more whispers came out of anyone's mouth. The air was completely still. No sounds or perceptible vibrations reached me for almost a minute. Then, I heard a bird's singing. But it was not a bird. I had heard this sound, always in the darkness, always next to blood.
My hands and my head were abruptly released. My shoulders were grabbed instead. I was made to stand up. Then, I was pushed by all of the hands in the room in a row. I felt them passing me forward, pushing me. I struggled, but I didn't make any noise until near the end, when I finally said, not too loudly:
"stop!"
I almost cried. I wanted for them to feel empathy.
"stop!"
I said again, but this time was my last. I felt the bird's chirping get louder. Seconds later, the hands let go with a push. Where I fell, I touched with my hands something wet. I smelled my hand. It smelled slightly rotten. A movement on my floor told me all I needed to know. A thousand hands had pushed me into a creature's maw from which chirps of joy flew aplenty. I felt the presence of the throat of the vilest of beings. I released a soft moan as two hard teeth crushed my skull.
This is my entry to @jeezzle's writing contest.
The image was taken from Pixabay.
Hmm, the rules said I had to use soundinthedarkness as the first tag, but I forgot. Oopsie.