Smoking Power

Chapter 28

I slowly crack my eyes open to see blackness and the bright beam of a flashlight a couple of metres away from me. I groan in pain as I struggle to sit up from where I've been lying down. I feel like I had a horrible cold yesterday and decided to work out all day, nonstop, and am now left with a pounding headache and complete stiffness all over me.

Gently I raise my hand to lightly poke my tender ribs, although they feel a bit sore to touch, I'm relieved when I don't feel any giant cracks or broken bones anywhere on me. My attention is then bought to the wet, slimy, moss covered rock that I'm sprawled out across.

I cautiously look up at the bright circle of light emitting from the torch. It looks like we're in a cave of some sort. The whole place is wet with a thin layer of water lying across the cave floor in one giant puddle. To allow myself more light, I let my iris in my eyes to heat up until they're two fiery orbs. 

Still sitting on the cold ground, I look around to get a better idea of exactly where we are. The walls, roof and even on the floor, is covered in a messy mixture of vines, moss and mould. The roof is like a huge dome above us, making the dripping noise of water splashing off the walls in varies parts of the cavern echo around us in loud booms.

In the moss and vine free area on our enclosures walls, it's a sickly yellowing-brown colour that makes me want to snatch the nearest bottle of disinfectant and smoother my hands in it. Across the large space from me, there's a large lake which stretches out as far as I can see.

Finally, I look around to see where everyone else is. Declan and Clarence are still unconscious, lying in awkward positions to my right. Amber's sitting a couple of metres away from me and rubbing her head. Clark's holding the torch and pointing it around the place, trying to get an idea of where we are like I was.

I groan again in pain as I stand up, my legs are equally as stiff as I am everywhere else. Clark hears me this time and moves the beam of light, coming from the torch, so it's now pointing at me. I raise my hand to shield my poor eyes, "Ow, my eyes. Stop shining it." I say groggily and hope for the best that Clark will know what I mean.

"Oh, my apologies." Clark hurriedly moves the torch so it's pointing to the wall behind me, next to my face. "How are you?"

"Sore." I admit to him while gently rubbing the back of my neck, "Do you know where we are? Or how we got here? Or better yet, what happened to us when we got sucked into that thing?"

"I have no idea, but if I had to give a completely wild guess, I'd say that the device that pulled us in, was some kind of artificial wormhole of sorts. I'm no expert though Micky, and in all honesty, I don't know where we are or if that wild guess was even close to being partly correct."

"It ain't a bad guess." Clark and I snap our gazes towards the voice, only to see Amber walking over to us, stopping when she joins in on our mini triangle that we've made. "I reckon that you were pretty much correct with that theory of yours. The pressure of us gettin' compressed so we could fit in that thing, then suddenly returning to our original shape, was to much for our minds to handle, so we shut down for a while, letting us recharge. Goodness knows how long we've been unconscious for and if the lid of that box shut after us."

I nod at her, if the box didn't get shut then who knows how much destruction it could cause. For all we know it could suck the whole building down with it. But as I look around at all the boxes full of gifts and poles that were in the room with us, I realise that that probably isn't one of the most likely scenarios since we would see the debris and ruins down here with us.

"Did all the gifts come with us?" I ask still looking at the jumble of everything spread out across the ground. I can see what looks like a box or two and I know that Clarks got the torch that was in one of the gifts, but there's a chance that the other two could come in handy somehow, seeing as though the torch that we assumed as being useless before, has a use now.