Island Of The Cryptids

22

He had locked her in the shack across the runway. She was handcuffed to a pipe, and she squirmed her arm to test the looseness. It wouldn't budge, and she gave up again. Kaeli pouted in her small corner of the room. She wasn't sick. She was sure of it. But Carlin firmly believed in it. He thought the contagion had gotten into her. But how could he know? He didn't have any proof that Hadden was the carrier of a biological weapon.

But she did agree with him on his "better safe than sorry logic". She despised being in this rank room, looking out the tarnished window towards the woods. It was a large sheet of glass, about the size of the wall. It was so dirty that you could barely see through it, and the darkness didn't help. The only thing that cast through the thick grime were the shadows of the nightly world.

She felt something she had not felt in a long time. Lonely. She felt complete isolation in that room. Nobody was there to save her, nobody was there to help. She was all alone, and she felt trapped. Almost because she literally was, but it stemmed deeper than that. Despite the small room she was in, she felt the vastness of the world outside reach to her through the walls. The titillating whispers of the jungle seduced her through the pane of glass, beckoning her out. The rain thumped against the glass, and Kaeli shivered. She thought about other things to take her mind off the daunting horrors of the outside.

Had what she felt in the plane with Manuel been the love she was longing for, or a lustful desire to share connection with another human? Had she really felt a connection like the one she previously had, the one that she thought was the one? She wasn't sure. She felt remorseful. She lamented the fact that she had lied to him. Was it a lie, really? She wasn't sure. But she had all the time to think about it.

She was trapped, cuffed to a pipe, her only company the pitiful ringing of the rain against the window.

"We want to come in, why won't you let us?" the rain called. "We're lonely, just like you. We want to come in."