Midnight Malfunction

Chapter 1

Ryan was desperate to find an exit from the building he had found himself in. He found out just now that it was full of them. The building looked like some kind of factory and Ryan thought that that could be a nice hideout just for the night. Unfortunately, when he entered the building, piles of metal had fallen, blocking the entrance. Of course, like always, he thought wrong.

'Why do i even trust myself anymore,' he complained to himself quietly, 'Because I have no one else to go to or even to trust, that's why.'

The place was pretty much empty, there was no machinery, nothing except piles of scrap on the floor. Ryan looked up to the ceiling that was made of glass panels slanting up and down. He saw that a part was missing. There was a platform just under it extending from one end of the factory to the other. He spotted some broken piles of metal piling up on the opposite side of the place. On the top there was a ladder that he thought could reach the platform under the broken ceiling. The problem was that they could hear him. They were bunched together. The horrifyingly annoying apes, like Ryan would call them, were communicating in some sort of language that their intelligent minds had made up almost on the spot after they were created. Yet again, the horrible memory of how it all happened popped up in Ryan's mind, overwhelming him to the point in which he couldn't think straight. He remembered his parents leaving him every day at 7.00 a.m. to go to work, coming back at 9 in the evening. Ryan had to eat the breakfast his Mom made him every morning before they went to work, it was always the same sandwich with lettuce, tomatoes and slices of ham. He was then left to go to school alone, eat the remains of the previous day's dinner for lunch, do his homework and get ready for the next day. Ryan never really judged his parents. They were scientists and he knew how important their jobs were. Every single day they would repeat how lucky they were to be a part of this experiment and how important it was for them to succeed.

'It will be revolutionary!' his Mom declared one night, 'Just think about it. If we learn the secrets of gene evolution, we can learn to evolve our bodies and mind, we will be able to avoid apocalypses, we can travel to other planets freely!'

Now he just laughed at the idea. "We will be able to avoid apocalypses,". They had only made matters worse. If only they hadn't gone too far, if only they had let Mother Nature do her thing, if only... Ryan pleaded for his parents to come back, to stop, to look at life the way it was... It was just too sad, too depressing, too unwanted to be real. Their experiments on our cousins, the monkeys, weren't successful. At least not the way people wanted them to be. The apes backfired, ran away from the laboratories, killing every single scientist that was in there.

Ryan snapped back to reality: 'The past is the past Ryan, just let it go, Mom and Dad wouldn't want you to give up now, would they,' He had started talking to himself a while ago, when he was separated from everyone he knew, that's what kept him comfortable all these two months of living a nomadic lifestyle.

The apes were bunched all the way in the back of the establishment, making it easier for Ryan to sneak up to the pile of junk and go unnoticed. Sneaking, and all-in-all crouching, was something Ryan despised because of the heavy bag he carried on his bag. Yes, he carried only the things he needed most , and,yes, he needed a lot. Lucky for him, he only needed to stay close to the wall and be careful not to step on broken glass. Sounded simple enough.

He walked slowly across the room, keeping an eye on those pesky little apes, just in case they turned around and it was time to run. Eventually, he got to the junk pile and climbed up it. The pile was sitting next to the wall and was very tall, so the creatures didn't see him.

'Maybe this is where they piled their garbage,' Ryan thought, 'but if that's so i hope no one ate something disgusting, maybe like some croissant,' Ryan detested croissants, they made him feel sick and dizzy, he felt like he needed to vomit.

Nevertheless, he made his way up the pile, almost not moving at all, slowly taking the ladder and placing it stably leaning on the platform. He climbed up and pulled the ladder up so he could reuse it to get on the roof. Interestingly enough he saw lights coming from the top. The lights were of warm colour, supposedly produced by fire. Ryan thought that maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea to go outside, but at the same time, it was worth a shot. So he put the ladder on the wall, climbed up, and, to his surprise, he saw...