Dura

Part 4

"I wonder what they'll think about our cellphones," Alex said.

The Neanderthals each lit one of those big cigarettes and the glow from them lit up their strong faces. One of them had green eyes.

"They're smoking a lot," Alex whispered. "Research shows that Neanderthal DNA may account for nicotine addiction..."

"Yes," I said. "And depression... You think they're depressed?"

Alex smiled, but the fear in his eyes didn't go away.

We couldn't see anything outside – except that the sun was setting – but we felt the bumps in the road as the truck drove forward at a pretty high speed. After some time, the road became smooth. Had we reached a highway? It was hard to tell. We couldn't hear any other vehicles outside. Wherever we were going, it was far away. We didn't stop until three or four hours later. It must have been in the middle of the night, but we didn't get to see the night sky. When the back doors were opened, we stepped out inside of a large garage. There were a lot of black vehicles parked under the high ceilings, but none of them looked like the one we had come with. These vehicles were smaller, like cars. All black. I guessed that this place wasn't where they usually went. The architecture was similar to Soviet-era brutalism and was as devoid of colors as everything else in this place. After what we had already seen, I wasn't surprised to discover that they had mastered electricity. However, they didn't use fluorescent lights as in a modern garage but rather pretty dim, but still large, lamps hanging from the ceiling. Again, I came to think of their better vision.

One of the hunters used a radio attached to the dashboard of their truck. After half an hour or so a small door opened, the sound of it echoing through the garage. Three people, a bit smaller, walked out of it. The group that had captured us pushed us in our backs so that we would straighten our backs. This seemed to be important to them, as they did it themselves as well. The new people didn't wear the same clothes as our capturers. They still covered their faces, not with hoods but with thin black veils. As they got closer to us, I could tell that they were women.

They looked at us, obviously fascinated. One of them picked up what looked like a walkie-talkie and said something to it without taking her eyes off us. Carefully, her colleague reached out and knocked on my helmet that I was still wearing.

We must have looked completely alien to them in our colorful gear and equipment. Although the women were smaller than the men, they were still much stronger than us. One of them led the men to another door, perhaps for questioning, and the other two – holding what looked like electric batons – took me and Alexander back to the door they had exited.

We stepped into an elevator. Unlike the elevators we were used to, this one was merely a platform. My clothes scraped against the gray concrete walls of the shaft as we went up. Looking up, I could tell the building was tall. One of the women controlled the elevator with a lever rather than just pressing a button. It was all clunky and cumbersome, but remarkably effective.

They took us to a small room, similar to an interrogation room, and had us sit down on two large chairs. A commotion took place outside of the room. People were running back and forth, talking to each other and into their radios. This scenario was nothing they had planned for. Different women entered the room from time to time. Some of them tried to talk to us, some just wanted to take a look. We sat in this room for hours. After that, two male guards took us to yet another room. It looked like a locker room that had been cleared out for our sake. They seized our belongings. Alex took his helmet off and gave it to the woman who had knocked on it, and then he carefully turned on the headlight to show her how it worked. They didn't seem too surprised by it. Most likely they had similar devices. The colorful plastic interested them much more, which I took as a sign that their technological level was maybe a hundred or fifty years behind ours.

"Plastic," Alex said without being understood.

They stripped off our clothes and pointed at a couple of showers in the middle of the room. We placed ourselves there and one of the guards turned on the water. It was too cold, but overall they didn't seem to want to cause us any pain. After the shower, we were given a pair of yellow overalls to wear. In the next room – this one looked like a classroom – we were brought to the desk at the front. A group of women – wearing protective masks – had put our smartphones on the desk.

Alex took his phone and unlocked it. This was the first time these people would see our level of technology.

"If they see this," he said to me, "if they see how advanced we are compared to them, they'll let us live."

He tried to be as pedagogical as he could, showing them the display as he pressed on the different apps. Of course, there wasn't any internet connection so he couldn't show them anything online. Their eyes were transfixed on the colorful display. The males, who didn't seem to be allowed to do anything else but to stand guard, peeked down at the display in wonder. Alex smiled at the attention, almost as if he was proud, but I felt severely uneasy. He opened his gallery and showed them a video he had taken at a large climate change protest he had attended in New York. The Neanderthal's fascination turned into worry as they watched the skyscrapers and the hundreds of thousands of people marching down the streets. After this, one of the women looked at us suspiciously as she picked up a phone on the wall and called someone.

After some deliberation, two women with batons led us into the elevator again. This time, we stopped at the last floor, maybe two-hundred meters above the surface. They took us through a corridor with what looked like office doors to the side. To my disappointment, there were no windows. A few other women stepped out of their offices and looked at us as we passed, equally mesmerized as they were scared.