Suddenly all noise stopped and the light vanished. Silence filled the cabin once again. Fear and panic had made the people hyperalert to any kind of noise from outside, the air filled with the sour and miserable smell that the old man, or whoever had been the one retching, had left behind.

  Still no noise came from outside. Then suddenly a tremor ran through the subway, and it slowly started to move again. "I think we are moving again." One of his friends turned toward him. "What the heck was that?" Nemo shook his head but soon realized that none of them could see him.

  "I don't know, and I don't think I want to find out."

  The whole subway erupted in a low murmuring whisper as people started to quickly converse with each other. Fen was also among these people as he turned to the group.

  "I don't know, but Mr. Harris once told me that in the rare case that something sees a light from a carriage, the things from below come to investigate it. Apparently he has already lived through something similar a few times, but he says nothing ever happened, no matter how bad the situation seemed."

  "Then why the hell don't they make these things lightproof?" Mathis asked,

  Suddenly the carriage went silent again. Then a voice from the front of the carriage took up Mathis's thought.

  "Yeah, why don't you make them lightproof? Like out of a solid piece of metal, like a U-boat?"

  The question was directed at the officer of the police force. But that man remained silent either because he too didn't know why or he was not qualified to tell.

  Soon the subway resurfaced, and light filled the cabin. Then a woman screamed. Nemo could not see why, but as the doors slowly and with a disgusting creak opened, the mass of humans quickly vacated the cabin. As he was exiting with the others, he finally saw what had evoked a scream from the women.

  It was where the man with the phone had presumably fallen. Now there was nothing. Nemo had assumed that he had left with all the other people, but that did not seem to be the case. Instead, the place where he had thought to maybe see a human body was covered in a slimy blue sludge, maybe the substance the man had puked, or maybe... in horror he thought that the man himself could have become that thing on the ground.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  As Nemo left the compartment together with the others. He was surprised to see many people standing around the group that had just exited the subway. Police, an ambulance, and some military were all present at the scene. The passengers were guided toward white tents.

  Together with his friends, he was ushered into one. There they finally had a moment to calm down.

  Heatedly they discussed what had just happened when an officer came and took one of them for questioning. The reason for the relief center quickly became clear: the government wanted them to recount what they had experienced and recommend them to counseling if the event happened to be too traumatic for them.

  Nemo was called as the third person from his group. He entered the backroom of the tent where a girl a few years younger than him sat. Then he finally was sure that what he had experienced had to do with the tainted side of the world. With a sigh, he sat down.

  The girl looked at her questionnaire and started asking the questions one by one.

  Where did you come from? Where were you going? Where do you work? What did you hear? What did you see? Do you know the person responsible? When she asked him if he knew what happened to the man, he shrugged.

  "I don't know what happened; as much as I know, the man got pushed, and then, I think it was him, he threw up."

  "Did you perhaps see where he went? Did you see him leave?"

  Nemo shook his head.

  "No, I was at the other end of the carriage. The only thing I know is that at the place where he should have fallen, there was some kind of weird, jelly-like blue substance."

  The girl showed emotion for the first time at this response.

  "What are you talking about?"

  Nemo, shocked by the sudden question, stuttered.

  "Well, when I exited the subway, at the place where I heard the man fall, I saw a jelly-like blue substance."

  The woman's eyes opened in shock, and she dashed out of the room, much quicker than he would've thought possible for a human. From outside he could hear the voice of a girl yell.

  "Quick, it was still in the carriage half an hour ago; with the damage it suffered, it could not have gotten very far."

  In the next moment, many things happened.

  Alarms blared across the station. Uniformed figures rushed past the tent's entrance, their movements a blur of coordinated chaos. Nemo sat frozen in his chair, the questionnaire abandoned on the table between them.

  The girl—if she was even human—hadn't returned. Whatever that blue substance meant had triggered an immediate response protocol that no civilian was meant to witness. Nemo was unsure what exactly he was supposed to do, but he thought it would be a bad idea to just leave. He had a feeling that it was all connected to his awakening.

  The longer the girl took to return, the more nervous Nemo became. He was sure he hadn't done anything wrong; he was just on his way to spend one last day with his colleagues. That much should be alright, no? Nemo shook his head; he felt overwhelmed, his mind full of questions. And he was hungry, so hungry, even though he had just eaten.

  Then he felt something on his chest and absentmindedly pulled it away from his body to check what was going on. And there on his chest sat a transparent and blue little squid that looked remarkably similar to the blue goop he had seen on the subway.