I did what I had to do to survive. Wouldn't anyone?
The catastrophe was evident even as I approached the bunker. Barricades smashed, hastily vacated cars that hadn't made it far from the parking lot, debris and even concrete rubble from the corners of the bunker walls. I didn't see any bodies around, and blood was probably hard to spot against the road. I didn't know what had happened, but I was curious. How often do you get the chance to check out a secret installation? Only the bold gets to, during times like these.

I saw something still living at the far end of the lot, lying on its back, moving its extremities in a futile attempt to get somewhere. I figured that taking only a glance at disfigured bodies at this point, would only discourage me, so I pressed on, into the dark through the still open big garage-looking door. That's when I first encountered them, the remaining ones scuttling about in the aftermath.

They didn't look like any animal or insect I've seen before, so it's hard describing them. The closest thing would a cross between a mantis and a reptile. The largest ones – the yellow and black ones with those green eyes that I got a good up-close view of – must have been the warriors of the colony. They were large as scrawny-looking tigers. They were the ones that must have been responsible for the half-eaten bodies of the dispatch that lay here, one of which one of the workers still huddled over.

...but no, there were other bodies. The bodies of the unarmed people looked different. Their clothes had been stripped off, and fine lines of blood circled them all over their bodies, as if somebody had cut their skin with a very small saw-blade, often without dismembering anything. I saw one of them missing their feet, though. The cross-section was smooth, even through the bone.

Not even when I saw the bug-reptile things, was I afraid, and I can't explain why. Maybe it was simply because I had made my mind up. Maybe I had played far too many computer games to regard weird big creatures as threats. Maybe it was something else, like some warped sense of destiny.

I remember one of those big things jumping me, and I remember grabbing a hold of its weak jaw, bending it open until it snapped. I remember it screaming and trembling in pain as it released me. That's the last thing that I can remember.

I woke up the next morning, and it was like any other morning: No school, no work. Just my useless apartment of continued alienated existence. I didn't remember how I got there, and I vaguely remember something strange about the day before. I discovered something new on the hall floor, though. A piece of debris, I guessed. A cubic decimeter small black metal cube that I must have dropped on the floor. It weighted heavily in my hand. This wasn't some piece of a pipe valve. Its edges had been crafted with millimeter precision, and there were patterns like canals in it. As I stood there trying to study it, it partly opened up a hatch in itself, and shot two sharp plastic tubes straight up my arteries. That's all I remember. ...or was that a memory? I don't know.

But I do know finding that it had evolved the following morning. Unfolded into something much less familiar, like some kind of bizarre small black metal moon buggy. No, that can't be right. Nothing that small can possibly unfold like that. I don't know. I think we communicated somehow. It was asking me questions. Favorite food? Favorite color?

I woke up the next morning, and she was there. She called me daddy. Where the cube had gone off to I had no idea, but it had left something just as strange in its place: An 8 year old child. I don't even think I asked questions at this point. She told me that me having these episodes of amnesia wasn't new to her, but that it usually passed. ...and it did. From that moment on I cared like any parent would do for his daughter – maybe more. She was the prettiest, cutest princess you ever saw. Years passed, and we were happy together.

I remember a lasting memory from my early childhood that had come to haunt me. We had gone in to retrieve one of their precious toys from their hideout, but we had made so much noise that they had discovered us. We ran for our lives, and we escaped. We escaped only because they caught up with Tom. ...so we waited outside at a safe distance for him. Waited for them to scold him and twist his arm and release him. ...but after half an hour I had had enough. I decided to go back and try to see what they were doing to him. The shouts and gasps that came from their torture room wasn't really explained by me peeking in through the door crack. They had tied him down, they had no clothes on, and one of the girls were... ...sitting on him, beating him with her butt. I was too small to understand sex, or rape for that matter. Even after all these years I'm still a virgin, and some part of me is still thankful for that.

Then one morning I woke up, from a sleep that could have lasted for more than a night, and there was a large metal bed-looking thing occupying most of my hall and part of my kitchen. The naked body of what must have been one of the neighbors was on it, riddled with fine red lines, and there was this continuous whirring of a surgical saw. From that point on things had changed. My apartment had become the main factory, and no inch of my hall and kitchen walls would ever be clean of blood splatter again. Even then I loved her. Even when I saw the surgical tools extract and retract from her body I loved her. She only did what she had to do to survive. It was only logical. You would have done the sa,e-