The Lost Home

The Slugs. It’s strange and vile creatures. No one remembers exactly where they came from. Some said that they came from the seas and oceans; others said that they came from the heavens, and that their homeland was the distant stars; there was even an opinion that they, like we, were inhabitants of the Earth, but only came from another dimension. All these hypotheses agreed on the one thing: the creatures appeared a long time ago on our planet, in a certain place, and from there they spread as quickly and destructively as an incurable infection covers the entire body with sores and sores.

Far from speculating on these theories, I was concerned about the more real problems that the outsiders had plunged my people into. We lost everything. As a society and as individuals, they have descended to the primitive communal system. They began to live in caves and dugouts, stopped all production and construction. Any result of our labor infuriated the slugs. They sent their armadas of scouts, military personnel, as well as strange equipment and unthinkable weapons to that place. The most destructive bomb we've ever seen was dropped on our last land settlement. Only a huge, gaping and smoking hole in the ground remained after that explosion, and nothing more.

According to the stories of our grandfathers, these creatures, at first, did not pose any danger at all, especially did not inspire fear, even seemed ridiculous to us, and caused some pity. Indeed, when faced with them, the most infirm old man, not only looked twice as large as any of the slugs, but could easily cope with an entire group. Erect, like us, but very slow and fragile. Their legs are weak, their arms are thin, and their heads are disproportionately large. But this first impression was fatal to us. Physically frail, they had other virtues: cunning and crazy fertility.

Over the past four hundred years, my people have come to the point of complete extinction. The remnants of previous governments, which still had some influence on society and maintained a small-scale connection with each other, adopted the only and main law on which the future of our race depended. This postulate should be learned by heart, and understood to the depth, it should be passed on to their children. As a result, it was put in one sentence, succinct and concise, so that even a small child could remember, and it was difficult for an old man to forget. "Live without going out Into the Light, Run without leaving a Trace."

And it had worked. They forgot about us. No one has been looking for us for more than a hundred years. The Slugs confidently walk around in our World, as full owners, pumping out resources from the bowels of the earth, burning our forests, destroying the animal world of our planet, without even knowing that we are very close. We learned to hide skillfully, to be silent and to do almost without fire. The settlements were based deep underground, and for movement between villages, they used underground rivers, the existence of which was not even known until this time. Our closeness to nature not only saved us, but also taught us to live in a completely different way, radically changing the system of values. Among other things, we understood and understood the language of our enemies, complex, extremely verbose, almost useless for survival, but it was necessary to know. The slugs didn't even realize how strong we were and prepared for the most devastating response in their bloodthirsty history.

Introduce myself. I am the Son of the Mountain-this name was given to me by the leader of our community when I was twelve. Twenty years ago I was selected for the scout group and assigned to my elder brother for training. A few years later, my brother was killed by a group of slugs that accidentally wandered too close to one of the entrances to the underground settlement. The North Wind – as it was called had come alone to distract them and lead them away to a safer distance. After completing his task, the brother fell into a cunning trap set by slugs. The trap badly damaged his leg, and we found him very late. He died without having mastered the strong mechanism and having lost a lot of blood.

Following our Law, we carried away the body of a tribesman, tidying up after him and putting an old and sick boar in a trap. We caught up with the slugs, but on the orders of the group's senior comrade, we simply accompanied them until they returned to check their traps. Satisfied with the boar they had caught, they left the woods. As long as we were together, I was ready to jump out of hiding into the light and attack the strangers at any moment. The anger and a thirst for revenge tore my chest, but the authority of an adult and experienced team leader, forced me to be inconspicuous with humility and only watch quietly. We chose a boar for the trap and fed it with poisonous herbs – it was a "gift" to the slugs for my brother - this type of sabotage was allowed by our Law.

Now I am already teaching young people various tricks of our craft. With a small group of students, we went from the taiga for a week-long trip to the foot of the mountain, the one whose son I was named. In recent years, the number of outsiders who came with weapons has decreased, and I believe that less prepared civilians have been sent to the taiga for research. Here is with similar individuals, we crossed paths. We had no task to contact in any way. I had to teach the young people to pass the slugs at a very close distance without being detected in any way. This difficult test was part of a vital training course for community scouts.

When we entered the enemy camp, it was about three am. All three young people followed him into the clearing without cracking a single twig or crunching a single dry leaf. Among other things, the task was to take one trophy from the aliens. When I reached the opposite side of the camp, I noticed something familiar, looked closer and it was as if I had been doused with March melt water – near a tree in the low grass the mechanisms laid with which slugs’ hunt, the same mechanisms that killed my brother. I had to warn the others immediately.

There was a problem: young people trained to see in the dark, using only the light of the stars, had to scour the eyes in search of tasty finds. It would seem that it could be easier.

But the guys were distracted. They gathered in a group in the center of the enemy camp, and stared at something lying under their feet. It was dangerous! Loss of control-you can only watch if you make sure that you are safe. The boys forgot that. I gave a small growl, like a large animal – the low frequency of the sound was beyond the reach of slugs, but it was supposed to sober the boys up and scare them a little. But no. The guys stood rooted to the spot. I got a little closer to them, and I realized what had become so fascinating for them. The boys had just turned fifteen, and of course they had never seen a slug so close in their lives.

Usually, because of the aggressive environment of our World and their own frail health, these vile creatures hide and wrap themselves in cocoons, just like caterpillars like them. The sun is dangerous for them, the cold is harmful, even some small animals and insects are deadly for them. My students stared at the slug, which had no cocoon at all, although the surrounding relatives, who were in a state of deep sleep, laid tightly wrapped in their protective suits. Its pale translucent skin, a huge head, limbs no thicker than branches-a rare kind. This outing broke all records for the number of missteps-surprised by the fragility and dwarfism of the slug, the guys lost their vigilance, and smiling and looking at each other, barely restrained themselves so as not to burst into laughter.

Next to an individual sleeping without a cocoon stood a jar capacity, and a big shiny object like the knife. I smelled a strong smell of honey coming from the jar. Three trophies at once. Thoughts flashed through my head like lightning, and before I could utter the command: "take cover", something clicked in the air and the corners of the green net rose like lightning from the leaves and grass on four sides of my guys. It shot up and slammed over the boys, and when it slammed, it rose even higher, lifting them off the ground. The slug that was lying in the center of the trap, along with the other baits, was nothing more than a dummy. The net sparkled with small lightning bolts and stung with sharp pain every time you tried to get out of it. The dozens of powerful searchlights flashed from all sides at once, and I jumped on the net, had already blinded, in the desperate hope of breaking it and releasing the teenagers. But as soon as I touched it, I was scalded by a powerful charge of current, and had already unconscious, I flew away.

I woke up only in the morning, a terrible headache and the vile stench of scorched wool turned me inside out. Opening my eyes, I slowly raised my head, looked around, and realized that I was in a small cage, like my students. Their condition completely crushed me: one laid on his stomach in his cage, covered in burns, and, judging by the heaving back, his breathing was painfully rapid and irregular. Others were conscious, but from their distant looks, it seemed that they had already said goodbye to the Forest. A few slugs in protective green suits and carrying weapons were moving back and forth between us, apparently loading their equipment into the transport. When they saw me awake, the creatures screamed among themselves, clearly showing interest in my person. Someone immediately ran to the largest all-terrain vehicle. Two strangers in shiny black suits came out and walked toward me. One of them had a straight, thin stick with metal electrodes protruding from the end. The one with the cane approached the cage and said to me, "Hello, Bigfoot. You understand me, don't you?".

"I asked you a question, animal!" he shouted, and poked me with his electric cane. He was aiming at the spot on my shoulder where the fur was already singed, and the burned hide hung in lumps on my matted hair. His blow landed just inside the open wound, and I was jolted upward so that even the bars above me buckled.

Instead of responding to this guy, I let out a loud roar that could be heard miles away. The roe deer raced away, and the birds flew up, but my kinsmen, the four companies that had covered us during the whole sortie, and who had been quietly watching all that was going on, answered with a roar from all sides, and obeyed my order. Surrounding the slugs, they sent a small pack of trained wolves on the one side, and the most experienced bears on the other, who obeyed orders without question. The alien, numb from the roar, dropped his cane. Releasing my paw between the bars, I grabbed him sharply, and, pulling him up to me and pressing him against the cage, I said to him in quite tolerable human language, clacking my fangs near his face:

"I understand you. And you? Run, slug, without going out into the light, live, without leaving a trace”…

*The bomb dropped on the last land settlement is known to new generations as the “Tunguska meteorite".

* Documents confirming the facts of contacts were periodically withdrawn and are still strictly classified.

*It is also known from accidentally leaked and then deleted articles that several individuals are kept in private zoos in China, the UAE, the United States, and Russia. This information is doubtful, since the inspection commissions do not have access to private objects.