Ok, I know you said to keep it short but I couldn't help myself :(. Chapter 1 I guess I’d better start at the beginning here, right after the crash. We were a colony ship, and, you’d think we’d be prepared for something like this, but we expected to be on a tropical paradise of a planet, not this slag heap of a rock. I don’t remember much, I fell unconscious soon after, and I don’t know how or why our ship crashed, but we did, and that’s the end of it. The pilots aimed for the flattest stretch of land that they could find, a vast expanse of rocky desert. However, the did not spot the Gorge, a massive canyon that cuts right through the desert, and, as the ship dug into the dirt, all up in flames, our section fell over into the Gorge. Safety precautions kicked in and the ship sealed itself from the outside. A few moments later, we heard the biggest explosion a person could ever hear. The reactor core, which was still up on the canyon, imploded in a blaze of fiery death. The Gorge saved us, but I’m still not sure we were the lucky ones… Chapter 2 The Gorge has got a large river running all through it, but you can’t see the river because it is covered in giant fungi. It’s not too deep, but the walls are as smooth as a laser barrier, and nobody could climb out without serious equipment. The shrooms grew in the water, but the large, rounded heads of the fungi poked out over the surface, all of them making a walkway that sits above the river. Well, as we soon found out, with the cost of some poor guy’s life, the shrooms secrete a poisonous gas to choke out other life in the Gorge. Well, our part of the ship was the security section and we had just enough spare respirators fro everybody to use. Unfortunately, the respirators are temporary things; they only work for a few hours before needing a power cell replacement. So, Captain Zac rounded us up and told us to find any bots we could, with the exception of cooking bots, and shut ‘em down to take their cells. Our bots weren’t normal bots, though, the sciency folk wanted more “personable” laborers to work with, so each had a personality code embedded in it. After a few minutes, when a human would walk up to a bot, it would start freaking out, pleading, screaming, running as fast as its little wheels or feet could carry them. Every so often, you would see Zac among the folk yelling that the bots were dead things, their cries for help was nothing more than a program built by human hands. It didn’t help much when you’d have to watch the lights go out of a bot. Out of the wreckage we were able to find a small speeder (a four-seater coupe), some antigrav units, guns, shock batons, and a few emergency medical kits and survival packs. See, thing is, on our ship, we had a quite relaxed atmosphere, so folk would come and go from place to place as they pleased, and “security clearance” was disregarded many times. So, even though we crashed in the security sector, only a handful of us were security. Chapter 3 I’d say there were about 200 of us when we started out. After the first night, we lost at least a half of us. I will always remember waking up to the call of the Gorgeaters. Gorgeaters, as far as I know, are the only things that can breathe in the Gorge. They’re absolutely terrifying, hungry, four-legged creatures with a piercing shriek that could make ears bleed if close enough. They got razor-sharp claws and teeth at the end of their long, plague doctor snouts. They’re pink, as if they were supposed to have fur but don’t for some reason. Every time they move, you can see their death-bringing muscles rippling inside their ravenous bodies, even in the night. We were not prepared for their first attack. Everybody scrambling, this way and that, bzzt of a shock baton, rifles discharging, the Captain yelling at people to rally, dying men and women screaming out their last breaths, and that awful, scrabbling noise of a Gorgeater ripping its teeth into some poor body’s flesh. Eventually, we beat ‘em off for the first night, but that wasn’t the last time we would see those devils. Chapter 4 We were anxious to get a move on. Funny, how easily we abandoned our funeral rites, hell, we even had people pointing guns at each other and yelling and all sorts of awful things. Everybody went mad that first night, we even had a few men get shot after the Gorgeaters had left. That was, until Captain Zac put a halt to it. He climbed on top of the speeder and yelled at the top of his lungs and blasted rounds in the air until not one person was staring up at him. Then, after everybody was silent, he quietly said through his respirator: “Here’s the deal: you do what I say or you die. That’s your choice. Now, I’ve downloaded the maps to this rock before we left the ship, and we’re going to travel along this Gorge until we reach a waterfall that we should be able to climb up out of. After we get out of this hellhole, we travel a few miles to a nearby river, then we set up a place to live until we can send for help. Everybody understand? Let’s get a move on!” And we did get a move on. I’m not sure why we all spurred into action, maybe it was because he was the captain or maybe we were just searching for any semblance of direction in all the confusion of the crash and the attack. I better leave the analysis to the psychologists, I guess. Chapter 5 During the day, we walked across the shrooms while it was safe. The cooking bots, square droids with built in ovens and refrigerators and tiny little stubs of feet, we strapped to our back and shoved dead Gorgeater into the ovens to eat. A few of the less healthy of us, the old scientists, Sarah, the pregnant woman, and a few of the injured took turns riding in the speeder and walking alternatively. The Captain sat on the hood of the speeder, where everybody could see him, shouting encouragement every once in awhile and ordering breaks and such when needed. We’d eat the Gorgeater every break to keep our strength up, we had more than enough dead Gorgeater to go around, but it was tough meat that hurt jaws and many folks had to jerk their necks back and forth to rip off the next bite, burned more often than not. The walking was hard; breaks only lasted 10 minutes at the most, usually only 5, but the real difficulty was the night. When the sun fell, we put our best shots on top the speeder and huddled around it, placing a few strong men in front with shock batons. The weak ones came next, wedged in between the speeder and the frontline. I was part of the speeder crew, the safest spot, but we had our fair share of danger too. The Gorgeaters came out of holes dug into the side to the canyon and some of the alpha Gorgeaters could jump from their holes right on top of the speeder, decimating us sharpshooters, unless we shot them down first. Every night was like this, Gorgeaters, crying their terrifying cry, and descending on us lowly humans, flashing their dreadful teeth and claws with murderous intent. Even though we had out defense, complete chaos ensued every single night. The silence afterward was relieving and gruesome the same time. Zac kept us moving, those of us who could still move, another mile or so until we found another spot to camp and rest for a few precious hours. We lost 10 the second day, then 14 the next, then 16 the next. After a few days, we stopped keeping count of the dead. Those who were dead were dead and had no use for the crew anymore.