Last Summer, I almost died. My uncle, the coolest person in the world, is the one that saved me.
My name is Billy. I live in Oregon with my mom, and sometimes my dad on weekends, but this happened at my uncle’s house in California, where I was spending the summer. I had never been so scared in all of my life.
What happened was, I was in bed and I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night. I tried to reach for my phone, which is normally on the bed next to me, but I couldn’t find it. I checked the alarm clock on the nightstand, and it said it was 2:17 AM.
I knew something was wrong. It’s kind of embarrassing but when I was little, I used to scream and wake up my parents because I knew there were monsters in my closet. They would always get really upset and have to come in and prove there was nothing there. This time though, at my uncle’s, I could feel the same thing. The difference was it wasn’t the closet that I was scared of. It was something outside in the hallway.
I don’t know if some noise or something woke me up, but I was wide awake. I carefully got out of my bed and tippy toed to the closed bedroom door to listen. I was so scared, and I just wanted to cry. I was certain there was something there.
I couldn’t hear anything but its like I could feel pressure on the floor. Like people were walking on the upstairs hardwood floors but trying to be quiet. Then I heard something like a held in sneeze and I knew that I was right. I panicked.
Normally, when I thought there was a monster in my closet, I would scream out for my mom and dad, at least when he used to live with us. However, this time my brain told me not to scream. So, I looked around my room for what to do. I wanted to escape out the window, but I didn’t know how to open it. It was too tall for me to reach the latches. For a second, I thought I could throw something against it and break the glass and then jump out.
It was too dangerous though. If I jumped, I’m pretty sure it would hurt really bad if I hit the ground from my second story bedroom. Plus, if I broke the glass but didn’t jump immediately… then whoever was outside would hear and immediately run in and get me.
So, the only thing I could do was scramble and hide under the bed. I was so scared I knew my breathing was too loud. My heart was pounding in my chest and I thought like maybe they would hear it beating against the ground where I was lying down. I’m pretty sure though I’m the only one that could hear it, it just felt so loud to me…
After a minute I realized I left the bed sheets totally messed up. If someone came in, they would realize that there was someone sleeping there before, and they might check under the bed. So, I quickly got out and sort of fixed the sheets the best I could. It probably wouldn’t have made my mom happy, but it was the best I could do. Then I scrambled back under the bed.
I just stared at the door for what felt like a really, really long time. Then my worst nightmare happened.
The door started to open very slowly.
A pair of shiny black dress shoes started to walk into the room. Above the shoes looked like some black or maybe dark blue pants but I could only see part of them. They moved into the room quietly. I could see another pair of black shoes walk behind the first pair. Then that second set of shoes walked quickly back out of my room. The first pair slowly moved in and walked towards the window where the person just stood there silently.
I was holding my breath but then realized I had to breathe. I could feel my chest trying to force air out and my head was pounding. If I just let my breath out like normal though, I knew it would make a loud noise so I cautiously let it out slowly so I could take another breath. I could feel tears coming down my face and softly hit the carpet.
“Understood…”
That’s what the guy said to no one. Then the pair of black dress shoes started to make their way back to the door. They started to step outside but then stopped and turned back in. They were then facing the bed that I was hiding under!
It happened so slowly but I saw the person drop to one knee and then a hand went to the floor. I knew I was screwed. The person was about to look under the bed and I was trapped! I wouldn’t have been able to run out quick enough before they grabbed me.
That’s when I heard my uncle shout and burst into my room. He was barefoot but I saw his legs run up to the person that was about to bend all the way down and tackled them. At that point I saw the other man clearly.
The guy had like a super trim haircut, like my cousin who had just graduated high school and was about to join the military. It was like a buzz cut and he was also wearing this really formal looking black suit. Like what my dad wore when we went to my grandfather’s funeral two years ago. My uncle wore some basketball shorts and a sleeveless shirt. He started wrestling with this other guy. The other guy shouted something in surprise like he wasn’t expecting to be tackled from behind.
That’s when I saw the gun. The guy pulled out a handgun and tried to aim it at my uncle. My uncle was smaller than this other guy but was fighting really hard. He prevented the other guy from pointing the gun directly at him. The guy pulled the trigger anyway and this weird sounding gunshot filled the room. It was loud but it didn’t sound like in the movies.
Then, like some miracle, the house alarm went off. The house alarm started blaring so loudly that it hurt my ears but I was so happy to hear it. My uncle was on the ground and holding his shoulder, which was bleeding. The other guy got up and shouted out to the hallway and he ran out.
My uncle was laying on the ground and he looked at me and held his finger up to his mouth like to tell me to “Be quiet”. So I did, I remained there quiet, under the bed watching my uncle groan until the police showed up about five minutes later. I also noticed my head was bleeding slightly because when the intruder shot his gun I flinched and jerked my head up and hit it against the underside of the bed frame.
Apparently, the bullet hit the window which triggered the break-in sensor and set off the alarm. I don’t know how the other men didn’t set it off when they broke in but if it weren’t for my uncle, I’m sure those other guys would have killed me or worse!
I’m back home in Oregon now but I wanted to tell my story. I sometimes think back to that night and I feel really anxious just knowing how close I came to dying. My uncle is still recovering from his injury but he’s not doing too well, according to my mom. She won’t tell me everything but apparently, at the University where he teaches, a lot of accusations have been made about him from some of his students. He used to joke with me how he had a job that he couldn’t be fired from but apparently something was happening that my mom thinks could cost him his job.
“It just doesn’t make any sense, he wouldn’t do anything like that”, I heard her saying one time on the phone to my aunt. I don’t know what they were talking about.
I hope he doesn’t lose his job at the university. They should be giving him medals and praising him for saving me and fighting off intruders like a hero! Adults are really weird though, they are always doing stuff that makes no sense.
Besides, my uncle’s job is soo cool. He teaches paleontology and deals with Dinosaurs! Last year he even lent me a tiny, fossilized Ammonite that I showed off to my class. It’s like a seashell but it’s over 70 million years old!
I was hoping to get something this year to show off but I didn’t get a chance. It was still fun hanging out with him though. Last summer he let me come up to his office at the University several times. It was soo cool walking around the building where everyone seemed to really respect him. I was so proud to have such a cool Uncle that everybody liked.
One day, he showed me this project that he had been working on. You know that movie… Jurassic Garden or something, where they find some mosquitos in some amber and they get the blood and clone dinosaurs? My Uncle was working on stuff like that!
Well, it wasn’t quite the same thing, but he did work with fossils a lot. He even got some amber sent over from some university in Southeast Asia. It was a huge piece of amber with a preserved tree stump in that they were asking for help in identifying.
I thought it was boring but my uncle seemed really excited about it. He said it was special. He helped clean up the big piece amber so that you could see clearly into it. The tree stump was too perfect he said. Once it was clear, it didn’t even look like wood. It looked like brown box or something. He said it was a semi-cylindrical object that was completely symmetrical and smooth.
“Whatever is in there, it is not natural”, he told me.
So he spent several days over the summer analyzing it and running some sort of scans and he told me that it wasn’t a tree stump. It seemed to have some smaller objects inside of it.
I remember thinking, what if it was a dinosaur egg or something cooler but my uncle assured me it wasn’t an egg.
There was some sort of accident at the lab where he was running his test and the amber broke. The object inside of it was mostly undamaged but the cracking open of the amber was a huge setback. There were apparently a lot of tests that he needed to run but since the amber was open, he had no choice but to analyze it.
He took me to work that day when he ran some more of his tests on the object. The object seemed to be some kind of box made out of some unknown complex polymers that resembled plastic… It had a flap at the top where you could slide out another piece. Do you know what was inside of that box?
Toys!
My uncle was so disappointed at first. He thought that somehow this thing was a mix up from the other university. He still hadn’t run carbon dating on it and the other university might have even been playing some prank on him.
The toys, which were tied to the back of the internal box, were like things you’d put in a doll house or maybe some action figure accessories. There was a brown dinosaur inside it that seemed to have some sort of feathers running along parts of it. Like it had a “haircut” of feathers arranged in patterns on its body. There were other things in the box that seemed to be made of similar plastic-like polymers. One looked like a computer and tablet device. Another two things looked like arm braces with articulated joints that you could attach to the dinosaur, which gave him like really funny robotic arms.
Even though I didn’t really play with action figures, I thought it was pretty cool. The dinosaur toy looked like some Velociraptor with very detailed joints and movement. Plus, because the inside of the box was tightly sealed off within the amber, the colors of the toys were really bright. Even if the box wasn’t that old it was a really cool thing to see.
Anyway, that’s my story and the rest of what happened that summer, besides being almost killed! There was also some kind of strange writing on various objects inside that box but my uncle couldn’t recognize the Asian language. Oh oh…. There was one other thing in the box, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It was like some kind of fat frisbee or disc. It had an opening in which you could put the dinosaur figure inside and I guess kind of toss it around for some reason.