This is what happened.
The ground began shaking around a quarter to three in the morning on a midsummer day in July. I believe it was the fifteenth, but I can’t be certain. Even now, the tremors that disturbed my sleep felt like part of a bad dream.
Only the explosion of the chandelier, breaking into a thousand pieces as it hit the floor, woke me. My wife, who had no trouble fading off into the little slices of death we call sleep, only moaned at the noise. I envied Sandi for that; my job trained my brain to be on full alert, twenty-four seven. Being a computer programmer has its price. It had made our marriage go sour. Even after the long, ten-year climb up the company ladder, with its attendant promotions and pay rises - professional validation and material security - our marriage was falling apart. When I look back on it I am not only bitter, I am angry with myself. It is true when they say there are more important things in life than your work. I tell myself I am only partly to blame; I’m a workaholic by nature, and during those ten long years I would wear myself out day after day and long into the night. Restful sleep was denied me; the codes had to be done, client requirements satisfied, and deadlines met. Sleep could wait.
Coffee and the usual morning argument with Sandi was the norm, and after a while I even resented getting out of bed, much less sharing my first meal of the day to a soured spouse who told me to find another job day in and day out. I should have listened to her. We’d have been on better terms for our last months together if I had done so. I still loved her and I decided to try and make it, but the career climb is hard and I didn’t see my marriage lasting another year. I think Sandi saw it too, but we were both too scared to admit it. We clung on the last thread of hope; maybe some miracle, some life-changing event would happen.
That life-changing event was no miracle.
Following the explosion of glass, the house groaned to itself, like old men stuck in their seats and being forced to move by their carers. I got out of bed slowly due to a sleeping pill habit (thanks, Sandi) now adopted in lieu of the insomnia. I scratched my head and wondered if I was dreaming. I wish I had been. A light spray of dust fell from the ceiling and everything became quiet.
I went to the living room and stared down at my busted chandelier. Silvery moonlight through the windows glinted on the shards of glass, turning the dark flooring into something resembling a star field. I cocked my ear and frowned. No birds sang their early morning song and no crickets talked back and forth; even the voluminous cicadas with their monotone voices remained silent.
It was too quiet. I looked around my living room and felt the hair on my wrists prickle. The sensation slowly spread up my arm and up to the back of my neck. My scalp tightened as the hair stood to attention – on full alert. Something was about to happen.
My front doorway exploded inwards, the door rushing like a bullet, slamming into my back. Pain arced up my spine and wind expelled from my chest blew across gritted teeth into the night air.
I fell to my knees, dazed. Sandi’s screams from the bedroom sounded far away. Contents from our shelves and pictures from our walls made new night music as they crashed to the floor and shattered. Lightning arced across the sky and turned my window panes stark white. Bright rectangular shapes of pure white burned onto my retinas and I swayed, struggling to cope with the after-flashes and the bizarre events that had invaded my home.
How could the doorway slam into me? This had to be a dream. It was if someone or something had picked up our house and moved it a few feet before carelessly setting it down.
I struggled to my feet. My vision blurred as I tried to make sense of what just happened. Loud peals of thunder cracked outside and shook the house. I had the immediate, albeit brief, sensation that I was floating. The white light exploded onto my windows again. The air seemed to sizzle and a loud ripping sound filled my ears, a terrible noise that brought pain with it. I felt my earlobes, panicked that my fingertips should discover blood seeping from the ear canals. I stared up at the ceiling, dumbfounded. The light outside became everything. It was everywhere and I felt part of it. I closed my eyes and knew nothing more as blue arcs, of what I would guess was lightning, barreled up in the heavens.
2
Sandi’s voice was far away. She sounded like she was at the bottom of a well. Another dream, it had to be.
“Wake up, Trent. Wake up, damn it!” Her voice, usually soft and pretty as an angel on the rare good days, was now in hysterics. I opened my eyes. The world blurred and slowly came into focus. Sandi was nothing but a shadow in front of me, screaming and ranting. I thought it was the usual song and dance we played every morning, but the house lights had gone, and the house illuminated by a weirdly pale, phosphorous green light. I began to prop myself up but Sandi grabbed my shoulders and started screaming all over again.
She dragged me to the door. We stumbled through it together, and outside into Hell.
The sky wasn’t mine, yours or anyone else’s anymore. New planets were our neighbors, impossibly close; they dwarfed our own world. They sat in the heavens, bloated spheres with a myriad colors.
I felt Sandi’s hand pulling on my shoulder and turned to her. She pointed out over our field into the distance. Squinting, I saw what she was pointing at.
A black cloud descended from the sky, rapidly approaching us as if pushed by a gale. It roiled, the things within seething.
“Trent?” she pleaded. I turned back and saw the terror on her face. My own fear was rising and I’m sure she saw it. “What…” She hesitated, her voice small, child-like now and not the aggravating bitch of a wife I had heard earlier. “What…has happened?”
No words came from my mouth. It was too much, way too much to take in all at once, and her small voice brought back the good memories of our first two years of marriage. No logical explanations, no rational thoughts came to me. I looked at her dumbly and only shrugged. I expected the familiar retort but none came.
I stared upward at our new alien heavens, my mind a blank. My gaze returned to the black mass of flying things in the distance. I figured them crows at first, but their strange flight pattern made me reconsider that conclusion.
They moved to the right in a straight, horizontal line, and then hovered in the air. I guess there were over a hundred of these strange birds but I couldn’t be sure; the light played tricks with my vision.
With another beat of their wings they moved to the left, this time in a downward diagonal. The flock beat their wings again and the whole group moved right – again, in that same mad, horizontal shift. This weird sporadic flight mesmerized me. Even Sandi left my thoughts.
A sound I hope to never hear again assaulted our ears and a shadow fell across us. Sandi screamed again, and I turned to face the object of her terror.
A bird. But unlike any avian creature of our world. Long, leathery wings beat incessantly, driving its hulking body - a thing of malice and horror – inexorably toward us. Its chest housed a mouth that could swallow a human with ease, lined with long, wickedly sharp teeth which would make the journey to the beast’s stomach a flesh-rending descent into Hell.
It snapped the air, looking for flesh with a singular electric-blue, bulbous eye glaring from what I took to be the beast’s head. That orb brightened; it had spotted prey.
Sandi turned and started to run for the house but she was too late. The bird-thing sounded again and swept its left wing at ankle height in a vicious, powerful arc, which clipped Sandi’s leg.
She went sprawling in the dirt and grass. The thing beat its massive wings, propelled itself upward to give its next descent terrifying, devastating momentum. It fell on Sandi faster than I would think imaginable, but the true horror came a split-second later.
Hidden within the abomination’s body was a long, thin stinger. I saw it extend and disappear into my wife’s body, then exit to repeat the horrific process.
Several times it pumped its alien poison into the person I had promised to grow old with. Sandi’s screams lost their feverous pit
ch within seconds. Her face grimaced and her body went rigid.
Pain and grief swept through me as I realized this was no dream: this was real, and my wife was about to die. Part of me wanted her to die – or rather, the bad part of her that had ruined our relationship.
The poison worked fast. Sandi’s screams became liquid cries as her flesh slowly fell from her body in large clumps. I ran towards her, but was stopped dead in my tracks. A shotgun blast roared from my right.
“Get in yer house, Trent!” The roar was from my neighbor, Oscar Woodall. The forty-three year old logger pulled the trigger on his shotgun a second time. The thing rocked back and forth and made that chilling sound again as Oscar ejected the spent shells and rapidly reloaded.
I reacted by instinct rather than Oscar’s command, and began running towards my house. From my peripheral vision I saw Oscar take aim again and fire. The thing’s eye exploded in a shower of gelatinous goo. My ears rang and my head reeled. This wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be possible. I bent over, trying to make sense of the gun-toting madness that had become my best friend and forced gulps of insane things down through my senses and mind. Oscar came through the door and I heard it slam.
“Get over here, Trent,” he yelled.
Somehow I did as I was told and made - or rather, stumbled - my way to the bay window in the front of the house. I watched as the flying bird-things attacked their comrade, the monster that had ended my wife’s life.
Oscar’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and pulled me into the kitchen. I didn’t resist. Everything now was like a dream.
Yet, the grief was real. I was pained by her death, more so than I would have thought, and I felt tears well in my eyes. Oscar was talking but I didn’t hear him. His voice was miles away. I fell to the floor and rocked back and forth as alien screams from outside raged on.
“Are you hearing me, Trent?”
I could hear, but I didn’t want to.
“Come on, man! You have to get it together.” He turned me around and looked directly at me. His face finally came into focus and I met his stare. I saw fear in my neighbor’s burly features. After a few seconds I replied, “Yeah, I hear you, Oscar. I don’t want too…but I do.”
“What are we going to do, man? Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
I stopped rocking and tried to make sense of everything, but Sandi’s death wouldn’t leave my mind. Eventually, my thoughts began to focus and I remembered.
The pillars, those damn huge monoliths that sprang from the ocean that seemed to put a spell on the entire world. It was the only thing that seemed to make any sense.
“The monoliths,” I said.
Oscar looked at me with a questioning stare. I sighed. “The monoliths, the towers that came up out of the sea all over the world.”
Oscar still looked bewildered.
“Don’t you watch the damn news, Oscar? It was all over the TV for the first month after they appeared.”
Recognition slowly dawned on him. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Martha told me about them. The greenish tower-like things? I didn’t pay it much mind though.” He paused, “I guessed it was just another news bit like all the rest.”
“This wasn’t like all the rest, Oscar. And where is Martha?”
“At home. She locked herself in the closet and won’t come out. I came over here to get Sandi to try and talk to her. That’s when I stepped outside and knew something wasn’t right.”
I gave a deep insane laugh. It echoed in my kitchen. “Yeah, things are definitely not right, Oscar.”
“Well, I have to get back to the house, Trent. Martha needs me.”
“Give me a minute,” I said. Oscar obliged, but I saw him look out the kitchen window as I tried to think of something to do…anything to do in this insane madness.
“Don’t take too long, those Z birds are on the move,” Oscar said.
“Z birds?”
“Yeah, weirdest damn flying things I’ve seen. They fly in what looks like the letter Z.”
I nodded and moved to the kitchen window. Oscar was right. The Z birds had ascended and were now flying towards the house. A loud fwap sounded from the living room followed by three more around the house. Oscar vanished down the hallway. More of the Z birds attached themselves to the walls, sounding like thundering rain that we’re accustomed to down her in the Sou…, but there is no South anymore. I have no idea if anything is left after this nightmare come to life.
I took the time to think, but nothing came. My mind was a wasteland.
“Trent!” Oscar yelled. “Come here.”
The fwapping sounds got louder. I found Oscar staring out the living room window.
“You have to see this, man.”
I looked out the window and the monster that had killed Sandi was no more, save for what looked like a skeleton which was slowly liquefying in the front yard.
“They ate it clean, man…in less than a minute,” Oscar said.
My words wouldn’t come. I could only watch, dumbfounded, as the new reality threatened to drive me to the edge of insanity.
I don’t remember if only seconds passed or minutes, but it was Oscar who got us moving. “You got a door out of your bedroom, don’t ya?”
I nodded.
“Well, we gotta chance it, man. Hear that?”
I tuned my ear to the sounds emanating from outside. The Z birds were biting and chewing their way into the house, and if they could make quick work of their former comrade there was no telling how quick they would be inside the house.
Fear. Somewhere deep within me, something instinctual, got my mind moving and set my heart thundering in my chest. My eyes popped open and my hands clenched at the sudden adrenaline that rushed through my veins. I spat out a long string of words and information that I don’t remember to this day.
Oscar shook his head. “Jesus, Trent, slow down. I didn’t get half of that.”
The sounds became louder. One of the Z birds had broken through to the kitchen and I heard its slick black body hit the tiled floor with a sickening fworlp.
Only one thing burned into my brain, the only thing my mind would settle on long enough for me to speak.
“We have to get to Alton Sleibock’s house.”
“I heard that part, but what about the rest?”
I laughed a little. “I can’t remember the rest.”
Oscar gave me a funny look. He wasn’t sure if I was serious or not. He started to say something then stopped as another loud crash sounded inside the house.
“Can we make it?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to try. It’s better than staying in here.”
I nodded, listening to the invaders ransack my house in their search for us.
“You ready?”
“No, I have to…” I looked down and noticed my backpack was filled with an array of stuff, but I had no recollection of packing any of it. I had even put on shoes. “Ummm, I guess so.”
“You either are or you aren’t. You wanna stay here and get ate?”
“No, let’s go.”
Oscar went to the door and pulled the window curtain aside. He peered out. “Seems pretty clear.”
“Clear enough for me,” I said as the noise inside became a thunderous roar.
Oscar slowly opened the door and waited. I closed my eyes and tried to forget about my wife. He helped me do just that - a second later I felt his burly hands grab my shoulder and yank me out of the house.
The air outside had changed. Heavy wouldn’t be the right word, but it’s the only way I would describe it at that moment. The light had changed as well, thanks to our new neighboring planet; its shadow put our landscape in perpetual twilight.
After a quick look around we ran. Oscar didn’t see any of the Z birds on the back end of the house by my bedroom. The Z birds had massed at the front of the house to which we had fled before their initial onslaught.
We must have been a funny site to anyone that cared – or was
able - to watch. We could have been running gremlins, hunched over and silhouetted against a fading twilight sky in our newly changed world.
3
Martha greeted us outside. She stood staring at the sky as we made our way across the small field in front of their house. I didn’t see the look of terror in her eyes, but I did notice that her hands were trembling when she said her first words to us. After hugging his wife, Oscar motioned us inside. I heard the flight of the Z birds leaving my home.
“Let those damn things go find another meal somewhere else,” Oscar said.
“What?” Martha asked.
“I’ll tell you about it once we’re inside, Martha.”
She didn’t protest. She followed her husband inside and I followed her. I gave one quick look again outside to make sure we didn’t have any pursuers and closed the door.
I knew the inside of Oscar’s house like my own. Oscar and Martha had Sandi and myself over for dinner once every fortnight. I made my own way to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. I drank it down greedily like a parched survivor rescued from the Sahara. I lowered the drained glass and looked outside, watching the sky turn a shade darker. My thoughts followed the sky in its mood.
I listened as Oscar told his wife the fate of Sandi. I heard Martha’s sobs and I fought to hold back mine. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the last happy time we had together, but before the pleasant memories took form, strong arms wrapped around me.
“I’m so sorry, Trent.”
I hugged her back. “Thank you, Martha.”
“She was a good woman and a great friend.”
Dreaming In Darkness Page 31