by Eddie Patin
The girl’s fingers stretched and went to work with the agility of a surgeon. She created a sphere with ease, then began to shade it with the slime—white on black instead of black on white, but it worked. Kayleen chuckled, finding herself once again working on the core shadow of the drawing...
And it was beautiful.
Kayleen turned to face the void behind her, as quickly as a snake, and lashed out with her long fingers to crisscross the void—slice, slice—leaving two long lines of slime in a violent X. She immediately elaborated on the inside of the X, manifesting lines of milky ooze into swirls and shapes that seemed like alien intestines...
She frowned.
That was an odd thought...
With a swipe of four long claws, Kayleen obliterated the weird art, then turned to the left to start a new piece with a vicious vertical line. The ooze splattered and trickled down the canvass of space-time.
Have my eyes, with which to see.
Kayleen added a finishing touch to the line art on her left, then paused to massage her eyes.
The pain built like a slow boil under her face, then exploded in rolling, thunderous flashes!
The girl screamed, raising her face up, and lashing out in all directions around her with speedy, jointed claws that stretched out like a starburst!
Everything turned gold for an instant, then, she could see again...
Kayleen emerged from the void like bursting the surface of a swimming pool, suddenly assaulted with a complicated world of overwhelming visions, grating sounds battering her ears, and the smells of ozone and lemon disinfectant so strong, it almost made her gag!
She was in the grocery store.
And the waking world was alive with chaos around her!
Kayleen was the center.
Lit by the pale light streaming in from the windows running along the east side of the building, the girl could see that she was surrounded by alien soldiers! Several were crouched or in the process of dodging, moving slowly, their transparent armor brilliant and sharp and terrifying, their blank faces focused on her! Some held rifles, pointing at her face—she could see the glowing red light coming from their barrels, and see burning vapor drifting into the air. That was the ozone smell. Other soldiers held their strange spears, pointed at her as if she was a wild beast. They held the long weapons out defensively, and some jabbed in at her ... slowly...
It wasn’t real. It felt like it wasn’t real.
But it wasn’t like the dream of the void. That was obviously a dream!
Right??
This world was sharp and clear and full of sensations that crackled on her tongue, in her ears, in her nose!
Kayleen took a moment while thinking about it to bat aside one of the glass-like blades thrusting in at her. Her hand seemed so weirdly big, and the girl suddenly noticed that all of the aliens were looking up at her.
Looking down, she saw milky-white and armored bodies torn to pieces, their parts scattered and white and purple entrails strewn on the floor. On her left, she saw an alien soldier collapsed on the grocery store floor, neatly bisected down its middle, its translucent armor popped open along a central seam where her claw must have sliced down its front like a laser beam...
Her attention was barely drawn back to the soldier facing her down with the spear; her hand was still flipping back from slapping the blade aside. With amazing dexterity, Kayleen turned her fingers and skewered the creature with three finger tips. She felt her skin pass through its armor and through its soft and wet body like she was poking through a wet tissue paper! The alien soldier froze in place, affixed by her claws, then collapsed to the floor when she pulled out.
The paint, she thought.
She was dreaming about painting with slime. Painting with her claws!
And in reality, she was slaughtering these alien soldiers in her sleep...
Kayleen looked down, and saw herself standing tall and solid on strangely angled, elongated legs. Her shoes were gone, and her pants was ripped all the way up to the tops of her thighs.
An alien soldier shot its rifle at her, and she snarled, spinning to face it, but found that her reflexes were already ahead of her, and the burst of red light was blocked by a manifestation of flesh from somewhere on her torso that disappeared as rapidly as it formed!
She smelled her sizzling skin and swiped across the soldier with claws that defied the laws of physics, it seemed, ripping across the creature from shoulder to hip with three devastating diagonal lines that burst with purple blood and bulging organs!
It fell, still clutching its smoking weapon.
With a quick glance, Kayleen noted that there were four alien soldiers remaining, still alive.
She could see them clearly, trying to flank her from all around, the two with spears closing, trying to thrust their puny weapons in at her while the gunmen backed away, crouching low to aim their rifles...
But they were so slow...
Kayleen roared, and saw one of the spear fighters fall to the floor in fear.
She lashed out with her left hand and lanced through the creature, feeling her golden fingertips pierce its armor straight through the space in between molecules, pass through the quivering flesh, the armor of the other side, then anchor into the linoleum and concrete of the floor!
The soldier shook once, then sighed to the ground without a sound.
Kayleen pulled her fingers out of it, then slashed through the air to cut the next one in half. She felt a flurry of sensation as her claws passed through its body, and the creature’s top half toppled to the ground with a splash of purple intestines.
Even though she couldn’t see the creatures’ faces from under the smooth, blank visage of their otherworldly helmets, she could feel the fear suddenly explode from the remaining two soldiers. She could see it, like an oily aura bursting all around them without warning just before they broke ranks and tried to run away...
The girl immediately knocked over the alien soldier with the spear, casting him down to the ground, his luminescent armor thudding against the grocery store floor, his long spear clattering away from his slender hands.
She picked up the elegant spear with a quick movement, then impaled the trooper, sticking him to the floor through one shoulder.
Glancing up, she saw the other one, a soldier with a rifle, fleeing for the door!
Without even thinking about it, Kayleen was on him, her long legs stretching to cross the distance without delay over two bounds, and she tore its back into ribbons through the armor, her long and bizarre fingers drenched in purple blood.
Kayleen looked all around and listened...
She calmed down, and all was quiet, except for the single alien struggling against its spear, trapped and affixed to the floor in the produce section like an insect stuck to a display with a needle.
Breathe, she thought. And as Kayleen slowed herself down, she found the grocery store growing larger and larger.
Or ... she was growing smaller...
“Crazy,” she said, and her voice in her ears reinforced that it was real.
It was all real...
The area where she was captured, and Hannah was killed, was now in ruin. Alien soldiers lay in pieces and lumps of semi-transparent armor like frosted glass, holding together chunks of pale flesh stained with purple blood.
Their guts look just like human guts, Kayleen thought.
Organs and entrails of various blanched colors, decorated with purple blood and tight, delicate veins and arteries, lay scattered all over amidst the bodies. Hannah’s corpse still lay where Kayleen saw her roommate die, undisturbed and staring at the space where Kayleen remembered falling down; her eyes and dark-lipped mouth frozen open in an expression of shock...
And the one living alien struggled and squirmed against the long, elegant spear that skewered it to the floor...
It writhed and pulled and pushed with its armored hands, but only slid up and down on the shaft of the weapon by degrees, faced away from Kaylee
n the monster.
The girl slowly approached the downed creature, suddenly very aware that she was barefoot. The tatters of her pants brushed at the skin of her legs, and she felt the cold air on her thighs.
Slowly circling the creature, Kayleen crouched down and looked into its blank face.
The alien looked up at her for a moment, then dropped its head to continue struggling against the spear.
“You’re screwed,” Kayleen said, then looked up at the long shaft of the weapon. That spear must have been over seven feet long! Did she really think of it, only a moment ago, as a puny weapon?
Reaching out to the creature’s strange helmet, Kayleen knew that with but a thought, she could transform her fingers into long, dreadful claws again if she needed to. Instead, she used her normal human fingertips to feel around the armor’s surface—it was much like slick plastic—and she reached around its bottom edges.
The girl pulled the helm off of the creature’s head, letting its long, straight while hair fall down around its face.
“Holy shit!” she exclaimed, looking at the face of a humanoid creature with long, delicate features and cascading thin hair as white as snow! Without fear, she made a fist in the creature’s hair and pulled its head closer to her to examine its features more closely.
The alien’s face made her think of a mix between a man and ... kind of a deer? Long and beautiful and smooth, with a thin and dainty nose and a small mouth, the creature had large, slanted almond-shaped eyes and long ears that were more deer-like or rabbit-like than like a human’s. She thought about elves from fantasy novels, but the ears were different—turned, and more like an animal’s. The eyes that looked back at her were captivating and deep blue like sapphires! Its pupils were round and black, like a human’s...
Kayleen gasped at the ethereal beauty of the thing.
The thing that was just trying to stick her with that spear, she reminded herself.
The alien coughed, and Kayleen frowned at the purple blood that ran down its chin, frothing forth from its thin lips and marring the elegance of its magnificent face.
She stood, still holding the creature’s head by the hair, and it writhed in pain as she pulled against the spear that ran through its body. But the creature made no sound. It didn’t whimper, or beg, or grunt in pain.
It breathed. She could feel it breathing. Purple bubbles of blood, frothing because of a pierced lung, expanded from its mouth in short bursts as it heaved breaths against the weapon skewering its body.
Looking at her other hand, Kayleen flexed her fingers, then tried to imagine blades. One by one, those fingers stretched out, growing sharper at the tips, the elongated and distorted sections changing color from her natural pale, nerdy skin toward a sheen of gold...
Then she sliced down at the alien’s delicate neck, pulling the alien’s head free from its trapped body in a mess of purple gore!
Kayleen tossed the beautiful face and purple-splashed hair down to the carnage-strewn linoleum...
And looked back to Hannah.
Her roommate lay dead on the grocery store floor, her t-shirt scorched and burned. The aliens shot her, and the girl was dead before she hit the ground. Hannah’s dark lipstick was still obscene against her pale face—offensive even to the end!
Kayleen walked over and plopped down to sit on the floor next to the dead girl.
She never liked Hannah.
She didn’t like how the girl was always trying to turn Kayleen into something she was not. Always pushing. Always rude. And if Kayleen ever spoke up, she’d have to deal with a ‘snowflake tantrum’.
But ... Hannah was her roommate, for whatever that was worth.
Was she some sort of friend?
Kayleen frowned. She waited to see if she felt sad, or felt any tears running down her face. As the girl flexed her jaw, she felt that there was something on her face, drying and cracking—probably slime or alien blood.
She reached down and picked up Hannah’s switchblade, pulling it out of her roommate’s stiff fingers. The weapon’s handle was black, and the blade was straight and tapered, made of shiny metal...
She’d keep it.
For Hannah.
Kayleen then caught a glimpse of something white sticking out of her roommate’s purple jean pocket. Reaching into the tight pocket with bloody fingers, she felt the corner-piece of some kind of heavy paper, and carefully pulled out an old and tattered photograph. White lines made by years of accidental folds crisscrossed the ancient picture of a little girl in a faded pink princess dress standing next to a burly man holding her while crouched, dressed in a blue-collar flannel shirt and work pants, smiling broadly with mirror-finish sunglasses...
It was little Hannah. That must have been her dad.
The pouting, furious face Kayleen was so accustomed to was smooth and happy, and it looked like the man and little girl were standing in the front lawn of a suburban house, the colors of the photo long washed out by the apparent years of riding in the girl’s pocket.
Kayleen felt a swell of something—some sort of sympathy, or just sadness—well up inside of her, and she stuffed the old photograph back into the dead girl’s pocket.
She sat and just breathed for a moment, looking around the body-littered store, and some spots of dark red blood suddenly caught Kayleen’s attention among all of the bright purple alien blood and body parts! She jumped to her feet and approached the red...
Who bled?
Not Hannah...
Was Kayleen wounded somehow?? There weren’t any other humans here that weren’t dead already! The dark red blood she saw as she approached was wet and fresh...
In a pool of dark red gore, Kayleen saw two small spheres.
Two orbs.
“What—?” she muttered, crouching down.
They were two red spheres of flesh, each with a little thing hanging off of them. They—
She picked one up.
It was an eye.
An eyeball.
With a quick glance down, she saw that the other was an eyeball as well.
Taking a closer look, she wiped the red blood off of the front of the little eye so that she could inspect its iris...
A blast of cold flashed through Kayleen’s chest when a lifeless, grey eye stared back at her.
It was her eye.
Kayleen gasped, then found herself breathing quickly. She jumped to her feet, and peered around, launching herself down the middle of the store at an amazing speed, her legs morphing under her to take massive strides, gripping into the slimy linoleum with makeshift claws from the sides of her bare feet. Floor tiles crunched and shattered under her grip.
She stopped at the cosmetic aisle, her elongated leg crashing into an endcap, sending a cascade of shampoo bottles careening to the floor! Kayleen stalked down the aisle with swift purpose, once accidentally slashing into rows of makeup with a warping claw, making another huge mess, until she found what she was looking for...
The girl stopped, closed her eyes, then reached down for a handheld mirror, immediately ripping the cardboard off of the front of it with surgical precision.
Kayleen lifted the mirror to her face and opened her eyes...
Her face was covered in dark red blood. Her hat had gone missing, and her crazy, brown hair was sticking out all over.
Kayleen’s eyes were gone—replaced with pure, golden orbs...
No pupils, no color—just gold. Spheres of solid, metallic gold, sitting comfortable in bloody, fleshy sockets!
Kayleen pitched her head back and howled in despair.
The Safeway shuddered with the sound of it, knocking bottles and boxes from shelves.
And nearby, other alien soldiers turned toward the shrieking sound, not knowing the danger that was now in their midst...
10 - Megan McKinney
Zion National Park, UT
She could hear its wet, panting breaths not far behind, and its claws glancing on the asphalt...
Megan ran, flying pas
t dead cars and SUV’s with tarps and bundles strapped onto them and trucks and vans with bicycle racks. She controlled her breathing and moved like a machine, hoping that the groups of people huddling around in the dark—the collection of civilization just outside of Zion National Park—were closer than she thought!
She passed the large, reddish cobblestone pillar with the hanging sign she knew so well that said “Zion National Park” and she kept going, pushing, the soft soles of her shoes tapping the asphalt lightly as she fled from the beast!
“Come on!” she screamed over her shoulder at Ramon. “Come on, Ramon!!”
Since Megan didn’t see her boyfriend running alongside her, she had to assume that he was behind her...
And so was the monster, huffing and growling, its repeating sprinting steps thudding on the road as it pursued them!
She risked a glance over her shoulder, and saw Ramon’s strained and tight face staring back at her with wide, gold eyes, his gangly limbs flying and his short, curly hair rippling in the wind behind his head as he struggled to stay ahead of the beast.
And the creature itself was a stain of black on the road, melded with the darkness, a mass of inky fur and muscles bounding behind them, intent and inevitable like death...
“Shit!” she cried, and turned forward again, focusing on the road, keeping her flying steps to the double yellow lines in between the lanes packed with dead vehicles.
“Wait!!” Ramon stammered from behind her. “Hold on! Wait!!”
“Run, Ramon! Run!!”
Up ahead, she knew that just as the road was curving, they’d pass the theater and brew pub. In the darkness of the power outage with the only light coming from the stars and the full moon hiding behind dark clouds, the valley with a big parking lot usually bristling with RV’s and overflow parking was tonight a sea of black, and the stores and movie theater buildings were hidden in the shadows away from the street.
Megan focused on the road; focused on her breathing, delivering as much oxygen to her well-tuned muscles as she could, moving efficiently—gracefully—speeding down the street away from the monster that pursued them. The steel revolver in her right hand added a little bit of unbalanced weight to her run, but she compensated by keeping her other hand further away from her body...