by Scot McAtee
***
When the morning came and she was getting ready for church, Riley noticed blood on the hand he helped her up with. “That’s strange. I wonder where that came from.” Later she also noticed Jack wasn’t at church. “He’s probably still sick. He did not sound good last night,” she thought. She went home thinking about visiting him. She made him some soup that their mother taught her to make, that they always eat when they are sick. “Maybe this will help, if Mom didn’t already bring him some.” When she got to his house, his back door was locked, which was unusual. She went to the front door and knocked.
He came to the door and responded with his eerie voice again, “Who is it?”
“It’s Riley, let me in! I have something for you.”
He hesitated a moment, moving around behind the door, and then opened it. She now looks up to him, like she noticed last night. She has always been taller. “He shouldn’t still be growing,” but she put that thought out of her mind quickly. He was pale and stood awkwardly. And his face…something was different. “Maybe it is the nose,” she thought, “or maybe his face is thinner.” Actually, all of him looked thinner.
“Hey, are you alright? You must be really sick. Have you seen the doctor?” she said breaking the silence as she walked in.
“I’m fine. I will see him later today,” he answered bluntly.
“I think you should see him right now!”
“No! You’re here and I can go later. I’m serious, I’m fine. Sit down,” he said gesturing to the kitchen table. “What do you have for me?”
“Some of Mom’s soup, but I made it.”
“Well Mom already brought me some, but I’ll get you a bowl. You made it so you should enjoy some.”
He went to get a bowl in the cabinets. He searched the cabinets for a bowl.
“There in here…” she said grabbing a bowl from one of the unchecked cabinets, where they always are.
“Oh! I must have forgotten,” he said uncomfortably.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“Yes.”
Jack rolled up his sleeve to pour her the soup.
“I thought you had a tattoo on your wrist!” she said, noticing it missing.
“Umm, no. You must be thinking of someone else.”
“I’m SURE you had a tattoo, right there,” she said pointing to his wrist.
“Well, I don’t obviously. Maybe you’re the sick one.”
She thought about how strange he is acting. “He’s so different,” she thought.
That night she tried to figure out what the problem was. She searched the internet for similar situations. She found articles about a woman from years ago who had the same symptoms at first, but then she started to look normal again after about a week. Later on she started killing people in the community. They could not find a connection between her and the victims. The police found her after one of the murders and killed her when she tried to escape, or “fly” as the officer said. All of the people she killed died by the same mysterious gas that the forensic scientists could not recognize. A week after she was buried, her body was assumed stolen from her grave, but the evidence looks like she dug her way out. They never figured out who did it, because there were no human finger prints, or where the body went. People said that they saw strange lights in the sky, near the cemetery that night. The police never did any following up to the mystery, after finding no evidence. Other people wrote their own theories on the story. They say her body was taken over by an alien, and even though she died in her human form, she survived in the original creature. Each and every theory ended with the same thing, that one will come back some day, and try to finish what they started.
After doing the research, she was petrified. “There has to be another explanation,” she thought.