I don’t know what happened. It all happened so fast.

I sat on the makeshift medical bench while the medical team tended to my wounds. I stared out at the shipwreck in front of me. The shape of the ship stood out to me, a heavy disk sitting below the globe on top of it. 

I couldn’t believe it myself, but we had come across a real-life, honest-to-god UFO. Well, no. That doesn’t come close to it. I had been _onboard _an honest-to-god UFO.

The worst part of it all, though, was the fact that wasn’t the most unthinkable thing to happen today.

I still remember last night pretty vividly. The expedition was starting to settle in for the night and John needed someone to complete the nightly patrol. Nobody offered, he asked me, I relented, and there my skinny, petite ass was, out in the snow. A small blizzard was about to roll in, so I had to patrol the area quickly for any polar bears or man-eating walruses of the like. I assumed it would be like all the other nights, and for a few minutes, it was. Like always, I walked through a rainfall of snow, the tip of my nose dripping from mucus, the cold air gnawing at my face until there was nothing left, with not a single carnivore in sight to put me out of my misery. Just when I stopped to turn back, however, I heard something.

“Help!”

I jumped at the shrill cries for help and responded.

“Hello?! Is someone there?!” I screamed through the wind.

“Help! Is someone out there?!”

I cautiously moved in the direction of the voice, my flashlight dimly shining a way through.

“Don’t move! I’m coming to you! Just stay there, ok?!”

“Help! Help!”

“I’m coming, don’t panic!”

It took some time, but after moving towards the rapidly climbing snow at my feet, I finally reached them. A woman, who also seemed to be from the expedition judging from her red jumpsuit. 

“Hey, are you hurt? Can you move?”

I would have used her name, but for the life of me, I couldn’t recognize her. I make an effort to try to get the names of my fellow researchers, so this had slightly bothered me. But, then again, the expedition had grown in size over the years from all the giddy college interns, so I paid it no mind.

“Help! Help!”

“Hey, it’s fine, I’m here!”

“Help! Help!”

Despite my efforts to calm her down, the woman just kept shrieking, over and over. Once I got closer, the snow causing my head to ache, I reached my hand out to gently grab her shoulder. 

“It’s alright now, I can take you bac—”

I didn’t get to finish my sentence before I turned the woman around and saw her face. Well, a face. Her eyes had no whites, being nothing but black augites, shiny and cracked around the corners. Her nose was just a bud, with two small holes at the very bottom of it. And her mouth. Good god, her mouth. It was as though a rotten garden had finally sprouted some perverse form of life for the first time in fifty years. 

Small, veiny, green sprouts wriggled in and out of her mouth, the corners of which were bloodied by the viscera she was holding in her three-fingered hands. The sprouts blew against the gust of air from her mouth as she continued her cries.

“Help! Help!”

I stumbled back, horrified at the sight of what I can only presume to be the remains of a young woman, and thoughtlessly dropped my flashlight into the snow. The creature stood, not stopping its mimicry, as fleshy, skeletal legs sprung from her back.

“Help! Help!”

Before I could scream or run, the legs lunged towards piercing my left arm. I black out. My body is slowly dragged towards a vehicle. A ship.

I slowly come to. I feel an overwhelming sense of panic when I realize that I am not lying down in bed, but rather floating in a strange liquid. Through the blurred waves and bubbles of the solution I’m in, I see two figures.

They’re speaking, or, at least, emitting sounds. I couldn’t make out anything they were saying at first, which I couldn’t tell was due to being trapped in liquid or the entities themselves. But soon I hear a voice, two voices speaking.

“We found them. Why are we keeping them here?”

“We don’t know what contagion they may have acquired from their time on Earth. We can’t be too careful.”

“I have a hard time believing that. We acquired all the others with no problem. What makes them so different.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot disclose that.”

“I see it’s for XXXX, isn’t it?”

My headache returns. Stronger and heavier than before. The two creatures continue.

“You saw what happened to the last one. Why are we wasting precious resources on this, again?”

“They have the organs to sustain their lifespan. We just need enough to complete the operation.”

“These are our people. Our population. I feel to see how the whittling down our numbers is going to further our race—”

A garbled noise booms through my mind. Like a foghorn burrowed deep in the Earth.

The noise brings about a pang that violently vibrates through my skull, and with it comes voices. Visions. Memories, maybe? Several of the voices talk over each other. Buzzing and warbled voices. A man’s voice. A woman’s voice. A man screaming. A woman carrying me. A creature with a bug-like head. More buzzing. Suddenly, something large, no, gargantuan, looms over. I only see its leg, the width of which perfectly matches the hole of Lake Michigan. The skies are black. Smog covering the roads. People in the streets, sprout legs, eyes black. Some survive the transformation. Some can’t. And through it all, I see….it. I see XXXX .

I open my mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. Instead small green veins slowly grow from my month, growing more and more until they take up most of the pod. I can’t hear the voices anymore, but the garbled noises from before. The veins completely encompass my body, and the last thing I remember is glass breaking and being pushed out of the pod by its liquid.

I have small blips of the ship itself. The emergency sirens blared overhead as I ran through the long hallways, illuminated with the red lights overhead. 

Before I knew it, I was lying down in the snow as my colleagues clamored around me, yelling to get the medical team. And there I was, on the medical bench. I continued to stare at the scene in front of me and looked down at my hand. I notice a small green vein buried underneath my ring fingernail before feeling something watching me. 

I look towards the pair of eyes and see a blond woman in a red jumpsuit. Our eyes linger on each other for a bit, almost as though there is a familiarity. She finally walks off into the chaos of the crowd, leaving me to my thoughts.

I’m still not completely sure what exactly happened today. Hopefully, I never will.

It can’t see, unfortunately.

The empty box it occupies is cold and pitch black, with not a single ray of light escaping.

Suddenly, the stomach turns warm, the hands damp from sweat.

Out of the darkness, large tendrils wrap around the hands, their wetness turning into a sticky web around the arms.

Soon, a giant blob of a scolding, tacky substance clings onto the back, spreading throughout the body like tar clinging to skin.

The stomach turns searing hot as the mass grows and melds with the body.

It grows hotter and hotter, and with it the vapidness of a black hole.

Its voice becomes more hoarse, ravenous, roaring and crying to be satiated, thrashing about in the room before feeling the familiar touch of a switch.

I flinch as the small bathroom I’m in is suddenly filled with light and flaccidly stand there in the mirror, glasses cracked and lopsided on my face, my dark hair frayed, my tan skin unnaturally pale.

The blackness of my pupils shrink to a small circle as the whiteness of my eyes return and I’m bemused that it wasn’t as bad as the other times, but I still stare past the human figure standing in the mirror and at the broken glasses on my face, lamenting that even with the light, I, unfortunately, still can’t see.

Everything is still pretty blurry to me.

It was around 10 o’clock when all the prisoners were taken from the cafeteria and herded back into their cells to turn in for the night. The cramped beds did well enough for the back-breaking labor the women had gone through all day. Manufacturing, testing, and transporting weapons and supplies to be used for, what I assume, carnage that even most of us in this prison could never dream of.

I climbed up to my bed and flopped my head down on the pillow, only to painfully hiss at the firmness of it. Don’t know what I was expecting, but then again, being in this place, I’ve felt worse. I stare up at the ceiling, looking forward to the next two hours of insomnia I’ll have to myself, hoping to yet again dream of the outside world, to explore the fields and houses that haven’t been engulfed by war. No matter how cruel life had been to me, I would always value the dreams of freedom to lull me back to sleep.

As the lights begin to go out and the cell doors shut, I sit in bed and close my eyes in a futile attempt to fool myself into thinking that maybe it’ll be before sunrise when I get some sleep. I sit in complete silence. Well. Not exactly complete. There would be coughs, groans, weeping, crying, grunts, and pants, the usual around this time of night, but after about, maybe, forty minutes, everything would settle down. The night would become still, almost frighteningly so. I bask in the cold darkness, listening to emptiness surrounding me when I hear grunts from the bottom of my bunk bed.

I try to hold in a sigh and turn around to peek my head under my bunk bed.

“Hey, can this wait ‘till when I’m not in the fucking cell—”

I look and, surprisingly, she’s not lying down. In fact, she’s not even in bed, but rather standing next to it, her body twitching and shaking. I hadn’t even noticed her get out of bed, or come into the room. But then again, it’s not like she was the most talkative person. I climb down from my bed and reach out my hand to get her attention.

“Hey—”

She jolts and jumps back to the corner of the cell, looking at me with wide red eyes. From looking at her, I could have sworn she had been recovering from six different illnesses. She sits in the corner, shaking and rocking.

“It’s out there. It’s coming. It’s in the woods. It’s here. It’s here!”

I stand there confused at the sight I’m seeing, when I realize that the cell looks surprisingly darker than usual, to the point I can’t even see through the window on the door showing the few small white lights still present in the facility. Before I knew it, these white lights became increasingly blinding to me despite their small size. Even though it had eventually gotten to being completely silent a few minutes ago, everything became louder and grating.

The petite squeaks that came from the rats scurrying around the vents had become painful static in my ears, their noises clawing at every part of my brain. I felt my breathing become faster and harder, which I was befuddled by because, to my confusion, it had felt like all the air in the facility had been sucked out. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t feel anything, not the temperature, not the small drafts in the room, not even the small hairs standing on my arms and neck. I was standing in a vacuum that simultaneously had no air and every noise in existence.

I try to get my bearings, get a sense of…anything. Quiet the noise, see the window, feel anything at all. But before that can happen, my cell door bursts open with a swarm of guards filing into the room and zoning in on my cellmate. My brain pulses as it is pierced by her screaming. The guards shout over each other before suddenly moving towards me.

“You gotta come with us!” One of them shouts.

This is where everything gets fuzzy. I only remember bits and parts of what happened after that. Obviously, there was kicking and thrashing. Me screaming. Them screaming. But I remember hearing one voice. One calming voice in the sea of blinding white chaos in front of me.

Be free. __

I don’t know where the voice came from. I had assumed it had just been my panic speaking for me, but the voice felt too…prophetic, to be mine. Either way, I remember biting into the exposed neck of the guard grabbing me, the metallic taste of his blood being the first sensation I felt since they came into the room.

I blacked out after that, and the next thing I remember is running through the woods, the freezing cold biting my arms and legs, but, again, considering the past events, it was oddly comforting to me. I kept running, looking ahead in front of me, huffing in nonexistent air. I feel a brief euphoria of feeling the prison grow smaller behind me as I look forward to the dull frozen greenery in front of me. Running further and further, the adrenaline I feel blinds me to the fact that the forest is getting colder and colder, the green of the trees turning to vapid gray, and soon, a cold blue.

Eventually, I am surrounded by icicles and frost with whatever life that was present being swallowed by ice. In front of me, I’m confronted with a blue-tinted darkness with someone standing in front of me. No, something, standing in front of me. Something, I want to say a shadow or vapor appeared in front of me, talking in a variety of voices. Some whispering, some screaming, some crying, some laughing. All of them, however, swallowed my senses, my brain pulsing yet again to the point where the pain temporarily blinded me. I saw a blurred image look at me with what I thought was a smile as a cacophony of voices all vied for my attention. But one voice speaks to me. It didn’t just talk to me, it comforted me, lulled me. I basked in the shrieking pain my head was in and heard it.

I am what you seek. Seek me. Embrace me.

I felt a tear roll down my cheek before my skin became engulfed in black rot, every vein in my body darkening before every single one of my nerves was twisted and ripped apart. I remember shrieking in pain, my throat becoming sore and blooded right before…

My eyes open.

I awake in my bunk bed staring at the ceiling of my cell. I quickly sit up, recovering from my apparent dream. I feel my skin, the air. I hear the nothingness of the prison, close my eyes, and breathe out a slow, slow breath. When I was finally calm enough, I jumped down from my bunk bed, only to notice my socks splashing into liquid.

I look down to find a pool of blood at my feet, along with the bodies of multiple security guards. I look around the room to find blood-splattered walls surrounding my cell. My cellmate is nowhere to be found and I feel a growing panic inside me when I look down and see my own hands soaked in blood. My breathing is broken, with brief periods of me holding my breath and shuttering it out of my nose. I look up in panic and see the door to my cell wide open.

I shakingly step outside and see a similar scene in every other part of the prison. All the cells, the walls inside and outside the cells, the floors, the vents, all painted in buckets of red, and guards and prisoners alike covering the floors. I walk out into the scene wondering, begging for this to not be real, and look down into the rotunda below the gates outside of each floor of the prison. I stare into the small circle deep below thirty floors and see something. I look closer and see a figure standing below me. It’s too high to see, but I could’ve sworn I had seen it smiling up at me. My tiredness must have caught up to me, as when I squeezed them shut to take a quick, frantic breath, I opened them and saw it was gone.

I stood alone in the now empty prison, the doors likely being unlocked and unguarded. I would be free to leave. Free to explore the fields outside.

Free to see what’s outside.

I stand outside my cell. I stare at the dark room in front of me. I return to my cell and sit on the bottom bunk bed.

I’m free to go outside.

It can’t see, unfortunately.

The empty box it occupies is cold and pitch black, with not a single ray of light escaping.

Suddenly, the stomach turns warm, the hands damp from sweat.

Out of the darkness, large tendrils wrap around the hands, their wetness turning into a sticky web around the arms.

Soon, a giant blob of a scolding, tacky substance clings onto the back, spreading throughout the body like tar clinging to skin.

The stomach turns searing hot as the mass grows and melds with the body.

It grows hotter and hotter, and with it the vapidness of a black hole.

Its voice becomes more hoarse, ravenous, roaring and crying to be satiated, thrashing about in the room before feeling the familiar touch of a switch.

I flinch as the small bathroom I’m in is suddenly filled with light and flaccidly stand there in the mirror, glasses cracked and lopsided on my face, my dark hair frayed, my tan skin unnaturally pale.

The blackness of my pupils shrink to a small circle as the whiteness of my eyes return and I’m bemused that it wasn’t as bad as the other times. But I still stare past the human figure standing in the mirror and at the broken glasses on my face, lamenting that even with the light, I, unfortunately, still can’t see.