by Sean Shake
Things with faces that were just a little bit too human—ironic given their alien origin—with eyes that tracked you with a maliciousness real animals just didn’t have.
Giant snake-like creatures, monstrous buzzards, horrific things that bordered on werewolves.
There was even footage from a beach of a shark swimming up onto land and attacking people.
It would’ve been comical, if it weren’t so terrifying, watching that shark waddle around on its tail-fin as it chased after people, caught them, bit into them, eating only a few chunks, before moving on to the next victim, like some mindless zombie.
I was just glad—for the first time ever—I was locked away safely in prison, in the middle-of-nowhere Ohio, behind forty-foot concrete walls topped with razor wire.
The nurse must have felt the same, because she didn’t go home at the end of the day, when her shift should have ended and another nurse should have taken over.
Either that, or she was working some killer overtime.
I fell into a restless sleep, and when I woke up on the morning of the fifth day, I saw her passed out on one of the other beds, farthest away from me.
I lay there, staring at the muted TV.
The ships hadn’t moved, but the terror had. What had started in New York had now reached California, and had also crossed the Atlantic to Europe.
I thought again of the shark.
No one knew what was going on in remote, less-developed places like North Africa, or whole sections of the Middle East.
I drifted back to sleep again, and dreamt of flying sharks.
When I woke up, it was evening, and the pretty nurse was back at her station.
“Hey,” I called to her, a news reporter on TV talking about government responses the only other sound in the room.
She looked at me and blinked, as though seeing me for the first time.
I realized it was the first time I’d said anything since the attack.
Silence was a virtue. I’d learned that.
“Something wrong?” she asked disinterestedly. I got the feeling she didn’t like me much. Not surprising, given where and what I was
“That’s what I was gonna ask you.” I lifted my chin at the TV. “You’ve been out there, any idea what’s going on?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t been out there since yesterday.” She frowned and tilted her head. “Or was it the day before?” She stared blankly into space.
“What’d you see?” I asked, snapping her out of it.
“It was nothing like that.” She pointed at the TV, which was showing pixelated footage of an attack by several large bird-like creatures on a crowd of people in a stadium. The footage was too blurry, shaky, and pixelated for me to tell which stadium.
Why even bother showing it if you were going to have to pixelate so much of it?
“Just people mobbing the supermarkets,” the nurse continued. “Buying water and cleaning out the shelves of food. Canned goods and stuff like that. But I never saw anyone get torn apart like…” She trailed off, looking back to the TV, her face a grimace.
A few hours later, the nurse left me alone, mumbling something about a shower—which made me wonder where the hell she was gonna take a shower in a prison full of men.
Not five minutes after this, I heard the door open, and even before I looked, I knew.
Knew it wasn’t going to be the nurse. Knew it was going to be something… else.
Something skipped in my mind as my chest throbbed, and I saw it was one of the guards.
Seeing as how I was the only one in the ward, I assumed he was here for me.
But I wasn’t healed yet. Not even close.
Yes, the wounds had healed faster than they should have, and yes I could now stand with only extreme—instead of agonizing—pain, but I had a while yet to go here.
Then something skipped again, my chest twinging, and I noticed his face.
Or, where his face should have been.
Because instead of a face, instead of eyes, nose, and a mouth, there were simply two vertical red slits, approximately where his eyes would be. They stretched from just above his eyebrows, to about the level of his mouth.
If he’d had eyebrows or mouth.
The ‘eyes’, had no irises or pupils, or anything like that. Just red slits, a bit wider and rounder at the center, yet I got the uncanny feeling that he was staring right at me. That his eyes were locked onto mine and trying to burrow into my mind, to invade me.
He took a step in my direction, the door swinging shut behind him, and I saw that the shoe on his right foot had torn, and something scaly and brown oozed out the side.
Something which slapped wetly on the floor as he approached.
I got off the bed as quickly as I could—which was very slowly—to put something between us, and looked around for anything I could use as a weapon.
I didn’t have an IV needle or tube to stab or strangle him with, or even better, one of those movable poles I could have used as a bō staff.
By force of habit I had studied the infirmary for weapons as soon as I was conscious enough to, but hadn’t seen any.
As I looked around again now, I still didn’t see any.
Then the eyeless guard was there, right in front of me, the bed the only thing between us.
He stared at me, but didn’t move. Was unnaturally still, in fact.
I crouched, hands on the railing, back and sides screaming in pain from my stab wounds, thinking, my brain racing through possibilities to get me out of this situation in one piece.
Or at least alive.
The bed was a big heavy thing, and its wheels were locked, so I didn’t think I could push it into him, especially in my weakened state.
But he was between me and the only exit. I had to get by him somehow.
Normally I would risk outrunning him, but I doubted I could outrun a toddler in my current condition.
Behind me were a few more beds, and high on the wall the TV, below and to the right of which was a door, not one that led out of here, but only into a cleaning supply closet.
Cleaning supplies.
I had only a vague memory of nurses opening that door to get out bottles of spray cleaner and clean off the trays we ate from—which were taken away after each use—but I thought I remembered seeing a mop in there.
I turned and hobbled toward it, glancing over my shoulder.
Following me, not running, but walking, the brown scaly thing that protruded from his right shoe slapping the floor with every other measured step, the eyeless guard made his slow way after me, in no apparent hurry.
I reached the closest, yanked it open, and was greeted with darkness.
I glanced over my shoulder again. He was ten feet away.
I fumbled for a light switch, felt nothing, then moved my hand to the other side of the door, where it caught on something and shocked me as the light flickered on.
“Fuck,” I muttered, in surprise rather than pain, as that little shock was nothing compared to what I was feeling in my side and back right now. I had also been stabbed once in the thigh, but if that wound was hurting, it was being masked by the greater agony from the thirty-seven other stab wounds I’d sustained.
Directly in front of me was a mop sat in a bucket full of remarkably clean-looking water.
I grabbed the mop, trying to swing it around, but it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and I swore I felt my side rip open as I pulled.
Ignoring the pain, I finally lifted the soaked mop out, then placed it on the floor with a wet slap, angled it away from me, and kicked, snapping the head off, and leaving me with a makeshift bō staff, one end jagged and sharp.
I spun around.
He was standing right there, not a foot away from me, staring at me with those red vertical serpentine slits.
We ‘stared’ each other down.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
It was always best to make sure your enemy was actu
ally your enemy.
He raised his hand slowly and pointed at me.
That was creepy as fuck.
“Get out of here. Leave me alone.”
He didn’t. Instead, he stepped toward me, invading that bubble of personal space you didn’t breach with another man unless you intended to fight him.
Or hug him, I suppose.
This thing didn’t want to hug me.
He reached out and wrapped his fingers around my neck before I could react.
The speed with which he moved was shocking after his slow pursuit of me.
I pulled back my makeshift staff and slammed it into his chest, realizing my mistake instantly.
The guards here always wore stab vests, and this alien was no exception.
Don’t react Gage, I heard in my mind. Action, not reaction. Don’t let others dictate your movements.
Shut up old man, I thought at the memory, but heeded him and calmed myself, even as the fingers tightened around my throat, cutting off my breathing and blood flow.
I already knew I was too weak to pry the guard’s hand off. I could tell that by how strong his grip was.
He tilted his head at me, like a curious dog, as though he expected me to react.
I got the sense that he was straining, putting all his effect into his grip.
The edges of my vision started to turn purple, and before I could pass out, I carefully took aim at one of those slits, the right one, and stabbed the broken end of the mop into it.
The eyeless guard stumbled back, his hand steadily going to the stick in his eye slit, wrapping his fingers around it, and squeezing so hard that it shattered, leaving a small nub sticking out. He gripped this more carefully, and started to pull it out.
While he was doing this, I pushed past him, and to my surprise moved at more than a hobble this time, almost a speed-walk.
I glanced down, expecting to see fresh bloodstains through my hospital gown, but the stains that were there were old, and I didn’t see any fresh blood.
At the nurses station I quickly scanned the counter for anything that might be useful.
All I saw was a radio and the nurse’s purse.
I grabbed both, stuck the radio in her purse, and, feeling very metrosexual, slung the purse over my shoulder.
But I couldn’t be picky. I needed my hands free, especially in my dilapidated state.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the eyeless guard had gotten the broken mop handle from his eye slit.
He dropped it, and looked up at me.
The place where I had stabbed him had now widened, and something burned dimly behind it, like the image of the sun through one of those special telescopes, the ones that allow you to see the surface, the leaping licks of plasma looking like hell itself.
Fuck this, I thought, and pushed the door open.
3
The door slammed into the nurse and she stumbled back, holding her face, blood leaking out from under her hand, a contrast to her pale skin.
She pulled her hand away from her face and looked at her bloody fingers, then up at me. “You hurt me,” she said, stunned.
“No time for sorries.” I grabbed her by the arm. “Come on.”
She went with me mutely, not asking any questions.
Damn, how hard had I hit her?
We made it to the stairwell door.
The nurse stood there, staring at me, her face bloody.
“Unlock the fucking door!” I urged.
She looked at the door, then down at the keys hanging from a lanyard at her waist. “Oh. Of course.”
She clumsily went through keys to find the one to unlock it.
Christ, I hoped I hadn’t given her a concussion.
I resisted telling her to hurry up—she was probably already nervous enough—but this was taking way too much time for my liking.
If only this place had ID cards to open the doors instead, we’d already be through.
I heard a noise, and looked over my shoulder just as the eyeless guard exited the infirmary.
He looked left, then right in our direction.
His vision seemed to lock onto me, and he did a stiff about-face, then began toward us at that same measured pace he’d come after me in the infirmary at, implacably undeterred by the fact that we were running away from him.
I didn’t like the certainty that this implied, as though no matter how fast or far we ran, he would catch us.
His right eye now had grown even bigger around where I had stabbed it, and something orange and red was starting to spread out from the wound.
And beyond the red, beyond the burning corona, was something of deepest black.
“Are you coming?”
I turned to find the nurse was in the stairwell, holding the door open and waiting on me.
I blinked. I could’ve sworn that door opened outward, not inward.
I glanced down at my side as I entered the stairwell and shut the door behind me, checking to see if I was losing blood.
I didn’t appear to be.
Strange. Adrenaline must have been stemming the flow.
And also the pain. I barely felt any, despite the running I’d just done.
At the next floor I stopped. “Hold on,” I said, and lifted my hospital gown to check my side.
The bandages were stained red, but I wasn’t losing blood.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “What about you?” I gestured at her bloody nose.
“Fine. It only bled for a second.”
“Good, let’s move.” I hadn’t heard the door to the stairwell open, but that thing wasn’t human, and who knew what it could do.
Walk through doors?
Why not? If it was from those ships, it might be able to do a lot more.
It was strange it had appeared in a guard’s uniform. Maybe the aliens thought it looked close enough to human to fool us. They might be monumentally different from us, and to them something with a head and four limbs—even if one of those was growing something reptilian—was close enough, not realizing just how wrong it looked.
“Just one more floor to the A-wing housing unit,” I said. “There’ll be guards there. We’ll be safe.”
4
But instead of safety on the next floor, we found pandemonium.
Monsters from nightmares were fighting each other, eating each other. Sometimes eating each other alive.
I grabbed the nurse by the arm and pulled her back into the stairwell, carefully shutting the door, then peering through the small reinforced window to make sure nothing had seen us.
The monsters were everywhere. Like those I’d seen on the news: horrific animals with an uncanny malevolence about them.
And that wasn’t all.
I hadn’t believed the news reports, but here they were, right before my eyes: things that looked like they came straight from the depths of hell.
Hideous, distorted beings that moved with a loping fluidity that was sickening; that suggested too many, or a lack of, bones.
I moved so I was out of view of the window, then pulled her to me so she was as well. “I put a radio in here,” I said, taking her purse off my shoulder and handing it to her. “Try to contact someone.”
She pulled out the radio and stared at it.
Before I could ask if something was wrong, she held it to her mouth and said in a monotone, “Aaron? It’s Emma. Are you there?” She released the push-to-talk button and waited.
There was no response.
She went through several more channels, trying to contact someone.
Finally, someone answered.
“Get out of here little lady.”
She frowned, apparently deciphering who this was. “Devon?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but it’s crazy. Everyone’s gone.”
She said nothing.
“Gone where?” I asked.
She repeated my question.
“I don’t know,”
Devon responded.
“Where are you? I will come to you.”
“No. One of em got me.”
“Then I am definitely coming to you.”
“It’s too late. I feel… Wrong. Just get out of here.”
“I’m not going to leave you.”
There was no answer.
“Devon? Answer me, dammit.” It was odd hearing someone swear so emotionlessly.
After several seconds of silence, I said, “We need to get to your car. I hope like hell you keep your keys in your purse.”
“I’m not leaving him.” The lack of emotion in her voice was starting to creep me out.
“You heard him. It’s too late.”
“I—”
There was a sound from the stairwell below us.
It was there and gone too quickly to identify, but we both heard it, even over the muted chaos going on on the other side of the door which we stood to the side of.
“Did—” she began.
I covered her mouth, then put a finger to my lips. I grabbed the radio from her, turned it off so it wouldn’t give us away if someone talked over it, and stowed it back in her purse, zipping this up so the radio wouldn’t fall out.
Then I took her hand and led her up the next flight of stairs.
It was an administrative wing.
I checked that it was clear, then entered, pulling her behind me and quietly shutting the door.
This floor was eerily quiet.
I wasn’t sure if that was odd or not. Normally I would think it was, however with everything that had been going on—the alien ships, the reports on the news of the attacks—I imagined many workers had wanted to go home and be with their families.
And the people who worked on this floor, the administrators, would be the first to go home when shit hit the fan.
You could run a prison for a while without administrators. But not without guards.
It made me wonder what kind of state the prison had been in before tonight.
It clearly hadn’t been as bad as this, it would’ve reached the infirmary sooner if it had been, so it must have been a recent development, perhaps right after the nurse had started her shift.
I found it hard to believe they’d evacuated everyone so quickly, including most of the guards.
