Am I ready? Wilfred Davis asked himself as he stared at the noose, mere seconds before the TV told him the world was over.
He had bought some nice, soft, silky rope from the hardware store earlier in the week. It was expensive for anything but the few short feet his intended purpose called for. He wasn’t sure if he would go through with it, but there was no harm in preparing, so he’d looked up a tutorial on YouTube and had it sorted a few minutes later.
Looking at the noose, at the finality the loose circle of fine woven threads represented had been intimidating, but also relaxing, in its way. But it was too quiet. Wil didn’t want to go in silence. There would be enough of that after. He had tried to find some good music on his phone, but the reception was piss-poor, and Wil didn’t want his musical choice to be buffering while he swung from the strong central rafter of the cabin.
So he’d turned to the TV. The reception was bad, as a lot of channels were only static on humming rainbow-barred screens.
The weather channel was stable, however. Its synthesized, lyric-less covers of 90s songs weren’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. A version of “Mambo No. 5” that sounded like it was being played in an elevator through a tin-can started playing and Wil rolled his eyes and shrugged. He still wasn’t sure if he could go through with it anyway. Maybe this was a sign telling him he shouldn’t. Or maybe that he was right, and this was the best he could ever expect. His life was the muzak Lou Bega: a shitty version of a mostly-forgotten song.
Wil put a sturdy table chair under the central rafter of the cabin and swung the rope over, then got on his tip-toes to secure it in place. That was when a flustered voice cut into the terrible keyboard cover of the fifth Mambo, and Wil paused with his fingers on the knot.
“Attention, attention. I don’t know how…shit. All future weather reports are, uh, not forthcoming. I mean, we do not have any forecasts for the weather beyond the next few days, and this station will be going dark very soon. There is something happening outside the station and, and, and I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I think it’s an attack or—or a disaster or something. The manager is dead. I saw him and he——oh my god.”
Wil stood there, an odd and macabre tableau: a pale man with unkempt black hair and hollow-looking green eyes, in his pajamas and on tip-toes tying a hangman’s noose.
It was not the first time he had been uncertain about his own demise. He’d questioned it many times over the last few years. It was the first time in a while that he had felt alarm, however. The concept of continuing as he had——alone, aimless, with no prospect of meaningful change or improvement——had been daunting. The idea of ending it was something of a concern, but also a relief. He’d been pulled between the two more often than he could recall: a drab life of quiet resignation, or a quick entry into oblivion.
It had been so calming, in a way. To give up and surrender to one or the other.
And now, this.
Whatever this was.
He remained atop the chair, on his tip-toes for another few minutes as he stared at the TV.
It’s not like this really matters, Wil thought.
And in truth, it didn’t. Not to him, anyway. He had already narrowed his choices down to going along with the meandering flow of his existence or sinking beneath it. Whatever was happening Out There wasn’t his concern. He was In Here, in his parents’ cabin, in his head, in an almost Zen-like state of calm and tranquility, and thinking maybe yes, it was time to get off this ride for good. He’d never asked to get on it, after all, and he hadn’t enjoyed most of his time up until now.
“I don’t——I don’t think it’s a nuclear thing. There are explosions but-but-but they’re not that big. Maybe cars or——” the announcer trailed off, his trembling voice fading as he moved away from the microphone.
Wil sighed and lowered his feet so they were flat atop the table chair. The noose swung a little at his expulsion of air, and moved in an easy pendulum in front of him. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Hypnotic, in its way.
This sounds like perfect timing. What better moment to off yourself than some kind of emergency? He thought. On the heels of this question were a dozen others though. Is it a prank? For real? Is it war? Natural disaster? Riots? Plague? The Rapture? Some other judgment or doomsday event? Aliens? It’d be a shame to miss out on aliens before I die.
“Dammit,” Wil grumbled. He made to step down from the chair but wound up shifting his weight the wrong way, tipping the chair to the side, and pitching forward onto the floor. Wil had a split second to berate his own idiocy before he face-planted onto the hardwood floor and the room went dark.
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Portland, Oregon
Seven Days ago
“How’d the interview go?” Ralph asked as he leaned against the entrance of Wil’s cubicle, elbow up on the flimsy gray partition. Wil didn’t hate Ralph, but he didn’t care for him raising his arms. He was constantly sweaty, regardless of the season, and his armpits were always a Rorschach of sweat and grime. Wil wondered what his shrink would say about the shapes he saw under Ralph’s arms: an sad goblin, a wilted butterfly, a bird with broken wings.
Today Ralph’s pit stains resembled two lumpy people turning away from each other. Ralph’s pits were such a unique window into Wil’s psyche, and Wil scoffed at the idea.
“Something funny?” Ralph asked.
“No. Sorry. The interview was fine. It was fine,” Wil said. And it had been. He had sat down with his boss, his boss’s boss, and a rep from HR to discuss why he deserved the promotion to lead designer. Currently, and for the last several years, he had been working under his boss, Yvonne, making instruction manuals for various products that required assembly. Everything from do-it-yourself furniture to model trains to dissection guides used in high school biology classes to automobile kits.
Each of those manuals required a lot of precise technical drawing, and that was where Wil and his coworkers came in. Drawing book cases and engine blocks and frog organs and laying out the designs for the manuals day after day. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t how he had hoped to use his art degree. Concept art for game studios, covers for comics, posters for movies, something with a little joy in it.
Not…bookshelves.
But he did it, he did it well, and it paid the bills. And after a few years working with his studio, he felt he might be able to get a little more. He’d worked hard, worked well, and had experience.
And the interview had been fine.
Fine.
Not bad.
Not outstanding.
Just…fine.
Like everything.
Like everything had been for years.
Wil had hoped he might upgrade to Fine & Dandy, maybe even Mighty Fine, or possibly someday, So Fine It’s Divine.
But no.
Yvonne had come up to him an hour after the interview and told him they had decided to consolidate the position with hers. His name would be on the shortlist if anything came up. Wil smiled at her and nodded and in that moment, decided killing himself might be the way to go.
“They’re just not going through with anybody. Decided to merge Yvonne’s position with the new one, cut costs. You know,” Wil said.
“That I do!” Ralph said, too loudly. “Maybe next time!”
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Maybe,” Wil said, but he already knew better.
----------------------------------------
Now
Oak Rest Cabin
30 miles outside Portland, Oregon
“———just don’t want to die in here. Not in this stupid crappy local weather station. If anybody can hear me, they’re outside. They’re banging on the doors. I think one of them got in already——” the trembling, sniffling voice of the weather announcer brought Wil back to consciousness. He didn’t have to feel for the lump on his forehead to know it was there. It felt like somebody had spot-welded an apricot to the area just above his left eyebrow. He touched it anyway and winced. It wasn’t as big as it felt but it was still sizable.
There was still gray October light filtering past the curtains and into the rustic cabin living room. He’d only been knocked out for a little while, maybe a few minutes, tops.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the announcer on the TV said. Wil squinted up at the old television set. It only showed the same picture of the Portland area, with multi-hued computer-generated cloud banks moving in the same short loop over and over again.
Wil winced as he got to his feet and his head throbbed in protest. The announcer was just crying now, sobbing as some other noise rose in the background: thumping. Thumping turned into banging turned into crashing turned into some wretched croaking howls and the screams of the announcer.
Then there was wet tearing and snapping, a sloppy smacking sound, another bang, and silence.
“Huh,” Wil said. He didn’t have any prior experience or anything to measure it against, but he was pretty certain he had just heard somebody die. Pretty horribly, from the sound of it.
It had to be a joke.
Wil found the TV remote and changed the channel to one of the news stations he had skipped over before.
A harried-looking woman with dried blood on one side of her neck, a bandage over one eyes, and torn, dirty clothes looked ahead into the camera with obvious shellshock. Her visible eye was wide, but vacant. Her skin was pale, and drawn tight. It took him a moment to recognize her, but that was Rebecca Cunnigham, half of Portland’s evening news anchor duo. Her cascade of blond hair had been partially burned off, the rest cut short and with several missing patches.
“——advised to leave the city immediately. Do not, under any circumstances, approach Portland or any other major city. We have confirmation that similar events are happening all across the country, and from what we can tell, many other countries as well, if not all of them,” Rebecca said.
“There are conflicting reports as to the nature of what is happening outside right now, and continues to happen. Traffic Chopper 04 has still not responded since it was hit by something. We have not heard back from the pilot or our traffic expert, Bill Jenkins, and our outward facing weather and security cameras have also ceased to work. Have we heard back from Mary?”
Rebecca asked this last of somebody off-camera, and Wil heard a distant echoing, “No.”
“It’s been a half hour,” Rebecca said. “She was just supposed to pop up to the roof and peek outside.”
“She’s probably dead,” the same off-camera voice said and Rebecca bit her lip and frowned.
“Uh, sorry, about that,” she said in a halting voice that had a faint tremble in it. Wil had edged closer to the TV without realizing it. He pulled the sturdy old chair he had accidentally knocked over to within a few feet of the TV and sat down on it.
Rebecca Cunningham had paused, unable to get any words out as she took several deep breaths. Wil changed the channel to see if there were any other unusual announcements being made.
Next channel. No signal.
Next channel. No signal.
Next Channel. No signal.
Next channel. The vertical view of a phone camera hurriedly running through a city somewhere. Not Portland. The video showed a street crowded with cars, most of them wrecked and abandoned, but several wrecked and occupied by still figures with blood seeping from their heads.
“Oh shit,” Wil said.
One of the cars had flames licking along its side and exploded. Fleeing pedestrians caught in the explosion were thrown away and across the street like leaves in a hurricane. The quality of the video was blurry but Wil saw limbs flying off torsos for a brief second as the explosion tore through a small crowd. People screamed and the cameraman (or woman), continued to flee ahead through the streets. Their breath came in rapid, terse gasps as they fled and tried to speak over the din.
“They won’t stop! They won’t stop!” the breathy voice of the cameraman (definitely a man, now that Wil heard him speak) panted. There were screams from somewhere off camera, and not the panicked shouts of alarm and dismay from the survivors of the car explosion. They were more visceral somehow, more sharp and desperate.
There were other sounds too: much like the weather station’s last broadcast, strange, inhuman sounds could be heard underneath the high-pitched shrieks of terror and pain. They reverberated through the TV speakers at a tone or pitch they couldn’t decipher without crackling and Wil winced as he turned the volume down.
The upper half of a man flew past the cameraman’s shoulder and smacked into the side of a wrecked delivery truck. The torso splatted against the side of the truck with a wet and heavy thud that left a firework pattern of blood against the truck’s white side. Wil actually screamed as he saw a cornucopia of entrails and organs slide out of the torso’s open end, just below ribs and the nub of a spine. Then, worst of all, Will saw the person flail it’s arms, saw the look of shocked, confused disbelief on the face and realized they were still alive.
“Jesus Christ,” Wil hissed and fell back out of the chair again, though only on his rear this time. The cameraman spun around and his voice rose into a wail of horror as something descended on him. That was when the shot froze, giving Wil the opportunity to study the dark shape.
The picture was blurry, the lighting bad, but it looked human…ish. It had a head, a torso, arms and legs, maybe even clothes. It might have been wearing a flannel shirt. It had a rather elongated skull for a person, not inhumanly so just noteworthy. What little could see of the shape’s skin beneath the heavy shadows was grayish. It might just have been a regular person with bad complexion save for one thing: the eyes.
The eyes glowed a ferocious and unearthly green, like will-o-wisps shining through the heavy mist of a swamp. Their light was poisonous and unclean and even through the shitty quality of the camera and the even shittier resolution of the old TV, the clarity of their venomous light was unmistakable.
“This is the best picture we’ve received so far of whatever is happening in Dallas, right now,” a man’s voice said. “It was posted online about thirty minutes ago from a livestream. We’re trying to locate other streams but reception is spotty in many areas, and many social media websites are slow due to what we’re assuming is an exceptional level of traffic.”
The view of the green-eyed humanoid shrank up to the upper right of the screen and gave way to reveal the desk of another news anchor, a national one, this time. The man explaining the clip was in a drab gray suit and blue tie, had short white hair, and a weathered face. His tone was even, but Wil heard a subtle tremor just beneath.
“We apologize for the extremely graphic content, but we do not have the time or staff to edit the raw footage properly, and it does provide an accurate depiction of how dangerous it is outside,” the man said. Simple white text appeared below the man that read “Mark Howard, Senior Anchor.”
“To reiterate the message from the White House: everybody must stay in their homes. Lock all doors and windows, close all curtains, bar any entrances and exits. Landlines for telephones are unreliable, but cell phone towers are mostly intact outside of major cities,” Mark Howard said. Wil immediately patted himself down for his phone.
He’d left it on the coffee table after he couldn’t find any good reception. He picked it up and tried it again, but the reception was still less-than-ideal, but functional. He checked his social media feeds (which were very slow), full of workplace acquaintances and people from high school and college he never really spoke with anymore. Many of them had last posted about mundane nonsense, the kind of banal updates that made Wil dread the next forty-to-fifty years of life.
“Traffic sucks. Thanks Portland.”
“Rent went up again. Always fun!”
“My friend set up a GoFundMe after his accident and it would really help if…”
“Kids stayed up all night crying. Lord why did I ever think…”
“Just got out of the new MetalliMan movie! It was fun but they’re starting to run together…”
That was the most recent post for most of Wil’s acquaintances. Just the day-to-day drudgery. They had all been posted last night, with the latest being shortly after 2:30 AM. But there were quite a few from this morning.
“Heard the news. This a joke?”
“Kelly went out last night for her friend’s party. Anybody heard from her? Not responding to texts.”
“Crazy weather. Everybody stay safe.”
“IT’S OUTSIDE MY HOUSE POLICE WON’T ANSWER SOMEBODY HELP”
The last message was only thirty minutes old and contained a picture. It took a while to load, but when it did, Wil’s skin crawled and the hairs on his neck prickled. It was from Ralph, of all people, he of the Rorschach-pits. The picture had been taken from inside Ralph’s house, from just behind the curtain of a window, discreetly pulled aside to reveal the front yard and street.
It was foggy in the picture, dense enough to almost obscure the house across from Ralph’s. However not so dense as to obscure what looked like insectile legs longer than street lights stepping on Ralph’s lawn. There were eight of them, each glossy and dark black, like some giant arachnid had decided to construct its web and catch Ralph on the way to work. The legs extended up through the fog and frame of Ralph’s camera, well over twenty yards in length.
A notification popped up as Wil stared at his screen.
RALPH ATKINS IS STREAMING
Wil clicked on it and almost dropped his phone as he was greeted by hysterical shrieks from Ralph. The camera focused on the front door which was bowing inward. There was a sharp gunfire crack of wood splitting and the front door, frame, and a good chunk of wall collapsed in. A chittering droning noise like a swarm of locusts emitted from outside, and Wil saw those long black pointed legs move forward, one stepping into Ralph’s ruined entryway. Ralph continued shrieking and then the feed ended.
Wil looked back up at Mark Howard, talking about some kind of massive riot in Dallas. He flipped back to Rebecca Cunningham, who had composed herself and was advising all Portland residents to go to any available basements or secure area in their homes. He looked down at his phone again, and the now rapidly growing feed of panicked, confused, and terrified posts.
Finally, he looked out the window.
The forest outside was calm. Quiet.
More than quiet.
It was silent.
No birds sang, no insects buzzed, no distant traffic hummed.
“What the hell is happening?” Wil asked the empty cabin.