I must have dozed off. When I wake up, I see a few flashlights sprawled over the ground, their lights on. "Hello?" I mutter. Dead silence. I pick up a flashlight and light up my surroundings. Everyone is gone. My heart begins to race. "Hello?" This time, I whisper. Even though I'm alone, I still feel like something is watching me.

  I tip-toe forward. Or, at least I think it's forward. I've lost all sense of direction; everything is just darkness now. It's gotten cold, too. Just below freezing, I think. I can see my breath against my ever dimming light.

  For the first time in what feels like months, I think about Taylor. But I shouldn't. Taylor isn't here. She never was. Only darkness and…

  …Breathing. Low, guttural breathing that's as all permeating as the darkness. I can feel it tingle my spine, and crawl across my skin, like some icy gust. My feet are glued to one spot. I'm utterly paralyzed. Whatever this thing is, its monolithic aura has already begun to devour me.

The flashlight suddenly dies. Now I'm alone with the Ape. Yes, it is the Ape. I don't need logic to deduce that. Hell, logic died the moment I stepped foot on the abyssal plain.

No, it died long before that, so long that I can't even comprehend it. It died before I was born, before humanity first discovered fire, even before the stars formed in the cosmos. It is an ancient corpse.

  The Ape is coming now. Its footsteps shift the earth's tectonic plates. The air molecules quiver with its movements. I'm so scared, my knees are locked in place, so I can't even fall to the ground. I'll die standing up.

  The ape’s breaths burn my face. It says something, but I don't understand it. For a split second, my flashlight flickers back on, and I catch a glimpse of the monster's face. White skin, two sets of car-sized fangs, and countless red eyes. Billions of them, like distant stars in the sky, all glaring down at my insignificant being. Though I see its face for only a second, the madness has already infected me. My brain has been scrambled. The neurons that filter the physical universe into my consciousness are being untied, one by one. My mind is stretched so far across the universe that everything is a shapeless, meaningless blur. All of history, from the big bang to the heat death of the universe, is happening at once. People, flowers, rocks, atoms, photons, gravity, dimensional plains, abstract concepts and even oblivion itself are all indistinguishable from each other. I’ve become everything and nothing.

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I want to slam on the break. Make it stop. Oh God, make it stop. But soon even my yearning for oblivion is yet another meaningless thing that I can’t comprehend.

  And yet in the incognizable kaleidoscope of my zombie sentience, I can still hear it; the demonic cackling of the Ape with Eight Billion Eyes. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for us. It’s coming for—

…

“Look at me, sweetie.”

Aubree rocked back and forth in the corner of her room. It was dark, except for the hallway light that peeked through the door crevice.

The puppet was no longer on her hand. Her mother must have taken it off.

“Are you okay, sweetie?”

“No,” Aubree said. Her mother held her.

“Do you know where you are?” She must have thought her daughter had gone insane.

“Yeah,” Aubree said. “At the house. In my room.”

“Do you know how long you’ve locked yourself in your room?”

That, Aubree didn’t know.

“Four days,” her mother said. “I’ve been so worried about you. Your coworkers are worried about you. Do you need help?”

Aubree nodded. “Yeah.”

Aubree went back to work a couple days later. Of course Mike vouched for her.

Soon, she was able to start paying for therapy sessions. She told her therapist about her difficulty following directions and paying attention. Basic stuff. She considered telling her about Taylor, and everything else. But…

After a few sessions, her therapist got her connected with a psychiatrist, who was able to get her hooked up with some medication for her ADHD. They started her off with small doses, and after a year she was regularly taking three pills a day.

She made very few mistakes after that. Customers and coworkers alike were regularly satisfied with her performance. Aubree continued to work at Fresh Farms Market for another four years, until the company went bankrupt. After that, she worked at Giant until the very end.

And every day until then, she kept the puppet she had made on the top shelf of her closet. And every night, she felt its eight-billion eyes burrow into her soul.