I have made many mistakes in my life. Some were mundane, like forgetting to put the toilet seat down only to hear my girlfriend cursing in the middle of the night as she stuck an unexpectedly wet landing. Others changed my life, and not for the better. I remember Sara, who I thought was the love of my life, urging me to try my first hit of meth. Taking the pipe from her with shaking hands, I placed it to my mouth. I didn’t really want to use, but I did it because I didn’t want her to leave me behind. My fears were well founded in retrospect, because that happened anyway. Of my many mistakes, however, one really stands out.

There I was, standing among the moonlight tombs in Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans watching my partner, who I had only known for a couple of days, dissolve in front of me. Although, dissolve might not be the precise word.

When we chased our quarry into this necropolis we were armed, young, and confident. Only the dead stood witness as my partner, Rob, reached out to grab the homeless-looking man we had pursued from near Magazine Street, having finally cornered him in the walled cemetery among its rows of above-ground graves. Rob was practiced and assured as he grabbed our target’s arm. He started placing the man, a nondescript older white guy dressed in a hoodie and jeans, in a hammer lock. But the man, if that is what he was, twisted his body around in a way that no human body should be able to move, as if his shoulder lacked connective tissues. Briefly, I recalled the old Stretch Armstrong action figure I had once owned as a kid.

The man’s, the creature’s, shoulder pivoted unnaturally in its socket as he quickly spun around to face Rob. From beneath his hood, his eyes began to glow. And as the light from his eyes came to rest on Rob, Rob’s skin began to glow as well. The effect looked gentle at first, until I noticed Rob seemed locked in place, his muscles twitching and shaking as if he were being electrocuted. He made low grunting sounds through his tightly clenched teeth.

The effect quickly intensified, the multicolored light from Rob’s skin playing across the white marble edifices that surrounded us. As I watched, dumbstruck, his skin became pixelated with blocks of different colors outlining the parts of his body like an old, low-bit video game. Then, some of the pixels started disappearing. He looked as if he was unraveling, de-rezzing.

Now, my mama didn’t raise any idiots. I had learned enough about electricity to know that one doesn’t just reach out and grab a person who is being electrocuted. That just puts you in the circuit and you lock up and can’t let go and are electrocuted too. What you are supposed to do is run up and forcefully knock the person away from the source of electricity. That’s exactly what I did. Running at Rob, I lowered my shoulder and powered through him.

Rob was blasted away from those glowing eyes. He hit the ground and rolled to his feet, his hand reaching for the pistol he had holstered at his hip. Not nearly as graceful, I tasted the cobblestones and dirt beneath us. As I gathered my wits, I realized that I must have hit Rob harder than I expected. My shoulder was throbbing.

I got to my feet and heard several gunshots split the night, echoes bouncing back and forth loudly from the tombs surrounding us. I turned in time to see our target slump to the ground, riddled with wounds. The hood was blown back and half of his face was gone, his eyes no longer shining with eldritch light. Oddly, there was no blood flowing from any of the wounds

With relief, I looked over at Rob, but panicked because Rob was still glowing, still dissolving. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw more sparkling. I turned my head, and looked at my shoulder. To my horror, I realized that it was glowing too, and the throbbing feeling was spreading.

OK, so maybe my mama did raise at least one idiot.

***

My name is James Smith. My nickname growing up was “Generic” because apparently my parents had no imagination. It turns out that I share my name with more than 38,000 other people in the United States, not to mention the legion of others in many English-speaking countries. I think Dakota Brown was the one who looked that stat up on the internet and hung the name on me. Yeah, Dakota. Your name is much more unique.

My story is an old, tired one. Boy grows up in a good household with his parents and two brothers. Boy is introverted, and likes reading and video games and tabletop role playing games. Boy’s family doesn’t understand him. Boy goes to college. Boy falls in love with a wild child. Boy follows his love into meth addiction. Boy develops methamphetamine psychosis. Boy’s paranoia leads him down a rabbit hole of internet conspiracy theories. Boy gets busted. Boy goes to rehab and gets clean. Boy loses his girlfriend to his drug dealer. Boy gets recruited by some shady anti-conspiracy organization on the dark web as a field investigator and joins on a lark. Boy ends up in a New Orleans cemetery glowing in technicolor.

You know, the one you’ve seen in books and Hollywood blockbusters a thousand times.

What, you haven’t seen any of those?

Screw you, Dakota. You still live in our home town with your insipid wife and your two overly-precious kids and you work all day selling insurance. Maybe I am not the generic one.

***

Rob dropped his pistol to the ground and raised his hands up in front of his face. For a few seconds he stood there staring, seemingly entranced.

“Shit,” he finally said, “I knew it had to be the Greys. They’re taking me to their ship, and . . . they’re going to genetically modify me. They’ll send me back and make me father a new generation of human-looking aliens!” He started breathing faster, clearly starting to lose it.

Like I said, I hadn’t known Rob for long, but apparently his personal conspiracy theories tilted towards abduction by Roswell-type aliens. I guess that makes sense as he told me he grew up in New Mexico. Given Rob’s grating personality and somewhat lopsided features, the aliens would have to be pretty damn powerful to enable him to father a generation of anything.

I had more immediate concerns. While NOPD is not known for their rapid response times, Lafayette Cemetery is located in the Garden District, a fairly affluent area. Hell, Commander’s Palace, a New Orleans culinary landmark, is located right across the street. Houses and other businesses surround the walls of the cemetery on all four sides. Although it was late and all the businesses were closed, the odds of the gunshots passing unremarked were nonexistent.

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Being a convicted felon, I had no desire to find out whether the poor reputation of the Louisiana prison system was well-earned.

My immediate instinct was to rabbit, to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible. But how was I supposed to do that when I was lit up like a slot machine? This was not a good recipe for an inconspicuous escape.

Police sirens sounded faintly in the distance. Were they getting closer? I looked around me, studying the maze of tombs. Lafayette Cemetery is not very large. Its footprint is only one square block. Was there somewhere to hide? Should I just take off? If I could get far enough away, could I pass myself off as just another Crescent City weirdo in a city full of them?

Turning back to Rob, I was prepared to tell him that we had to go. The words died in my throat when I noticed that he had retrieved his pistol from the ground and was now staring at it intently. He was nearly hyperventilating. More of him was gone, more dark spots appearing in his shifting, writhing mass of color.

“I feel like I’m about to pass out,” he gasped, forcing the words out one by one. “Something in my mind is telling me to sleep, just sleep.”

He seemed to gather his determination for a moment. He looked at the gun in his hand. I started feeling a sense of foreboding.

“They can’t have me!” he screamed into the night.

The hand holding the pistol swung up to his head and there was another gunshot. Rob slumped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. The light abruptly cut off, his appearance returned to normal, and this time there was blood. It was spattered on the tomb behind him and pooled beneath his head.

Glancing at the where the creature had fallen, I could see that its body was gone. While I was distracted by other things, it had apparently melted into a puddle of goo, clothes and all, and was beginning to evaporate.

Even though I was deeply horrified by everything that had taken place, I am a survivor. The mercenary, analytical part of my mind realized that this could all be explained away as “deranged man breaks into a cemetery to off himself,” but only if I could somehow escape.

The sirens were definitely getting louder, and I wasn’t getting any less conspicuous. The glowing had expanded to every visible part of my body. Unlike Rob, however, I didn’t notice any dark spots appearing in the fields of color on my body. I had no idea what that meant.

The closest siren reached Washington Avenue right outside the gates, then it abruptly cut off. Emergency lights reflected off of the buildings surrounding the cemetery. More sirens approached in the distance. There was no time left for me to run.

So, I quickly formed a plan. I would tell the police that we had decided to search the cemetery for supernatural activity. I would tell them that I had just met Rob the day before and we had bonded over a shared love of the supernatural and that we had gone looking for ghosts. That should be plausible in New Orleans with the number of tourists paying good money for schmaltzy ghost tours.

Ghosts? Hell no. Vampires. We had gone looking for vampires. This was the Garden District after all and I had heard that Anne Rice of Interview With The Vampire fame had lived in this neighborhood.

I would say that Rob had then gone crazy, injecting me with some kind of drug that made me light up like a glow stick and then he had killed himself. Maybe they would stay away from me if they thought I was radioactive? Maybe I could mention some sort of radioactive isotope?

Yeah, it was thin as hell, but my mind was reeling after everything that had just happened. You try coming up with something better under pressure.

To make any of this work, though, I would have to get rid of my weapons and other suspicious paraphernalia. Among other things, I was carrying a gun and a long knife, a ski mask, thick zip ties and duct tape. Or, I could just say that I was carrying what appeared to be a rapist’s tool kit. Plus, felon with a firearm charges are no joke.

My only hope was that the officer or officers outside the gate would wait for backup after a shots fired call before entering the maze of tombs. That would give me enough time to hide my incriminating belongings. I couldn’t help but wonder if New Orleans had a police helicopter. If one of those appeared, I would be screwed.

Not all of the tombs and graves in Lafayette Cemetery are in perfect repair. I started creeping around looking for holes in the ground, loose stonework, anything that would serve as a hiding spot. I had to find a way to stash the gun. If I was caught with a gun, nothing else mattered.

It was difficult to get my arms and legs working with their usual level of coordination. My muscles were pulsing and throbbing. My hands and feet tingled. I moved in an unbalanced, shuffling way. The humid air was stifling, and it was hard to breathe. And I was getting tired, so very tired. I just wanted to take a break, to lie down, to rest.

I kept moving forward, though, searching for a place to ditch my suspicious items. More cars pulled up loudly outside the cemetery gate. Moving farther away from the gate, I was still searching, still hoping. I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I had to survive. I had to turn this around somehow. Moving was so much effort and I hadn’t found anywhere to lose my things.

As I approached the rear of the cemetery, I heard the clattering and squealing of the cemetery’s metal gate opening. My time was up.

Unable to continue moving forward, I slumped down against the outer wall to await my fate. My plan was stupid anyway. Nobody would believe that crap. Radioactive isotope? Yeah, and Spider-Man is a documentary.

The feelings in my body were intensifying. I had to fight for consciousness. Just like Rob had earlier, my body began to jerk and shake as if I were being electrocuted or having a seizure. The pain was excruciating. Every cell in my body felt like it was dipped in acid.

Flashlight beams approached in the distance. My peripheral vision started narrowing until all I could see was what was directly in front of me.

I felt my mind slipping away but I hung on to consciousness. Excited voices approached in the distance, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. The energy within my body reached a crescendo. My vision turned blindingly white and all I could hear was a high-pitched whine the volume of a jet engine.

After what seemed like an eternity, without any warning the energy in my body suddenly cut off.

I could move again. My body felt normal. Looking around, I saw nothing but inky blackness.

Suddenly, ahead of me like a spotlit portion of a theater’s stage, a patch of brightness appeared. I walked towards the light. As I got closer, I noticed that there, suspended in the darkness, was a table with one chair.

“Am I dead,” I wondered to myself. “Is this the afterlife? Am I about to be judged?”

Sitting down on the chair, I noticed I still had my clothes, my backpack, and all of my other items with me, which would seem out of character for judgment day. Although who knows? I had never experienced judgment day before.

I relaxed for a second, trying to quell my nerves. My hands were visibly shaking from too much adrenaline. Taking a few deep breaths, I tried to slow my pulse because my heart felt like it was about to beat out of my chest.

But my adrenaline immediately spiked again when another’s voice intruded in my thoughts. “Welcome.”