Seth could only stare in mute amazement as a bright white crack started breaking open right in front of his eyes.
The sound of a fork scraping against a plate began shredding through the air. The sound broke him out of the stupor and he clutched his ears while the crack seemed to completely open.
He fell on his back as he watched a large skeletal hand that looked to be made of purple taffy mixed with bone fissures slowly emerge through the crack. The misshapen hand was about half the size of Seth and as it reached about a foot away from his face, it stopped and began to jerk about.
Seth screamed in fear and scrambled back on all fours away from the abomination.
“It’s not real, it’s not real, IT’S NOT REAL!” Seth sputtered.
Just when it seemed as if he was getting to a safe distance, the hand stopped and shifted in place to make way for something else through the crack. Seth's gaze followed the change from the hand to the entrance of the crack. What he saw shook him to the core.
At the entrance of the crack was an eye.
So black and empty it could only be compared to the endless vacuum of space. There was a promise inside the void, telling Seth that if he moved even one more muscle, he wouldn’t live long enough to see himself graduate tomorrow.
As he lie there in a half sit-up position, resembling a deer in headlights, the hand shot out and grabbed him by the face, using its monstrous strength to slam his head into the curb, surely breaking his nose and giving him a nasty concussion. Blood dripped down Seth’s face, and he turned his eyes sluggishly to the six pack he bought earlier.
“Dammit, I grabbed the wrong kind,” Seth aimlessly muttered right before he drifted into the darkness.
---------
People’s voices started brushing on the edge of Seth’s consciousness.
“The new guy looks like a pile of shit,” a deep voice said.
“Looks like he was a struggler,” a lighter, more feminine voice observed.
Seth’s crusty eyes started to pry open, and a beam of light shot into them, caused him to clamp them shut again. Slowly he squinted and opened his eyes again to adjust to the brilliant beam.
“Well, he is alive after all,” the deeper voice exclaimed in a bored tone.
The voice belonged to a bearded man standing over Seth who was apparently sprawled on the floor. As Seth looked around to collect his thoughts, he noted in surprise that he was no longer in the parking lot of the Circle K, in fact, it didn’t look like anywhere he had ever been before.
The ceiling, walls, and floor were all stark white and seemed to be glowing. He also saw a number of other people littered around the room. He tried to crane his neck to observe the whole room when a lance of pain spiked through his head. Seth groaned and rested his head back on the ground.
“Here, swallow this,” the feminine voice said next to him. It belonged to a young girl kneeling over him. She offered him a green tablet that matched her eyes, to which he drunkenly accepted.
Shortly after he swallowed the tablet, a pain even worse than the previous sparked in his head and grew larger and larger until Seth screamed out in agony. He almost passed out again, but the pain was gone soon after and he realized he felt way better.
Sitting up testily, Seth felt none of the pain from before. He reached a hand up toward his previously tender nose discovered it was perfectly fine other than some dried blood.
“What did you give me?” He asked the young girl.
“Like I know,” she vocalized.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“They just gave it to me and said to make you take it when you woke up.”
“Who is they?” Seth inquired.
“Like I know,” she repeated impatiently.
As Seth fully stood up, he glanced at the bearded man whom he noticed earlier still standing near him. “So do you have something for me too?” Seth asked the guy.
“Do I look like Kriss fucking Kringle? The only reason I’m here is to make sure you don’t do something to my daughter.”
“Dad...” the girl warned.
“Sorry hun,” the man sighed. “Let’s get going, now we ain’t gotta deal with him.”
“Alright,” the girl agreed.
As they walked away to converse amongst themselves, Seth was about to stop them to ask more questions, but instead turned his attention to the rest of the room. It looked to have around a couple hundred people standing about. Some were talking in small groups, others were standing in the corners or against the wall keeping to themselves. There were even a few in the fetal position crying or looking like they were about to.
The one thing they all had in common was the suspicious look in their gazes.
Seth panned his eyes over each person to see if he recognized anyone. As he inspected the crowd, he saw that there was a wide diversity amongst them. It seemed almost like someone handpicked a few people from every country and put them all in one room.
What disturbed Seth the most was the fact that any conversation he overheard while pacing the room was in the English language. He found it highly improbable that they all just happened to be from areas who spoke English, no matter how popular the language is, there was too many different races and clothing types for that.
Finally, he noticed two people huddled in one of the corners that he recognized. He was startled to see that one of them was actually Sydney. Also, the guy talking to her in a hushed tone was another one of his classmates, Will Rivera.
Will was one of the guys at school Seth could actually remember the name of. He always treated him kindly, even if he was just an acquaintance. Seth began to make his way over to them when a giant panel opened up on the wall farthest from Seth. Silence fell over the room as everyone waited in anticipation for something to emerge.
He heard a woman cry out as a figure walked out from the darkness of the panel.
The thing was humanoid in shape but it looked as if it was created out of a variety of different pieces of flesh. It had one sea green tentacle as its left arm and what looked like a glass human arm as the right. The rest of its mismatched body looked like a quilt made of hair and scales. Its legs resembled a gorillas with silver hair and black skin. It was near three times the size of anyone in the room and it had a strange looking collar on its grotesque neck.
Above the monster’s collar was a purple hood that hid its head.
The panel closed behind the apocalypse creature and it stopped a couple meters from the wall. It pressed a button on its collar and a square portion of the floor rose up under it and lifted it off the ground above the heads of the crowd. Everyone gaped at the floating creature as it came to a stop in the center of the room.
When it hit its standstill, the monster let out a series of gargles and screams that caused everyone to take a step back from it. The monster stopped and reached up to click another button on its collar.
“Sorry about that Thigsins. I forgot to change to your barbaric language before I arrived.”
It panned its head over the crowd, its voice a robotic rumble.
“I’m sure you have many questions, but I don’t care. On account of my distaste for all of you and your languages, I will make this short so I can watch how all of you will inevitably perish. You are all a waste of oxygen and the nutrients it takes for you to survive. You are a reject of your disgusting world, which means no one will notice or care you are gone. But rejoice! You have been taken from your hopeless lives to participate in our renowned dimension studies! Each of you will be sent to one of our training worlds in respect to the dimension you are assigned with a few precious gifts. You will all act as experiments that further our growing understanding of creation!”
The creature stood with its arms raised seemingly to be waiting for applause.
“What the hell are you talking about?” A grizzled old man shouted from the back.
This began an uproar of questions and cursing from the rest of the crowd. As they started to get louder and louder, the creature looked as if it was shaking in anger.
“SILENCE!” It screeched.
Its voice shook the room and shut everyone up in an instant.
“How dare you...”
The creature extended his glass arm at the old man that started it all and everyone stared in terror as the guy seemed to turn inside out starting at his mouth. Blood poured all over the ground as his organs continued to plop on the floor and the sickly sound of the man’s muffled screams were suddenly cut off as the remains of his body fell to the ground.
No one said a word as the whole room seemed frozen other than the monster who just brutalized one of them.
“Because of your fellow filth’s disrespect, I will no longer grace your useless existences with my presence.”
The creature turned around as a crack in thin air formed next to it.
“I can’t wait to see what anomalies wreak havoc amongst this round of subjects,” the monster murmured to itself as it stepped through the crack and disappeared.
The floor piece that held the creature floated back to its original place in the creature’s absence. Everyone could only stand in their own stupor after what had just transpired. No one could fathom what that creature was or what it was talking about. After what happened to the lone old man, no one knew what to do next.
Seth was no different than the rest of the people gathered in the room. He could only stare at the corpse of the man and wonder what the hell a “Thigsin” was.