I secure the door behind me and draw the curtains, making sure to cover the window perfectly. The room reeks of cigarette smoke, old carpet, and muffler exhaust—which is entirely my fault, but there’s no way I’m leaving my only means of transportation outside. I’ve rolled my Kawasaki into the room and placed it next to the bed.
Feeling rather vulnerable, I check the small bathroom to make sure it’s empty. The area is tiny, but thankfully clean. I leave the light over the sink on and close the door halfway, then turn off the lamp by the double bed. The less it looks like someone is in here, the better.
Kicking off my boots, I sit on the bed and press my back against the wall-attached headboard, feeling fortunate I got here before things got any worse. My hands shake over my lap. I squeeze them into fists and concentrate on breathing and conjuring random, off-the-wall things.
Souped-up road bikes.
Machiavellian.
Double espressos.
The ideas run out as images of what I saw on the news insert themselves in the middle. Fires. Tear gas. Pike Place enveloped in flames. People running, trying to escape the chaos. Police officers wearing gas-masks, holding shields. Shaky camera shots of hunched figures slipping in and out of dark alleys, snatching men and women from the sidewalks and pulling them into the gloom where no one dared follow.
I think of the terrified faces of the café patrons as their lives suddenly went from run-of-the-mill existences to run-for-your-life, apocalyptic nightmares.
A police siren wails outside, faint at first, then loud, then gone. I stand, skirt around my bike and peek outside, pulling the dusty curtain back just a bit. The street is dark, only a “Vacancy” neon sign shining on the sidewalk. There isn’t a soul roaming around, not even cars driving by on the adjacent road.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at my sock covered feet.
The world is not what it was yesterday, and it never will be again.
Monsters are real, and they’re no longer afraid to come out and show themselves. On the contrary, they are eager, prepared and organized—more than I could have ever imagined.
Their coming out was nothing less than a concerted effort. They are on TV, radio, Internet. All the news channels are reporting their existence at once. Some are calm and quite informative on what will happen next. Others are frantic and unable to express what their eyes are seeing. It is clear which news organizations are run by Eklyptors and which aren’t.
Depending on their news source, citizens around the world are being encouraged to seek help and information from their local authorities or to stay home and lock their doors. Depending on their trusting natures, people are either going out looking for answers or barricading their windows and gathering anything that can be used as a weapon. Depending on their choice, some citizens aren’t human anymore and some have quickly remembered how to pray.
I shiver thinking of our failure. We could have warned them. We could have done something, but we were utterly unprepared for something of this magnitude.
The extent of their invasion is staggering. They are everywhere. Police departments, fire stations, hospitals, news channels, government organizations. Every place imaginable. Their numbers are beyond my wildest calculations.
My stomach flips, a combination of fear and disgust. My life is destroyed in every possible way, and there’s no solace in the fact that I tried to fight. Because it all amounted to nothing and, now, everyone is to share my fate or actually worse.
Whatever hope there was, it’s now gone. They will persecute us until every last one of us is one of them. The CBS anchor said: “There is no point in fighting. We are stronger in number and strategy. Our plan has been in motion for many years. If you are learning about it now, it is because we are well past the point of no return. The scales have finally tipped in our favor, and there is nothing, let me repeat, nothing that anyone can do to stop this. So … come peacefully and join our ranks, we promise you and your loved ones won’t be harmed. Listings are available through the link below for locations where you can seek information and learn more about our new society. We promise you it will pale in comparison to anything seen before. Lastly, I entreat you to ignore any deranged reports about our movement. They are blatant lies, mere Hollywood stunts.”
It is laughable and terrifying at the same time. In spite of the full-fledged Eklyptors— “creatures” as some news reports are calling them—that attacked law enforcement agents and appeared on some of the newsfeeds, they’re claiming none of it is real and want people to believe that it’s all ridiculous lies worthy of a sci-fi movie; for when has anyone seen half-human monsters pouncing on policemen and ripping their throats out?
“My God! My God!” an independent news reporter exclaimed as she and her camera crew filmed one of the beasts from a distance. “It’s a … it’s a sort of animal. No, not animal … creature. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her voice went raw with fear. “I don’t know if you can see, but it’s massive. It’s got huge claws, and they’re … they’re bloody. Oh, Jesus. Back up! Back up!” The image shook as they moved further away. “God, it can stand!” she said as the Eklyptor reared on its hind legs and pounded its chest. It looked a lot like Ape Man, except bigger and further gone into nightmare.
Even with that, most members of our oh-so jaded society think the horrifying, quickly disappearing, YouTube videos are part of some elaborate hoax. Because who in their right mind would believe that honest-to-god monsters are walking our streets? Who would believe in men leaping over cars, tearing people in half with their bare teeth, blocking bullets with their exoskeletons, delivering poisonous bites?
No one.
Not when we’ve grown up in this CGI era and have become used to end-of-the-world special effects and plots.
If children don’t believe in monsters under the bed the same way they don’t believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny, of course adults don’t believe in werebeasts. That it’s all a big, fat joke or a twisted reality show created by Hollywood is really the only logical explanation. Forget locking the door and hiding. That’s for losers and deranged conspiracy theorists. Most will trust the authorities and walk into a nightmare suspecting nothing, a nightmare they’ll never, ever walk out of.
I lay back and stare at the ceiling, wondering what the members of IgNiTe are doing at the moment, how they are reacting to this turn of events. Did they know this was coming so soon? Are they prepared to fight? Will James call me now? Am I more valuable in this new world?
Jumping off my bed, I pull out my laptop and set up a hotspot with my cell phone. I sit cross-legged on the floor, run the program I wrote and access the pathway that Aydan left open for me.
I wonder if there is some mechanism that notifies him. Hoping that’s the case, I wait for him to notice my presence, but he doesn’t. I roam the system for a while, hoping to find something useful, but there’s nothing. Not even “read.me” files. Aydan was thorough cleaning everything up, which suddenly strikes me as odd. Why do all of this just to leave a door open for me? Why not just block all access? Why create the means to communicate with me?
It makes no sense.
The whole world makes no sense any longer.