The Terror From Beyond the Void

WE FINALLY HAD a plan. Lure the creature as close to the electro-magnetic wall as we could, and cross our fingers that there was somehow a reaction strong enough to kill it. If we were right about our latest theory, our technology had been eliminated so it wouldn’t be a threat to the creature itself; not just so we couldn’t use it. And if that was the case, then this creature was no more of a danger to us than a black widow spider.

Bite me and I’ll squash you without remorse, I remembered my thoughts from the previous day. Come to think of it, the black widow also had a morbid—and eerily similar—method of killing and eating its prey; liquify and then devour.

Hope had been restored. A chance of getting out alive lingered, although it still felt far off. We still needed to find out exactly how to lure it close enough. That’s where any doubt remained.

“If it was smart enough to reroute the energy, don’t you think it’ll be smart enough to stay away from it?” Kevin asked, his concern genuine.

I thought for a moment, understanding what he was saying. However, I also saw how the creature acted when feeding. “It’s so focused when it’s eating,” I said. “It’s like nothing else matters. Remember when it was eating Natalie? Your brother had passed out, your mom was screaming. You were able to retrieve the hatchet and we did what we needed to do. All while it just fed.”

Kevin nodded, gulping back the sour taste of the horrific memories I had regurgitated.

“If we can get it eating something, or chasing something, close enough to the border, maybe its focus would be so locked on that it wouldn’t even think about the energy field.”

Kevin nodded again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “That might work.”

Next order of business was to find the bait.

We waited quietly, still, for the next fifteen minutes. We were watching the woods, listening for any sign of life. A scampering squirrel, a curious deer—anything. But with only a hatchet in our possession, and nothing else, our work was cut out for us. Spotting the bait was one thing, but sneaking up on it was a completely different challenge. Not to mention holding it to one spot and trying to get the creature to show up.

Failure was already creeping into the back of my mind; a heavy sense of overwhelming defeat. We were out of our element, and the more I thought about that aspect, devastation began to ravage my thoughts. I looked over to Kevin, who was still propped up against the tree. He was zoned out, but I had a feeling it wasn’t because he was trying to listen or watch for wildlife. He felt it too—the defeat.

After watching so many people be killed by the invasive horror, what truly made us think we had a chance? I began to accept the reality of the situation.

Then, a noise.

It wasn’t the rustling of the trees or bushes. It wasn’t the innocent squeak of a rodent. It was a sound similar to the one I had heard while in the woods with Duke. It was a deafening crack, like the loudest thunder imaginable, coming from above in the clear blue sky. Kevin and I looked up.

Another crack tore through the air, reverberating through our bones and shaking the ground beneath us. In the sky, above the green canopy, we witnessed another fireball soaring through the air. Behind it, only seconds later, was another one.

Another thunderous crack led to the appearance of a third and then a forth. It sounded like a flyover at a baseball game. The sky was now littered with dozens of fireballs slicing through its aquamarine hue.

I knew what the outcome was of just one of them crashing. It had taken the lives of five people. But seeing the endless hail of terrors from beyond our world—failure, defeat and surrender is all my mind could conjure.

We didn’t stand a chance.

Humanity didn’t stand a chance.

—

Kevin and I sat in silence. Once the gut-churning display in the sky had passed, we expected to hear and feel more crashes. But we didn’t. Kevin said, “Why would we? We couldn’t hear the man from the other cabin. We can’t hear anything beyond our enclosure.”

I understood his point, but was wondering why we didn’t feel anything beneath us. No shaking, no rumbles. Unless the crashes were far away. And that would have meant that the invasion was much more widespread than just the Timber Acres Camp Resort. More widespread than the Allegheny Mountains.

I thought about our home back in Ohio. I thought about our neighbors, friends, our family—did they know what was happening? Was it happening to them as well?

A headache crept in and lingered as the impossible thoughts just kept coming. It was driving me mad. No communication, no knowledge of what was going on—no hope for survival.

My legs were antsy and my nerves jittered just beneath my skin. I stood up to stretch and whet my bodies need to move. I cracked my neck to one side, getting it to pop loudly. I cracked it to the other side with the same results. I twisted the top half of my body to get my back to crack next, and something caught my eye.

People, I thought. “People!”

Kevin shot to his feet and rushed up beside me. I pointed through the trees, in the direction where the invisible wall had been arranged. There were two people; two teenage girls. They had seen us too and were waving their arms frantically.

There was no sound coming from them. Being on the other side of the invisible wall, there was no chance for us to communicate with them. The sudden excitement of seeing other living people dwindled after I remembered this.

“Maybe we can motion to them, like that guy at the cabin did with us. They look scared,” Kevin said.

We moved closer to the two girls, cautiously taking our steps. We knew we wouldn’t be able to get too close, but if we were able to at least try a charades-like communication with them, then maybe we could comfort them.

I didn’t know what they knew. I didn’t know if there were more people in their group or if they had lost friends or family as well. What had they seen and experienced? Damn, I have never wanted to talk to people more in my life than I did now.

The faint sound of buzzing and a tingle in our heads told Kevin and I we had gotten close enough. We stopped in the middle of a small clearing, surrounded by bushes and wilting flowers. We had the girls’ attention. Being closer, we saw they were dirty from head to toe; their clothes wet and torn, dried blood in several spots.

I waved to them. They looked at each other and then back at us with hesitant waves. One of them tried speaking, shouting. I shook my head mournfully and motioned that we couldn’t hear them. They seemed to understand, and the shouting might have been a desperate attempt to interfere with the expected outcome.

Kevin stood anxiously by as I traced the large invisible box with my hands, and then pointed to us. I then air-traced another one and pointed at them. They nodded, already knowing that fact.

Then, something spooked them. They started looking around, frightened, and holding onto one another. Kevin and I scanned the area, but couldn’t see what they saw, or hear what they heard. One of the girls screamed and shimmed away from the other. She started to run, but stopped. The other girl slowly backed up.

I couldn’t see anything.

“What’s going on?” Kevin trembled.

“I don’t know.”

The bushes behind the girls, between where they stood and we did, started to move. Their backs were against the movement.

“Hey!” I instinctively shouted, momentarily forgetting they couldn’t hear me.

“It’s in there,” Kevin said, pointing to the rustling bushes. From within the bushes’ large leaves, the creature appeared, rising up from the earth. It was covered in wet moss, an expanse of erect pine needles, and released a wispy steam as it peeled away from the soil.

“Behind you!” I shouted. I knew it was a useless effort, but it was only human instinct to warn others of imminent danger. Kevin joined in, echoing my useless cries. Just as we obviously predicted, our warnings landed on deaf ears. The creature, looming behind them — and exceeding their height by more than a couple of feet — lashed one of its arms through the air. Kevin and I watched a dark, stringy liquid slither through the empty space between it and the girls, like an airborne, striking viper. Its venom would instantly infect; the girls would have only minutes left to live, if that.

The liquid splashed onto one of their backs, spooking them both into spinning around. Their eyes landed on the skulking beast; their emotions exploding with wide-eyes and gaping mouths. They screamed loudly; I could tell without even hearing it. The horror and dread in their faces — they knew it was over for them.

The girl that was splattered, I saw the infection wrap around her neck and spread all over her face and head within seconds. She dropped to the ground, her head leading the way like an anchor. The other girl fell to her knees, trying to shake her friend, or whoever it was to her, back into a state of awareness. But her desperate and ignorant attempts only resulted with the instant transmission of the alien infection. It rapidly scaled her arms and she shot to her feet, stumbling backwards and holding her vile appendages out in front of her. Her eyes couldn’t have been any wider; I felt like I could hear her screams.

All the while, the creature continued to loiter, unnaturally hunched, waiting for its meal to take an edible form. I felt like Kevin and I were loitering too, watching the teen girls like they were helpless mice being fed to a hungry snake.

“Look,” Kevin whispered in a soft, trembling voice. He took a couple of wobbly steps backward; his instinct telling him to distance himself from the horror. I followed his gaze to the girl already dead on the forest floor. Her body had become the revolting, green slop that the creature craved. Only then did it break its idle stance, lowering itself to the ground and crawling to her like a wounded soldier.

It began to feed.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the second teen girl collapse. She was completely covered in the unsightly, puke-green husk. As the creature continued to hungrily feed on the other one, my eyes refused to leave the distorting, melting metamorphosis of the second girl. She changed from a gruff solid to a pulpy liquid in under a minute. My stomach turned. Vomit teased the back of my throat and I felt faint.

I took a couple of steps backward, wobbling just like Kevin had. My knees were feeble, my breaths short and shallow.

“We need to…to…” I couldn’t find the words. Probably because there was nothing we could do. There was nowhere to go. No one to call. We were trapped and marked for death.

I turned around to check on Kevin, and was immediately struck by a spark of fright in the back of my neck. It shot down my spine, numbing my legs and making me lose all feeling in my face. Kevin stood before me, wrapped in the grimy, green cocoon. The sight was a shock to my system — I was convinced it was a fever dream; it couldn’t possibly be real. His head then began to slope to the side, turning into a gooey mess. As he collapsed at an angle, splashing down into the dirt and leaves, another one of the alien terrors rose up from behind him. It took two, long strides towards Kevin’s melting form before stooping down to its knees and shoveling the mess into its mouth.

This time, I did vomit. It exploded from me like a geyser, hitting the ground only feet from where the feeding was happening. I collapsed to my knees, violently throwing up more. During a brief lull, I turned my head around to where the teen girls had been killed. The creature on that side of the invisible wall was just standing up from the first girl and making its way to the second.

The appalling squelching noises from only feet away grabbed my attention again. Vomit dripped from my mouth as I turned my head back around. The creature just continued to eat. I gawked at it, confused and terrified. The loss and grief I felt from losing my entire family suddenly faded. I was focused on the wet, slurping noises. The creature didn’t know any better; it was just doing what its instincts demanded. I started to wonder if there was even an endgame for their invasion. Maybe it wasn’t a devious extermination of our species; maybe it was just a pit-stop, a place to eat, before moving on. They didn’t seem like a vicious, violence-for-the-sake-of-violence, species. They were acting out of primal needs.

Another loud crack from above made me look up. Through the treetops, more fireballs entered the atmosphere, soaring through the sky like jets. I wondered where they were going. I wondered what poor souls were going to be trapped by them, cut off from the rest of the human race, afraid and unable to understand what was happening. To be this cut off from knowledge and information was a beast all on its own. We, as humans, had created a world—a way of life—that we took for granted.

The squelching noises had stopped. I took notice of the silence. I looked back at the creature. It had finished and was now only inches from me, on its hands and knees, gawking at me with its luminescent white eyes and gaping, toothless mouth. I closed my eyes, expecting to get tagged by its bodily liquid at any moment. It let out a shrieking bellow; its hot, rotten breath gusting against my face.

But instead of the wet splash of its liquid against me, I felt a jolt of electricity through my body. It rattled my spine and shot upward, striking the back of my head with a force so powerful that I blacked out.