The Terror From Beyond the Void

MORNING CAME too fast. I opened my eyes, still feeling exhausted. The room was alive with all of the features the darkness had hidden the night before. I rolled over and saw that Macie’s side of the bed was empty.

I walked out of the bedroom and into the open floorplan of the cabin. Macie sat at the kitchen table, reading a book and eating a bowl of dry cereal. The crunching of the shredded wheat seemed louder than it should have.

“No milk?” I asked, plopping down in the seat across from her. I didn’t smell any coffee either. “No coffee?

“Fridge is out. The milk went bad overnight,” she said, waspishly.

“The power is still out?”

I stood up and looked out the front window. The firepit was nothing but a heap of ashes and charred wood. The camper’s door was closed and the shades were still pulled on the windows, telling me that the twins were more than likely still asleep. A light fog drifted through the trees, blurring anything from view past the camper. I couldn’t tell if the Saunders’ had power, or were even awake.

“I’m going to check the generator,” I said. Macie didn’t respond, she only crunched on another spoonful of dry cereal.

Outside, the air was cool and damp. The bugs made themselves known out in the woods, as did something else scampering around not too far away. A squirrel, or a chipmunk perhaps.

I walked around to the back of the cabin to where the generator was. It was connected to the cabin with a heavy-duty extension cord. It was yellow and black with switches and knobs all over it. I had never actually had to use one before, and with most of the instructions faded from the sticker on it, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. Now would have been the perfect time to pull up a YouTube video on generator repair, and pretend I knew how to do it when I victoriously strolled back inside.

“It’s no use,” a deep voice said behind me. Startled, I swung around to see Duke Saunders standing there. “Ours is dead too. Phones, TV, coffee—all of it. It’s like we were sent back to the stone age.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, thinking about Wes’ off-hand comment the previous night. “What happened? Some kind of radio waves?” I still didn’t know if that was a thing or not.

Duke just stood there, breathing in deep, and taking in his surroundings. “I don’t know,” he exhaled. “It’s all so quiet up here.”

“We lost power last night while we were roasting hot dogs. Seemed dark over your way. Did you lose it sooner?”

“No. We turned in early. It was a long drive from Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin, huh? Green Bay?”

Duke laughed. “No, we’re not the big city type. Burrows, actually. Small, quiet, uneventful. That’s the way we like it.”

“Never been out that way.”

“It’s a different world out there. Where is your clan from?”

“Ohio.”

“Ah, yes. The Buckeyes.”

I laughed. “Yeah, we have a major football problem.”

“Understandable. You have a team, we have a dairy farm.”

Duke and I both laughed, but then I remembered the problem still at hand: the power.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked.

Duke looked around. The wispy fog appeared as a spectral barrier that kept us confined to the camp, and kept others out.

“We journey into the fog,” Duke announced playfully in a deep, macho voice. “I think there are other cabins not far away. We passed some on our way up here yesterday.”

“Good call. Maybe they have power, or at least a generator that works.”

—

I told Macie that I’d be back, and then Duke and I ventured out into the woods. The fog was thick in some spots, light and wispy in others. The pine needles and dead leaves crunched under our boots as we searched for another cabin.

“What do you do for a living, Ben?” Duke asked, ahead of me by only a couple of steps.

“Public transportation,” I said. “I travel around Ohio, fixing city buses. It was a great job for so many years until the pandemic hit and not as many people were using public transports. They realized that they could get along just fine without me, so I was moved to a single garage in my hometown working on whatever they’d scarcely throw my way.”

I saw Duke nod his head. He didn’t respond verbally, probably out of respect. A lot of people had lost their jobs; a lot of people were demoted, their livelihoods bruised and sifted down to barebones. The world was in such a vulnerable state.

“What about you?”

“I work in digital marketing,” Duke said.

“So you were able to work from home during the pandemic?”

Duke nodded again. “Yup. Then I tore my meniscus earlier this year, and my boss just accepted the fact that they could get along just as well with me pumping out projects at home. I got hooked on oxycodone and Netflix after that surgery. I still enjoy both,” he winked with an ornery indication.

Even though I couldn’t get behind his oxycodone compulsion, I did enjoy binging things on Netflix.

I couldn’t help but notice how quiet nature was. I couldn’t hear a single bug, although our boots crunching across the forest floor could have just drowned them all out. The air was refreshingly cool; much appreciated before the day’s temperature would rise within the coming hours.

“Well,” I began, trying to generate small talk away from the job discussion, “This is something, huh? You would think having power and access to electronics would be the last thing you’d want while camping anyway. But here we are, trekking the wilderness in search of power.”

“The world has changed, Ben,” Duke said. “We, as humans, can’t live without technology anymore. It’s become such a crucial part of life. Without it, the world will crumble.”

Unfortunately, I agreed with him. Technology was a curse as well as the promise of our future.

Duke suddenly stopped walking. I stopped right behind him. He looked around the woods, trying to unnaturally penetrate the fog with his vision. I got the sense that he might have lost track of which direction he was leading us. I hadn’t seen any other cabins when we entered Timber Acres, so I was trusting his memory and assumed knowledge of others in the area.

“I can’t remember which way the road was,” Duke said, confirming my assumption. I focused hard in one direction, but then turned and looked the other way. Suddenly, a crack from above, like thunder ripping apart the atmosphere, shook the ground we stood on. I stumbled to one side and Duke to the other; he braced himself against the trunk of a large tree.

“What on earth was that?” Duke exclaimed as the ear-splitting crack faded just as quickly as it began.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounded like—”

Before I could finish my thought, we heard something else from above. We looked up through the canopy to see something burning across the morning sky like a fireball. A comet? A meteor? I didn’t know what it was. But a burning ball of flames leaving a smoking trail in its wake soared overhead, reverberating like a fighter jet, and disappeared out of sight.

“Jesus!” Duke yelled. “That thing is going to crash into—”

Duke couldn’t finish speaking before the flaming object crashed. The sound it made was explosive, like a bomb going off not far away. A shockwave of tremors spread across the forest floor, knocking Duke and I off our feet. The trees shook, the fog spinning and twirling around us. Once the violent shaking subsided, Duke and I exchanged glances, both of us on the ground. I could tell he was thinking the exact same thing:

What the hell?

We brushed ourselves off and rushed through the trees and fog, charging in the direction we both assumed the object had fallen. With the air becoming warmer the deeper we got, a soft buzzing returned to my ears, similar to when the lights had gone out the previous night, but more. It sounded like a swarm of angry bees, getting louder and louder, and then abruptly stopping.

When the sound stopped, we stopped. But not because of the change in sound, but because of what lay ahead of us. Through the drifting morning fog, we saw spotty areas of flames among the forest floor. The ground burned in one area, and then a few yards away were more flames. A couple of branches on the surrounding trees were also doused in flickering flames. The air smelled like the aftermath of a fireworks display and the smoke that spun up from the ground blended with the fog to create an ashy haze.

Duke and I found ourselves in the middle of a crash site.