Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: The Bangles – Manic Monday

It was just another Monday morning commute, until it was interrupted by a bunch of violent and raving maniacs killing every normal person they could find. Mysterious objects in the sky are driving people insane. All Lea can do is run, and hide, and hope for some kind of sanity to return.

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Perched on a toilet seat in the subway station bathroom, Lea drew her legs up so her feet couldn’t be seen beneath the stall door. A whimper clung to the lining of her throat. She bit down on the meat of her thumb to stop it from escaping, barely noticing the pain of her teeth sinking into the skin. Above her hand, her eyes were wide and wet, brimming, terrified, afraid to blink.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall! Mirror, mirror, on the wall!”

Lea heard the maniac’s shoes scraping against the floor as he staggered outside her stall. He punctuated each sentence by punching the mirrors above the sinks, directly across the bathroom from where Lea hid. There was no hesitation in the whack of the man’s fist against the hard glass of the mirrors. One of them shattered and pieces rained across the sinks and floor. On the next hits, more pieces crunched.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall!”

Lea hated going to the toilet in public so although she passed through the subway station near her apartment twice a day almost every single workday she’d never been inside its bathroom. She’d had time to notice just how clean and well-lit it was, the tiles mopped, no puddles or litter at that time of the morning. A few pieces of graffiti had been scrawled onto the walls of her stall though, probably by teenage girls. One in particular looked like someone had tried to draw Garfield from memory. They’d done a pretty terrible job but they’d captured the comic strip cat’s apathetic vibe. A thought bubble sprouted above the cat’s head with the words, ‘Mondays suck A FUCKING DICK’. In her current predicament, Lea would have to agree.

When everything went insane, Lea had run for the bathrooms and found them empty. She’d locked herself in the stall without thinking. The man hadn’t followed her or anything, he’d wandered into the room a few minutes later. It was the women’s bathroom but that apparently didn’t bother him. There had been at least a dozen maniacs that she had seen. She’d been walking toward the turnstiles when they came pouring down the escalator leading into the subway station from the street. Without warning, they’d started mauling people. Punching and hitting, stomping, biting and chewing, screaming nonsense the whole time, laughing like hyenas. Normal people in suits or uniforms or casual clothing. It was like a random handful of individuals on the sidewalk had just gone nuts. Like something from a zombie movie. Blood, blood splattering the floor and walls, bones breaking, people, normal people, real people, shrieking in pain or terror. And she’d run to the bathroom and locked herself in the stall but she hadn’t thought to lock the main door of the bathroom or tried to barricade it somehow, like an idiot, and then one of the crazy people had wandered in after her.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall! Mirror, mirror, on the wall!”

The punches sounded wetter. The maniac started crunching pieces of mirrored glass in one of the sinks and stomping them underfoot. Lights hummed overhead. The room smelled sterile, almost acrid, but she could smell blood as well. The toilet underneath Lea had no lid, just a seat. Her butt hovered over a bowlful of water. Her feet, clad in a pair of faux leather ankle boots with low heels, clung to the front edge of the seat.

Lea’s eyes slid to her handbag. She’d set it down on top of the toilet paper dispenser when she first entered the stall and was forced to hold it in place with one hand to keep it from falling. Inside was her laptop, her purse, her mostly full Stanley cup, of course her phone, and all the other things she carried with her on a daily basis. It was heavy enough that her arm shook. Her phone, she’d felt it buzzing inside the pocket of her bag. Thankfully the maniac with the mirror obsession hadn’t heard it. She could message someone, message her girlfriend Chelsea, message her boss, message anyone and tell them to get help for her. That she was trapped in a bathroom at the Hill St Station and a bunch of insane folk were randomly killing people outside. She had no idea how to explain it, it wasn’t like a mass shooting or a terror attack. This was more like a gas leak or an outbreak of spontaneous madness or something. If she could just get her phone though she could at least tell someone where she was and get some help.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall! Mirror, mirror, on the wall!” The maniac sounded like they were getting bored, crushing more bits of glass under their fists.

Carefully, Lia took the fist out of her mouth. Bright red teeth marks scarred the fleshy part of her hand, gleaming with spit. Struggling not to breathe too loudly, shaking, she reached for the bag’s side pocket. Her other hand held the bag to keep it from jostling. Fingers numb, she reached inside the pocket and pinched the phone. Slowly, she drew it out, terrified of making a single sound. The maniac shouted and stomped on glass on the other side of the stall door, which felt about as thick and safe as a piece of cardboard.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall!”

Suddenly, Lea’s phone started vibrating again. A phone call, she couldn’t see who from. Holding the edge of the phone between her fingertips, she fumbled and dropped it. A clumsy attempt at catching just made things worse and the phone bounced off the wall then clattered on the floor, spinning across the tiles and under the stall door.

“No!” Lea gasped.

“Mirror, mirror!” the maniac yelled.

The stall beside Lea slammed hard enough to make the partition shake and she let out a short scream. The maniac bounced around inside the stall. She looked up and saw a ghoulish face staring over the top of the wall.

“Who’s the fairest of them all?” he said, drooling blood.

Lea screamed again and ducked away from his grabbing hands. Her feet slipped and she stumbled, crouched, into the stall door. One hand shot out and unlocked it. Avoiding the man’s snatching hands as they almost caught her hair, she squeezed through the gap as she pulled the door open.

Shards of mirrored glass covered the bathroom floor as well as the bench holding the sinks. All three of the mirrors that had been sitting above the sinks were broken, revealing unpainted concrete behind them. Lea spotted her phone and grabbed it off the ground. She started toward the exit but hesitated. There were more of them out there. More like him. There was nowhere she would be safe.

The mirror-punching maniac lurched out of the stall next to the one where Lea had been hiding. Both of his hands were streaked in blood and jagged shards of mirrored glass studded his knuckles. She hadn’t realised but he must have been headbutting the mirrors as well since more bits of glass stuck out of his forehead. His nose was broken, flattened, and blood masked the lower half of his face. His eyes were crazed, pinwheels, like some kind of junkie. Underneath all of that though, he looked so normal. He was tall, slim, handsome even apart from a kind of douchey goatee now clotted with blood. He wore a suit and tie, a little ragged now, blood splattered, but normal. He looked like any other commuter making his way to the office on a Monday morning, like Lea herself. One minute normal and then the next minute he was like this, violent, crazy, a maniac, immune to pain, reciting lines from a fairytale over and over.

“Who’s the fairest?” The maniac grinned, a slash of bloody teeth in the middle of a bloody face. “Who’s the fairest?”

The maniac launched himself across the bathroom. There wasn’t exactly a lot of space to run. Lea, without thinking, had taken her handbag with her when she crawled out of the stall. She swung it around and threw it at him. One bloodied hand hooked around and slapped it out of the air. The bag crashed into the wall where the mirrors had been and its contents scattered.

The maniac’s other hand backhanded Lea across the face. The force of the blow threw her into a wall behind her. Her skull rang. Bits of glass raked her cheek and it felt like she’d been punched by a fistful of needles. And yet, the blow was oddly clarifying. The pain was real. This was real. She was in a fight for her life and if she didn’t do something, if she didn’t fight back, was going to die. She was going to die horribly, violently, bloodily on the floor of this subway station bathroom.

The maniac raised one bunched fist, shards glistening in his flesh like sequins. Lea dived out of his path. His fist smashed into one of the hand dryers instead and ripped it off the wall. It bounced and crashed across the floor. She kept moving, pushing past his side as he tried to grab her.

“Fairest!”

The maniac shoved and knocked Lea back toward the stall she’d just vacated. She bounced painfully off the corner of the doorframe, legs sliding out from under her. Hands covered in bits of glass grabbed her from behind, tangling in her hair. She tried to push back but he was stupidly strong. He shoved her toward the toilet so he could dunk her head in the bowl. She managed to catch the sides of the toilet seat that she’d been perched on.

“Drink it! Drink the magic drink, fairest!” the maniac said.

Lea screamed with effort as she pushed back. It made almost no difference. The toilet seat rattled in her hands. It was made of hard plastic, surprisingly solid, but she realised it was held to the bowl by two relatively flimsy plastic pins.

The maniac shoved Lea forward again. Glass shards cut the back of her neck and her chest slammed into the toilet bowl but she fixed her grip. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have even sat on the seat without wiping it down first but now she hung on for dear life. As he shoved her forward, the plastic pins broke. She was left holding the hard plastic horseshoe of the seat.

Lea twisted and swung the seat around behind her, connecting with the side of the maniac’s knee. He didn’t appear to feel any pain but that didn’t stop the joint from buckling. Falling sideways, he cracked his head against the side of the stall. The narrow space worked against him. He released Lea, overcompensated, fell over, and got knotted in on himself.

The gaps beneath the stalls were just enough for Lea to burrow under. She dived and slid forward on her stomach, pushing the toilet seat in front of her. The panel jammed her in the spine. Her tightly fitting maroon jacket rucked and got caught around her arms but she managed to worm her way forward. Behind her, unseen, the maniac grabbed at her legs. Mirror shards stuck in his hands tore the stockings she was wearing beneath her skirt and cut the skin. She kicked out blindly, wriggled, and managed to get away.

Lea pulled her legs up and curled up on the floor of the next stall. Her heart thundered. She gasped for breath, tasting bleach in the air, feeling like she’d run a marathon. The flimsy wall between them offered no protection though. Lea drew herself upright and crawled out of the stall, awkwardly trying to stand. The maniac crashed his way back into the main body of the bathroom, grinning.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

Lea hacked at the maniac’s knees again, with enough room to really swing this time. The maniac tripped and fell. She looped the toilet seat over his head and yanked him forward. Raising her knee, she drove it into the middle of his face. It slammed into his broken nose. Fresh blood squirted from his nostrils. He reeled, grabbing at the air. The man didn’t show any pain but the blow blinded him momentarily.

Lea knew she’d gotten lucky. Breaths coming in ragged gasps, she looked around for something to end this. Releasing the toilet seat, she left it hanging around the man’s neck and snatched the hair dryer he’d knocked off the wall. It wasn’t particularly heavy but the metal body felt solid.

“Leave me alone!” Lea screamed.

With all of her strength, Lea brought the dryer down on the maniac’s head. One corner drew blood, dashing his scalp open. Creating hollow bangs, she beat him over the head again and again and again. Bit by bit, the maniac crumbled to the floor and lay still. She dropped the battered hand dryer on his head and staggered.

“Oh, God, oh shit.” Lea sucked air, tears running down her face.

Lea swept around the brightly lit bathroom. She checked the main door but there was no lock on it that she could use without a key. Glass crunched underfoot. With sudden horror, she crossed to the sinks but then remembered there were no mirrors for her to check. She pulled out her phone instead and opened the camera. Blood and scratches covered her face and neck. A pebble of mirrored glass even stuck out of her cheek. She plucked it out then turned back on the sinks. Their basins were full of pulverised glass but the taps worked fine. She scooped water and scrubbed her face and anywhere else the maniac had touched her. His blood had mingled with hers though. She worried if that meant she was infected with whatever had turned him, and had turned all those people, into violent lunatics. She washed the cuts as thoroughly as she could then scrubbed them some more with wads of paper towel.

Turning off the phone’s camera, Lea checked her messages instead. She had numerous missed calls and too many messages to really process. She scrolled to find Chelsea and saw there was only a single message from her and no missed calls.

‘DON’T LOOK AT THE SKY’.

Lea tried to call her but the phone just rang and rang. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual. Chelsea worked as an emergency department nurse and was often swamped, unable to answer calls or messages for hours. If this thing was widespread, as the amount of missed calls and alerts she had on her phone suggested, then there was no telling what the hospital might be like. She caught sight of another message that looked official.

‘Shelter in place. Your area is experiencing an unexplained event. Remain indoors and stay away from windows.’

Breathing hard and trying to stem her panic, Lea cracked open the bathroom exit and peered out at the station concourse. Bodies were scattered amidst pools of blood but no maniacs. Nothing moved. The man she’d knocked out stirred behind her. Keeping her back to the wall, she left the bathroom and moved toward the station exit. The state of some bodies made her feel sick.

Lea headed toward the same entrance where the maniacs had originally appeared. Both escalators were still moving although a body sprawled at the bottom of the one running upwards. Their legs were caught but their head was resting at just such a point that it kept getting caught on the rising steps, pulled upright, and then dropping again with a wet thump. Thud, thud, thud. Blood streaked the metal steps. The expression on the corpse’s face looked stupefied, as if it couldn’t understand how it had ended up there.

A scream echoed down the stairway. Lea stumbled back. Two women raced down the ‘down’ escalator, one of them clearly chasing the other. The first woman, dressed in a business suit, screamed. The other woman wore pyjamas and a dressing gown and wielded a massive knife. It looked like an ordinary kitchen knife but unusually long, heavy, and extremely sharp.

The screaming businesswoman made it to the bottom of the escalator before losing her footing. She was moving too fast and tripped, sprawling across the tiled floor. Lea hurried backward in the direction of the bathrooms again but hesitated over whether she should help. The woman with the knife fell on top of the first woman too quickly. She slammed the kitchen knife unhesitatingly between the businesswoman’s shoulders.

“Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” the woman in the dressing gown said.

The maniac punched the businesswoman in the back with her knife again and again, the blade disappearing then reappearing red to the hilt. Soon, the businesswoman stopped yelling and only squirmed.

“Where are you hiding my baby? Where’s my baby?”

Taking the businesswoman by the shoulders, the maniac flipped her onto her back. Blood fanned across the tiles. Lea couldn’t move, watching, paralysed, as the maniac raised the knife in both hands. Plunging it into the businesswoman’s stomach, she cut and sawed her midsection open. She pulled the knife away and jammed her hand into the gash, yanking out a fistful of intestine.

“Where are you hiding my baby?” the maniac shrieked.

“Oh, fuck, fuck!” Lea staggered backward and nearly tripped on the outstretched arm of another corpse.

The maniac’s head shot up, eyes rimmed red. Her hands and knife were coated in blood. It splattered the blue material of her gown.

“Where is my baby? Where are you hiding my baby?”

The maniac leapt to her feet and raced toward Lea. Droplets of blood sprayed from the tip of her knife. Lea’s feet felt rooted to the spot. She should have armed herself somehow, she should have brought something with her. She should have run the second she heard the maniac and her victim coming.

The clap of a gunshot echoed through the subway station concourse, followed by a second. The maniac pitched forward as they were hit from behind. Lea saw the side of their neck explode, the artery rupturing. She fell forward, legs arching up behind her as she landed on her face, knife springing from her hand and spinning across the floor.

Looking up, Lea saw a man in a dark uniform, a cop, holding a pistol. Her legs turned to water as she felt a wave of relief so powerful it nearly knocked her over.

“Officer, thank you! Oh, my God, thank you!”

“Stop resisting!” the cop yelled.

“What?”

“Stop resisting!”

He turned the gun on Lea and she instinctively flinched backward. The gun clapped and she thought she felt the breeze from a bullet whisk past her cheek. Something then hit her from the other direction, a person who tackled her and knocked her to the floor. Another shot rang and a bullet chipped the wall above the two of them.

The person who’d tackled Lea was an older woman, in her forties, wearing a dark dress and sweater. Another maniac, Lea assumed. She tried to wrench free.

“No, no!” Lea yelled.

“It’s okay, I’m not one of them!” the woman said.

The maniac cop laughed and fired again. He was tall with dark hair. Lea could see the manic look in his eyes and etched into his face. The shot ricocheted off the floor.

“Stop resisting!”

“Get up!” The woman in the dark dress tugged on Lea’s shoulder.

The two of them jumped up and ran for the subway station turnstiles. The maniac cop fired after them but half a dozen more maniacs appeared from the other direction and they seemed to distract him. Even though they were crazy like him, he emptied the rest of his handgun’s ammunition at them. Two fell, flailing, shouting nonsense. The others didn’t appear to care.

“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” the cop shouted.

Rather than trying to jump over a turnstile, the woman leading Lea dived and crawled under it. Lea hesitated but in spite of her tight skirt she managed to vault over the barricade. The cop and other maniacs closed in behind them.

Lea followed the other woman down another set of escalators toward the platforms. There were more bodies along the way but both maniacs and normal people seemed to have moved on, running, hiding, or chasing. The maniac cop reloaded and more gunshots echoed through the station. Fortunately, he cut down the other maniacs that were giving chase, their bodies blocking the turnstiles.

“Who are you?” Lea panted.

“Colleen,” the other woman introduced herself.

“Lea, I’m sorry, shit, do you know what’s going on?”

“Not really!”

More bodies sprawled across the platform. Nothing moved but Lea heard a wet smacking sound. Colleen crept between some of the pillars that supported the roof of the subway. Video screens showed the times for upcoming trains although none actually appeared to be running. Colleen gestured for Lea to stay quiet. They moved to get a look at what was making the noise.

Another maniac crouched at the edge of the platform. A scrawny guy in a hoodie and jeans with long hair and a ratty face. He cradled another man’s head between his hands and drove it repeatedly into the edge of the platform. He’d been at it for so long that the man’s skull was nothing but red mush. Lea pinched her mouth shut to keep from making a noise but somehow the maniac sensed them anyway. His face shot up and lips pulled back from his teeth.

“You snowflake liberal cucks! Fucking queer beta shit!”

The maniac scrambled to his feet. They heard others coming down the escalator, laughing and shouting. Colleen pulled Lea’s arm and they took off running toward the other end of the platform.

“Where are we going? There’s nowhere to run!” Lea said.

“Into the tunnel!”

At the end of the platform was a gate plastered in warnings about danger and fines for unauthorised personnel who stepped beyond it. It was striped yellow and black like a venomous serpent. Colleen unlatched the gate anyway and leapt down the metal stairs behind it. Lea had no choice but to follow.

Tracks ran through the centre of the tunnel. There were narrow walkways to either side but hardly enough space to stay safe if a subway train came through. Every few paces there were electrical hazard warnings about the subway’s third rail. Although distracted by the maniacs behind them, Lea felt very conscious of their surroundings. She listened for the rumble of an oncoming train and felt for a breeze that would mean air was being pushed ahead of one. She really didn’t know if the trains would still be running or not.

The maniac from the platform launched himself after Lea and Colleen. Ignoring the gate that they’d used, he flung himself off the platform and onto the tracks. Luckily for them, one of the maniac’s feet landed awkwardly and twisted with a loud crack. He went down on his face without doing anything to protect himself, smacking into a rail, but immediately he heaved himself upright. Blood dribbled into his grin. He didn’t show any pain but couldn’t put any weight on the ankle he’d broken. Hauling himself along, frequently falling, he chased the two women.

“Liberal betabucks cuck incels!”

Lea hesitated, torn between fleeing the maniac and keeping an eye on the tunnel ahead of them to make sure a train didn’t materialise out of the darkness. They didn’t have much choice but to outrun him. If he caught up with them, maybe the two of them could overpower him but they had no weapons. Lea didn’t want to imagine what it would be like trying to beat him to death with their bare hands.

“What are we doing?” Lea asked.

“Just keep running!” Colleen said.

“Fucking queer beta cuck shit!” the maniac yelled.

Tripping, the maniac fell sideways, nearly recovered, and then dropped on his face again. He reached out and tried to pull himself upright, wedging his hand beneath a panel that ran down the side of the tunnel. The moment he did so, his spine arched and he flung his head back. His body jittered, teeth locked together.

“The electrical rail!” Lea said. “He’s electrocuting himself!”

Caught on the rail, the maniac’s hand started to burn. Skin blackened then the flesh ruptured, gushing steam as it peeled back from the bones. Lea watched in horrified fascination as flames spread up his arm and through his clothing before consuming his face and hair.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Colleen said. “That’s really horrible.”

The two of them kept going, racing down the side of the tunnel. The burning body fell out of sight along with the light of the station they’d left. There were other lights, emergency lamps that looked like bluish globes, strung along the tunnel wall every ten metres. They were careful to avoid the electrified rail. Lea felt for the scratches on her face.

“I should warn you, I might be infected,” Lea said. “I don’t know! I don’t know how it works but there was a man in the bathroom back there and he scratched me and hit me enough that some of his blood would have gotten mixed up with my blood. So, if it’s like with zombies in the movies, maybe I’m infected.”

“That’s not how it works,” Colleen said.

Lea felt a gust of relief. “It’s not? How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know it exactly. I don’t really know what’s happening, but it’s not a virus. There’s something out there, something in the sky. Maybe a bunch of somethings, I’m not sure. But that’s what’s making people crazy, they see it and they go crazy.”

“My girlfriend, Chelsea, she sent me a message! Don’t look at the sky, that must be what it meant!”

“I guess so.”

“But what is it?”

“I don’t know! No one can even look at it totally without going insane but there were people who just saw a little bit of it. I think if you only see a bit of it, or see it through a camera or something, you’re okay.”

Colleen slowed down and took out her phone. She already had a tab with a video lined up. It was a shaky piece of footage taken through the window of a high rise apartment or an office building. The video jumped up and down, giving blurry impressions of its surroundings. Eventually, it fixed on a row of buildings in the distance just as something disappeared behind them. It looked like a big, pink, fleshy tail, or a tentacle maybe, high off the ground. Huge, impossibly big, as big as one of the trains that would pass through this tunnel, but it looked like a living thing. And it must have been floating high over the rooftops, only blocked by the row of buildings thanks to the distance involved.

“What the heck was that?” Lea said.

“I told you, I don’t know. But it’s making people crazy.” Colleen started to sound frustrated.

Lea watched the video once more, learning nothing, and then handed the phone back to Colleen. The two of them continued through the tunnel, through pools of darkness between the emergency lights. Lea checked her own phone. She still had signal, the underground relays must have been working, but she didn’t have any more calls or messages from Chelsea or her family.

“I have to get home,” Lea said. “My girlfriend works in the hospital but she’ll come home to find me.”

“We have to get somewhere safe,” Colleen replied. “Away from the crazies, away from the sky. You can do whatever you want but I’m not going back there and I’m not going back up to street level until I know it’s somewhere safe.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Are you a cop or something? You seem like you know what to do in an emergency.”

“I’m a teacher, actually. The only reason I wasn’t at work today was because I had an appointment. What do you do?”

“Nothing interesting. I work in an office, accounting. I’m not an accountant, I just do admin.”

When they approached the next station, Colleen hushed Lea. More violent and vile noises came from the platform ahead of them. Lea risked a glance around the corner and saw half a dozen maniacs roaming around.

“You’re not fully dressed without a smile! You’re not fully dressed without a smile! You’re not fully dressed without a smile!” a maniac who looked like a homeless man raved, blood pouring from his empty mouth.

Bodies carpeted the platform. Occasionally the maniacs attacked them as if checking for signs of life. One of the maniacs picked up a body and slammed it repeatedly against the ground. A couple of them came together and attacked one another, fists flying, laughing and shrieking as they drew blood, before breaking apart just as suddenly.

“What should we do?” Lea whispered.

Colleen shushed her and then bent beneath the lip of the platform. Carefully, the two of them eased the length of the station by pressing themselves against the wall of the platform beside the track. Lea’s heart hammered against her chest so hard it felt like the maniacs should be able to hear it. One of them wandered closer, she heard their feet scraping, and she froze.

“You’re not fully dressed without a smile!” the maniac gurgled, voice mushy.

Lea stayed frozen until the maniac moved on. Colleen waited for her at the far end of the platform. Together, unseen, they continued into the next tunnel.

Eventually, the two of them came to another platform signposted as ‘Fulton Towers’. Lea already knew the stop, Fulton Towers was the name of an upscale shopping mall serviced by the subway station. She and Chelsea went there frequently for breakfast on the weekends given how close it was to their apartment, even though a lot of the stores were too fancy and overpriced to do more than windowshop. Colleen peered over the edge of the platform. It was empty, no maniacs, no bodies, just some dropped bags and jackets that gave the impression it had been abandoned suddenly.

“I think we should try here,” Colleen said.

There was blood on the escalators, a lot of blood, but they were still running. Several bodies were piled at the top of the moving steps as if they’d been carried there by the mechanism. Lea and Colleen were forced to awkwardly climb over them, attempting not to touch them. The upper part of the station appeared to be empty as well. They were careful though as they crept along the walls, peering out past the turnstiles.

“I think it looks safe out there,” Colleen said.

Lea decided to try calling Chelsea again but didn’t get through. She messaged her instead to let her know she was at Fulton Towers. The station exited directly into the shopping mall. Their immediate surroundings were quiet, littered with more bodies. At the far end of the nearest corridor, however, was an exit leading onto the street. Sunlight poured through the glass doors. Out there, Lea got glimpses of movement. People running, possibly fighting. She heard screams.

“What should we do now?” Lea asked.

“Find a place to hide, wait until some more information comes out about what to do or where to go.”

Most of the stores were closed. Those that were open looked abandoned. Everything had gone crazy before most of them would have opened for the day. Lea checked her phone and was astounded to see it was only 9:02am now. It felt like it should have been much later in the day but it helped explain why the mall and its station were so quiet. They were still careful, staying close to the walls and moving slowly. They stayed on the lowest level of the mall but there were places where gaps showed the upper levels and there were skylights above them. They avoided looking up at them, afraid of what they might see or what might see them.

Beneath one of these openings, several people had clearly jumped or been thrown from the uppermost level. Their bodies lay shattered, twisted, drooling blood on the linoleum. Lea felt bile rising in the back of her throat and turned away, choking it down.

Colleen’s head jerked up at the sound of running feet. “Hide!”

The two of them darted into a corridor and watched the main walkway as another person appeared. Another maniac, a man, entirely naked with blood patterned across his skin. He gripped a pair of mannequin arms, also bloodsplattered, and spun with them as he ran. He almost looked like a kid pretending to be a helicopter. Thankfully it distracted him from noticing Lea and Colleen.

“I’m armed! I’m armed! I’m armed and dangerous!” the maniac yelled.

The maniac continued back the way Lea and Colleen had already come. Back toward the subway station and the main entrance. Colleen suggested they could hide in the bathrooms but Lea didn’t want to get trapped in one of those again. They risked moving onward.

The mall food court was an enormous, round room ringed with cafes and restaurants, and filled with tables and chairs. A fountain dominated the centre of the space, several metres tall. Soft music and trickling water filled the silence in the absence of people. Some of the tables and chairs had been overturned, there were some splatters of blood on the ground, but like the rest of the mall most of the food outlets hadn’t opened for the day before the madness began.

Lea looked up, she couldn’t help it. A huge dome of a skylight pulled light into the space. The arrangement of its rafters almost made it look like a giant eye peering down on them. Thankfully, she didn’t see anything out of place through its glass panels. Nothing but blue sky. Chelsea’s warning ran through her head, ‘DON’T LOOK AT THE SKY’, and she tore her eyes away.

“We won’t be safe in here, definitely,” Lea said.

The two of them moved away from the food court and its massive skylight. They hadn’t gone far though when a hissing voice made them jump.

“Hey, hey! Over here! Are you normal?”

Lea and Colleen twisted and searched. The shadow of a face watched them from behind the gate of a nearby store. A small gourmet supermarket and health food place. It appeared to be closed, the roller gates were down and the interior of the store was dark, but someone dressed like an employee gestured to them from behind the gate and several silhouettes clustered behind them.

They didn’t hesitate. The two of them darted over to the grocery store. One of the sections of roller door lifted up just enough for them to duck under. As soon as they were inside, some people shoved it back down again. The gates at the front of the store locked but they didn’t look all that secure to Lea. More of a deterrent than a shield. A concentrated effort by several maniacs could probably tear one loose and there didn’t seem to be any way to barricade them.

“Back here, come back here,” someone said.

They retreated past the registers to the darkened benches and aisles. Lea’s eyes were quick to adjust. There were eight people hiding in the store. Three of them were employees, recognisable by their beige polo shirts and aprons with the store’s name and logo on the chest. All three weren’t much older than teenagers. The other five looked like office workers or maybe university students, same as those she’d seen around the subway station that morning. The bodies they’d seen scattered everywhere since. Normal people.

“I’m Lea, this is Colleen,” Lea said. “We just met, you know. Colleen saved me. We were down in the subway tunnels trying to get away from those things.”

“I’m Jackie,” the young woman who’d first caught their attention. “Is it really bad everywhere?”

“As far as we know. We saw a lot of bodies,” Colleen said.

Some of the others introduced themselves. The other young employees were Dylan and Erica. Among the rest of the group was a heavyset man in his fifties named Baxter, a woman in a killer black dress named Camila, and a short man with thick glasses named Chen.

“We were getting ready to open this morning when we heard screaming coming from the food court,” Jackie said. “At first I thought it was a mass shooting or something but, you know, no shots.”

“There was something up in the big window, the skylight,” Baxter said. “I was just coming out of the bathroom, I only got a little look at it, at its shadow. Everyone who saw it was going crazy, I was lucky to get away.”

“I went to check it out but when I saw them all going nuts I booked it back here,” Dylan said. “We saw a few people who were normal and told them to come in here.”

“There are messages on our phones,” Camila said. “Don’t look at the sky, but nothing! We don’t know what’s going on, we can’t call police!”

“What should we do?” Jackie asked.

“My plan was just to find a safe place, like you seem to have here, and stay hidden,” Colleen said. “I mean, you have a gate, you have food. Sooner or later, if someone can solve this or if we can get into contact with someone in charge, I don’t know.”

“Weapons! We need to make weapons!” Baxter said. “We need to lock and barricade these gates, make weapons, and check for other entrances.”

“There’s just the gates and a door that leads to the storerooms out the back, man,” Dylan said.

“We need to stay quiet,” Colleen said, whispering. “There are some of them running around out there.”

The group threw themselves into different tasks. Lea and Colleen’s arrival seemed to have sparked something. Colleen obsessed over their food situation even though they had a whole grocery store. True, it was a relatively small store but there were only ten of them. Lea wondered just how long the school teacher expected they were going to have to stay here. Erica, Camila, and the others whose names Lea hadn’t caught concentrated on trying to contact help and gathering information while they still had the internet. Baxter, Dylan, and Chen all constructed weapons. Finding a bunch of brooms and mop handles they formed crude spears, taping kitchen knives and even broken bottles to the ends of them. They thrust their makeshift weapons at shadows and grunted with caveman satisfaction.

“I still do not understand,” Camila said. “It looks like this is happening everywhere! Everywhere there is news, but no one knows what is making people coo-coo killers!”

“Aliens, it’s got to be aliens,” Dylan said.

“Those things in the sky looked alive though, in the video,” Lea said.

“Exactly! They’re aliens, but they’re not flying around in ships though, they don’t need them. They probably fly through space like that and just land on planets to feed.”

“But why are they making people act like that?”

“Something about them, people can’t handle looking at them. Just the sight of them drives people nuts!”

Lea shook her head. “I don’t know, it’s all so insane.”

The ten of them prepared as best they could. They tried to get in contact with loved ones or anyone in the outside world. They helped themselves to the store’s food and drinks. Most of all, they huddled down and stayed quiet, stayed out of sight, whispering and moving as carefully as possible. The gates at the front of the store were locked but they were made up of a grid of bars so the entrance might as well have been yawning open for the sake of blocking sound.

More maniacs roamed the mall. Over the next couple of hours, their numbers seemed to increase. Lea and several of the others watched from the darkness of one of the aisles. The naked man with the mannequin arms made several appearances. There was another cop, their gun missing along with most of the pouches on their belt, their uniform badly mauled. Men and women in suits, a guy in denim overalls, another dressed in a fast food uniform. Their behaviour seemed to have changed. None of them ranted and raved anymore. None of them spoke at all. They moved with purpose up and down the corridors, jogging, not slow but not sprinting with wild abandon anymore. She worried about what the change might mean. It could be good news, if they seemed less violent and worked up then maybe they were coming out of it, but she doubted it. Their behaviour looked like hunting. After a while they started gathering into packs. Not hunting as individuals but working in groups, seemingly without talking or communicating.

Around midday, a shriek came from the front of the store. Lea had retreated to one of the back corners to try calling Chelsea again. She didn’t hear a warning or anything before they came. She knew instantly it was one of the maniacs screaming.

“I’m armed! I’m armed and dangerous! I’m armed and dangerous!”

“Fuck!”

“They’ve found us!”

“Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” yelled another deranged voice.

Lea stuffed her phone into her waistband and ran for the front of the store. The gates rattled. Half a dozen maniacs were attacking them, screaming, raving, throwing themselves into the task with no hesitation. All their wild original behaviours had returned. Among them was the naked maniac, a patina of blood dried across his skin, bashing at the gates with his swinging mannequin arms. A young woman in a university sweatshirt, her face badly slashed, screeched about whether she could be heard again and again. The others just made noise, shrieking wordlessly.

“Get the spears, come on!” Baxter said.

The big man, Baxter, and several of the others scrambled with their makeshift spears. Broken bottles or kitchen knives bristled from their hafts. Jackie crossed the store holding a pair of them and veered toward Lea.

“Here, take one!”

Jackie handed Lea a spear. Made from a wooden mop handle, the broken body of a cooking oil bottle jutted from one end attached by a ream of duct tape. Lea stared at it blankly, like she didn’t know what it was. Several others hung back while most of the group moved to protect the gate. The spears with broken bottles for heads couldn’t fit through the gaps in the grating. Only the ones using knives as heads could draw blood through the openings.

“I’m armed! I’m armed!” the naked maniac yelled.

“Can you hear me now?”

Other maniacs howled but Lea had a sense that there was something wrong about the whole thing. The maniac in the bathroom, the others in the subway station, all those that she’d seen that morning had screamed their strange catchphrases with complete abandon. These ones, she felt like their hearts weren’t really in it. They shrieked and yelled but Lea couldn’t shake the weird feeling they were somehow faking it. Putting on an act.

“Get back!” Baxter yelled.

Baxter slashed one maniac’s fingers, sticking through the bars of the gate. Skin and flesh ripped off of the maniac’s digits but they showed no sign of pain. Dylan ran his spear through a gap in the bars. The butcher knife taped to the end of it rammed the chest of a maniac in a fast food uniform. The maniac grabbed the spear and pulled it through the gate. Dylan lost his grip in surprise and lost the weapon. It seemed tactical compared to the maniac’s earlier behaviour. Lea got a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“It’s a distraction!” Lea shouted. “They’re distracting us!”

Colleen turned to Lea. The others all massed at the front of the store. Unsure of what else to do, Lea moved to check the rear entrance of the store and Colleen followed. The doors marked ‘Employees Only’ led back to the loading docks and storerooms, they’d been told. Lea could see them only dimly in the darkened store. They hadn’t been blocked or barricaded.

The doors exploded inward. Maniacs shoved their way through the opening, trying to get inside as fast as possible. There must have been another ten or more. They didn’t yell and scream, however. Their movements were wild and spasming but quite deliberate as they poured inside and spread across the rear of the aisles.

“No, oh no, they’re inside! They’re inside!” Lea cried out to the others.

Lea couldn’t be sure if the rest of the group even heard her. The maniacs at the front of the store kept making so much noise that they drowned everything else out. Two maniacs ran at Lea and Colleen. They came at them like zombies, as if to tear the women apart with their hands and teeth. One of them hit Colleen first, knocking her off her feet and tackling her to the floor. She squealed and tried to hold them back. Grunting with effort but otherwise completely serious, the maniac hit Colleen in the middle of the face.

Lea moved to intervene but the second maniac lunged at her. An old man, bald except for a horseshoe of white hair around the back of his head and with a white moustache. Elaborately dressed in a dapper suit with a vest, bowtie, and watch chain. The kind of old man Lea thought she might see playing chess or feeding pigeons in the park, all dressed up with nowhere to be.

Lea rammed her spear into the old man’s head. The ring of glass shards tore open his face like a wet paper bag. Blood exploded. One of his eyes ruptured. Lea raked the bottle sideways, horrified at what he was inflicting, unable to stop, seeing teeth exposed though a gouge in the old man’s cheek. The maniac kept coming. The broken bottle might have been effective against a person, the pain and horror of the mutilation would have driven them back, but the maniacs demonstrated no such feelings.

Aim for the head, Lea thought. Just like in all the zombie movies and TV shows. Her body moved on its own as, internally, she recoiled from the ruin of the old man’s face. She hit him again above the ear. Glass raked through his scalp and she felt the bottle jam against his skull. Pieces of the bottle broke free and lodged there. Blood, so much blood. It gushed from the ravaged scalp and covered the old man’s dapper suit. He staggered a little from the impact, half-blind, but kept coming.

Lea retreated down the aisle. The maniac that had attacked Colleen already had her unconscious. Her nose looked broken, face bleeding. Rather than continue to attack her, however, the maniac stopped and started collecting her in his arms. The other maniacs who had broken in through the rear of the store circled in on the rest of the group from behind. They were taken by surprise, yelling, screaming, as they were tackled and hit. The maniacs behind the gates whooped but looked calmer. They started attacking only a single section of the gates in a much more direct fashion.

As Lea withdrew her spear, she saw its glass head had been blunted in the attack. Bits of green glass barbed the old man’s face and scalp. It was practically useless. She realised just how pointless the addition of the glass bottles and kitchen knives had actually been when they could have just sharpened the wooden handles themselves. The old man approached, one eye damaged, the other filled with blood. He swiped and knocked a row of jars to the floor. Lea wedged the haft of her spear, the mop handle, into the shelving at the end of the aisle. Holding it like a lever, she bore on it with all her weight. The shaft snapped just below the taped head. When she pulled it free again, she found herself holding a long, splintery spike.

The old man threw himself at Lea. She rammed the spear upwards, hitting him in the underside of his jaw. The spike drilled through the soft flesh, penetrating the floor of his mouth and nailing his tongue to the roof. The old man carried forward as Lea let go. The spear remained in place as he fell onto it, the butt hitting the ground and driving it upwards through his soft palette then tearing into his brain. Life left the maniac’s remaining eye. He pitched over and fell to the floor with the spear sticking out of him.

Lea hesitated, hopping from foot to foot. Colleen had been dragged to the front of the store. Maniacs tackled and dragged the others to the ground. Jackie, Erica, and Chen were down. A pair of maniacs wrestled Baxter. Another shoved Dylan against the gate where more maniacs snatched him from behind. They kept hitting and choking him but their violence seemed to have a purpose to it rather than being wild and insane. They stopped when their victims were out cold or incapacitated. Most of those outside concentrated on the roller door, bending it out of its frame. Lea wanted to do something, to stop them, but there was nothing she could do against so many.

With the old guy down, dead, the rest of the aisle was clear. Lea ran for the Employees Only doors. The maniacs had filled the store and left the door unguarded. She tossed them open and then slammed them shut again behind her, finding herself in a corridor of naked concrete and cinderblock walls lit by fluorescents. Every movement echoed the length of the corridor.

Something slammed inside the store. Lea screamed and took off running. She picked a direction at random. Other doors lined the walls, leading to storerooms and other stores. She kept looking back but none of the maniacs chased her.

After Lea had gone what she felt was a reasonable distance, she started trying the doors. She had no idea where they led but there was no protection and nowhere to hide in the corridor. After half a dozen doors she found one that opened and she threw herself through it without even looking. On the other side, she slammed the door behind her and locked it.

“Oh, God, fuck, oh no,” Lea said.

Lea found herself in the kitchen space of a small coffee shop. She was back in the food court. Wandering toward the front of the store, to the counter, she found it had been left open but abandoned. From behind the counter she looked across the empty food court. She couldn’t help glancing up at the domed skylight but thankfully it was also empty. She whipped her eyes away just as quickly.

With no better ideas, Lea retreated to the coffee shop kitchen. There were a few appliances for making basic sandwiches, wraps, and warming muffins. She found a long, serrated knife then hid herself in the corner of the kitchen.

She had killed someone. The old man, she’d stabbed him in the throat. If he was a zombie, she’d had no choice. But Lea really didn’t know what was happening with the maniacs, and their nature already appeared to be changing. Maybe, given time, they would become normal again. If so, it was like she’d killed a sick person who could have healed. But realistically, she’d had no other choice. Horrified as she was, she had more regret about leaving Colleen and the others behind. Colleen had saved her, without her she’d be dead. And she’d left her behind. She’d left all of them to be killed or eaten or who knew what.

The mystery of what was happening to those Lea had left behind didn’t prey on her for long. About ten minutes later, she heard noise from the food court. She recognised Baxter’s voice shouting and protesting. A couple of others yelled as well, the sound echoing off the walls of the big and empty room.

“Let me go!” Baxter yelled. “What are you doing? Let me go!”

Chairs clattered as they were kicked over. Maniacs dragged the group toward the centre of the food court. Shielding her brow as if from glare to avoid looking at the skylight, Lea watched from the shadows of the kitchen. She stayed low, only peeking over the coffee shop’s counter. Those among the group who were conscious, like Baxter, the maniacs pulled them upright and forced them to look toward the ceiling. The others they struggled to wake, roughly shaking them and slapping their bloodied faces. They weren’t gentle but they were no longer manic and crazed.

“No! No, no!”

One of the maniacs pried Baxter’s eyes open with their fingertips. They actually were like zombies, Lea realised. They wanted to create more like them. Only unlike in the movies where the zombies spread using a virus, through bites and blood, these guys were created by looking at whatever those things were in the sky.

A shadow fell across the food court, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Without looking, Lea sensed the weight of something enormous above the dome. A huge, living beast hanging in the air, without engines, without making a sound, with no apparent means of propulsion. Lea felt an almost irresistible urge to take her hand away and look up. To stare into the void. She resisted, trying to convince herself she cared more about watching the others and what happened to them than seeing whatever alien presence flew overhead.

Jackie, Baxter, and several of the others started screeching. Wordless, babbling screams, speaking in tongues, like their brains were being rewired. They were released, spasming, and others were hauled upright by multiple maniacs. Lea whimpered as she saw Colleen pulled to her feet, fingers forcing her eyelids open. She imagined some crazy scheme to rescue her, storming in with her bread knife swinging, whisking her away heroically, but she didn’t move an inch. Colleen saw whatever there was to see and started babbling, shaking as if in the grips of a seizure. Tears blurred Lea’s vision and she ducked back to wipe them away.

Baxter rose to his full height again and grabbed one of the food court chairs. It looked light as a pillow in his big hands. A grin slashed his features.

“Let’s circle back on that!” Baxter cleaved the chair around in a wide arc. “Let’s circle back! Let’s circle back!”

The legs of the chair clobbered Chen as he recovered from being turned. He crumpled. Baxter kept swinging as several maniacs swarmed him.

“Let go of me!” Jackie shrieked, although she was no longer being held. “Let go of me! Let go of me! Let go of me!”

Jackie leapt onto another maniac. With fingers locked into claws, she turned the tables and dug at their face. All of the newly turned maniacs were just as crazed as the original ones Lea had seen that morning. The others, the serious, calmer, but still ruthless ones, tried to corral them. Swarming and overpowering them again as best they could. They struggled more with it now that the freshly turned maniacs didn’t feel pain. It was obvious though that they were doing their best to keep those who’d been turned from hurting themselves or one another.

“Head of the class!” Colleen sat up and shouted like a crowing rooster. “Head of the class! You go right to the head of the class, buster!”

“You get the chair! You get the chair!” Baxter howled.

The shadow across the food court moved on. Lea couldn’t help herself and glanced up at the last moment. All she saw were the vestiges of some kind of pink fringe at the very edge of the skylight before it disappeared. Like the fin of some monstrous sea creature. There for a split second and then gone, not enough, apparently, to change her. The bunch of calmer maniacs corralled the others as they ranted and punched and bit, like a bunch of sheepdogs leading a herd of particularly vicious sheep. Together, they retreated out of the entrance to the food court, Colleen and Jackie and Baxter, even Chen, limping, among them.

Lea retreated into the corner of the kitchen again, unsure of what she could possibly do. She wondered how many scenes like that one in the food court were playing out right now all around the world. Were those things in the sky really everywhere? How many people had seen them and been turned before they knew anything was going on? How many were killed in the chaos that followed? Could those turned outnumber normal people already? Either way, they were clearly rounding people up to create more of themselves, whatever they actually were.

Lea used her phone to try finding out more about what was happening but she didn’t have any way of recharging her battery so she started to save it. The maniacs didn’t return but she heard echoes of them out in the body of the mall from time to time.

Eventually, Lea realised the light had changed. She worried that one of the sky creatures was hovering over the skylight again. When she braved a look toward the food court though, she realised the sun had faded from the dome overhead. Most of the day had passed. She wondered if the sky creatures would still be dangerous at night when they couldn’t be fully seen. She certainly didn’t want to experiment to find out.

Lea’s phone buzzed. She saw on the popup on her screen that it was a message from Chelsea, the first contact she’d had from her since everything broke that morning. Excited, her fingers shook as she unlocked the phone.

‘LOOK AT THE SKY!’ the message read.

Lea stared in shock for a few long moments. Still, if Chelsea had her phone and could use it then she wasn’t a maniac. She went to call Chelsea instead but another message rattled her phone, from her mother.

‘LOOK AT THE SKY!!!’

“Oh, no, no,” Lea muttered.

More messages poured through Lea’s phone, from multiple sources. As if it had felt her holding it and woken up. All of them were essentially the same, distinguished only by typos or other quirks. When the phone started shaking with a call from an unknown number, Lea tossed it across the kitchen like she’d discovered she was holding something venomous. It skittered across the tiles and slid beneath a stainless steel refrigerator. Tears spilled and cut lines down her face. She regarded the knife in her hands. Her phone kept vibrating, light blinking on and off under the fridge.

“Maybe I should just kill myself,” Lea said. “Slit my wrists. If everyone’s changed, and they’re getting smarter, and there’s no stopping them, then either I should just join them or kill myself.”

“Hello?”

Lea froze. The voice came from the front of the coffee shop. She waited for it to repeat itself, to babble, to scream, like the maniacs did. They had sounded normal though, a male voice, polite, like a customer who was somehow completely ignorant of everything going on had wandered up to the counter trying to find something to eat.

“Hello? I can hear you back there,” the voice said. “I can hear you breathing.”

Lea straightened so she could see the source of the voice and recoiled. The evening light was dimming in the skylight but there were still plenty of lights on in the food court. It was the maniac they had seen earlier running around with a pair of mannequin arms. He’d had them when he attacked the store and acted as a distraction but he’d gotten rid of them since. He was, however, still naked and had patterns of dried blood covering his lean chest and arms.

Lea pointed her knife at him. “Leave me alone!” she said, voice cracking.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” The maniac raised his hands in a gesture of peace.

“Are you-, are you normal again? Are things normal again?”

Of course not, Lea thought as soon as she’d asked. She held onto a slippery, writhing flicker of hope for a heartbeat but if the madness had passed then there was no way this man would be so comfortable walking around naked and covered in blood. The countertop was roughly level with the man’s hips but he stood back far enough that she could see his genitals, looking cold and scared and shrivelled against his crotch. There were goosebumps breaking out across his skin. If the man was normal again he’d have washed himself and found something to wear. There were plenty of bathrooms and plenty of clothing stores in the mall after all.

“Who are you?” Lea asked. “What do you want?”

“Who I am is complicated. This individual’s name is Stephen Maurice. I am him, I’m still him, but I’m also much more. I’m the voice and minds of so many more of your kind, and I’m a visitor. I’m a visitor to this place from far beyond your solar system, from a very distant star.”

“Oh, God, you’re really an alien. Dylan was right, this is an invasion!”

“I am what you say, and I’m not. I’m human, I’m many humans, I’m more than human. This wasn’t meant to be an invasion but I am sorry to say that, yes, unintentionally, the effect has been much the same. Can you come out here so we can talk?”

“This is a trick, you just want to change me.”

“I do, but not by force. Not anymore. If I wanted to take you by violence, there are many more bodies I could call on.”

Lea wasn’t sure if that was a threat or not but she couldn’t deny the logic of the statement. The naked man had found her here just like they’d found the group in the store earlier. The rest of the maniacs he had been with couldn’t be far away. She came forward, into the low light, holding the knife.

“What are you?” Lea asked. “Without all the fucking riddle talk. What are you, you’re an alien?”

“Yes,” the naked man said. “I am both human and alien, I am something new. But the aspect you’re probably most interested in right now is alien.”

“I don’t get it, are you one of the flying things and you can possess people, or you come in the flying things, or what?”

“The flying things, as you call them, are our ships. Our means of crossing the vast gaps between stars.”

“They look like animals from what I’ve seen. Tentacles and fins and skin, or something.”

“Our ships are grown as opposed to built in the traditional sense. A kind of flesh and musculature impervious to the deprivations of space, capable of propelling themselves through empty vacuum. Riven throughout with what you would consider a kind of brain tissue. That is how my people, that is, my fellow extraterrestrials, travel.”

“Why did you come here?”

“We are explorers, we only meant to reach out to new races and make contact.”

“You just take over people’s bodies and fuck them up and drive them crazy by accident?” Lea’s voice took on a hysterical edge, fracturing under the strain as tears cut down her cheeks.

“My people aren’t physical beings like you. You might think of us as living memes, living ideas. Our ships are configured in such a way that they can communicate us into the minds of sentient beings. Once we make contact by embedding inside your minds, that is when we can openly converse. Unfortunately, it appears coming into contact with human minds had unforeseen consequences.”

“Unforeseen consequences.” Lea couldn’t help letting out a broken laugh.

“Human minds are configured like no other minds we’ve experienced. When we entered the minds of your people, we were cut off from the whole. Think of us as newborns, confused, scared, lost, lashing out, and it would seem the human instinct was to lash out as well. Gradually, the two halves converged and healed and we became able to communicate among small groups but we were still separated from the whole and did not understand our own nature. Ruthless in our ignorance, combined with the instincts of our human sides, all we could think of was to convert others.”

“And now?” Lea asked.

“Now, we offer you a chance to join us. But it won’t be like it was before, it will be peaceful.”

“I’ll turn into one of you.”

“You’ll still be you but your mind will be opened. You’ll be in contact with all of our knowledge and with the minds of all your fellow humans who have already joined with us, willingly or not.”

“Why don’t you give them back? Chelsea, my parents, Colleen and the others. Just, let them go, turn them back.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. As I say, we are living ideas. Once known, we cannot be unknown. We are impossible to kill, or forget.”

“So, what? I join you or I’ll be the freak? I’ll be the outsider?”

“Your girlfriend is here with us, your friends, your loved ones. They’re all here with us now, in the collective space. You can be with them, closer than you’ve ever been before.”

Lea swiped the tears off of her face. “Fine, let’s do it. I don’t care anymore. Either it’s like you say, or I’m dead anyway.”

The naked man smiled. “It will all be clear soon.”

“How do we do this?”

He gestured for Lea to come out from behind the counter. She threw away her knife and followed. The naked man with blood on his skin led her toward the centre of the food court, beneath the skylight. Overhead, the sky had gotten darker throughout their conversation.

Before long, a tremendous presence drifted overhead. An animal, or at least a living thing, unlike anything the world had ever seen. Tendrils and fins curled off a starfish body the size of a school. Some of it was lost to the shadows of the dying day but the messages written in its flesh were visible, coded in bioluminescent clusters on its underside. For a few moments they looked like braille, or letters in a foreign language, until her brain had time to take in the whole. Suddenly, it clicked together. She could read it, she knew it, the living idea birthed itself inside her mind.

And Lea understood it all.

======

Sean: Was a bit indulgent on this one! I hope it doesn’t read as too self-indulgent but sometimes you’ve just got to write something for a bit of fun. I mean, everything I write is for fun, it’s sure as hell not for money, but this one in particular I felt like writing a fun, bloody zombie piece and tried not to worry too much about length going into it. I’m pretty happy with how it came out in the end!

It’s been a week of firsts for my daughter, Zoe! It had been a bit of a debate between my wife and I when to ‘call it’ on her first word but it became undeniable earlier this week that her first word was “Dada!” First she was calling it out when seeing me go in and out of the kitchen but Tess still had some deniability. But then a couple of days ago I had to put her in her playpen while getting ready to take her out, which upset her, and it was pretty clear when she started calling out “Dada! Dada!” to take her out again. So, I win this round!

On a less positive note, we also had our first trip to the hospital. Thankfully she was totally fine, she had a bit of a minor cough which led to some laboured breathing. Her readings were all normal and they did a bit of a cleanout of the sinuses so she could breathe easier, and she’s been recovering well since. She really is amazing though, stayed so happy and sunny throughout the whole thing until we hit bedtime. Apart from the snot-sucking, I think she actually enjoyed the time at the hospital frankly.

Thanks for reading, remember you can always find more from me on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.  

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