#author: M59Gar

[redditnosleep]

Past The Spine

by M59Gar

My friend Shannon had been through quite a bit in the past few years, and that was that only reason that I didn't immediately call the police when I stopped by her work and found her halfway through the process of climbing out of a recently deceased corpse.

She was drenched in blood, naked, and absolutely silent except for her exhausted breathing as she pulled herself up and out. The morgue around her was otherwise normal, and I saw no indication of how exactly she had fit inside the old man's body, but of course I was in shock. She had some towels ready nearby; I handed one to her as I turned respectfully away.

"Christ!" She jumped when she saw me standing there with the towel offered toward her, but took it quickly. "Shit, what did you see?"

I stared at the wall of cold chambers while she dried herself off behind me. "I don't know, Shannon, what the hell were you doing?"

"I'm not some kind of freak," she said immediately. "Please, just let me explain."

"Explain? What the hell could you possibly explain about this?" I put my shirt over my nose to block out the horrid smell of the open body, but it didn't work. I waited until she shoved her clothes on and finally turned around. "You missed some."

Her hair was still drenched in black, red, and yellow fluids, but the best she could do was to wrap a second towel around it. "Look. It's not some sort of fetish. There's something down there."

I fought down the urge to vomit as I looked into the frail old man's still-steaming body. His heart, lungs, stomach, pancreas, and intestines had all been coiled around in a haphazard circle covered in various oozes. "Down where?"

"In there." Her expression was haunted. "Past the spine."

"Is this a joke?" I couldn't believe it.

"No."

I took a step closer and tried to look down the middle of the circle of organs, but there wasn't any gap between them. "Then what do you mean? What's down there?"

She gulped unhappily. "I don't know exactly. A space."

Narrowing my eyes, I thought about what I'd seen. She hadn't slipped up out of the body sideways. She'd climbed straight up, as if out of a hole. The sight had been very disconcerting; it hadn't been geometrically possible, and my brain was still struggling to make sense of the memory. It was possible she was telling the truth, and there really was some sort of weird hole in this old guy's body. "You're serious?" I reached for a long metal tool on a tray nearby.

"That won't work," she said, stopping me. "It's made of metal, so it won't work. Only living things work. You can't even reach it wearing gloves. Has to be your bare hand, which is why I think nobody else has found this."

"Really." I sighed. It was definitely a prank, but I wasn't one to hesitate and get emotional. "Fine. Let's do this ridiculous nonsense." I took the last step, held my breath against the stench, and reached straight down. After pushing between squishy wet tissues and organs, my hand came to rest on the hard bones of the old man's spine. I looked to Shannon, but she wasn't laughing. "Past the spine?"

She nodded and gulped audibly.

As disgusting as it was, I was determined to see this strange situation through. I moved my hand to the side—and my fingers slipped deeper. "What the hell?" I frowned and leaned down closer to the corpse as my hand continued to push between what felt like a deep pile of squelching organs. I went down all the way to my shoulder until my short sleeve hit the inside of the old man's back-skin and refused to go further. "Oh my god, you're telling the truth!" I pulled my arm out as fast as I could and held it away to avoid the dripping juices I'd brought with me. My arm was covered in a distinctly thicker goo than the wet ring around my sleeve; whatever was down there, my non-living shirt had not been able to enter. "What is it?"

Shannon shook her head. "That's what I've been trying to figure out. After somebody dies, there's a short window where it, whatever it is, remains open."

I took another towel and wiped my arm off as best I could while trying not to gag. "Wait, do you mean it isn't just this particular body?"

"Yes." She went over and began sewing up the chest cavity. "I'm new here, but I accidentally discovered whatever it is on my second autopsy." She looked past me at the door. "My boss is never here and leaves me to do this on my own, so I've been trying to figure out what it is. I dropped vines down a few times, but they only work if they're still attached to the plant."

"Meaning still alive."

"Yeah. And only new corpses work. Ninety-six minutes or so after death, there's a weird tug, and then the vines are snapped off and I can't feel that weird space with my hand anymore. But I haven't been able to figure anything else out because technology won't go in."

It was disgusting, horrifying, and fascinating all at once. What could it possibly be? What could it possibly mean? "So you decided to go down there yourself."

She nodded. "I promise I'm not a weirdo. I just had to know. The thought has been tormenting me for months. What if that's where our soul is? Or what if it's an afterlife of some sort?" She looked away. "Or what if Brian's in there somewhere?"

That sounded like a problem. "Brian's dead, Shannon," I told her calmly. "You're not going to find him in whatever the hell that is."

Softly, she said, "You didn't see him die in front of you." She kept her gaze down to avoiding looking me in the eye. "The world is going crazy. There's hate and delusion everywhere. People need this now more than ever. If we could find out what happens after death, it could change everything."

What else could I say or do? She wasn't going to stop just because I said so. The most I could do was get her to agree to a certain set of precautionary conditions. She'd never gone more than a few moments deep simply because of sheer terror, but she would be safer if I was in the morgue to watch over her. We special-ordered the longest vine plant we could find and I waited for her call.

It came very late on a Tuesday. I spent six minutes getting there and bringing the plant; nobody else was around, and she already had the poor teenager cut open and ready, with a white blood-stained sheet over his head and legs. She disrobed, tied the vine around her left ankle, and then took a deep breath to calm herself. "There's at least thirty minutes left on this one," she told me.

I set my watch. "You've got seven minutes. No further. Just to be safe."

She nodded nervously and moved forward.

The sight of a person climbing head-first down into a steaming open chest cavity really cannot be conveyed in words. I'd popped nausea medicine on the way over, and I was glad I had. Her waist almost didn't fit, but I pushed her bare feet down, and she slid out of view between the organs, which congealed back into place once she was gone. The long vine began sliding down between, and I waited with a pounding heart.

What was she seeing? What was she doing down there? I was probably imagining it worse than it was, since she'd had space to turn around the previous time. My mind constructed a vision of a tight organic tunnel that might close like a muscle and crush her to death; or perhaps there was an enormous drop into a never-ending void. How could we possibly know until it was too late?

My watch counted down the seconds interminably. Four minutes passed, and then five. The vine was still being pulled in. At six minutes, it stopped, and I sighed with relief. That had to mean she was coming back.

But she did not emerge at seven minutes. The tension in my chest rose. At eight minutes, I began to pull the vine. It moved easily, and I figured I was pulling up slack—until a snapped end emerged. Panicking, I reached my hand down.

It was still there.

She hadn't been trapped. She'd just lost the vine at a weak point in the plant we hadn't caught.

I waited.

At ten minutes, I began to panic.

At eleven, I forced myself to focus.

At twelve, I knew for certain she was in trouble.

I paced around for a full thirty seconds before screaming at myself to stop wasting time. I tore off my watch and clothes, closed my eyes, and basically shoved my arms and head down into the swamp of blood and guts held open on the autopsy table. I found the teenager's spine and pushed my way past it; this time, I didn't stop.

It was easier than I expected. Despite the pressure from wet flesh on every side, I slid right in. The knot of vine tied around my ankle got caught on spine bones, but I reached back through the pile of organs and freed it with terrified fingers. It was only when I fell further and felt air on my face that I finally took in an explosive breath and opened my eyes.

The air was a thousand years beyond foul, but breathable, just like she'd told me. It smelled and felt like breathing in rotting corpse and dying diseased flesh as a veritable fog; a blood mist. The sight was similar. Shannon had also told me that the place had a dim crimson glow about it, omnipresent and without source, and by this light I saw choking miasma in two directions. Bloodless arteries opened to my left and right, neither big enough to fit a person until I pushed in and the muscle-bound walls relaxed to give me access. I followed the remains of her snapped vine.

More than anything, I wished I had clothes on. Every single surface was alive, pulsing with a distant heartbeat, and secreting dark substances that were strangely hot, cold, or even numbing to the touch. Being naked in an environment like that made me feel vulnerable in a way that brought out terror at every unexpected noise, sight, and texture. I cursed Shannon's decision-making more than a few times, that was for sure, but I wasn't going to let her die down here.

Her vine entered what looked like a hollow groove into a massive bone, and I was happy just to be on a solid surface as I crawled between increasingly narrow white walls lit in red. This tunnel had been carved; I could see that in the spiraling notches all around. Had the muscle-tunnels also been drilled out, but then later healed away the scars? It was as if some worm or parasite had dug its way through a dimension of flesh, and we were merely following in its ancient wake.

The smooth bone began to steepen, and I guessed that Shannon might have slipped and slid here. Carefully bracing myself on the spiral notches, I worked my way down the incline with my vine still tightly bound to my ankle.

And good I did. The bone-spiral tunnel ended at a steep fleshy drop-off. Shannon was there below, clinging to a solid white spur. I was still inside the bone itself, so I could only see down, but I carefully moved to reach her hand with mine.

She stared up at me with horror in her eyes. Her voice was odd, distant, and distorted by the rot-congested air. "Don't look out!"

"What do you mean?" I called to her. As I leaned out of the bone, the view away from the wall of flesh below began to open up. I'd finally reached an open place rather than a tunnel, and I could sense that if I turned my head I would see a tremendous vista. It was the same sense I'd had a few times in my life while riding a ski lift or walking past a window on a plane. All I had to do was glance—

She screamed again: "Don't look!"

For once in my life, I listened to someone else. I didn't look.

Our hands met, but both were slippery. I tried to rub the liquids off on my skin, but that didn't work. Everything was wet and disgusting.

I leaned down further and offered an elbow. "Wrap your entire arm around my elbow!" I shouted; the act made the world beyond us open up a little bit more, and I could feel horrific sights beginning to piece themselves together in the corners of my eye. I couldn't quite tell what was happening out there, but if I so much as darted my gaze—

She grabbed my arm and screamed in my ear: "Don't look! Don't you look, µ¬ßµ damnit!"

What had that been? She'd said a word, but the meaning and intonations had been alien to my mind. By the look on her face, she'd heard it, too.

I pulled her up with all my might, and the nightmare world outside our bone-tunnel receded.

Together, we climbed our way back up the spiral carvings, then crawled as fast as we could along bleeding muscle. The living world around did not seem to react to us or care about us in anyway. For some reason, I'd expected anger or hunger or at least something. If it was alive, if it was conscious, if it was sentient, we were nothing at all to it.

We reached the point where the vine rose up into a seething mass of dark organs, and I pushed her up ahead of me.

Then, for some reason, I turned and looked down the other direction; the way I had not gone when I'd first arrived.

The crimson-lit silhouette of a vaguely teenaged boy sat curled up and crying at a curve in the tunnel.

He raised his head, as if he could somehow sense my looking at him. He began to crawl forward. "Help me!"

Frozen and aghast, I waited.

"Help me!" he screamed again as he came nearer. "Oh, µ¬ßµ, what's happening? I was in the car, and there was this loud crunch, and I hit my head, and I thought for sure I—" He paused at hearing his own words. "µ¬ßµ? What is that? Why can't I say µ¬ßµ? Oh µ¬ßµ! No! Why? No!" He looked at me from two arm lengths a way. "Are we in Hell?"

I didn't know what to tell him. I'd never seen such agony and loss in another human being's body language before—and he still didn't know the truth. I gulped down my paralysis. "Can you... see me?"

He nodded. "Help me."

What could I tell him? I chose my words carefully. "I don't think I can."

"Why?" He whimpered so sadly I thought it would break my heart. "Why can't you help me?"

"You..." I shook with a portion of the pain I was about to give him. "...you don't have a face."

He just sat there sobbing as I leapt up and climbed. I knew the sound of that hopelessness would haunt me for the rest of my life. It was unlike anything a human being on Earth could make, for it was absolute, and it was forever.

I pushed up out of the corpse on the table and crashed my way to the cold, hard, dry floor. The impact hurt, but nothing had ever felt so safe and secure.

Shannon sat curled up in a corner, much like the boy I'd seen, and she'd given no thought to putting her clothes back on or getting the dozen kinds of plasm and blood off. She could only stare at the floor in shock, rock back and forth, and murmur, "He wants me to tell people about him."

"Who?" I asked her. "The teenager? He wouldn't survive here even if we brought him with us."

"No," she whispered. "µ¬ßµ. He wants me to tell people about him. He saw into me. He saw into me when I looked at him. He put his fingers in my grey matter and massaged my brain tissue without ever touching me. He said the Bible and the Quran are close, but we got it slightly wrong. A few things backwards." She stopped rocking in place and stared me in the eye. "We're not going to tell anyone about µ¬ßµ, are we?"

I got a towel and wrapped around it her. "No. We won't say a word."

And you know? At the time, I actually believed that. I thought I'd gotten away with it by not looking, but the corner of my vision did absorb some small portion of whatever nightmare she witnessed. That's why, after several weeks of resisting, I can't help but write this. I simply feel compelled to tell people what happened, and to tell people that µ¬ßµ exists. So, now you know, too.

I hope that's not a problem.

[kitsure]

Night 2:

The Black Square by  u/M59Gar

[sending-the-message]

Anomaly #48 by M59Gar

I received a letter today—but not through the mail. The envelope was left for me personally. This is not exactly what it said, but rather my interpretation.

We've met briefly twice. I feel compelled to write this to explain myself. Feel free to edit it or whatever, I'm not a writer like you.

I'm only an E-3 Private First Class, so I had no idea why I was spared the axe. I was basically a foot grunt in the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. The EMA handles prevention, preparation, and response for everything from weather crises to terrorist attacks. My particular department within the EMA is a bit less publicized, but, as you know, it's supposed to handle anything outside the bounds of normal. The problem is, I'm the only one still working here.

I didn't even have a desk. I spent most of my time driving from place to place and setting up equipment; we always did this in groups of four due to the unknown dangers. When the firings began, all I saw was our office building becoming emptier day by day. We started having to drive out to small towns across Ohio in groups of three, and then pairs. My partner that last day found transfer orders left for him on the secretary's front desk. He took the orders, grumbled, and headed out, while I was left to wander our darkened building in confusion.

The computers were all still there, but locked. Our equipment and gear remained. Fortunately I had a key to their storage rooms, but there was not a single officer, secretary, or grunt to be found. I figured it was only a matter of time until the new administration sent down transfer orders for me, too, and I just had to wait.

I actually stood the entire next day. Right there in the front area, I stood by the secretary's desk and waited. At any moment, an officer might come by with my orders, and it would not have been good for him to see me slacking off. At times, phones would ring in the back, but those offices were dark. Once the clock hit five, I waited another few minutes, but nobody came.

The next morning my legs still ached, so I said screw it and took a seat there in the lobby. For hours I sat staring at the clock and ignoring the phone calls echoing from the darkness. At some point, I picked up a magazine.

The next day was Friday. The orders had to come then, right? Nope. I stretched out along the chairs and went to sleep. If an officer wanted to bust my ass for that, I was beyond giving a shit anymore. By then, ten phones were ringing constantly in the dark.

Saturday, I drank. Sunday, I drank. Come Monday, I sifted through the mail that had been delivered through the wall slot looking for my transfer orders. Nothing. By then, all fifteen phones in the back offices were ringing constantly. Hungover as I was, I got pissed. I was a loyal soldier that always tried to follow the rules, but how much was a man expected to take?

I stomped back to the farthest office and picked up the phone. "JESUS, WHAT?"

The only response on the other end was a little girl crying.

That moment changed everything. I'd just assumed it was more government bullshit; I'd had no idea I'd been listening to cries for help for days and not answering. The rest of the EMA always transferred all abnormal calls to us, which meant they'd been transferring people to an answering machine all week. To that little girl, I remember saying with more compassion than I ever thought I had in me: "What's wrong?"

And she said, "Mommy and daddy aren't right."

The phone did have tracking information. Deshler, Ohio. I'd never heard of it. After a few half-answered questions and some Google Mapping, I told her, "I'll be there in two hours."

That was the first time I went out alone. It was against all our training, but I had no other option. I couldn't depend on civilians from other departments, and asking anyone outside the EMA would get me thrown in prison or worse for violating secrecy. I geared up as quickly as I could, throwing on every piece of gear I guessed I might possibly need and throwing even more in the humvee. It was lucky I brought the flamethrower, because I had to burn down a living church made of organs and bone. Then I had to burn a pile of flesh the parents of Deshler were making with their own cut-off limbs. Then, I had to burn some of the parents, too.

But that finally broke the control of the demonic flesh-church, and that little girl got her parents back minus one arm.

When that was done and I got back to the office a little after lunch time, I said the ultimate screw it and turned on all the lights in the building. After I found the central map of Ohio in what had been the operations area, I pulled all the phones out on long cords and sat them on a table next to the coffee maker. I was not authorized to answer the phones, but who was going to bust me?

Vinton, Ohio. A creek had turned into literal blood. I pushed a green pin into the map. Non-threatening as long as you use water filters.

Sabina, Ohio. The forest was dying around a strange new cave. I pushed a blue pin into the map. Localized phenomena, not too dangerous all things considered. Just don't go in the cave.

Brooksville, Kentucky. Sorry, you'll have to call the Kentucky office. They're not answering? It was a tough decision to make, but I couldn't help him.

Montrose-Ghent, Ohio. Corpses being found burned to death, but the people being identified by teeth are still alive and well? I considered it for a long time, and then put a red pin into the map. Possibly very dangerous and would require followup. If the citizens in the area called again convinced that the individuals with matching corpses were now acting strangely, I would know for certain they were being replaced.

And so it went as I tried to map the dangers. Along with the eighteen monitored anomalies that I'd inherited, there were forty-six ongoing incidents in Ohio. Yours was the forty-seventh. When you met me for the second time at that bar and I was piss drunk, it was because of the forty-eighth.

See, I'd been doing this alone for seven months by that time. For every minor success like burning down that living church, there were nine other total containment failures. I was one man. I managed to reroute all the office calls to my humvee and I spent every waking hour driving all across Ohio and back, but it was never enough. I began to realize that I could no longer intervene. All I could do alone was monitor. I was beginning to lose hope.

And the final nail in that feeling came when I actually managed to get the governor's office on the phone after months of trying. I got his direct aide, and I began to tell him about how my department was screwed and Ohio was bubbling over with dangers.

He said to me, "But your department still exists."

I said, "I'm the only one still working here. I can't—"

He cut me off and repeated, "But your department still exists, correct?"

"Uh, yeah, but—"

"Then the only thing you are authorized to tell anyone who asks is that your department still exists. You have no problem with the truth, right?"

I was sitting in my humvee watching a rising pillar of smoke in the distance as some small town burned. I'd driven through it and I'd seen the fire department sitting idle while the townsfolk worked together with buckets and well-water to put out the fires. It was incident #44, with a blue pin, and there was nothing I could do to help. "No sir, no problem with the truth."

"Good. The governor's considering a run for President in a few years, so let us know if any major incidents happen. We'll capitalize on that."

I frowned. "Capitalize on it, sir?"

"Contain it, I mean. Swiftly."

I wonder if he heard my uncomfortable swallow. "Alright."

And then I was left to continue my drive from site to site. As I took forest road after forest road, it hit me: they'd cleaned out the personnel from my department on purpose. They'd fired all but one—me—so that they could truthfully say the department still existed. The part they would leave out if anyone asked was that the department was only one Private First Class who could not prevent abnormal disasters on any meaningful scale.

Can I even possibly describe what that felt like? I'd been sold out. Given a duty impossible to handle so that I would fail. I wish I could write better. I wish I had the words. I was cold, and my heart felt like stone. That's why I turned her away when she ran up to my humvee and slammed her bare flat palms on the window.

I'd come to check out a possible anomaly, and I'd stopped on the road outside the small town in question at three in the afternoon. In broad daylight, she ran up to me in terror and begged for a ride out of town. She had long unkempt blonde hair and a silver crucifix on a silver chain around her neck.

Through the glass, I asked, "What's the problem?"

"People are divided," she shouted. "They hate each other!"

I was bitter, so bitter. "What's new?"

"You don't understand. They're all listening to the radio and getting crazy!"

It was no anomaly, just Midwest politics as normal. I thought to say something to her, but instead I just took off. She stood there defeated in my rear-view mirror, growing ever smaller as I watched.

On the way back to the office, I stopped on the outskirts of Columbus and drank. I sat at that bar and got friggin' wasted. That's when you ran into me, and that's why I said you were on your own, why I said we're all on our own.

There was nothing to do but keep driving. The next day, and the day after that. It was Wednesday when I sat outside a town square and watched hordes marching with torches in their hands and shouting angrily in unison as they protested or counter-protested issues unknown. I'd begun to listen to talk radio instead of music at some point, and concerned voices were discussing the rise in distrust, hate, and violence.

A female voice on the radio said, "They're all crazy. Literally lunatics. Where did this come from?"

I left that town square with its angry mobs and drove back to the office to sit in silence and stare at the map of Ohio with its green, blue, and red pins. It occurred to me that the number of anomalies in the state had more than doubled in the last seven months. There'd been no pattern so far—

The image of that terrified blonde woman and her silver crucifix would not leave my mind.

Where had I seen her? I'd deemed it normal and put no pin, but if I did—

I grabbed another map and overlaid a transparency of the river system.

Then I grabbed a transparency of Ohio's caves.

Of course the pins didn't make a coherent shape! I'd been looking at roads and coordinates, not rivers and caves—and yet I should have thought of it months before. Creeks turning to blood, cave entrances appearing and rotting life around it, it was all connected.

And that small town with that terrified blonde woman was right at the center. From that spot, all of Ohio could be reached through underground means.

There was only one black pin, a classification of threat all its own, and I pushed that black pin into the dot that represented her town.

I sat back and stared at the map, taking in the truth. Now what?

I had to go out there. Despite hopelessness, despite how afraid I was of what I might find, I had to drive out there. Was it time to call in reinforcements? I didn't know exactly what I was up against yet, so I tried to call friends and colleagues from other states.

Kentucky—no answer.

Indiana—no answer.

Pennsylvania—no answer.

West Virginia—still expending all resources struggling to contain the coal demon.

And those assholes in Michigan certainly wouldn't ever help an Ohioan.

Alone it was.

But it didn't feel like I was alone. On the hour drive out there, I had the radio to reassure me. Her voice was as concerned and scared as I was, and guest after guest confirmed what I was feeling: an insanity and blight was creeping across the land, leaving the trappings of civilization in place, but undermining us from below in ways that left us vulnerable to sudden collapse.

On that drive down dim forest roads, a peculiar chiming kind of urgent despair fueled me. I had every weapon and device I could think of in the back of the humvee, but I still felt unprepared. There was nobody to call for help and no backup, and the men in power would only make it worse by trying to use a disaster for their own ends. If I didn't find a way to stop the black-pinned anomaly, what might they do? Give themselves more power? Suspend elections? Declare martial law?

The radio echoed these concerns before I even thought of them myself. Her voice kept me focused.

It was two in the afternoon when I pulled up to that town square. A pedestal stood in the middle of a fountain, but there was no trace of the statue that might have been upon it. Traces of garbage littered the wide flat brick area, hinting that some great commotion had happened here.

With a gas mask on and my assault rifle slung back but ready, I got out of my vehicle and quietly circled the main fountain. There was no telling how a black-pin level threat might present itself, but I had some idea that it had to do with insanity and blight.

The first sign of life was a local resident passing by on the sidewalk; she was white-haired and frail, and she flipped me off when she saw me.

Okay.

Birds flew overhead and a squirrel ran up a tree. My test kit from the back of the humvee showed nothing abnormal with the air, so I took off my gas mask.

Looking in a window, I saw a general store in normal operation. I entered slowly, gun half-hidden behind me, and lurked along the back shelves while listening to two customers. They sounded normal.

I grabbed a candy bar and went up to the front counter, acting nonchalant. The owner was a gruff man in his fifties, and I began to feel a little nauseous as I got near.

He asked, "You local militia?"

Lying, I just nodded as I got change from my pocket. What was making me feel sick? It was a noise. Some sort of staticy disgusting sound; I looked past him and saw a radio with its power light on. He was listening to some sort of horrific channel that was emanating vile filth. I kept myself from wincing as I studied the bits of what looked like liquid gold that had oozed out of the speakers and onto the walls around the radio.

"You like him?" the shopkeeper asked. "He's got great points."

I nodded, lying again. He could hear words in that horrible noise that made me sick. That was it: that was the threat. I left the store, hurried around the corner, and vomited in the grassy alley.

That woman had said people were listening to the radio and acting crazy—now I knew she'd been completely serious. But what effect was it having on them? Life seemed to be going on as normal here, except old women were flicking me off and shopkeepers were happy to see supposed armed militia men that were neither police nor military.

I sat in my humvee for an hour listening to the radio myself, this time to a local channel that was increasingly turning to talk of resistance. This woman seemed to be talking in metaphor, though.

"The servants of Gold are all going insane," she said. "That's how he likes them. The longer they listen to his message of hate, the more agitated they become. Even good people will turn to violence if indoctrinated long enough. We have to prepare ourselves for what is coming."

The servants of Gold... did she mean people listening to that particular nauseating noise? Around three in the afternoon I left my humvee and visited another two shops to confirm: each building had a radio playing that god-awful noise.

And each radio was oozing liquid gold.

On touch, it was solid and cold. I could not lift the radios from their splotch of hardened gold, nor could I turn the knob to change the channel. Gold had crusted over all possibility of stopping the noise, and had even coated the power cord and fused the plug to the wall socket. I tried to use my combat knife to break through the gold and cut the power to one of the radios when the shopkeep wasn't looking, but I was only barely able to knick the stuff.

And every few minutes I had to go outside and throw up. That screeching and vile noise simply could not be tolerated for very long, and I was worried it was going to cause serious damage to me somehow. How could they listen to it? They were all nodding along to it, often in sync with each other as they did so, and customers often commented in agreement with unheard points.

When I felt sickest, I retreated to my vehicle, and the local channel made me feel better. "Perhaps it's innate evil," she continued saying. "Perhaps only those with evil in their hearts can hear the message of Gold. Those of us who are sickened by it must fight back as best we can. Everything the servants of Gold touch is tainted, and we must take a stand against them!"

Where was this message coming from? There was no identifying information. All I could do was listen, and listen I did. I sat and watched the townsfolk go by. Some eyed my military vehicle with distrust. Those people did not go into the shops that had been playing the message of Gold.

The sky began to darken to a grey-blue gloom when I awoke from a lull thanks to the snap of the voice on the radio. "The time is now! They march!" I rubbed my eyes and looked out across the square.

A wall of marching men was approaching from the distance. Many held torches. I checked my map to ensure this was not a town I'd directly visited before. How many rallies like this were there? And were they nightly? Other denizens of the town were fleeing past my windows.

I turned and looked back.

They weren't running. They were gathering.

The mob approaching from the other side of the town square were carrying buckets of water en masse, and I slid down in my seat and made sure my doors were locked. My vehicle had been built to withstand military assaults, so I was sure I was mostly safe, but it was still unsettling to watch people flow past my windows with angry faces and tensed stances.

The two crowds met at the center, forming opposing fronts at the empty pedestal. For a few minutes, the two sides shouted at each other in a cacophonous roar. Finally, one young man on the torch-bearing side jumped on the pedestal and tried to claim the space.

A bucket was swung and water flew up to douse the young man's torch. Made soggy, he backed down, and a surge of violence almost pushed forward. Older men at the front held their torch-bearing younger compatriots back. I expected a full-on riot to start any moment, but the two sides merely glared at each other—and then began to disperse back home. As quickly as the showdown had begun, it faded away, and I searched the crowd in the dim evening gloom until I saw her.

Finally getting out, I approached the blonde woman who had once asked me for help. "Hey, do you still need a ride out of here?"

She turned at my touch and reacted defensively, but then saw that it was me. "Do you have any silver?"

I noticed that her necklace and crucifix were gone. "No, why?"

"Can I sell you something?" she asked.

Confused, I asked, "Like what?"

"Anything. Anything I own. Clothes. Food. Keepsakes." She clutched my arm near my slung gun. "I need to buy more silver." She looked toward the pedestal at the center of the square. "They want Gold to stand there, to be our new Lord. We have to stop them. They're all insane."

"I don't have any money. Or silver."

Sighing, she hurried off before I could her ask her more questions.

I had no choice but to go home. That night, I slept fitfully. I needed to know more. Something was happening in that town that had to do with the poisoning of my entire state, but I couldn't see the connections just yet.

Thursday morning I was back early and asking questions. I listened to that woman on the radio talking of resistance and solidarity on the way up, and, this time, I found the half the townsfolk that were not listening to the vile message of Gold. They were immediately receptive to me, as if I was one of them, as if all good people of the world were immediately on their side, and they explained in hushed tones what had been happening.

A year before, a deathly ill homeless man had wandered into town. He'd brought with him a large book and a small statue. His only words in the local doctor's office had been, "Burn it."

But of course they'd opened the book and touched the statue instead of burning either one of them. The doctor and the mayor had, together, ignored the homeless man's warning.

The mayor had been the first to start talking about a new way of thinking.

Half of the town didn't understand what he meant. His ideas were nonsense and his words didn't seem to mean what he thought they meant. His rhetoric switched often between anger and fear, but the reasons were inexplicable.

Half of the town agreed completely with every word. Makes sense, they would say, and yet when asked to explain why, they would simply repeat what the mayor had said, making no more sense than he. In the months since, the divide had widened.

I understood. Either the book or the statue was the source of the infection, and it was some sort of viral or memetic mode of thought that naturally seemed able to infect only half the population.

While we talked, the radio played for all of us, confirming what we were talking about.

"It helps to keep us sane to know that we're not the only ones feeling this way," one young woman told me, indicating the radio. "Drowns out that hateful noise that Gold spews out on the radio day in and day out."

An older woman gripped my wrist. "Got any silver?"

"Does it counteract Gold's influence somehow?" I asked, thinking of the silver crucifix.

The old woman nodded. "In a way, yes."

These were the only useful facts I got out of the conversations that day. Much of the time was wasted talking about how horrible the followers of Gold had been to them, how hateful the things they said and did were, and how insane and hypocritical they acted. At long last, they gave me the location of the book, and I decided to investigate.

The book had been set upon a pedestal in the Unified Church near the town square. Previously, Muslims, Christians, and more had used it as a place of worship together. Now, it sat empty and dusty. The front doors closed behind me slowly, cutting off the afternoon light, but I had my flashlight on my weapon to guide me.

Past the pews and up the steps at the back, I stood under the dim multicolored light from the stained glass windows and held a lighter to the corners of the book. No investigation, no reading. Screw that. As old and dried out as it was, it caught fire easily and burned away in moments. I watched from a few steps back until the embers died out, and then I went and sat in my humvee, mission accomplished.

But that night, Thursday night, the townsfolk again gathered in the square to scream at and bait one another. Multiple splashes of water were thrown, multiple torches were doused, and several buckets and wet torch-sticks were thrown on the brick between the gathered crowds.

I hadn't done anything at all by burning the book. Damnit. Back at the office, I looked up the foreign words that had been on the cover, and I found out that they'd been Greek for The Journal of Alexander of Macedon. What secrets or instructions it had contained, I would never know.

Some of the townsfolk had also mentioned an eclipse as some sort of approaching problem, and I looked it up: the next one would occur in four days on August 21.

The next day, Friday, I drove up again and listened to the increasingly frantic talk on the radio. Someone's house had been burned down mysteriously in the night. They were alright, but their home was not, and tensions were rising. Some were demanding retribution.

That day, the showdown in the town square was earlier, at five o'clock, and I used the sudden opportunity to sneak back to the parts of town controlled firmly by the followers of Gold. I had a mind to find that statue.

Thing was, their houses were bare. There was no furniture, no belongings, just hundreds of boxes littering the neighborhood that were all from an online cash for gold site.

They'd sold everything they owned for gold. Literal gold.

The only object left in every home was a radio plastered to the wall or to the floor by hardened oozing gold. Why didn't they take that stuff out from around the radios if they were so desperate for it? I again used my knife, this time with more freedom since nobody was around, but I found that I couldn't even knick it anymore. It was stronger than before, and no doubt could not be removed by the townsfolk at all.

Now where was that statue? The resistance had described it as about six inches tall, so I figured it would be hard to locate. It wasn't until I passed it four times that I realized the tarp-covered form in the mayor's yard had to be it. I pulled the tarp off and stared up at it.

Six inches tall? That godforsaken thing was eight feet, and was carved in the form of an ancient hero in the style of Greek statues I'd seen in textbooks in school. It was pure gold from its bare feet to its ivy-crowned head, and I had the eeriest feeling that it might turn and look at me at any moment despite showing no ability to move on its own.

Just to confirm, I turned on my radio—and turned it off just as quickly as I nearly passed out. The evil radio signal was incredibly strong here at its source: the statue itself. It was not just a statue made of gold. It was the entity Gold itself, taller and stronger for all that the controlled half the townsfolk had nurtured it.

I hid beyond the trees for two hours to get proof of what I suspected. As the conflict in the square let out, many of those that bore torches now returned and offered up pieces of gold jewelry and coins and trinkets. These were absorbed into the statue on contact, and it grew slightly bigger as I watched from afar.

It was also guarded by twenty men with assault rifles equal to mine. That would be the local self-trained militia, policing their interests even though they had no right to do what they were doing. Who was going to stop them?

I drove home that night and prepared as much C-4 as my depleted department had left. I would blow that monstrous thing back to Hell long before Monday. Letting it survive until the eclipse seemed like a bad idea.

But I would need help.

"There are almost always men around that statue," I told my co-conspirators in a resistance meeting in the home of the blonde woman I'd met twice. Her name was Kara, and she'd sold everything she owned to buy silver. The only thing she had left now was a radio in the corner, and we met while it gave off soothing notes of confirmation and solidarity in the background. "I need to know when the next rally is ahead of time."

"They're not exactly planned," one of the girls said. "We just show up when everyone else is showing up."

"Then how does everyone else know when to show up?" I asked.

The girl pointed to the radio. "When she says it's time, that the other side is coming. She warns us."

"Who cares?" Kara demanded. "It's time to start killing anyone who believes in Gold. He's obviously pure evil, and his followers are insane idiots. Literal Nazis. Can't they see what's happening to them?"

I nodded. It was a little extreme the way she put it, but I did wonder how they could be so blind to the truth of what was happening.

Saturday's rally showdown happened at four in the afternoon. It was raining heavily, so the C-4 plan was a no-go. There were too many complications with the heavy downpour; notably, I couldn't confirm every one of Gold's followers was at the town square. Without torches, they were far more timid. With the torrents pouring down, the resistance was emboldened, and Gold's side backed down first.

That night, I didn't drive home. I stayed in town in one of Kara's empty rooms. We sat and listened to that supportive voice on the radio until the late hours. I don't remember sleeping, but the woman on the radio told us Gold's people were back with a vengeance because of yesterday's slight. At three o'clock on Sunday, we got our gear together and joined the flow of the resistance on the street.

I separated from the crowd and slipped past them. This time, though the ground was wet, the air was dry, and all of Gold's people were out with their torches. The mayor's house was unguarded, and Gold stood glowering over all the land, ten feet tall and in a more aggressive stance than before.

Absurd overkill was what I would call it. I used all the C-4 I had, and it took out the mayor's house completely and set two neighboring homes on fire. I laughed and clenched my fist in the air as the cloud of dust and soot rolled across town.

But when that dust settled, Gold was shining and undamaged—and his face was now towards my hiding spot in the woods. His blank Greek-statue eyes were on mine. He had not moved as far as I had seen, but still he had caught me. As the angry mob with torches surged back to investigate the explosion, I ran.

That had been my only chance.

We all stayed up the entire night listening to the screaming and shouting on the streets. Random houses were lit on fire as both men and women ran amok in secret, no one knowing exactly who was responsible and no one wanting to know. Each side assumed the other lit whichever fire harmed them anyway; specific individual culpability no longer mattered. When Monday dawned bright and hot, nobody had died yet, but the fever of hate had us all burning at the edge.

A fire-axe in hand, Kara recited to many of us in her empty living room, "The eclipse will peak at 2:30 PM, when the moon obscures eighty-six percent of the sun. We will still have some light, but it will be a dark time for us all if Gold is allowed to reach the center of town."

"The moon is at a disadvantage against the sun," one girl said.

An older woman replied, "Which only means we must fight that much harder."

Kara gripped my shoulder and told me, "Go hold the line. We'll need you. Try to block what you can with your humvee."

I nodded. I wouldn't let them down.

At 1:12 PM, I peered up with my sunglasses on and finally noticed that it was happening.

At 1:47 PM, the chanting of Gold's followers reached my ears, preceding the men themselves. I took up position behind my vehicle, and good that I did, for at least forty of them had automatic weapons. They held these at the ready as they appeared across the square. Others bore torches.

At 1:51 PM, the ground began to shake ever so slightly. I stared in horror as a gold form as tall as a house appeared from around the corner and stepped slowly into view.

Gold was animate, and he was approaching. His eyes were blank and his face was expressionless, but I could feel the hate coming from him in waves. What would happen if he was allowed to reach the central pedestal of this town? The men were screaming for me to stand down even as a wall of people approached behind me with weapons of their own. This place was about to be a killing zone; a massacre under the darkening sky; a human sacrifice of hundreds for a new God made of gold.

But the ground was shaking again, and I peered over my shoulder in surprise.

Behind me, behind the resistance movement with their guns and buckets of water, appeared a silver statue as tall as a house. Carved in the Greek style and bearing the form of a heroic woman or ancient goddess, it stepped forward in direct opposition.

"Help her!" Kara shouted to all of us. "We must help Silver reach the center of town!"

2:12 PM, and the eclipse would reach its darkest in nineteen minutes. I stared at Silver as she approached, and as she drew closer I felt the same bolstering energy that I'd been getting from the radio this entire week. The ground shook as Gold and Silver took steps closer at the same time, and the followers clustered around each roared for blood.

"Take the shot!" Kara screamed at me. "Shoot them!"

But I was frozen in place by shock and awe. Why hadn't they told me? And why hadn't I seen? They were seized by the same mania as the men with torches, just in opposition. None of us had seen it, while at the same time wondering why the enemy couldn't see their insanity. I let my gun slide back around my shoulder and instead gripped my head. Were there—had there been?—I smashed open a nearby window and leapt into a house.

As dangerous as it was to create the sound of gunfire, I shot the radio I found therein. Its signal went from reassuring words to silence, and I finally saw the truth.

Silver had oozed out of the speakers and hardened all across it, making it impossible to turn the radio off or change the channel.

Hate your enemy, they're insane. Bear fire / water. Your fellow citizens are monsters. Ally the men / women. Fight each other. Sacrifice at the apex of the sun / moon. Kill each other. Murder each other in the streets, turn the world red with blood, but above all, give me gold / silver. Make me stronger.

That was the real message.

One message.

Just one message, delivered two different ways.

It was the same being.

Gold and Silver were one entity with two faces.

And the pain in my head was echoing torture now that neither message held me enthralled. This was the blight, the poison, the cancer—a message oozing out into the land. It would start here with the sacrifice of a thousand men, women, and children, and it would spread once Gold/Silver knew how best to divide and conquer us.

My watch: 2:23 PM. Eight minutes. What to do? What to do? I ran back out into the square under a ruddy sky leaking blood upon us as a dark drizzle of madness. The two lines of followers faced each other with guns drawn, so many guns, so many weapons, each side screaming for the other side to start the violence and be the ones to blame. Meanwhile, Gold and Silver stood tall among them, nearing the center.

What object was I missing? What detail? There had to be some way to stop this.

Who hadn't I seen in all this insanity? Who hadn't I met? There had to be someone here who—

The homeless man.

The doctor's office!

I ran down the street and smashed through another window. There were four beds within, and one held the ill old man. He'd been here the entire time, and nobody had thought to ask his opinion. While the ground shook and the light from the windows deepened to darkest blood red, I screamed over the roar of the crowd: "Alexander! What do we do?"

He blearily opened his eyes.

"Tell me how to stop Gold and Silver!"

He blinked a few times, and then murmured, "Burn it."

"I did!" I shrieked in his face. "I burned your journal! I did that already!"

He shook his head, and his matted grey mane of hair exaggerated the motion. He touched my sternum. "Burn it."

I didn't solve his riddle. I'm not that smart. But what I did do was run to the gas station at the corner and fill a container with gasoline. At 2:29 PM, pulse racing near to knocking me out, I ran down the open space between the two lines and stood on the pedestal myself as bare gold and silver feet planted themselves on either side.

I knew nobody would hear me if I shouted, so I just did it.

I raised the container and started pouring gasoline on myself. The liquid rushed down over my hair and down my face; I tilted it back and shifted the flow mostly onto my back.

Then, I held up the lighter I'd used to burn the journal.

The screaming and shouting on either side of me died down as the folk that had been normal men and women now began to comprehend what I was doing.

I turned around and showed everyone the lighter. To my right, Gold stopped stepping forward. To my left, Silver stood motionless.

Silence fell.

What could I say? I was no speech-giver, no officer. "Look at yourselves!" My words echoed around the dead silent square. For a moment, they lowered their weapons. I could only think of how assemblies had been handled in school. "Raise your hands if you've been told to hate your opposition!"

Ever so slowly, people on both sides began to raise their hands.

"Look!" I said, laughing because of the incredible tension. "Don't you think that means something? Gold wants you hate them, Silver wants you to hate them? Let me ask you this: what did that sick homeless man bring to town?"

"A book," one of the men with torches called out.

"And a statue," Kara added.

I pointed. "That's it. That's it! One statue! Just one!"

People began looking at each other in confusion, something I took as a hopeful sign.

"They're the same!" I shouted as loud as I could. "You see two statues here, opposed and opposite, but they're the same! You've all given every single thing you own to make it stronger. It. One thing. One entity. And you're all about to kill each other in sacrifice to it like some sort of insane Mayan cult!"

I think I stood in fearful silence for nearly thirty seconds while people began to murmur to one another. I was deathly aware of the nearby torches and the lighter in my hand that might set me ablaze at any moment. The two statues stood tall above me on either side, and yet neither made a move to crush me.

The first act was done at random. A woman threw a bucket at Silver.

Where it struck, water spilled, and a section of the goddess statue began to dissolve.

To my right, someone threw a torch, and a bit of the heroic statue caught fire.

Seeing that, at 2:31 PM, instead of allowing that entity to lord over them, angry citizens defended their town by throwing torches and water, burning and melting one into a pile of molten gold and dissolving the other into a pool of inert silver.

I backed away and turned off my lighter.

The red hue in the sky faded as the eclipse reached its peak and continued on without incident.

Leaving the square, I entered a half-burnt-out house and washed the gasoline off with tap water, crying for some reason the entire time. I'd never been so close to death, and I'd never seen anything like that. Worst of all, I felt stupid for being so duped, for being so blind. It would never have come to all that if I had just been able to see the truth.

Exhausted and drained, the people went back to their homes for the night, this time with apologies, hugs, and commiseration. They would never let this happen again, they promised each other.

I sat in my humvee and watched the pools of silver and gold. I wasn't ready to drive. I wasn't ready to do anything. I turned up the heat to counteract the physiological effects of shock.

Afternoon became evening, and I watched the wanderer Alexander enter the square and scoop up a small handful of liquid gold and silver. In his hand, it formed into a humanoid statue about six inches tall. I got out and stormed across brick, ready to confront him with my weapon drawn, but as I rounded the fountain and the murky bloody waters it still contained from the earlier unholy rain, I could no longer see him. Statue in hand, he'd vanished.

And I was left with nothing else to do except drive home. On the way, I stopped by your neighborhood and saw that you had all collectively built a wall around your anomaly and were guarding it together. That sight made me feel better. Alexander of Macedon is still out there, and wherever he roams, the curse of Gold and Silver will rise again—but each community has a strength made of the hearts of the people in it. Together, they can beat anything, whether the threat comes from within or without.

That's my new plan. I'm not alone at all. Wherever danger appears, I will go and try to help the community handle it together. We may no longer be able to depend on government to handle these things, but we will always have each other.

++

[redditnosleep]

Invisible

by M59Gar

I stay up later than most people, so I was still awake and playing computer games when the crash happened. Tires screeched before I heard a tremendous crunching of metal. I thought it was just a simple car accident outside until an emerald spray of light flared out from the street and through the neighborhood before me—and when I say that, I mean through the neighborhood.

Beyond my computer monitor was the wall of my room, and beyond that, I saw, illuminated impossibly, my neighbors in their beds at the end of the block. It was only for an instant, for the blast of green light swept at me at high speed, but I saw the rooms and objects and people in each house split second by split second, as if someone had X-rayed entire homes and posted the shots on my bedroom wall. I had just enough time to look to my left in horror at the unseen source of the extradimensional light; like a strobe on a concert stage, it flashed brightness and pain, reaching a peak just as I stared right at it. For an instant, I saw the inside of my own eyeballs—and, somehow, the bones in my face. I saw the front of my own skull from the inside out.

Then, I projectile vomited.

My next memory was waking up the next morning with a dirty rag in my hand. I'd mostly cleaned up the vomit, and then—what? Passed out? I finished cleaning and then took a shower while fighting a massive headache. I could still feel the green flash in my eyes and in my head, but the experience felt dreamlike. How could I possibly have seen into other houses?

My roommates had gone to work already, which meant they hadn't been feeling sick. There was no way I could go in, and I would be late even if I left immediately. At least this time I wouldn't have to fake the misery in my voice.

My boss answered, "Hello?"

"I can't come in today," I told her. "I'm feeling terrible."

She didn't reply. About fifteen seconds later, she hung up.

That was weird, but I didn't have the presence of mind to worry about it at that instant. I took a few painkillers and sat drinking water in the kitchen until something occurred to me. Wandering out onto the street under a cloudy sky, I tried to pin down the location of the light I'd seen. It'd rotated out like the beam of a lighthouse; even though it had swung by at a blazing speed, I had a general sense of the direction it had come from. Finding the right angle, I studied the pavement.

Several sets of tire tracks seemed to indicate that something had happened here. At least three or four trucks had swerved or stopped suddenly. In the center of these tracks, there was a small scorch mark, as if something had burned outward from above and lightly seared the road. The grey sky was beginning to release a light drizzle, and I could see the black beginning to wash away.

"You'll catch cold, dear!"

I turned. It was the old lady across the street, and she was waving at me from her porch. "Hi, Mrs. Harwell."

"It's raining," she called again.

"Thanks, Mrs. Harwell," I replied loudly. She went back inside only after she saw me reach my front door. She always meant well, even if her concerns were a little old-fashioned. I waited behind the window until she went back inside—and then I went out to my car. I needed coffee something fierce, and our house supply was gone.

The drive-through at the nearby Starbucks was overflowing, so I decided to go inside for the first time in years. I didn't remember customers being so pushy. Even while in line, people kept bumping into me and trying to cut ahead. They only stopped when I raised my voice and insisted they respect the line. By the time I reached the front, I was already pretty worked up.

And then the barista asked the person behind me what they wanted to order.

I turned and looked back in disbelief, but the asshole behind me just said, "Mocha frappucino, please."

Looking the barista in the eyes, I put my hand on the counter. "Are you kidding me?"

He blinked. "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you there. What can I get for you?"

Didn't see me there? I glared, but told him, "Venti black coffee."

He went to tap the order into the system, but then paused, as if he'd just forgotten what he was doing.

With more anger than I intended, I said again, "Venti black coffee!"

He stiffened. "Right, right."

In a huff, I moved to the side area and waited. A minute passed, and then two. The mocha frappucino guy got his drink and left. Leaning over the counter, I asked, "Aren't you guys supposed to shoot for three minute times?"

The barista making drinks at the espresso bar looked my way briefly, then back at her work.

I stood there for another ten minutes as customers came and went. Finally, I'd had enough. "Hey, hello? I've been waiting for a venti black coffee for fifteen minutes!"

The girl making drinks finally seemed to notice me. "Oh, sorry." She moved over to the carafes and grabbed a Venti cup before coming to a confused stop. "What was I doing?"

For the first time in my life, I shouted in a Starbucks. "Venti black coffee!"

That got their attention—but not the kind I liked. Stern glares suddenly focused on me, and the guy I'd ordered from said, "Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave if you don't calm down."

"Sorry..." I stepped away, visually backing down. "Sorry." The girl slid my coffee across the counter and went back to work. All the customers in line watched me with disgust or fear as I grabbed my drink and hurried out. As I hit the sidewalk, a guy going in bumped into me, hard, and my coffee fell on the ground and splattered. "Seriously?!"

But he hadn't even so much as hesitated. He joined the back of the line inside and stood looking up at the menus as if nothing had happened. Was everyone out today just a total jerk?

I drove around to the drivethrough and waited in line for twenty minutes only to have the barista on the speaker ignore me. I rolled up to the window, but they never opened it to talk to me. Extremely angry, I drove off, and decided to just go to the grocery store instead.

But after getting a bag of ground coffee beans and waiting in line, the clerk began ringing up the person behind me.

In front of everyone, I demanded, "Hello?!"

Both the clerk and the customer continued exchanging pleasantries while items were being scanned.

The customer paid and bumped right into me as she moved past.

I stood staring as the clerk began ringing up the next lady. No longer angry, it occurred to me that something was going on, and there was no way that this was a conspiracy or a prank show. It involved too many people in too many different locations, and even—

No!

Even my boss! When I'd called in sick, she'd hung up after a few seconds, as if listening and hearing nobody on the other end.

I didn't know how or why, or in what manner, but I couldn't deny it: I was invisible! I could see my hands and body and legs, and people could see me if they actually looked, but they seemed to be having great difficulty noticing that I existed.

On that weird hunch, I started backing away from the checkout, coffee bag in hand. Paying seemed foolish when nobody could notice me—and it wasn't like I hadn't tried to pay.

The security guard near the door perked up and grabbed my arm. "Sir, did you pay for that?"

Shit. "I did, yes."

"I don't think so." He raised his radio from his belt to call someone else.

"Wait," I told him, half-panicked. This had never happened to me before. "I've got a receipt here, look." I reached down into my pocket, and he let go of me. I threw the coffee bag up to distract him; he fumbled at it and caught it as I ran out into the drizzly grey afternoon.

He didn't follow.

What the hell was going on? So I wasn't invisible—at least not in the sense that I could get away with crimes. Thing was, the security guard hadn't been nearby when I'd been at the checkout line. I had the strangest feeling that he would have stopped me even if I had paid.

My headache was coming back, and I still hadn't gotten coffee. Defeated, I drove home, and sat in my car in the rain trying to figure out what to do. After about fifteen fruitless minutes of searching the Internet on my phone for any discussions about something like this happening to someone else, my roommates pulled up behind me. I got out and caught up to them as they were halfway across the lawn.

Lucas grabbed me by both shoulders with amazed relief. "You can see us?!"

But my reaction did not match his. "It's happening to you guys, too?"

Simon wiped rain from his face. "Everyone at work got weirder and weirder as the day went on. We couldn't do our jobs because customers were ignoring us. By the time we left, nobody even noticed."

It was a strange and terrifying thing to consider as we stood there under grey skies being rained on, but I felt slightly better knowing I wasn't going through it alone. "Let's go inside."

We retreated to the kitchen, where we dried off, put a pizza in the oven, and tried to figure out the parameters of what was happening to us. Calls to our friends and families were answered, but the people we reached didn't seem to be able to hear us. My heart seized in my chest as I had to sit and listen to my mother asking, "Hello? Hello?" She seemed vaguely aware that my number had been the one to call her, and her voice grew strained and terrified whenever I spoke. At some level, I was certain she knew what was happening, even though she couldn't consciously register the thought.

But nobody else seemed to have that intuition. We were cut off.

The oven dinged, signaling that the pizza was ready, and I pulled it out and cut it into slices. Halfway through the process, I froze. "Guys."

Lucas and Simon had been arguing about the green light I'd told them about, but they both stopped immediately at the urgency in my voice and looked at me.

"I couldn't buy coffee today," I said, still staring down at the pizza cutter in my hand. "My first attempt was really difficult, and then after that I couldn't even buy it from a grocery store. What if we can't buy food?"

Simon gave a half-humored half-perturbed laugh. "What do you mean, can't buy food?"

"Like what if we literally can't buy food?" I replied aloud, my gaze rising to our cupboards. I began to open them and mentally catalogue our meager collection of random boxes. We had some rice, a few cans of tuna, a can of beans... "The cashier literally wouldn't ring out my stuff."

"We'll just use the automatic checkout," Lucas suggested.

I shook my head. "The security guard stopped me, thinking I'd stolen the coffee. I have a feeling we'll get the same response from any grocery store. Even if we pay, they might stop us and take the food back."

A haunted expression passed over Simon's face. "And even if we do pay, we can't do our jobs anymore. We won't have any money."

"Maybe it's temporary," Lucas countered. "Maybe it'll wear off tomorrow. Or in a week or something!"

I opened the fridge and freezer. "What if it doesn't? We've got two frozen pizzas in here and a few scattered leftovers. We could literally starve right here in our house."

"No. Screw that. We'll ration it." Lucas got up, grabbed a pad of paper, and officially recorded what we had. "Half a box of rice, four cans of tuna, a can of black beans, two frozen pizzas, and some meats and pastas we have to eat first." He put the list on the kitchen table and stared down at it. "That's nine thousand calories total, if we're being generous." He got out his phone. "Says here a twenty-something man needs around two-thousand-five-hundred a day. But we can survive on a thousand, maybe a little less, if we're disciplined. So for the three of us—"

Simon cut him off with a horrified whisper. "That's only three days of food."

"Maybe we can steal some," I suggested. "You know, walk out with it from the store."

Lucas knew the truth. "If we get caught and go to jail—even just basic local lockup—we will absolutely die in there. We'll be trapped in a cage and forgotten about immediately."

That was it. There were no options. How was it that a modern human household only had a few days of food in it? How was it possible that we were facing possible starvation in a country so well off? That first day, we didn't believe the nightmare. We went out and visited five grocery stores in succession. No matter what we did, no matter whether we paid or used the self-checkout or even rang up the groceries ourselves, security guards or employees and sometimes even other customers chased us down until we gave the food back. There was something manic and hostile about their attitude toward us, as if we were less than human somehow, and we came away with more than a few bruises for our trouble. There was no telling what actual police would do to us, so we were forced to give up our attempts and return home hungry.

"This'll pass," Lucas insisted. "We'll sleep tonight, we'll wake up, this'll all be over."

That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Sleep? Ridiculous. We were in mortal danger, and every passing moment meant ninety less seconds for us to find a way to survive. But that was the thing—we weren't in immediate danger yet. The mechanisms of society were still real to us, and we were still civilized young men. Stick together; that's what Lucas had said. If we stuck together, we'd be fine. Sure.

I didn't sleep. I spent the night researching local companies, but found nothing. A group of vehicles had been transporting something down our street; that something had ruptured and sprayed us with otherworldly emerald light, and that light had phased us out of the human social consciousness. Who or what could possibly do something like that? As dawn spiked into my eyes through my open window, lighting up my eyeballs with internal afterimages, my perpetual headache dimmed slightly.

That morning, bleary-eyed and haggard, we split a pizza. It was delicious, because it was all we would get for the rest of the day. During the night, Simon had gathered a list of hundreds of phone numbers of people and organizations that might help us, and he spent that day calling them one by one. Lucas spent the day driving to every single grocery store, restaurant, and market in the entire area that might possibly have food. I spent my hours simply thinking—thinking of a solution, a way out, anything. I wanted to conserve my calories by moving as little as possible.

But I couldn't even do that. When Lucas ran out of gas, he found that gas station clerks were denying his cash and pumps weren't reading his credit card. It was if, he told me over the phone, the machine didn't even know he'd put his card in the slot. The pumps hadn't even given an error message. They'd just done nothing.

Whatever had happened to us, it was getting worse.

I picked him up and then parked my car in the driveway. I had a quarter tank of gas left, and it was apparent that meager amount would be all the gas we would ever have.

That night, we didn't go off into our separate rooms. We sat playing a board game until exhaustion finally found us one by one. I was the last one left as Simon and Lucas lay sprawled across the game pieces. I wondered if I would eventually end up seeing them like that again, not because of sleep, but because of death. What would I do if it came to that?

I awoke the next morning with that question still unanswered.

A funny thing happens when you run out of things to do. When you don't have a job, when nobody will talk to you, when you've done everything you possibly can—called everyone, tried every opportunity, gone around every corner. You can't think about anything but survival, but there are no thoughts of survival left to think, so you think about nothing at all.

We ate the last of our food and sat playing board games.

And we did that the next day.

And the next day.

It was our house; our chairs, our carpets, our beds, our walls, our fridge, our back yard. It just didn't have any food in it. You can't eat chairs or beds. And you know what? Hunger isn't that bad, really. The thing that slowly drives you crazy is how relentless it is. You don't get to just sit there and play a board game. Every second that it's not your turn and you're just sitting there, all you are is pain.

A week in, Simon picked our board up and threw the game on the ground. "There's gotta be like, a fucking apple tree somewhere!"

Lucas didn't take his eyes off the game piece in his hand. "It's the end of October. Nothing's got fruit right now. There's no food to be had. At least not within range of a quarter tank of gas."

"We're surrounded by food! It's just locked up behind the walls of all these grocery stores!" Simon's eyes were wild. "We should just kill them and take it."

Lucas sneered. "And then what? Get gunned down by the cops? They've got no problem noticing us when we act up."

I'd been thinking about calling my mom again, if only to listen to her voice, but my calls had just been giving her repeated terror and confusion. Something in me had snapped. Even if we did find a way to survive, our bills would eventually come due, and the power and water would go out. New renters might even move in to our house and completely ignore us while we sat next to them dying. "Simon's not wrong, but forget grocery stores. Let's just break into people's houses while they're at work. Much less chance of getting caught."

We wore hats and tied handkerchiefs over our mouths to hide our faces. We didn't want to go too far, since we'd have to carry what we stole, and we didn't want to go too close for fear of being caught, so we chose the house at the end of the block. At ten in the morning, we snuck through back yards and hit the garage side-door handle with a hammer.

It was eerie, being in someone else's house like that. There were photos and knick knacks everywhere of lives we knew nothing about. Someone had left socks on the living room floor. Worst of all, I knew the layout of the place already: I'd seen it before. As we snuck into the kitchen of the house at the end of the block, I knew for certain that the green flash had truly illuminated this place. It hadn't been a nightmare. I'd physically seen rooms and people a block away through a dozen walls.

Lucas quietly opened a cupboard and looked over at us in dismay.

It was empty.

Simon went to the fridge and found nothing inside but a plastic tupperware container.

I looked at the photos on the counter. "How could a family with four kids have no food in their home?"

Lucas froze. "Unless it's happened to them, too."

Simon got what he meant at the same time as I did: "They could literally be here right now."

Scanning the kitchen and living room in fear, I wondered if I was looking right past my neighbors. We were definitely threats; could they see us? Were they standing in terror in the corner? If one decided to leap forward and attack us, we would never see it coming.

We ran.

Taking refuge back in our own house, we frantically searched the news and the Internet—yep. There it was. Hundreds of homes all across the area had been finding their food stolen, to the point that police were on high alert and the city was promoting home security and defense.

"Jesus Christ," Lucas murmured. "That green light didn't just flash us. It's been happening to the entire neighborhood, maybe more."

Simon slumped on our couch. "Which means dozens of families have already been out there looting and stealing ahead of us. We'll never get away with it now."

I was laughing. I didn't know why. I couldn't help it. It was like the world had it in for us—or not even the world, really, just society. Other people. Every single avenue was being closed off one by one, either by us, by society, or by others trapped in our same situation. I was laughing at the absurd mechanical perfection of it all. Civilization was circling around like a clock to trap us and starve us. "If we stay here, we're doomed," I laughed. No, not laughing. Crying. "Let's just drive. We'll just go in any direction, and we'll drive until we're out of here."

"We've only got a quarter tank," Lucas shot back. "And we can't exactly rob houses without a place to hide and eat and sleep. Worse, if we get stuck even just a few miles out, we'll literally die. We don't have hours of walking left in us, let alone days. There's nowhere to go."

My crying laughter had infected Simon. "How can there be nowhere to go? We're literally surrounded by homes. We're in a sea of houses and food. Everyone's fucking fat and dying early because of it, and here we are starving among them?" His grin widened beyond manic and his laughter became visibly painful as it wracked his weakened body. "How can this be happening?"

Lucas stood above him and shook him against the couch. "Get your shit together! We're way past screwed, and going crazy isn't going to help!" He stepped back and let us both calm down. "It's time to make decisions, while we still have our heads about us."

I no longer felt like laughing or crying. There was just... nothing. "Decisions? Like what?"

Lucas looked us both dead in the eyes in turn. "We're not going to kill and eat people."

At first, I thought he was kidding, but then I realized that it really might come to that. Our reality included that possibility. "Because we'd just get hunted down and arrested and die anyway."

He nodded.

Simon just stared at the floor.

And we sat in roughly those positions as time slipped away from us.

We still tried to play board games. At times, the hunger even left us. In our third week, inanition truly set in, and I noticed myself getting thinner. We made some jokes about finally going on a diet, but we had little humor to spare, and we began spending more time silent than not.

By week five, Lucas had a timer on his phone to remind us to drink water, because he'd noticed we weren't getting thirsty anymore. All our movements became painful, and we stopped playing games that required reaching over the board to place pieces.

Eventually, we stopped playing games altogether, and simply lay there in silence. There was nothing to do but wait and hope something would change. There was nobody to call, no access to food, and no way to get to it even if there was. Darkness and light, night and day, became a whirling cycle of nothingness without thought or interruption.

Our last real conversation was unprompted. Simon rasped, "I'm glad I don't have to go through this alone. You guys are my best friends." He shivered under his blanket. "I love you guys."

"Love you too, man," Lucas whispered back as best he could.

They waited for me. It took me a minute to work up the saliva to speak, but I told them, "It's been a good year."

I couldn't see them from where I was lying, but I could feel them smiling.

On the first night of our seventh week without food, I texted my mom just to take comfort from the notification that it had been read. I knew she couldn't understand the words, and I knew it would just cause her confused distress, but I just wanted to feel like I existed.

That brief boon of awareness allowed me to lift up my head and look over at Simon. He'd rotted away while still alive, but now I could see a dryness to his skin. My heart sank. "Lucas, I think Simon's dead."

His only response was a sigh.

No.

No. I would not go out like that.

"We're not gonna die in here," I told him, using all the strength of my frail limbs to force my body from the floor. I moved to help him, but I stopped after a single step.

Lucas had not sighed. Air had merely escaped his bloated body. He'd been dead for days.

I'd been lying in a room with two corpses.

There was still a quarter tank of gas in my car. I had no idea how far it would take me or where I might end up, but I had to try.

The front door took me ten minutes to reach, and my car in the driveway looked to be miles away. Worse, it was drizzling, and the cold sliced through my body like hundreds of knives. I swayed with each step as my leg muscles begged to give out, but I refused. Inch by inch, I worked my way along my front porch and onto the walkway that curved toward my car.

"Ooh, you'll catch cold!"

Holding my arms tighter around my body for warmth, I looked out in confusion.

Mrs. Harwell was on her porch and waving at me. "It's raining!"

What?

Weakly, I called, "You can see me?"

She waved again. "It's raining dear, shouldn't you go inside?"

I was saved! It was incredible. How could she notice me?

But a voice behind me replied, "Thanks Mrs. Harwell, will do."

I looked back to see a guy my age entering my house. He put down his backpack and went into the kitchen.

He lived there.

He lived in my house.

And he'd never noticed us dying in his living room.

She hadn't seen me at all. She'd seen him.

It wasn't my car in the driveway. It just looked like it. They'd towed mine at some unknown point; it was nowhere to be seen.

I fell on the lawn, then, without an ounce of willpower or hope left. There was nothing I could do. No resources, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no nothing. All I could do was lie there and die.

The sky rotated around me, going from grey clouds to clear night to blue dawn, until the morning sun glared into my eyeball from the side. Too weak to move, too weak to look away, I let it burn.

And a curious thing happened—I began to feel better.

Soft blue and bright orange burned through the reverse images of the veins in my eyes, and I felt a wrenching sensation in the center of my head, just behind the nose. For a brief instant, I saw the bones in my skull again, but losing a bright green hue, shifting backwards somehow, as if I was being pulled back into reality.

The guy who lived there came back out to get something from his car—and found me lying in the grass, half-dead.

He could see me.

He could see me.

A blur of painful motion followed, but I was vaguely aware of being taken to a hospital. I spent another several weeks there regaining my strength. Throughout, I watched the ongoing local crisis on the television in my room. To them, it was an inexplicable crime wave, combined with reports of bodies popping up out of nowhere—even in people's homes. Whatever force that had pushed us out of social reality appeared to wear off a few weeks after death. At first, it was just adult corpses appearing in kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms... but then they began to find children.

I know that nobody will believe me, but I have to get the word out because nobody else can. There are people among us starving and dying every day, cut off from survival by the machine of civilization, always riding the edge of crime and desperation. You can't see them, but they're there, and they will eventually be found. We can do it while they're still alive, or we can wait and hope that the next corpse that phases back in doesn't pop up next to us in bed or on our couch while we're watching television—but it will happen, one way or another. You could be sitting next to an unseen rotting corpse at this very instant; or perhaps it's someone still alive but on the verge of starvation. The only difference is whether we can bring ourselves to notice the problem in time.