I’m running down a long hallway, hundreds of identical doors on each side for what seems like a mile. There’s a man in a black leather coat standing near the double doors leading to the stairwell, and upon noticing my assailant, he drops his cigarette and starts running with me.
We take the stairs two at a time and I kick open the metal door leading outside. There’s a pickup truck parked at the curb with its engine running and I hop into the driver’s seat. Leather jacket man wastes no time getting in on the passenger side.
“Let’s go, let’s go!”
Smoke rises from the scorched rubble of buildings for miles in every direction, and as we peel off, our pursuers are now in the sky, trailing the truck. I’m not sure if they’re firing lasers or shells, but their shots send up plumes of fire and cause the ground to explode to the left us, to the right of us, behind us.
Something pops one of our tires and we swerve off the road and fly into a ditch, deploying the airbags and I wake up sweating and nervous, another bad dream.
Back at the office, I stand half-asleep in front of the printer, jolted awake by the realization I’ve made three hundred copies of my client progress reports instead of three. I fall into my cubicle chair and crack open another energy drink to join the five empties lining the edge of my desk.
This time I’m in my bed, and a figure no more than two and a half feet tall stands on my chest, his giant eyes and long proboscis resembling a huge mosquito. I try to lift my arm to punch him, try to roll left or right to shake him off me, but I feel like I’m trapped in molasses. His fingertips begin to spin like drills and he punctures my chest, blood splashing out onto my sheets.
His expression never changes, his features are frozen like he’s wearing a mask. His pointer finger draws closer and closer to my eyeball and I’d give anything to scream. I feel like the plug for my body has been pulled out, all I can do is watch. I want to scream and cry from the pain in my chest, but even my involuntary reflexes are broken.
I thought you couldn’t feel pain in dreams.
Tina, my boss, has bags under her eyes and she keeps dropping her pens. I tried to catch a catnap at my desk, but every time I start to drift off I see that mosquito gnome, his drill fingers closing the distance to my eyes.
Today, in addition to energy drinks, I have gone through several cups of coffee. I can see the scanlines on my monitor, like when you see an old computer screen in a video.
The woods are thick with fog and the scent of rotting leaves. I’m running again, but this time I know where I have to go. There’s a cave on the edge of the forest where the others are meeting to talk about our strategy, it sounds like someone has come up with a way to fight back.
But I’m always two steps too slow and their buggies are gaining on me. No lasers, just giant scythe-like sickles they use to slice off heads and limbs.
They’re wearing thick rubber suits like you’d see the hazmat guys wearing when they hose down a redneck with a meth lab in his truck.
I never thought it would be like this. I naively assumed anything traveling light years to get here either wouldn’t kill us or would have more modern methods than lasers and blades.
Low-hanging branches cut me and whip into my face. My foot’s caught in a snarled root and I drop to my knees. I hear the swoosh, the hiss of the blade and I feel mud in my ear and nothing but warmth from the neck down. I look up at the rest of my body and for that last second of life, I can see the demon hovering over me, his head whipping around as he looks for his next victim.
I wake up in a puddle. I haven’t wet the bed since I was ten years old.
Our regional manager’s head drops mid-sentence, but it snaps up after a few seconds. He looks worse than I do, and his lecture about rampant clumsiness and lost productivity rings hollow. On my way to the office today I passed four wrecks, even the cops swaying and unsteady on their feet while talking to the shaken drivers.
Six people called out today, but I haven’t heard anything new about Covid or Monkeypox. On the news, most schools are seeing attendance drop below thirty percent. Classes are suspended, and the kids that show up are crowded into auditoriums where the handful of remaining teachers can watch them.
The sky is red, and fighter jets keep exploding above, vaporized by some unseen force. It’s like a bad sci-fi movie with no happy ending. I’m not running this time, I’m shackled, chained to other people in a line so long I can’t even see any captors poking the person on the end to keep them moving.
A huge beast with green skin and yard-long teeth bursts from the ground, grabbing a prisoner from the line of people next to me. As they’re all chained together at their necks, the whole string of people is whipped into the air, shrieking and gurgling, a big whip of metal links and human bodies.
But nobody in my line stops. We just keep marching, blank stares and prayers that the creature will keep gorging itself on the chain of human sausage links keeping it occupied for the moment.
And then other creatures pop out from below, tossing sheets of sod and boulders of concrete debris in every direction and wrapping their appendages around the nearest dirt-smeared schlub. A slimy green arm coils around me and I’m crushed, unable to split my focus between my shattered bones and the tension on my neck from the weight of a hundred bodies pulling on it.
I think I’m okay when I wake up—at least none of my bones seem to be broken. But I cough up a mouthful of blood and throw up another half quart after running to the toilet.
I skipped work today. I tried to call off, but nobody answered any of the numbers I called.
On the news, planes are dropping from the skies for reasons nobody can determine. A passenger plane in Reno, a private jet in Poughkeepsie. Unspeakable tragedies, but not the leading story. Insomnia seems to be sweeping the entire globe. Kids with instant nightmares when they close their eyes, adults vegetating on their couches. Even animals are observed pacing, looking twitchy and restless.
They interview a scientist who proposes the cause is some as-yet-undetected pathogen that renders the infectees incapable of sleep, something similar to fatal familial insomnia but transmissible through the air. They pivot to a reverend who says it’s a harbinger of the second coming of the Lord.
The last person they interview has giant hair and speaks with a slight lisp, a veteran of those wild shows about saucer people building the Great Wall of China and Stonehenge, and he raises his hands whenever he feels like he’s making a strong point. He’s tanned and doesn’t look like he’s missed any sleep, he actually looks like he’s enjoying the attention.
“Aliens want new habitable worlds without risking their own ships and lives. Imagine being effectively immortal, living for untold thousands of years only to die from the bullet of a rabid Floridian. Creatures this advanced wouldn’t need to come here and attack us with guns and lasers. They’d use vectors of attack we couldn’t even dream of.”