Aelis woke in the middle of the road again.
Only this time…she wasn't alone.
The sky had turned the color of a tumor. No stars. No sun. Just a pulsating dome of grey-yellow meat that moved if you stared long enough. The clouds didn't float anymore—they slithered. One of them looked like it had fingers.
The street around her was full of people.
Neighbors. Strangers. Dozens of them.
All facing the same direction.
All utterly still.
All bleeding from the eyes.
A low-frequency hum rattled the ground—faint, but constant. Like the earth itself was whispering to them. Their mouths were open. Nothing came out. But Aelis could hear it anyway. A language not meant for ears. Something in the bones.
She stood up, shaking.
Every person in the crowd turned their heads toward her at once.
Not gradually.
Not humanly.
Just—click.
And their jaws dropped open even farther.
Inside were no tongues.
Only eyes.
Human.
Blinking.
Crying.
"You opened it," they whispered in one voice that came from the sky, not their throats.
"You brought it back."
Then they began to convulse.
Their bodies twisted inward, bones snapping like toothpicks, mouths splitting wider until their torsos peeled like fruit. Something inside pushed outward—emerged. Long limbs. Flesh on the outside-in. Things that looked like they'd been made from memories of people, not people themselves.
And the worst part?
They were smiling.
All of them.
Like it felt good to be emptied.
Aelis turned and ran.
The road cracked beneath her. The pavement breathed. Each footfall made it shiver, like it was trying to digest her.
Sirens howled in the distance—but they were wrong. Bent. Off-tune. Almost musical.
Buildings bled from their bricks.
Cars were overturned—not crashed, but peeled, as though something had reached inside and pulled out the people like pulp from fruit. Their skeletons were arranged on the hoods in perfect spirals, as if someone had curated them.
She sprinted toward the only place she thought might still be sane.
The gas station.
But it was already changing.
Fluorescent lights flickered above the entrance, buzzing like flies. The glass door was smeared with handprints. Inside, something was dragging itself across the tile.
A clerk, or what was left of one.
His body was melting—no, slipping. His skin was sliding off his bones like wet cloth. His jaw unhinged and flopped to one side, still trying to speak.
"They…c-came from under, not up…"
His head fell off mid-sentence.
Aelis screamed and backed away.
The TV behind the counter flickered on. No remote. No power.
A news anchor sat in total darkness.
His face—blistered and soaked in sweat—was half-missing.
"If you're seeing this," he whispered, "you're already breathing it. They found a way in through the wet places. Through the dreams. The drains. The skin. We…we called them gods. But they were just hungry."
He began to sob.
And then his face opened like a book. Pages of skin peeled back and began to speak in a dozen voices—all Aelis's.
She stumbled out into the street again.
The sky above her twitched.
And from the horizon—something enormous moved.
Not walking. Not flying.
Just unfolding.
A mountain of meat and bone and memory.
Its shadow dragged across the land like a blanket of cancer.
And below it—cities burned, not with fire, but with wet. Like the world itself was being digested.
Aelis collapsed to her knees.
Something inside her chest fluttered.
And for the first time, she realized:
It wasn't her heart anymore.
It was something else.
Something growing.
Something waiting to hatch.