Light at the End

Sleep had become an enemy. For weeks the nightmares had grown from unsettling to outright catastrophic, the kind of terror that left me shaking long after sunrise. Even the Prazosin wasn’t helping anymore. I swallowed my night meds anyway, more out of habit than hope, and lay back as my CPAP amplified every breath into a hollow, mechanical echo. Somehow even that sound had become ominous. I fought sleep with the last scraps of my will, but exhaustion finally dragged me under.

I opened my eyes to the middle of a city I didn’t recognize — a sprawling metropolis lit by flickering streetlamps and neon signs. People sprinted in every direction, ricocheting off obstacles like panicked pinballs. Their faces were twisted upward, toward the sky.

I followed their gaze.

Six enormous circular shapes drifted through the clouds, silhouettes pulsing with dim, unnatural light. Before I could make sense of them, four broke formation and dropped toward the street with a deafening roar — part jet engine, part metal being torn in half. As they descended, their shapes resolved into something disturbingly familiar: flying saucers straight out of every sci fi movie I’d watched as a kid.

A harsh white beam swept across the street like a searchlight. When it passed over a group of people rounding a corner, the beam snapped into a thin green line — and they vanished. No sound. No smoke. Just gone.

My hands clamped over my ears as I stumbled into the stampede of fleeing bodies. I knew running was pointless, but instinct shoved me forward. My feet tangled, and I crashed against an overturned yellow cab. Pain shot up my arm, but I shoved myself into the narrow space between the wreck and the curb, praying the saucers wouldn’t see me.

A flash of light illuminated two children huddled together — a boy and a girl — directly in the path of the descending craft. Terror numbed everything inside me, but something deeper pushed me out of hiding. I sprinted toward them, legs shaking, lungs burning. I grabbed their arms and shoved them beneath a nearby bus just as a green blast struck a mailbox. The metal box launched into the air, ricocheted off a telephone pole, and disappeared down an alley.

The rest of the fleet descended in a synchronized dive, all of them angling toward us.

I spun in circles, searching for any escape route, but the streets were boxed in by wreckage and fire. There was nowhere left to run. The air vibrated with the rising whine of the weapons. This was it. The end of the line.

A few yards away, through the smoke and debris, I could see something was moving in my direction, half crawling, half slithering across the ground.

As it drew closer, I realized the thing had no legs. Instead, it had at least ten purplish tentacles sticking out from what I could only surmise was the creature's abdominal area. Its translucent upper body was difficult to describe, in that it was elongated, but constantly shifting from angular to almost circular. The entire body flexed and pulsated with bright yellow light with each movement.

With no escape to be had, I could only stand and watch as the alien made its way to the glass-covered sidewalk in front of me. It raised a tentacle in my direction, and I couldn't help but notice the object in its grasp bared a strong resemblance to a common oxygen mask. Frozen in place, resigned to my fate, I could only stare as the aforementioned limb stretched out and shoved the mask over my mouth and nose..

The world exploded into white

I woke to the sharp smell of antiseptic and something metallic — fresh blood. My vision swam, then steadied on a room lined with white, glowing windows and bright yellow light was pulsating from an undeterminable source. Something thick and foreign filled my mouth and throat. I tried to move, but my body refused.

Three figures in green scrubs stood beside me, faces hidden behind surgical masks. One held a scalpel stained with dark fluid. On a tray beside him sat a plastic basin containing what looked like a kidney — except it glowed an unnatural fluorescent green. Other shapes lay beside it, equally wrong.

A cold realization crept through me. The organ had come from my body.

The surgeon spoke in a flat, clinical tone.

“I will now remove the patient’s brain.”

Instinctively, I tried to raise my hands in protest, but my arms lay useless under the surgical covering. After a few seconds, I felt, or rather sensed something move slightly in the area of my right hand. A little quiver, a shift in position, and finally something broke free and began to rise. A tentacle appeared, pulsating in time with the yellow light.

Pressure touched the side of my skull. The scalpel pressed down. I screamed, but no sound escaped.

Everything faded to black.