I wasn’t nervous at all as I approached the small, nondescript building in the middle of the downtown area. After all, I had responded to probably hundreds of these ads in my lifetime. I go in, I participate in some study or focus group, and I get paid $50 for an hour of my time. It was a great way to make money on the side.

This time was different, though. When they reached out to let me know they would like me to participate, they explained the payment would be higher because the process was a little more “invasive.” They said they would need to perform an injection, and that I would need to consent to that. The process would take about two hours, they said. It seemed excessive, but I couldn’t turn down $500 for 2 hours.

I pushed through the very plain, tinted glass door into the building. A welcome bell rang, and I read “Caedes Corp.” in small letters on the door. It was the name of the company who had emailed me. At least I knew I was in the right place.

“Welcome!” the receptionist exclaimed, looking up from her computer. She looked overly happy to see me. She was pretty though, a brunette with piercingly green eyes and a pearly white smile. She looked a lot like my wife.

“Are the doctors expecting you?” she asked. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I had no idea if the people running the focus group were doctors or not. I must have looked a little bewildered, because she didn’t wait for my answer. “Why don’t you come back here, I’ll let them know you’ve arrived.”

She led me to what looked like a doctor’s office. I sat down in an exam chair and not 15 seconds later, a man burst through the door. He was tall and muscular with stubble and gray eyes, dressed in a lab coat.

“Ready to go?” the man asked through a thick accent. My nerves kicked in, and I started to become apprehensive, but before I could say anything, a needle was in my arm.

When I woke up, I was zip tied to an exam chair. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. I could see, but it was fuzzy. I could move my head to look around the room, but that was it. The same doctor was examining my face.

“The patient seems to be awake,” he said to nobody in particular. I saw him withdraw a long, pointed knife. The blade gleaned fluorescent light from the ceiling. He plunged it into my chest. I couldn’t feel a thing.

“The numbing component seems to be working.” He slid the knife out of me. “Let’s see if the coagulation agent in this formula can stop the bleeding.”

The bleeding didn’t stop. I watched my blood spill to the floor. The last thing I saw was the doctor walking out, calling to the receptionist to bring back the next patient.

It wasn’t the noose that scared me, nor the crowd grimly standing in the town square save for the drunkards, yelling and throwing whatever they had scrounged up before. I had been expecting that. It wasn’t the executioner with his black hood, nor the self-righteous judge reading my death sentence in his pompous wig. Even the forced calm walking from the prison to the gallows had been something I could maintain. I could make peace with it; I would go to the Lord on this day.

What made me tremble was that there, hanging unseen above the heads of the crowd, was a cohort of ghastly black figures with white toothy grins and no eyes, but they looked at me all the same.

“Any last words?” came the Judge’s voice.

They were advancing slowly, sniffing at me, circling me.

Patience friends, the largest one said, we will feed soon enough.

The hangman kicked the lever.

Nobody thought that the destruction of our kind would be at our own hands. Nobody ever thought that technology would kill us. Nobody ever thought about global warming or pollution.

I did.

And I still do. In the cold and the darkness of this abandoned coal bunker, among the few hundred people that our kind had been reduced to, I still think. I still think about the events which led to our downfall and the rise of another race. A race much more intelligent than ours. I still think.

The melting of the Ice Caps was in 4041. It was soon after that they struck. They dismantled the network, cut of all routes of contact. Then murdered in their thousands. They destroyed countries and wiped whole continents off the map. Some people say they were alien, others disagree. Others say they came from within the Ice Caps, that they were preserved since the beginning of time. They were the first race on Earth and were believed to have died out 2000 years ago.

Now about time. Our time on Earth is over and their time has come.

Some call them Martian.

I call them Humans...

I threw my son, Jerry, out of the house. I remember that day like it was yesterday. I walked into his bedroom and bit by bit, I threw everything out. My wife was screaming at me the whole time.

“If you throw him out, I am leaving you Henry!” she hollered.

Jerry meanwhile, just stood there and stared at me.

“You do what you gotta do,” I said to my wife. “But I warned you all this was coming. If Jerry doesn’t want to work or go to school, I’m throwing his ass out and I’m a man of my word.”

I don’t know what happened to my wife or Jerry after that. I think they went to my in-laws.

About a month later I got a phone call from her.

“Jerry enlisted,” she said.

I didn’t think Jerry was military material, but hey, if the Army can make a man out of my Jerry, all the better.

Some days, I would go into my son’s empty room, stare at the four walls and reminisce. I remembered telling Jerry bedtime stories. I remembered showing him how to make a tie. I remembered helping him assemble that model car he got for Christmas one year.

Each visit to my son’s room kept bringing me back to the same question:

Where did I go wrong?

Then one day, it started…the walls began dripping oil. I thought it was water moisture from the humidity at first, but when I soaked it up with a paper towel, I could smell it. It was definitely oil.

Two days after it started, two military officers came to my door with the news. My son was dead. He was a mechanic; “vehicle technician” they called it. Apparently there was some kind of accident.

I’ve come to believe that the oil bleeding out of the walls is somehow related to his death. But why oil? What is the significance of it?

Wife called me to tell me the news. Last words she ever said to me were “This is all your fault!”.

When the newspaper came, I finally understood. I went to Jerry’s room with a bottle of whiskey. I toasted Jerry and his mother and to all the sweet memories that I remembered and to those I have forgotten. I then smothered myself along the walls, letting my clothes soak up all that oil.

And then I lit a match.

Jerry Ranchem was found dead in an oil tank container late Tuesday evening at the Fort Harrison military compound. Private Ranchem was reported as AWOL 24 hours prior. It is believed that Jerry was trying to take a quarterly sample from the oil tank reservoir when he fell in and drowned. The circumstances surrounding his death are unclear but the MP do not believe there was any foul play and that Private Ranchem’s death was purely accidental. Jerry is survived by his mother Elizabeth and his father Henry. A military funeral is being planned

The salesman approached a potential customer.
“Oi, mate.”
“Yeah?”
“Need a hand?”
The salesman opened his coat to reveal dozens of disembodied hands lining the inside of his jacket. The hands were rotting, covered in dried blood and various hungry flies.
“Oh god, no! Why? Why do you have those?”
“To give a hand to anyone who needs it!”
“No! Stop it, this is too dark! I don’t understand… I don’t understand the purpose of this!”
“I’m glad you brought that up, sir! There are many uses for my merchandise”
“Please don’t call it that. Those are human hands.”
“You could use them for almost anything, sir! You could use it as a door-stopper! Use it as a very non-absorbent sponge! Ever wondered what one hand clapping sounds like? If you bend it the right way, you can find out!”
“I’m going to be sick. Oh god, they smell so bad. They’re all different sizes. Why are those ones so small?!”
“Afraid you’ll lose one or damage it? We offer warranties!”
“This is too disturbing, I’m calling the police!”
“Ooh, your phone is cracked, eh? Don’t worry! These hands work as an excellent phone case!”
“How?! How would they do that-no, never mind, I don’t want to know.”
“I understand. Sometimes these hands are too much for people to come to grips with. Eh? Get it?”
“…”
“Do you moisturise?”
After a struggle, the salesman left with more than he arrived with.

I used to live in a small building downtown. One of the reasons I moved out was the bad neighborhood, including this guy in the apartment right over mine. It was a weird looking fella who mostly kept to himself. Around midnight though, there was frequently a strange noise that got on my nerves. It wasn't loud, to be fair, but I have really light sleep so it was hard to get my eyes shut with those little bumping sounds going on and on. It reminded me of high heels walking about, but not as loud, as if the person causing the noise was actually trying to be silent. After a few days, i realized the pattern was always the same, like a recording played over and over with random intervals in between. And that went on for the best part of an year, always the same sequence of bumps, slowly tattooed into my mind, sometimes for hours straight during the night.

It was only several years later, helping my daughter with her homework, that I learned a little bit of morse code. She knocked on the table with her knuckles and a shiver immediately went through my spine as I recognized that exact pattern. When i asked her what it meant, she laughed. "It's the easiest one, daddy" she said. "It's the one to call for help.".

I couldn't believe it when she said that to me over dinner. Divorce. It was a complete surprise and I wasn't anywhere close to being able to fully accept it. I had a feeling it had something to do with us not being able to have children, in which case, it wasn't her, it was both of us. The doctors couldn't find a reason for our fruitless marriage. My heart went out to her. I knew she was hurting.

"It's not what you're thinking," she said coolly as I looked at her over the table. We were at our favorite restaurant.

"What is it, then? Let's work it out," I said, hearing the quiver in my voice. I gulped down the rest of my wine.

"I can't. I just... I can't. I'm changing." And she got up from the table and left.

She was waiting for me in the car after I paid the check. There were moths flitting through the cool night air lightly batting themselves against the streetlight overhead. I drove us home, the silence in the car oppressive.

I eventually signed the divorce papers because I wanted to make her happy. I moved to a small apartment nearby vowing to stay in touch with her but she became more and more distant and I heard a strangeness in her voice when we spoke.

One day she stopped answering my calls and texts. I probably shouldn't have but I called her office. Call me weak but I just couldn't let go of what we had.

They said she hadn't been at work for two days. I still had a key to the house and so I decided to check on her.

The front porch light was on when I pulled up the drive. Like airy snowflakes come to life, white moths circled the paltry yellow glow. There was a cold fog creeping in, its tendrils vaporous and ephemeral.

I knocked at the door. There was no answer and so I let myself in.

The house was cold inside. The thermostat said fifty degrees. The doorway to the basement was open and there were more of the fat, white moths flying around inside, bumping the ceiling and searching for light, their furry bodies bulbous and out of place.

I called out for her but there was still no answer. The temperature continued to drop as I slowly descended the basement stairs until I was almost shivering when I reached the bottom.

At the far side of the room was a pile of bones and a congealed, black pool of blood. Shredded, torn skin and some discarded organs lay scattered about. A dark red smear went up the wall and as my eyes drifted up what I finally saw in the corner of the ceiling was a giant, quivering chrysalis, a cold cocoon in that freezing basement, and then I realized that when she said "It's not you, it's me," she meant it.

So I live in the country and I lived in a house on a hill. I had some neighbors that owned land behind us where the hill kind of evened out and went down a little bit. My neighbors also had cows which walked around their land.

So 3 my friends came over (making 4 people) this about when we were 11 or 12. We eventually got bored and decided to go exploring we all grabbed weapons (two nerf swords, a wooden sword, and I grabbed a bow and arrow). We them lifted the barbed fence and walked to until we could see more of the neighbors land and there was a bunch of red stuff littered around a large cluster of trees. And there's was either thing that looked like a rib cage of a cow. But we shrugged it off to be a pipe. My neighbors also had a small barn near by. Since there was no sign of anyone to see us we decided to check out the stuff by the trees we soon started to smell rotting flesh. And when we got closer we saw that all the red cluster were dead cows. The cows looked like they were killed for something other than for their meat. We saw some hooves in a circle like a shrine. Two of my friends wanted to go deeper into the trees and explore but we eventually went back to my house. (My friend had also taken pictures of the cows, pictures are below)

Later the two of my friends who wanted to go back went back to the cows. While my friend and I stayed in my room and talked to friends in a phone call. They ran back and claimed they saw something which it sort of did, I'll let you be the judge of that. (Pictures are below)

That was the end of that day.

My friend reported the cows to the police. They confiscated the pictures, claimed it was demon worship, and did nothing else to our knowledge.

My mother talked to the neighbors and he didn't like that we were over there.

I still don't exactly know what they were doing over there but it was strange

the things my friends saw

NSFW) the cows, these are the only ones that my friend was able to save, the police took the rest.

Alice White had received a strange letter in the mail. It read as such.

A challenge construed of rhythm and rhyme,

Taken by one unlucky Alice at a time,

Make sure when you're done, to pass it down the line,

And use your next words with great care.

Misfortune is given, not earned or deserved,

The rules of this curse must be strictly observed.

And though the next stanza may make you unnerved,

Alice White, here is your dare:

Skin ten young cats; partake of their brains.

And leave their sad corpses in various drains,

And though this dare will leave mental head pains,

Continue this chain in the mail.

Don't fail!

It was the most ridiculous things she had ever heard. Even if she were to take even a small consideration in the note, she loved cats. She was not going to do sick things to them. She crumpled it up, and tossed the note, envelope and all, into the waste bin.

Alice awoke to the sounds of voices. They were laughing at her, mocking her.

"What a lightweight."

"Can't even eat a couple of cat brains. Ha!"

"Loooseeerrrrr..."

Alice shoved her head under the pillow. The voices continued, now speaking directly into her head.

"Coward."

"I bet she can't do it, can she?"

Alice sat up abruptly, and saw nothing but an empty, dark room. Alice thought that maybe that stupid letter was getting to her. Shaking her head, she got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She flicked the light switch. There sat the letter in the middle of the kitchen table, perfectly fine. "I must be seeing things," Alice muttered. She drank her water, all the while keeping an eye on the unassuming paper. She laughed a t how scared she had gotten, and headed back to bed.

She laid down, attempting to get comfortable, but she found it rather difficult. Something was off. She sat up, and there was the letter, sitting on the nightstand. The instant, she locked her eyes on it, the voices started up again. They were so loud, Alice couldn't hear herself think. She couldn't hear herself screaming., and the rawness in her throat told her she was screaming, the hour be damned.

The whispers and teases increased, and she couldn't tell the voices apart anymore. The volume was hurting her terribly. "Alright!" she cried. "I'll do it." The voices ceased.

Alice got up again. She was going to get the stupid challenge over with, gory as it was. She stepped out into the cold night, knife in hand. She heard a soft meow, and lurking at the very edge of Alice's lawn, was kitty number one.

She was unnerved by the sicko who had left cat corpses in the school storm drains. She had nearly vomited her breakfast, she was so disgusted. As she continued sorting through the mail, something had caught h...

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"Our situation is basically indistinguishable from that of Mr. Chicken." - David Foster Wallace

"Whippoorwills in a whirlpool, son. What are you doing? If pain and anger are what drive you, you're going to wish you'd taken the bus. Have you been smoking Fresno again?"

"No, dad. I'm a deity. I don't smoke."

"You can do anything you want, son. Follow your dreams!"

"I guess. I just can't escape this feeling, this relentless ennui."

"Oh."

"Yeah. I can't shake this feeling they embodied me . . . I'm the god of lemonade, dad. I think they embodied me just so they could make fun of me."

"That's not true. They love lemonade. Like a lot."

"Not really the point. They're just so awful."

"Tell me about it. I once sat across a picnic table from a very fat man who had shoulder - length hair but was bald on top. He was eating corn on the cob while the wind blew and blew. I wouldn't recommend it."

"I want to kill them all. I want to eat them and I'm suddenly remembering I'm a god. I could totally do that, couldn't I?"

"Well, you're going to need help."

"Why?"

"Okay, not help. More like permission. But given the way things are right now, I think we might be approaching a 'clean slate' situation."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. For Velveeta alone they should be made to suffer."

"I kinda want to snap my fingers and kill everyone named 'Jimmy' all at once."

"Sounds fun. Tell them you're going to do it before you do it. Give 'em a week or so."

"Oh wow. That's slick wicked. I love it. What if they don't believe me?"

"Stand and deliver, my son, stand and deliver. Start with the redditors. Crunch them flat in their sleep tonight."

"Done."