There was a deafening bang, and before the sound reached their 
ears, the light from outside the window scorched their eyes and 
vaporized them into nothingness. 


It was like... Jesus, | need another drink... fuck. It was 
like... the only way | can think of it was like you know 
that thing that doctors do when they stick a tube up 
someone's ass and look at the inside of their intestines? | 
saw that on TV once, it was like that, except | was going 
down the throat of some horrible underwater hell- 
monster, not up some poor bastard's rear. There were 
these... muscular contractions, | guess, and they were 
slowly sliding us down the length of the tube. If we 
weren't wearing the hard suits, we'd have been crushed, 
but as it was, we were held so tight we could barely 
move, even with power-assist. | managed to get my head 
up enough to see the kid's face. His faceplate was 
covered in vomit, poor bastard had puked in his suit. | 
started yelling for him, trying to get him to say something. 
He managed to tell me he was all right. He was sobbing 
like a baby. 


| started doing some calculations. Based on my dead 
reckoning tracker and initial sonar scans, we were 
moving about a meter every minute. That meant seventy 
two hours until we came out the other side, assuming we 
did. We had the air, our rebreathers could keep going for 
days. What we didn't have was the power to keep the 
suits warm for that long. If the heat went out, 
hypothermia would kill us... | dunno, look it up, in any 
case we'd be dead. We needed to conserve power. 


| told the kid to turn off his helmet lights, lock his joints, 
and turn down his heater to minimal. He started crying. 
He didn't wanna do it. | didn't blame him, but | told him 
we had no choice. We finally agreed to shut down 
everything but our internal helmet lights, at least. It 
seemed to calm him down, and honesily, that extra 0.1 
percent power wouldn't make a difference. 


| think that was the worst part. We spent at least a day 
like that, locked in our suits. Couldn't move our arms and 
legs. No sound but the thing's gurgling and your own 
breathing and the sound of your rebreather. The puke on 


May snaps upright from her comforting bed, sweat pouring profusely 
from her face. She scrambles up towards the window and forces 
open the curtains. Typical sight for a winter morning, nothing odd or 
out of place. A car is parked in front of the house. 


It was just a nightmare, May reassures herself, her breathing still 
heavy. She reaches for the phone that she knocked over in her 
panic, swiping through the messages again. Yeah, it was just a 
nightmare, probably not a good idea to watch horror movies before 
bed, May smiles as she sends a playful blame to her friends. She 
throws the phone aside and begins her morning routine. 


"Morning, hon. You look exhausted." 
"Morning, Dad. Probably from staying up too late." 


"It's not bad to stay up every now and then. Prepares you for future 
sleepless nights working on papers and stuff." Dad winks at her. 


They sit down and have breakfast, and her dad begins to talk about 
his strange encounters again. May is intrigued by how her dad 
always makes it so immersive and believable, even if she is 
wondering if he has been playing too much DnD like Mom said in 
her dream. 


Another strange encounter occurred that morning, and the stories 
were cut off by a new Sun rising in the middle of the town, 
obliterating everything it touches. 


May snaps upright from her comforting bed, sweat pouring profusely 
from her face. 


Something isn't right. 


She scrambles to the window again. Still a normal sight for a winter 
morning. May is in shock. What is happening? Is this some kind of 
future prediction, or telepathic warning? She sits back down on her 
bed, face in her hands, trying to comprehend the sheer 
incomprehensibility of what just happened to her. 


May skips her morning routine, wraps a jacket over her pajamas, 


then hurries down the stairs, past the kitchen, towards the front 
door. 


"Morning, sweet- Wait, where are you going?" 


She opens the door and is greeted with a barrage of freezing winds 
in her face. Coughing up the snow in her mouth, May turns her gaze 
upon the sky. Something is definitely not right. Behind the thin layers 
of winter clouds, she can make out the faint, ever-changing 
silhouettes near the horizon. More like masses of shapeshifting 
colors, colors that are definitely not normal for a sky color. As she is 
stunned by the odd sight, her dad walks up behind her. His mouth 
drops a bit. 


"This... this is not normal. Wait a minute, I'll be right back." 


She watches as he runs back into the house, pulling out his phone 
and dialing someone. Within minutes, he returns with her 
dumbfounded mom and brother, not understand anything that's 
going on. There's barely anything happening, anyways, just your 
typical color-and-shape-shifting-thingy in the sky. Her dad shoves all 
of them, still in pajamas and thin jackets, into the car and drives 
away from town, looking very concerned. However, May, in the front 
seat, can see in his eyes that he doesn't know what to do. Maybe 
this is nothing more than a weather phenomenon and her dad is 
worrying everyone over nothing. 


Her thoughts, along with her family's, and also their car, are 
completely wiped off in an instant. The last thing any of them ever 
saw was a blinding white light. 


May snaps upright from her comforting bed, and instantly knows that 
something is extremely wrong. Without any thought, without 
scrambling to the window, without even putting on a jacket, May 
finds herself at the kitchen door, screaming at everyone to get out of 
the house. Her dad isn't there. He has left early again. 


Screaming to no avail, she pulls at her mom's arm, drags her to the 
front door. But her mom is not, at all, worried by the thing in the sky 
as her dad was. May is desperate. With her mom looking at her as if 


she has gone nuts, she knows that it was pointless. May runs. Runs 
as fast as she can, ignoring her mom yelling at her from behind. She 
runs past houses, past people moving in the opposite way, past the 
occasional vehicles that pass by. Her legs are in pain. She keeps 
running. At times, she runs into people that she knows, friends and 
neighbors alike, no one has any idea why she is running away. No 
matter what they ask, her only response is, "Run." She keeps 
running on the snow-covered path, for what seems like eternity. 


It was finite, however. All that's left of her is a faint shadow on the 
nearby wall, which is later washed away by torrents of poisoned and 
filth-filled rain. 


May snaps upright, and runs downstairs. 
Her dad is there. 


Without a word, she brings him to the front door. It worked. At the 
sight of the sky, her dad immediately escorts her clueless family to 
the car. The engine comes to life, and off they go. Her mom and her 
brother keep asking questions, and all she is able to respond is "We 
need to leave." Her dad is no better. He appears to be in deep 
shock, sweat pouring from his pale face. He looks as if he has seen 
some kind of otherworldly eldritch horror. Maybe he has. 


They keep driving, and driving, and driving. They reach the town 
border. They keep driving, driving, and crash into something. A 
transparent, no, invisible barrier. Encasing the whole entire town. As 
she gazes helplessly into the road beyond, her dad frantically 
scrambles through his phone, calling for help forces. 


This time, May actually had a split second to look at the light, before 
her eyeballs are torn off from her face. She briefly writhes in agony 
as her skin melts away from her twisted flesh and bones, tainting the 
once-white snow. 


May snaps upright, and there was light. Her blood splatters onto the 
invisible wall, drop by drop joining each other. 


And again, there was more light. Her flesh melds into her mom's, with the 
bones of her brother smearing over. 


Once more, another blinding light. May's organs burn her inside out, fixing her to the 
once comfortable bed. 


Not enough, here's more light. The demons slip through the makeshift barricade in her garage, 
toy with her mind and feast on her flesh. 


She stands inside it. There is only light. Nothing else. 


It keeps repeating over and over, the endless light slowly burning away the will of escaping in her. 


May wakes up. She lies on her back, staring at the bland ceiling. 
She sits up, peeks through the window curtains. 


It is not just a small spot near the horizon anymore. They are all over 
the sky now. Masses of ever-changing shapes and colors, every 
time more chaotic than the last. 


May smiles, teardrops forming in her eyes. 


She looks down. Some people on the street appear to have noticed 
the signs of the end. 


Of the light. 

Maybe the light is the reason behind all of this. 

Maybe the light has brought her an eternity of suffering. 
She can't escape. 

She can't fight against it. 

She can't let herself succumb to the light anymore. 


Her breaths shorten, drowned among muffled screams. Her hands 
fight each other to resist the urge to cling on to the light. 


From the chair beneath her, one could see a shadow rocking back 
and forth. 


At the end, there was light, keeping her shadow in place one last 
time. 


Item Description: A nuclear snow globe. When shaken, 
instead of falling snow, it shows a miniature-scale 
nuclear explosion. It emits no radiation, sound, or force, 
and the explosion pattern changes every shake. 
Aftereffects such as radioactive snow and black rain 
have been observed. At random intervals, the snow 
globe will contain a small shed, car, or truck, which 
reacts to the explosion. 

Date of Recovery: - - 

Location of Recovery: Sokrovenno, Russia. 

Current Status: In storage. 


Mitochondria 


There are vague memories of light at the beginning. 


His body is compressed and cold. There is the cold of concrete on 
his skin so much that it is his skin- the cold smell of paint and rebar 
in his breath that’s lost in the twisting passageway above him. From 
time to cold, cold time he hears the cave move, scratch, rumble, the 
only movement his body has. 


He struggled once to move his leg, to feel it, but the rock is cast to 
his foot, his bones fuzed together (how many joints does a man 
have?). He cannot remember being smaller than eight, remembers 
when he grew, grew, his back became large enough to crack the 
concrete compressing his ribs, (move his abdomen to conserve heat 
but it is cold) but his ribs are conformed now, twisting and turning 
around the hard concrete. No room to move. Arms out in front. 
There is no crying. No crying. He cannot see- the concrete is 
conformed around his open eyes, only his nose and mouth exposed 
to air, the tube in his anus. The time he cries the tears stick to his 
skin and pool into the (cold) concrete. 


There is food. 


Food comes to him. Comes. Comes. Smacks onto him so he must 
eat in order to breathe. Hair. Nails. Teeth. The bones cram into his 
throat and make him choke. The marrow is the best. Animal fur. 
Blood fills the cavern and he almost drowns, almost passes out, he 
cannot move, his head is trapped inside. (How many joints does a 
man have?) For he only has his jaw, slipping, slamming, darkness 
inside. The womb. The womb. The womb. His abdomen constricts 
and he shits out the pipe. 


Time moves faster sometimes than not but there is no passage, how 
many joints does a man have? His father. Sometimes, the cave 
mouth opens and there is a moment before wet meat slaps down on 
his crusted lips that he sees harsh white light flood inward and the 


muscles of the rock constrict, he is one but cannot move. It does not 
speak but gives him food. He loves the rock as it hugs him tight. 
Pelvis broken and regrown to the curvature of the rock’s insides he 
opens his mouth with blind desperation and consumes hair sliding 
down his throat long, long hair, then lips like his own that squish like 
skin and burst into meat and then teeth that grind against his own 
and he struggles to breathe again. 


It's cold, cold, cold, his world is cold and hard and dark. He hears 
nothing through the concrete in his eardrums. He has been here as 
long as the rock has moved and it took his shape, roughly, he 
laughs. 


Arms outstretched, the rock feeds him. 


Enjoy the Silence 


| like it here. 


| always liked the little pockets of forest left over between cities, the 
places where it wasn't worth anyone's time to level the ground or log 
the trees. It's not exactly the wilderness, but it's peaceful enough to 
give you the feeling, and there probably aren't bears. 


Since my eardrums got busted, of course, it wasn't the same. The 
sunlight and shadows were the same, but half the quietness of the 
woods is actually the little sounds of leaves and twigs and maybe 
water. Just enough noise to make you feel like there's hardly any. 
Sometimes people ask me (with those long pitying faces) how | can 
live without music, or voices, but | think it's that not-silence that | 
miss the most. 


When we secured this place back in '03, and the others told me how 
the sound was baffled almost out of existence, | figured hey, 
everyone hears the same nothing here. I'm not missing anything. | 
guess | was pissed off at Mace for a while when we found he'd 
brought Smith here — who the hell did he think he was? What gave 
him the right? But whenever | had some time off in the area, | would 
come up here and sit and it started to make sense. Nowhere safer in 
the world. 


Zhao's saying something. The others are looking at her like they can 
almost hear her. Dee rolls her eyes and waves impatiently at the 
area. Zhao sighs and starts signing instead. 


Any ideas? 


| think it's pretty obvious, Richards signs. Maybe it's just a visit. He 
made this place for her — I'm not surprised he can't keep away. 


Dee and Zhao nod, but something's bugging me — something I've 
forgotten. It's happening more often than I'd like these days. | should 


know why this is important, but it's jammed in a crevice in my head 
and | can't dig it out. 


Up the hill and | can feel years of dead leaves crunch under my feet. 
Can't remember that sound anymore either, but half of it comes 
through the soles of your shoes anyway. Speech-to-text scrolls 
down my HUD as Dee grumbles about the hill, but | tune it out as 
usual. 


| find the right vantage point behind a tree leaning back from the 
crown. From there | can see moving undergrowth in three directions 
where my teammates are coming, and one sorry-looking old man 
(old? no older than me) with a gun shoved in his belt, standing ina 
shaft of afternoon's last sunlight like he planned it. Knowing him, he 
probably did. 


There's an older iPod and a pair of portable speakers sitting next to 
the cairn he left for Specialist Zoe Smith. And a hole in the ground 
just before them. And a tarnished silver urn overturned, a white 
sheet over the spilled contents. 


| hoped they would send you, Charles Mace signs to me. 


| hoped | wouldn't find you, | respond. Haven't you done enough to 
her? 


Not yet. 


The iPod screen shows something's playing. Of course no one else 
can hear it either. | flip on the HUD's zoom function to read the 
screen. 


It's safe for us. The sound waves won't travel far enough. But it'll 
work for her. 


"Two four zero two," | say out loud. It feels hoarse and for a moment 
I'm not sure if the software's picked it up properly, but then | see 
Richards's face through branches of red leaves, across the clearing 
about one o'clock. He looks... | don't know what that look is, but he 
damn sure knows what's happening. "He's trying to bring her back." 


She knew this song before. Mace smiles. I'll teach it to her again. 


The white sheet ripples a little. The leaves aren't moving.