[the senioritis has transferred into my writing habits]

I don't think I've ever considered myself to have lost my fucking mind, not even after I lived alone in a shitty apartment for way too long on fast food and chips, but I think I finally have misplaced my marbles.

"Hungry."

"No. I'm not going out and getting more food. It's expensive."

"Hungry, Dallon."

Yeah, I'm hungry, but I've been starving for a while now and nothing has solved the problem yet. Thus, I ignore it like the idiot I am. "Shut the fuck up."

"Hungry."

I give in and I start slowly, keyword is slowly, snacking on dry cereal. It's an off brand box of Lucky Charms, because it's two dollars cheaper that way. "I should probably get some psychological help. Talking to myself this much is definitely far from normal."

"You are not talking to yourself. You are talking to me."

Now I'm thinking I'm having a full conversation with someone else inside my brain. Those aliens really got me fucked up. Speaking of which, Tyler and Josh still haven't gotten back to me. I hope they're okay.

"And who are you? I'm pretty sure this is just me, letting the crippling loneliness get to my head. Good try, mental instability, I've caught you red handed this time."

I wait for a minute but there isn't another response. Wow, I really showed myself.

Then my head starts to hurt. At first I think it's weird, but then it hits me that I haven't had anything to drink other than Kool-Aid, coffee, and flat soda.

"Don't open the door."

What the hell. There's nobody at the door, nobody even leaves or visits the apartment complex, not even the landlord. She hates it here. Occasionally, people will deliver fast food from GrubHub or whatever, and there's a knock on the door.

There's a knock on the door.

I don't move. I'm absolutely terrified first of all, that my brain predicted something before it happened. Maybe I can be a psychic or something. I'm also frozen because the voice on the other side sounds like a demon when two men taunt and call me by name to demand that I open the door, and one of them knocks again.

"Nobody's home." I yell at them but it just comes out sad and scraggly. I think they laugh, but the ringing in my ears is pretty damn loud and I can't really hear much.

"Open up, Dallon. Swift wants to see you."

My head hurts. Everything hurts. Tyler and Josh said they'd take to fall so she wouldn't go after me. What happened to them? They promised. "Tell her I'm busy. She'll understand, we're good friends."

The door gets kicked down in one motion, and six guys all storm in with guns pointed to me, laser guides all aiming for my chest. They're all ripped as hell, and they all wear the same uniforms and sunglasses. My head hurts too much to even try to tell them apart. Maybe I'm having a panic attack, who knows, but I sure am sweating like one's coming on.

The one closest to me gives them some weird hand motion and everyone behind him freezes. "What're you doing with your arms?"

It takes a second to realize he's talking me. "They're up. I'm surrendering."

"...No, you aren't."

"Are you blind? I fucking—" I look to my arms to prove him right, and they are in fact, not up one hundred percent. They'll go up, and then they'll go back down to my sides, then up again, then back down.

"Coward." The voice in my head growls.

With my arms stuck in some weird middle ground, the one who criticized me in the first place gives up and waves his stupid posse forward. "Restrain him, someone?"

I can't feel my legs anymore. Oh my god, Swift is actually going to kill me. She'll feed me to her aliens and I'll die, I'll die like her billion other test subjects. I hope I don't sweat this much when I'm dying. It's kind of gross.

One of them steps forward with these funky little cuffs, but he doesn't make it very far. My left hand shoots forward, and black goop builds off itself to wrap around his throat, slam him against the ceiling and floor a couple times, and finally throw his unconscious body down on my table, which breaks immediately.

He lets out a strangled groan of absolute pain, and the thing sinks back into my skin. I stage whisper an apology to him, but I don't think he believes me.

"Shoot him!" Somebody yells from the back, clearly someone without a gun.

The lineup near the front steps back a pace or two and glance to each other nervously. If I wasn't about to be brought to the one person that wouldn't hesitate to rip my soul from my body, I would be having a full blown panic attack on the kitchen floor. Instead, I'm just sweating a lot. "Commander, I-I don't think we should—"

"Fucking shoot him already!"

They all do as he says and dozens of bullets fire at me simultaneously. The black goop moves my arm and forms a shield that absorbs and promptly drops every single shot they fire. I think that angers some of them, because they all let their weapons fall, and they charge me.

The first one gets thrown out of a window by a hand, but larger and forming off of mine, which then sweeps the feet of the next three. Then it shrinks and moves on to one reaching for their gun, and twists their arm backwards so far, their shoulder dislocates and the skin starts to tear.

They all pause for a second. "Hey, guys," I'm shaking again, "I'm so fucking sorry. Should I call an ambulance or the cops?"

The commander in the back rushes me and without thinking about it, I kick at him and the black mass accelerates him through my wall, and then through the door of the neighbor across the hall. I think it's safe to assume he won't be getting up any time soon. 

Sirens blare in the distance, and I assume they're for me, so I hop over the bodies on the floor and dart out down the hallway. I speed down the staircase in a few seconds, and before I know it I'm on the ground level, sprinting out of the front doors and down to the parking lot where I keep my motorcycle.

"Hey, uh, voice in my head? Can we talk for just a minute?"

"Of course, my love."

"Yeah, hi, good to talk to you again, please don't call me that. What just happened back there?" I get a few weird looks, but everyone assumes I have the Bluetooth earbuds underneath my hoodie and the sweat running down my sweatshirt makes me look like I'm just taking a cool-down run from a lot of exercising. I'm blessed.

"They tried to hurt us. I protected us."

"Alright, alright, cool." Maybe I'm about to have a mental breakdown, maybe. "And who are you?"

I don't get a response immediately, in fact I don't hear one until my legs are pulling me on my motorcycle and my fingers are thoughtlessly shoving my keys into the ignition. "We will drive."

Black spreads through my veins and takes hold of my hands as it revs the engine and speeds the vehicle into the street with no regard for the traffic as it weaves between cars. It doesn't hit anything, and it's only a couple miles over the speed limit once it deems our distance safe enough.

"Hey, you're a good driver, whatever you are."

"We learned by watching the man with the fluffy hair drive us to the hospital. No speed limits for him." It purrs.

I nod. Fair enough. "Good job."

And then somehow, somehow, it fucks up so badly by going the speed limit, there's a huge black van keeping pace behind us even after we speed back up, with the barrel of a very large gun hanging out of the window point at the road I front of us. I assume it's for me and my newly delinquent ass, and not the series of potholes coming up.

"Hide?"

"My ex fiancé wouldn't dare let me in, and there's nowhere else to go. You're out of luck," a bullet grazes my shoulder, "but, uh, we should go a little faster."

"Agreed." The speedometer increases by another twenty miles per hour, and cars start pulling off to the side to park and wait until we've passed them by.

The van gains another few cars, which we miraculously lose while swinging around corners at top speed to give us a bit of a distance. There's a helicopter circling over us, following the chase through the city streets. I hope I'm not on the news. Brendon would probably kill me before Swift got her hands on me, and in that case I'd actually prefer her to murder me.

At one point the black goop tilts the bike down almost to the road and keeps the momentum going while it slides us underneath a semi truck. Our following slams on the brakes and we're blocks away by the time the truck moves from the intersection after almost decapitating me.

"Okay, that was pretty fucking cool—"

I'm cut off by the front of another van slamming into the side of my bike at full speed. I get flung from the seat and I skid across the asphalt across the intersection.

The van pulls to a stop and the Commander from my apartment steps out and lifts me off the ground by my sweatshirt collar. I have to have broken every bone in my body, and there's red crawling into my eyes. There's blood everywhere, the parts of my body that I can still feel all sting like someone poured rubbing alcohol and lemon juice into all the open wounds, and I can't breathe.

"Hope you don't die before Swift can get her claws on you." He spits and shoves me back down, then he walks off and another guy comes to roll me over and slap metal over my wrists.

"Don't move."

Out of the corner of my eye, the same black mass seeps from underneath and mixes with the blood pooled under my body and wraps around my limbs, cracking bones back into place, adhering cuts back together like they never opened in the first place. My chest crackles back to the point where I can take a full breath, and my legs tingle back into existence after a few relieving snaps and crunches in my back.

It fully envelops my body from my feet up, shattering the cuffs in a thousand pieces, slowly lifting me up until the black goop covers my face, and I watch the scene unfold from behind two large eyes that don't belong to me.

A large black hand lifts and promptly chucks two people into the nearest building, and grabs the Commander, drags him over across the intersection, and pulls him off the ground to our height.

"W-What the hell are you?" He whispers hoarsely and claws at the arm slowly crushing his neck. His face pales and his movements start losing effort.

It doesn't answer, but it does rip his head off in one large bite, which lands in my hands and then falls into nothingness when I scream and drop it.

"We need to go. Stay still." The voice echoes from inside, and tries to comfort me as it bounds from rooftop to rooftop.

I'm freaking out. It's one of the aliens, I'm possessed by one of Swift's killer aliens. The scans from the hospital all make sense, and so does the excessive hunger and ambush from a semi-SWAT team.

As soon as we're alone in an abandoned warehouse, the alien absorbs back into my body and leaves me to sit on a platform overlooking the first floor of the building. There's rust everywhere, and the floor creaks with every movement I make. My ankle is still twisted at an odd angle, but it doesn't hurt too bad, and the black goop forms around it as soon as I think about it.

There's another shooting pain through my leg, and I have to bite my tongue so I don't attract any attention. "You forgot about my ankle."

"We can try to fix it."

"No, no. It's okay." I changed my mind, I don't want it to be fixed. I should be dead, but it my body was reanimated by an alien, at least let me have one scratch.

"Sorry," it says, "we didn't see the van. They won't hurt us again, love."

"It's okay. Y-You can let them." I'm done. I don't want any part in this anymore. I've been living with an alien in my body for the last day or so, and I'm done. I'm too busy freaking out to question why I'm it's love, or why it keeps referring to itself as 'us'.

I think I can say for certain, nothing is ever going to be the same.

☢️

Brendon and Sarah both sit dumbfounded, staring at their television screen blaring the local news channel. The video feed switches from the streets to the hosts staring in utter shock as the scene ends and Dallon is nowhere to be found.

She lets go of her boyfriend's hand, who's clutching for dear life just as hard as she is. "I don't think it's just the flu."

He nods. "It can be the flu if you want it to be."

"Can we do anything?"

"To help him with that thing? That's some next level shit—"

"No duh," she hisses, "but you were engaged to him at one point, and he's alone in dealing with all of this. We can't just leave him to figure this out on his own."

He slides his hand from her grip and pushes his chair to the floor. He's terrified, but also a little concerned for his ex-fiancé's wellbeing after coming face to face with death in a riveting high-speed chase through a densely populated city. "What the hell can we do for him now?"

"I don't know! Go get him and I'll meet you at the hospital. We can figure it out when we get there." She stands and storms across the kitchen to their bowl of keys, and tosses the car keys to Brendon. "I'll catch the bus. We don't know where he is, but he's somewhere on Madison Avenue. See you at the lab?"

"See you at the lab, babe. Stay safe."