Scifi Horror Short

- Twenty-one year old Maria Knox sat lost in thought, watching a great rocky expanse of nearly nothing pass by from behind a bus window. Her chin rest in her hand while eyes the color of stormy seas dwelt on the cacti and red clay formations, idly. She was on her way to her father's after a job fell through.. 

- Roughly two-thousand miles had been traversed by the waiflike young woman, over three days on this bus. She was so entirely ready to get off. Everyone was so worked up about this "invasion prank." Fooled by a three-minute long, out-of-focus video that could easily have been fake. There were millions of videos that looked real but weren't. She avoided the panicked huddles of people on her path through the states. 

- Thirty minutes later, she exited the bus terminal as a light snow began to fall at around three in the morning. There, waving adamantly in his navy blue parka and sitting stiffly in the same beat-up old Honda Accord that she'd remembered from her childhood, was her Father. Knox slid silently into the passenger's seat beside him. 

- "Quiet as ever, eh Maria?" Her dad's smile assured her. He was used to his little girl's silence after all these years and was just glad that she was with him again. "I missed you Mox..." He put the battered little, forest green car into drive as she hugged his neck, and whispered a quiet reply. 

- "Missed you too, old man." Knox withheld a few defeated tears she'd been holding onto, and soon fell asleep on the way home. 

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- Early spring. A light snow is falling, probably the last of the season. The town is enjoying a peaceful night until a metallic ship glides over it... Seeing only a small grouping of their prey here, the aliens drop droves of Grays silently into the forest beside the sleeping town. With orders handed down, they slip into the closest houses they can find, three or four at a time... 

- After depositing it's quarry, the otherworldly dreadnought that was the alien ship let out a massive EMP pulse... This pulse would render all electronic devices useless, but it's effects do not harm organic life. Quietly, every light in the city went out, and all the electricity faded out of the small mountainous town. Come morning, the snow would stop falling. Most of the people would be dead or hiding as troops of grays systematically snuff out the lives of anyone they find. The outskirts of the town were hit first, people who ran became red piles, spattered in the freshly fallen snow. 

- This is when Cheyenne began to scream. This is when her people began dying, one family at a time. Even protective pets aren't spared the Gray Ones' massive, bludgeoning hands and endless forces... You find yourself hearing the sounds of crashing and terror. Perhaps a group of them has slipped into your neighbor's home, and the chaos you hear is the family beside your's being snuffed out by the blows of an alien grunt.

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- "Moxie, wake up--!" She was shaken awake by her father, who was impossible to see in the complete darkness of her newfound home. "Something is really wrong, people are screaming next door." He whispered, urgently, his voice instantly alerting her that something was horribly wrong. She wiped her mouth, desperately trying to catch sight of her dad's blue eyes and wavy blonde hair in the dark.

- "The power's out. Phones too. Everything." He said, her eyes adjusted to the dark as she slipped jeans over her pajama pants, and a parka over her shirt. 

- She began to hear it too, the wailing in the distance.... Thumping, a woman screaming... More thumping... Children's terrified cries... She gripped the strap of her trusted backpack and her father's hand... Silence reclaimed the night. "We've got to go..." 

- They left the house a few minutes later, with very little supplies on them to speak of. The plan was simple. Get to her dad's hunting cabin in the nearby hills. It would be a long, steady jog without a vehicle... Her many years of track and field history reassured her, but it would still be a tedious run. Her father was pushing forty-five now and fit as a man his age could be thanks to his line of work. The lean, steel-muscled fitness instructor had trained her throughout the entirety of her life, and was ready to make a break for it now. 

 - He strapped his rifle to his back, and pushed a map into her hands as they left the house. Looking down through auburn blades of hair at the folded paper in her hands, she saw that it marked the location of his home, and the cabin... 

- "Dad...?" The word went unnoticed as he pulled her out into the frigid night and through the streets. Her thoughts could not dwell on her dad's gesture... That he felt he might not make it... It only made her eyes fog, and her footfalls waver. She focused on the run, the sparkling snow crunching underfoot, her breath curling in the night far behind them. 

- On their way outside of town, the pair was noticed. What they beheld, the figure closing the gap between it and them, was otherworldly and lusted for blood. The eight-foot-tall, gray skinned, emaciated alien barreled toward them from its post in a nearby house. There were only seconds left. 

- The rifle wasn't raised in time. Her father was tackled to the ground and pattered with heavy blows to the face after his rifle was knocked away. Knox fumbled for the gun in the snow as her father was bludgeoned to death beneath the fists of an alien menace... The deadly alien soon barreled toward her. 

- Raising the barrel, she let loose a bullet that ripped through the Gray figure's large head. It fell, a tri-fingered fist still clenched to the toe of her shoe. Barely a moment passed before she knelt by her father's side and sobbed into his blood-spattered, navy blue parka. After a long moment, she raised her head, wiping her eyes. "...Old man... Dad." 

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- The quiet, eight-foot tall figures glide from building to building in groups of five or less, clearing quadrant after screaming quadrant of the town. They do not don armor and have no mouth to speak with. The grey ones simply had unblinking eyes and smooth skin the color of ashes. Should a person come in contact with them, the grays would respond violently with fists and handheld bludgeons... They feel no pain, and do not stop coming unless you destroy their link to the central brain, their large craniums.

- Wherever you are in the hapless town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, you are not safe. The behemoth alien ship has glided soundlessly to the center of the town while you've been fighting to stay away from violent, gray figures. Even if you're inside or on the ruined, reaped outskirts of town, you will not be saved from what is coming. It is perhaps, a slow death. Over months or years, but still a slow painful death is probably waiting for you. Because the dreadnought ship let down an otherworldly beam of light, full of concentrated mutagenic radiation. It destroys those instantly who are in the center of town, those exposed to the full beam of light, thankfully none of you are there. Still, painlessly, without any alert from your senses, the mutagenic fallout begins to gnash at your DNA. 

- You have hours before it begins to take its hold on you... Each of you you will begin to feel the effects of your new, bittersweet changes. The world around you will become more hostile, as the civilians around you undergo their own changes. 

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- Suddenly, a bright beam of light fell in the center of town, it captured her eyes as it flowed intensely from the sky. It was silent. Pondering the nature of it, she thought 'it's not a laser... There were no explosions. I don't understand.' She leaned to kiss her father's frigid hand. 

- His index finger and arm pointed the way he had wanted her to run. It was his last message. She cried even more now, but was soon snapped back to reality by the faint but familiar sound of screaming. Some poor soul had become another victim of a tall, gray figure. As Knox rose to her feet, she collected her father's rifle, the few bullets he had and the key to the cabin.

- She began running, her only purpose being to put one foot in front of the other, in the direction of the cabin. After her water ran out, and the sun was beginning to rise, every cell inside of her screamed in agony. She arrived at the cabin as the sun climbed high in the sky... And fell into the doorway. Knox spread herself out on the cool stone floor of the kitchen and slept, utterly exhausted from her run. Little did she know, her genes were being torn asunder, and reordered. The fabric of Maria Knox was being unraveled by its fibers and replaced. Only time would tell what mutagen the young woman would possess.