They Come from Above
Their swift, massive ships control everything in the above.
They navigate with the absolute assurance that they can trespass on our world at any time and there is nothing we can do to stop them. They have been coming here for so long that stories of their visits have passed into legend and into nightmare and taken hold in the secret places where fears are born.
Sometimes their ships come upon us with no warning, their silent shadows leaving a chill in their wake that is not wholly physical. Other times they announce themselves arrogantly, letting us hear the sound of their engines, machines crafted of materials unknown to us, the product of a complex technology we can neither understand nor replicate nor challenge.
There is no safety in numbers. There is no safety in isolation. Even our homes offer no sanctuary. They have methods of finding us; they can reach us even as we sleep. They have studied us and our habits for centuries. They know our patterns in the different seasons and in the different hours of the day. It amuses them to predict our movements. It pleases them to analyze our ways while their ways remain fathomless to us.
They track us and they mark us and finally, when it suits their whim, they will take us.
They come most often in the gloom—in twilight and dusk and darkness—but even on the brightest day we must be vigilant.
Enough of us have seen them and survived that we know what they look like—hideous, malevolent creatures, incapable of sentiment except perhaps toward each other. That their intellect is superior to ours we have no doubt, but their moral code seems primitive.
I have heard of the horrors awaiting those unlucky enough to fall into their hands; tales of bodies slit and eviscerated, spines torn away in one long column. Slow deaths by suffocation and bludgeoning and other tortures.
I know all this and yet, when they come for me, as they have always come for my kind, I am taken unaware. No, not unaware exactly, because that suggests innocence or a denial so deep as to be almost psychotic. I know what they are capable of and yet...
Their probe hypnotizes me and, as if by magic, I am captured and brought aboard their ship. It is not a painless process but I try to be brave. Perhaps they can comprehend courage in their prey and respect that bravery and maybe, that will earn me an easier death.
I see red as they grasp me with their horrid appendages and I cannot breathe in their brutal atmosphere. I gasp, mouth wide open, my whole body convulsing with the effort. I turn and thrash, each movement more desperate, but I am caught fast under the sinister glare of their peculiar eyes, set in their giant misshapen heads. Their gaze is pitiless, or perhaps merely curious, there is no way to tell. My fate hangs in the balance.
"Damn, throw him back Clem, he's got to be the smallest bigmouth bass I've ever seen."
-END-
