What Are They Doing To Us?
I came to on the kitchen floor, choking on nothing, my lungs convulsing like they were trying to vomit air. Each breath scraped my throat like glass. I blinked hard against the burning white above, fluorescents buzzing like flies in a jar. I tried to remember where I was, who I was. The lab coats. The needles. Were they a dream? The fragments were there, jagged and shifting, refusing to come to fully show themselves. Everything hurt. But not in any way I’d ever known. This wasn’t bruising. This wasn’t soreness. This was wrong. Like my body had been repossessed. My skin felt too tight, drawn thin over bones that weren’t mine anymore, like I’d been rebuilt with the blueprints of something else.
“Hello?” I tried to say, but it came out slurred, thick, disturbed. Something wet hit the floor. I turned my head and saw it. My tongue. My own damn tongue, slack and gray, twitching against the linoleum like it was trying to crawl away. Panic swelled. I tried to rise, but my arm folded under me, not broken. Just... folding. Collapsing in on itself like a puppet with its strings cut. The bones were gone. I looked down and my legs were missing. No stumps, no blood. Just... gone. In their place: pale, wet coils of segmented flesh, twitching spasmodically, blind and slick like something born in the dark. My skin, or what was left of it, had gone translucent in places, revealing a grotesque theater underneath: veins turned black and ropy, wriggling like roots through rotting earth. Beneath the surface, something moved. Something tried to push through. I scrambled back, and my palms left a smear, a puddle of something viscous. Pain barely registered. It was eclipsed by the deeper horror, that I was inside something I didn’t understand. My body wasn’t mine. It was a costume that had melted in the sun.
I caught my reflection in the oven door, warped by grime and heat and horror. And there I was. Or some version of me. My eyes were bulged too wide, they were lidless and raw, rolling in their sockets like they wanted out. My nose had collapsed into a flat ridge. My lips had vanished, leaving only a trembling slit of muscle, twitching like it still thought it could speak.
And then, the knock. A calm, almost polite rapping at the front door. And a voice: “It’s time.” I froze. There was a window there, and what looked like a double sided mirror. They were watching. Recording. Waiting for me. And that’s when the betrayal came. Not from them. From me. My muscles spasmed, seized. The slick, segmented limbs beneath me began to writhe with purpose. I tried to resist, but it was like wrestling a river. My hands, clawed now, and wet. They dragged behind me, scraping against my protest as the new flesh took over. Slithering forward. Obedient. Almost Eager. I was being taken somewhere. And I was the one doing it too, against my will. Whatever they turned me into... it remembered how to obey. And it didn’t care that I was still inside, screaming.
