"I'm sorry, Ben, but we're going to have to let you go."

Ben took a break from staring at his clasped hands. He turned his downcast face away from the gray institutional desk, dragging his gaze past the coral-papered prefab walls of the small office, and looked his boss in the eye.

The assistant director of Leith Dynamic Intelligence, Alan Cunningham, was a man in his fifties, balding on top with too-long brown hair at the back and sides. He had the crumpled shirt of someone who'd slept on the couch in his clothes, and the uneven beard of someone who'd spent at least two fourteen-hour days kissing corporate ass and pretending to be busy in the wake of a client-relationship catastrophe.

Ben scanned Mr. Cunningham's face for sympathy, some sign that the man could be convinced the loss of the Avanti contract wasn't his fault.

"This is about Avanti, right?" Ben asked.

Alan took a long, slow breath. "They were eight percent of our revenue, Ben."

"You know that wasn't my fault."

Privately, Ben knew it was his fault. He'd deliberately overlooked an ongoing error in the firm's data until it spiraled into a noisy mess that had shut Avanti down for forty hours. But nobody else knew that.

Alan broke Ben's stare, looking off to the side with an awkward expression that approximated guilt.

"Look, Ben, integrity is your area. The operations manager at Avanti is saying it was your responsibility to stop this happening."

"We don't have monitoring for this kind of problem, and I don't have the time to run ad-hoc checks for things that have never come up before," Ben said, punctuating his point by jabbing his finger on the table. The mid-level managers appreciated a little hand-talking. "You can't possibly think I let this happen on purpose. It was just an unavoidable, unforeseeable problem."

Halfway through Ben's response, Alan started nodding sadly.

After he finished his explanation, Alan blew out a breath, letting his cheeks puff up.

"Ben, look, I believe you. I agree with you. But Avanti are only willing to stay with us–"

"We're not even getting shot of Avanti!?"

"–on the condition that we let the person responsible go. As far as they're concerned, that's you. It's all been decided at director level." Alan's tone became conciliatory. He raised his hands, gesturing as he spoke, as if he were batting away physical manifestations of Ben's objections. "Look, we'll call it a redundancy. I'll give you a great reference, and it's a good time to be in the job market."

Ben leaned back in his chair. He and Alan stared at each other.

Mr. Cunningham wasn't wrong, exactly. Ben hadn't had a pay rise in three years. And maybe his next job wouldn't force him to work with clients who could be called manifest evil without being entirely melodramatic.

Mr. Cunningham reached out a hand over the desk to shake.

Ben looked at it for a second.

For a foot-soldier of corporate psychopathy, Jon wasn't too bad.

He reached out and took the assistant director's hand, shaking it.

At that moment, the door to the office exploded open, like the other side had been hit by a wrecking ball moving at full swing.

Wood splintered like stale bread. Shards of the obliterated door slapped Ben's face and shirt, splinters scattering across the desk and floor. The office filled with a smell like wet dirt.

A thing stood in the doorway. A monster. The overlap of spider, lizard, and tumor, and completely alien. It had a teardrop-shaped body with a dusty black hide, dozens of long legs growing up and down its bulbous torso that stretched out centipede-like to clutch the door frame, and a pink wet opening at the bottom of the bulb – a vertical slit lined with blunt white protrusions like horse teeth, opening and closing like a gasping mouth.

Mr. Cunningham started screaming loud enough to tear his vocal cords.

The thing reacted instantly. Two new legs appeared from nowhere, spearing across the room and driving into the man's face and throat with a sound like a dropped egg.

Ben was about to start screaming right along with him, but seeing Mr. Cunningham impaled shoved a lump of bile into his throat. Some survival instinct clamped down on his lungs and diaphragm, freezing him in place and locking his breath.

Mr. Cunningham didn't stop screaming. His eyes rolled in his head to look down at the ridged black leg. It had impaled his head, piercing through his cheek and out the back of his skull.

The legs jerked, pulling Mr. Cunningham out of his seat and towards the thing. It pulled him up, holding his neck to its gasping mouth, and started eating.

Mr. Cunningham never stopped screaming. The thing wasn't breaking skin. There was no blood. It was like each mouthful was reshaping him without hurting him, chewing him up like bubblegum so he could fit into that narrow mouth.

His body was halfway inside the thing, head and legs sticking out at the same angle, when his eyes met Ben's. His expression was terrified, pleading. His voice had broken, only a raw hissing coming out of his mouth as he tried to scream.

Seeing the fear in Alan's expression finally broke through Ben's terror. He whirled, grabbed the stapler from the desk, pulled down the bottom half, and pointed it at the thing. He started squeezing the mechanism, popping off staples at the alien creature.

The staples bounced harmlessly off its hide, but it reacted to the noise. A leg shot out from nowhere. The clawed tip pierced the stapler like a shadow cutting through the image of an overhead projector, then pulled back, trying to feed the stapler into its mouth alongside Alan. The thing chewed twice before rejecting the stapler, dropping it to the floor with a metal clack.

Ben's breath was still locked in his chest, his throat closed by terror and an ancient instinct towards silence.

He glanced at Alan's face again. The man was finally dead, his eyes hollow and glassy. Seconds later, his head disappeared into the thing's mouth, the skull stretching out like taffy as the monster's chewing distorted the flesh. The thing continued by consuming the man's dangling arms and legs, slurping them up like the trailing ends of spaghetti.

Ben couldn't bring himself to move, even to retch.

He closed his eyes and remained perfectly still.

He stood motionless, a terrified statue, blind and quiet. Some supernaturally powerful force reached a hand forward from deep in human evolutionary history to suppress his tremors, lock his limbs, to let him ignore the burning in his lungs.

Eventually, he needed to take a breath. He winced at the almost inaudible click of saliva as his lips parted. The sound of air moving through his throat was a gale against the backdrop of the now silent office.

When an hour had passed – or a day, or a minute – Ben opened his eyes.

The teardrop thing was still in the doorway. It hung there, as still as an egg sac, as menacing as an unexploded bomb.

DUN DUN DUN DUN Morning. Today's forecast calls for blue skies.

Ben's phone was going off in his pocket. Sunday nap wakeup alarm incorrectly set to go off on Monday.

Ben threw himself to the side at the exact moment that the thing threw a skewer at the noise.

The fanged tip of the leg caught the outer edge of Ben's thigh, pierced his pocket, and hooked on the phone. It pulled.

There was a feeling of pressure, a momentary tugging that pulled Ben off his feet and towards the thing, but then he fell free.

The teardrop alien only cared about the phone, still blaring music. It swallowed it whole.

The sound of the Electric Light Orchestra kept coming from inside it, slightly muted, like it was playing from the bottom of a laundry basket.

From the floor, Ben saw movement in the corridor outside.

Another pair of legs appeared from out of sight to the left, spearing through the thing in the doorway, angling for the phone that was now inside it. The original thing reacted in the same way, shooting out skewers at the unseen alien.

It devolved into a stabbing match, both creatures bloodlessly lancing the other with thrusting legs and a sound like forks stabbing through the plastic cover of a microwave meal.

Ben's primal survival instinct forced him to move. As quietly as he could, he fast-crawled for the door, passing under the legs of the thing hanging from the door frame, ignoring the identical alien dueling with it, turning right and worming his way down the corridor, his movements as quiet as a swiffer broom on the linoleum floor.

When something inside him decided he was far enough from danger, he paused to empty his stomach, as much from the physical contortions he'd put his gut through as from what he'd seen.

He wanted to find a closet and hide forever. The part of his brain controlling his body had other ideas, shuffling him towards a fourth-floor fire exit.

He was no longer human, no longer bipedal. He was a crawling thing, a worm thing, hiding like a worm hides from the birds.

Two more of the centipede-teardrops passed him as he crawled away, oblivious to him, homing in on the increasingly distant music, the same upbeat song playing on loop.

He reached the fire door and rose up against it, briefly becoming a centaur as he pressed the push bar.

The door popped open, Ben fell through, and the building's fire alarms started wailing.

~

The concrete stairs were painfully hard on Ben's knees. The angle was unnatural. Crawling down the steps forwards put his head on the same level as his hips. He constantly felt at risk of falling. Every additional step jarred his wrists. The descent was harder because of the mangled remains of the stapler clutched in his hand – no memory of when he'd grabbed that or why.

He paused for breath on a landing, sitting there for a minute, trying to get control of himself.

The landing was distressingly normal. The walls were painted in soothing institutional green. The floor was bare concrete – no unnecessary expense spent on an area that would only be seen in an emergency. The steps were lined with rubber grips at the far corners; for safety.

He stayed there for more than a minute, breathing in and out, trying to regain conscious control of his body. His breath froze when the fire door on that level slowly crept open.

A woman emerged. She was in her early twenties, with her hair tied up in a tight ponytail, wearing a business casual outfit. Ben didn't recognize her, but if she worked on another floor, he wouldn't expect to.

She stopped when she saw Ben crouched in the far corner of the stairwell.

More people stepped out behind her: an eighteen-year-old-ish guy wearing a t-shirt and white denim jeans, probably an intern, and a woman in her forties wearing an up-do and a pantsuit. Eighty percent of the business was remote, but there were still people in the office. There were still people alive down here.

"Run," Ben mouthed at them. Not a shout, just as loud a whisper as he could manage, but even a shout would have been drowned under the wailing alarm.

They showed no sign that they'd managed to read the word off his lips. They just moved past him, shooting him odd looks as they continued down the stairs at a relaxed pace.

Ben went with them, still on his hands and knees, even while they walked. That part didn't make sense. There was no human logic behind staying on the ground, only blind animal logic.

There was another teardrop on the second-floor landing. It was in the corner, stabbing halfheartedly at the alarm siren above it on the ceiling. The thrusts pierced the metal case without really damaging it, slightly modulating the noise to a warbling scream, but not killing it.

Ben heard another scream behind him – the other employees reacting to their first sight of the things.

He spun around, putting his finger to his lips with all the intensity and meaning he could force into the motion.

They got the message quickly. The young woman had tears in her eyes now, the older woman's brown skin had practically gone gray, but they were all quiet. The weird looks they had been giving him transformed. Now he was a sage. A wormy prophet. They joined him on their hands and knees.

Ben jammed his index finger on his lips again, then pointed down the stairs.

The other employees crept past him. They went down the stairs on their butts, feet first, while Ben stayed locked in place.

The alien didn't stir as the others made their escape. He sat perfectly still, his eyes locked on the thing.

Now that he had a moment to sit and stare, he saw new details.

It didn't have a fixed number of legs. They appeared and disappeared, rotating in and out of its body, shadows lifting off its skin and gaining sudden reality, thrusting out, then sinking back into nothingness.

Its mouth was connected to a short fleshy tube that descended into its body for about a foot, then opened into a dark area. The 'throat' was wet and bubblegum pink, lined with round white teeth all the way down.

After half a minute of staring at it, Ben suddenly jumped. At some point, he'd slipped from watchful fear into fascination. Maybe the terror had pulped his brain, or sitting still for a minute under the cover of the fire alarm was close enough to safety that his brain had decided to rest.

The stairway was clear. The thing was still picking at the siren. He could go.

Feeling bold, he got to his feet. He reached the stairs and took the first step. The fire alarm stopped.

In the buzzing silence, screams echoed up the stairwell from the floors below.

Something heavy slammed into Ben's back, hard and textured, with long legs prickling at his clothes and exposed forearms. The alien thing was going for the new loudest sound, and Ben was in the way.

He fell forward, pushed to the ground. He raised his arms to protect his face. The sharp corners of the steps kicked him in the ribs and hips. He forcibly swallowed the yell of pain that would have got him speared.

He snapped up and grabbed one of the thing's legs as it passed – why? – but it just pulled through, slipping out of his grip like he was trash that had caught on a shoe.

He looked up and saw it disappearing down the stairwell. It had a weird way of moving. It didn't scuttle. It kind of bobbed, using its dozens of legs to grab handholds on the walls and ceiling, pulling itself along like a wasp's nest swinging along monkey bars.

He pulled himself up, wincing at the pain from the fall, and followed it down.

He moved like a ghost, tip-toeing after it, the shadow of a shadow. Briefly, he was the predator, and the teardrop thing the unsensing prey, until he reached the ground floor of the building.

The fire doors onto the street were wide open. The road outside was strewn with cars, crashed and abandoned. Smoke rose above the city towers in the distance, and the smell of hot tar and burning plastic filled the air.

The teardrop thing stopped just inside the doors. The other people from the office were already there, standing utterly still and silent. The screaming hadn't come from them.

The scene struck Ben as surreal for a moment. The way everyone was standing around made it look like the alien thing was just hanging out with them. Then the screaming came again, from outside, and the teardrop lurched out through the doors.

Ben stepped very reluctantly to the door, following it with his eyes.

The street was a nightmare. There was blood and body parts. People had died out there, and they weren't the weird, dry deaths of the teardrop things. There were severed hands, scraps of scalp, torn bloody clothes.

There were more monsters out there, but of a different type. These were like starfish, each about the size of a truck cab, with six or more sinuous arms, their skin a soft and glistening coral-brown.

The source of the screaming was a man hiding in a car. As Ben watched, slack-jawed, a starfish tore the roof off the car, lifted the vehicle off the ground, and tipped it so that he slid out into its central mouth, like a CEO slurping the clam out of a shell.

Blood spurted out of the thing's gnashing hole, a red jet six feet long, and the man was just gone. All Ben could think was, At least he's dead.

"The world's gone to hell," the older woman muttered beside him, her tone saying she meant it in a completely literal way.

Ben glanced at the teardrop thing, but the starfish had dropped the car, and the thing was moving towards the sound of crashing metal, lurching like an insectile tumbleweed, drunk and unstable, clearly not in its element on the open flat ground.

"I don't know what to do," Ben said.

Speaking felt like rebellion. Somewhere in the last few minutes, any sound had become taboo. Making noise just to speak struck him as obscene.

He shook the feeling off. The nearest teardrop was ambling towards the wrecked car. The starfish... who knew how they hunted. It was forty feet away anyway.

The woman looked up and down the street. She seemed strangely disaffected, demonstrating an immense power of calm, or just that she'd unhooked herself from reality.

She shrugged. "Run and hide. Run and hide."

Ben nodded. That resonated with him. Their strategy had to be the strategy of worms.