The state of the roads and what they could see of the inside of buildings told a story: monsters had appeared on the street, people had abandoned their cars and run into buildings for shelter, where they'd only found more monsters.

As they crept along the streets, they passed restaurants where tables and chairs had been toppled, and storefronts where black-bodied harvestmen hung only a sheet of glass away, like ghoulish alien mannequins waiting to be dressed.

As well as evidence of violence, they kept coming across scenes where it looked like people had just vanished.

They passed a yellow school bus where something had torn the driver out, leaving the smashed windshield smeared with blood and scraps of blue-collar shirt, but the actual seats were untouched, with little school bags sitting lonely and unattended on seats and the floor.

"Did any of you hear anything while this was happening?" Ben asked the others.

There was so much chaos on the streets. There should have been shouts, screaming. Ben had been in the meeting, but the others had to have been at their desks, maybe even with windows overlooking the street.

"I heard a car crash," Monroe said. "Maybe twenty minutes before the alarm went off."

"I heard screaming downstairs," Dawn said. "Not too unusual. I just thought someone was having a bad day."

It had all happened so quickly. Like a sluice had opened and flooded every building and splashed into every room. Humanity had been so safe, at least from everything except itself. They'd thought they were untouchable.

What if the whole world had been wiped out in the span of thirty minutes, with barely a cry of alarm to signal it?

"I don't think it happened all at once," Ben said. His gaze snagged on a Liberty bumper sticker, cut in half when the car's trunk lid had been torn off its hinges. "Carl at West Village was fine fifteen minutes before we stopped at the store. My guess is, either it's moving in a wave cross-country, east to west, or it's stochastic. Random spots at random times."

Ben liked the first explanation more than the second. If it was a wave that'd passed, then the appearance of the monsters was something that had already happened. If it was random, then it was something that could still be ongoing, and that meant it could still get worse.

"Maybe we should grab a car," Monroe said.

Of all of them, Monroe had been complaining the most, and they were still less than halfway to Bowen's Bridge, the historic wooden bridge that went over the Harraseeket River.

It would be two more miles until they got clear of the city proper. After that, they'd make it onto the straightaway of the highway, where visibility might be good enough to let them use a car without worrying about attracting monsters hidden on side roads and in buildings.

Only seconds after Monroe had spoken, a low hum became audible somewhere off to the right, past the corner of the intersection they were coming upon.

The noise gradually grew until Ben recognized it as the sound of an engine, something going fast in high gear, speeding towards the crossroads up ahead.

There was a screech of brake pads on steel as a convertible skidded into view, swerving to avoid abandoned cars. Seconds later, an explosion of breaking glass rang out across the street. Windows on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings ruptured as harvestmen leaped out into the air.

It seemed like every building within twenty feet of the passing soft-top had at least a couple of the alien creatures waiting inside, all flying out of the dark interiors like spiders caught on the wind.

Most of them missed the car and did their best to chase after it with their unbalanced out-of-element gait.

One landed on the passenger side of the car, but was thrown clear when the driver clipped an abandoned security van.

One of the harvestmen looked different to Ben. It was bigger, an oval lozenge-shaped body instead of a teardrop, held horizontal to the ground by eight or more legs spreading out from four distinct parts of its body. It looked more like an actual animal than the rest, which might as well have been blown up viruses.

When the bigger huntsman landed, missing the car, it recovered in less than a second, then started scuttling forward in pursuit. Its octopedal body plan and gait made it a lot faster over the open ground than its ponderous cousins, and it looked to be moving as fast as the car.

It caught up before the convertible had even finished crossing the intersection. From five feet away, it jumped, dropped a pair of legs toward the car's hood, and skewered the engine, all in a single sub-second movement.

The front of the car popped like a balloon. The engine died in a gout of flame and a drowning scream of tortured metal.

Screeching tires. The car fishtailed then spent the rest of its momentum against the side of a crashed electric SUV, broadcasting a dull crunch.

The cloud of harvestmen caught up in seconds.

They zeroed in on the front of the car, striking at the hissing engine block with clawed legs. They didn't seem to care that it was just hot metal, peeling away fragments of the hood, chowing down on torn steel sheeting and glass.

The bigger harvestman pierced the remains of the engine, tearing it out of the car with apparent ease, then bundled it up like candy-floss and disappeared it into a quivering mouth.

The driver, a heavy-set guy with yellow hair and a chin wide enough that it was apparent from fifty feet away, was trapped in his seat by a cage of shifting black spears.

Ben crouched, unslinging the hiking backpack off his shoulder and onto the sidewalk. He pulled out a set of the kids' walkie-talkies, turned them on, and threw one of them over-arm in the direction of the intersection.

The little radios had a paddle on the side to press when the user was talking, but they also had an alert button that would generate a loud beeping noise to get the other person's attention.

The one he'd thrown landed thirty feet away, its rubber case bouncing once before it settled.

Ben pushed the paddle on the side of the one in his hand and started mashing the alert button, desperate to draw the harvestmen off the car.

Distantly, the tossed device started beeping. It was loud enough to hear from where they were standing, but not loud enough for the harvestmen attacking the car to go for it.

Ben briefly considered screaming at the distant alien mass, but that'd be insane. Even if he were on his own with nobody else around him at risk, it would still be insane.

The driver tried to slip out under the barrier of thin limbs, but as soon as he pulled the handle to open the door, they turned on him.

Like a flock of crows descending on a baguette, they fluttered around and obscured him.

After a few seconds, he appeared again, lifted aloft and out of reach by the largest harvestmen, which bundled him up like a pancake and disappeared him like it'd done with the engine. Ben was forced to hope he was dead. There was no way he should have survived being rolled up like that.

The entire group stood there silent for a minute.

"He wasn't even driving the right way," Hayden said quietly. "The bridge is the other way."

They switched to the other side of the street and kept heading forwards, trying to skirt the crowd of now silent sentinel aliens.

The noise of the car had drawn crowds of the creatures out of every building and Ben and his group were forced to get within twenty feet of the mass to navigate a route around them.

Even knowing the things could only sense sound, it was a gut-watering five minutes. Slow, silent walking. Praying that nobody sneezed. Praying that nobody coughed. Hoping Eve wouldn't decide to have another inexplicable outburst.

As they were passing the tail end of the crowd, Ben saw another harvestman that looked different to the others.

He had trouble working out exactly what was wrong with it, until the constant shifting of its legs turned its body, and he got a look from a better angle.

The thing had a face – a human face – emerging from its black surface, like a swimmer surfacing for air.

The face had belonged to a man, maybe in his late twenties, with light brown skin and a patch of curly hair hanging off the edge of his forehead.

He was dead, now. His features were slack and his eyes were glassy and vacant, but as the thing twisted and the face turned towards them, the harvestman froze. It took a faltering step towards them, then another, then it started waddling with intention behind its movements.

Ben had the sudden and certain realization that it could see them through the guy's dead eyes.

"It can see us," Ben whispered. "Go, go, go." He patted Hayden and Dawn on the back as he started to fast-walk back away, his eyes locked on the thing, moving with silent toe-to-heel steps for fear of the blind aliens still crowding around.

The others turned around and instantly realized what was happening. Hayden visibly stifled a scream at seeing the vacant face, and Monroe started dashing away in a full sprint.

Everyone followed suit, sprinting, heedless of the noise.

They were running for a few seconds before Ben realized Hayden wasn't with them.

He stuttered to a stop and turned to look behind them.

Hayden was standing still in the street, facing the oncoming creature, shaking the spray cans in her hands.

He turned around and started half-stepping back towards her, already running mental simulations of how he'd drag her out of the monster's grip after it attacked.

As the face-creature reached spitting distance, Hayden raised both improvised flamethrowers and fired twin jets of fire straight into it.

The thing showed no sign of pain, and its dusty skin remained unmarred, but the human face burned. Corpse skin blackened. Dead eyes went cloudy and burst in streams of milky tears. Suddenly blind, the creature stopped.

It stood, still, waiting for a sound. With the face ruined, it was left without a reason to move. Clearly the things didn't have much short term memory.

Hayden turned and retched, spitting a mouthful of acid onto the blacktop.

Ben caught her by the shoulder and pulled her back, as even that slight noise drew the blinded harvestman forward a step.

After that, they all ran.

They ran for minutes at a time, tiring themselves out, Monroe's complaining endless, backpacks cutting into shoulders, until they were all sweating and foot-sore. The human body was built for long-distance running, but the average office worker wasn't.

They made it out of the built-up city, into widely spaced leafy suburbs, then to the urban foothills of the highway, where the road was left stranded between walls of patchy forest and sprawling acres of wild brush on either side.

They dodged two starfish on the way, both in squash-form. They were ominously quiet, like they were waiting — or pupating.

They'd walked, jogged, and dragged themselves six miles, with the four more ahead of them getting increasingly hard to face.

It was more than just the effort of walking for Ben — he'd been on longer hikes — but being on edge for that long, all of it under threat, was giving him full-body aches and nervous mental exhaustion. The itching on his chest was getting worse, like crawling ants.

Visibility was good on the road. There were very few parked or crashed cars outside of the city, as if whatever traffic there'd been had just moved on and never been replaced from behind. They could see a good half-mile in either direction, and it looked free from harvestmen and starfish. What they could see of the brush at either side of the road was similarly empty.

After a few minutes on the highway Ben stopped walking, and the others slowed to a stop next to him.

They gathered in a loose circle like they were anticipating a conversation. Monroe tried to sit down on the iron divider between lanes, couldn't get comfortable on the thin strip of metal, then stood back up.

"How do we feel about stopping to rest?" Ben asked, glancing at the walls of trees beside the road, then at a cluster of buildings surrounding a rest stop fifty yards ahead.

Dawn groaned in relief. "Thank God. I didn't think anyone was going to say anything."

Monroe muttered an aggrieved affirmative. He'd been voicing similar thoughts the whole way, but nobody had been listening.

"We're more than halfways there," Hayden said. "We can be there in less than an hour if we keep going."

"I'm thinking, we've still got hours of daylight, and right now, we're not in a state to run if we have to," Ben said. He turned to look at Eve, standing between him and Monroe. "Me, Dawn and Monroe want to rest. Hayden wants to keep going. Eve, what's your vote?"

"Well, I think the decision to stop and rest already has a majority-" Dawn said.

Eve swayed slightly, looking from one person to the next, a half smile on her face. "I get to decide?"

"No," Dawn said.

"You get a vote, sure," Ben said. "Let's hear from everyone."

For all that he didn't trust Eve's judgement, it'd be better if she knew she had a voice.

"Let's go back there," she said, pointing her knife back in the direction of the city.

Ben doubled down on his assessment of her judgement.

"Okay, and one for... going back to the monster-infested city," Ben said, before turning and saying, "Let's rest up at that service station up there."

~

They approached the buildings cautiously.

The little way-stop had a gas station and a repair shop, with a tiny souvenir shop tacked on at the edge. There was also a cafe, Bart's Diner, sitting on the opposite side of the highway with its own parking lot.

They headed for the diner, walking around it in a circuit first, peering through the glass front and the high windows at the back.

It looked empty and deserted, despite the pair of cars in the parking lot. They spent a minute doing their best to confirm it was clear of of any kind of alien, before approaching the front door.

Ben went in first, wincing at an electric boop that went off as the door opened. Dawn and Hayden followed him, then Monroe and Eve.

There were plates on tables with half-eaten meals. Cups of coffee and milkshakes on the bar.

There was still some food sitting under heat lamps behind the counter: limp bacon, a gallon pan of beans, some room-temperature mashed potato, and half a banoffee pie. After checking the storeroom and bathrooms, Ben and the others didn't hesitate to plate themselves up some lunch.

It wasn't until they were all sat together spread across two tables that they realized none of them could summon up the appetite to eat.

~

Ben stood in front of the bathroom mirror. He thought that he looked haggard beyond belief, like he'd gone three nights without sleep. He drew his hands over his cheeks, stretching out the bags under his bloodshot eyes. He was a mess. He needed a shower and a nap.

He idly scratched at his chest, then pulled the collar of his shirt down, hesitatingly, worried about what kind of stress rash he'd got this time.

He stopped as his fingers brushed against something.

A lump. Rough, uneven skin. Worryingly numb to his touch.

He undid the top few buttons of his work shirt, then pulled it open.

There was some kind of growth on his chest.

It was the same color as the rest of his skin, but ribbed, and bulging. A hand-length lozenge of rough, numb, hairless flesh, like a cyst or a tumor.

"What the fuck!"

He pressed at it with a finger, finding a squishy, doughy consistency, like it was half full of liquid.

He probed at one of the deeper ridges, a striation almost like a horizontal slit or bloodless cut.

The tumor's eye opened.

Ben was aware of himself yelling — screaming — but he didn't realize how much or how loud until the bathroom door burst open.

Hayden leaned through, WD-40 flamethrower in hand.

"You okay?" she asked.

Ben pulled his shirt closed on instinct. He didn't immediately answer.

The itching, crawling sensation reasserted itself from his chest. Even worse, now that he knew what it was, he had a psychological itch, the feeling of the knowledge of something infiltrating his skin.

He hesitated to answer, feeling... what? Shame. Sudden self-revulsion. Fear.

So far, he'd been a human among monsters. He'd run and he'd escaped. No. He only thought he'd escaped.

The alien forces, whatever they were, they'd got him. He'd become part of events. He'd been compromised.

He pictured the human face emerging from the harvestmen, and despite still being alive and in control, he felt some kinship with that dead face, as something subsumed.

"I— I have a tendency to spiral," he said to Hayden.

She raised an eyebrow. It didn't make sense to her, but he'd needed to remind himself.

Hayden ducked back out of the bathroom with an okay expression.

Ben's chest itched, and his skin crawled. He felt infected, colonized.

He needed a second opinion. He needed someone else to bring him out of his head and into a more measured reality. Not Hayden, though.

After a few seconds, Ben followed her to the door and leaned out, looking around until he saw Dawn.

"Hey, Dawn?" he called. "Can you come in here for a minute? I need to show you something."

Dawn turned away from the coffee she was pouring and gave him a long, penetrating look.

"In the bathroom?"

Ben nodded, grimacing.

She walked up slowly, an unimpressed expression on her face. Ben led her inside, waited for the door to close, then turned to face her.

"I'm going to show you something. But, I need you to not scream. I think I need your advice. I just need someone to see it."

"I don't think I want to see what you think I want to see," she drawled.

Ben waved a hand in negation.

"I've got... an eye tumor. It's, look—"

He pulled his shirt open quickly before he could second-guess himself.

The mass on his chest sat exposed in the air.

There was movement under the skin, an eyeball rotating in an alien version of REM. With an almost inaudible click of wet flesh separating, the eyelid lifted.

"Woah. Fuck!" Dawn spat, backing off a step.

She held back, half turning back to the door, eyes wide with a hand to her mouth. After a few seconds, probably after seeing Ben fail to transform into a slavering monster, she stepped forward again, peering down, disgusted and fascinated.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "Is it alive?"

The eye turned to look at her.

She backed off again. "Oh wow."

"Wow — no. Not wow. How do we get it off," Ben asked.

"I don't know. I don't know. Maybe we could... we could lance it?"

A slit along the ridge of flesh opened — a mouth — and the lump hissed at her.

"Okay. Okay," she said.

"Okay," Ben repeated.

"Okay no. I guess not."

"It doesn't like that idea," Ben said.

"Does it hurt?"

Ben let out a breath and shook his head. "It itches."

They stood in silence for half a minute, staring at each other.

Dawn caught Ben's eye, and something she saw in his expression broke the tension. She started laughing. Ben let out a single laugh in answer despite himself, a hysterical the-worlds-gone-to-shit bark.

The mouth of the eye-growth opened and it started hissing aggressively. That set Dawn off again, even as it sobered Ben.

He turned back to the mirror and started buttoning his shirt back up.

"What are you going to do about it?" she asked.

"I'm thinking... it's a wart," Ben said. "A weird, ugly wart. If aliens and monsters are the new normal, then this is normal. It's just a skin problem. The harvestmen, the starfish, they're dangerous, they're terrifying. This is just alien dermatitis."

Dawn shook her head, smiling sadly.

"If they've got any doctors at the Bridge shelter, maybe they can take it out," Ben added.

They were interrupted by panicked screaming coming from somewhere else in the diner.

Dawn was the first to move, marching for the bathroom door. Ben checked his shirt and dashed after her.

He got back into the main room of the diner where Dawn was already standing, on edge, looking around. Apart from her, the room was empty.

A second later, the scream came again, coming from the back door. Ben sprinted towards it and burst through into the stockroom.

It took him a moment to process the scene. Monroe the intern was lying on his back on the concrete floor. Eve, her back to the door, was straddling his waist, with her hands out of sight in front of her.

He almost backed out, but Monroe caught sight of him and raised his head.

"Help me!"

Ben stepped forward, and Eve snapped her head around to look at him: a one-hundred-eighty degree Exorcist turn, punctuated by a slapping, cracking sound as her own spinal column separated into two pieces.

She was smiling at him – a stretched, gleeful grin.

Without taking her eyes off Ben, she raised her right hand, the steel of the knife glinting in the light from the high windows, then brought it down on Monroe's chest, again and again, in slow, clumsy strikes, like a toddler trying to paint.

Monroe screamed, trying to stop her hands, but he was too squeamish to put his hands in the way of the blade and he couldn't get a grip on her wrists.

Ben rushed forward. He grabbed Eve's arm and shoulder and tried to pull her off Monroe, but her head rolled at an impossible angle, her mouth coming close enough to Ben's for a kiss and snapping at his nose instead.

Ben rolled back in fear and disgust, letting go of her arm.

Eve raised the knife high in the air and brought it down in a single, heavy, precise motion, stabbing it into the center of Monroe's chest.

A second later, she was scrabbling towards Ben, scuttling insect-like with her chest pointing at the roof and her upright face turned towards him, her arms bent backward to support her weight.

Ben stumbled away, putting his back to the shelving against the wall.

Eve rose to her feet too, hobbling backward towards him, knife held in a strange reverse grip, grinning.

He didn't have anything. The hatchet was back at the table. He didn't have any weapons.

He reached out for the shelves, looking for anything, and his hand found a pack of instant noodles. He tossed it at Eve, but it just bounced harmlessly off her face.

She raised the knife in a double-handed grip, and Ben put his hands up, preparing to take the cuts on his arms to save his face.

Two gunshots rang out. One blast, deafening in the small space, then another.

Eve slumped, sinking slowly to the ground, her head a red ruin.

Ben stayed frozen for a moment, still flinching, hands still covering his head, then he slowly lowered his arms.

Dawn was standing in the doorway, feet apart, shoulders squared, holding a small black handgun in both hands.

She shook slightly, her hands trembling even as she kept the gun fixed on Eve's body.

Ben's chest was heaving. He could see Dawn was panting, too. He let himself look down at the ruined body of the person they'd known as Eve.

Had she even been human? Her blood was red enough.

He drew his hand across his mouth. He was used to suppressing nausea by now. He found himself looking around the room, still packed with tension that had nowhere to go. His gaze landed on Dawn.

His eyes fell on the weapon in her hands. "How long have you had a gun?"

Dawn forced out a breath, then slid the gun back into an under-arm holster hidden under her suit jacket.

"Did you bring a gun to work!?" Ben asked, incredulous.

Dawn finished putting the gun away, then closed her jacket. Her voice was quiet and unrepentant. "I just like to know it's there."

Ben gestured at her helplessly. "That's the most fucked-up thing I've heard today!"

The thing that had been Eve suddenly lurched upright, leaping to its feet with a wet, cackling, booming, unhinged laugh.

It raised the knife, angled to sink it into Ben's eye.

Something moved at Ben's chest. The top of his shirt popped open. Two long bootstrap-thin tendrils snapped out, slashing back and forth through the air at Eve with a noise like cracking whips.

Where they touched her skin, they cut, making deep lacerations, severing her ruined head from her body, dismembering her arms from her torso.

The Eve-thing fell to the ground in pieces.

Horrified, gripping the shelves to stop his legs going out from under him, Ben caught the sight of the tendrils being pulled back into the mouth of the thing on his chest.

The images, and the sensations, and the implications were too much for Ben in that moment. The world narrowed to a point, then became blackness.

~

Ben was suddenly in the diner, lying on one of the cracked vinyl benches. His head was pounding, and his lips felt dry and cracked.

There was an open first aid kit sitting on the table, and Monroe lay across from him on the booth's other bench.

Monroe's shirt was off, and there was a broad adhesive bandage stuck on his chest — and he was alive. He was staring at Ben, eyes only half-open, an unhappy expression on his face.

"Thanks," he said to Ben.

Ben stretched, feeling his head for bumps, then sat up. "I thought she'd got you."

"Knife caught in my breastbone. Hayden says."

"Did you get any idea what was going on?" Ben asked. "Did she say anything before she attacked you? Any sign of what she was?"

Monroe shook his head.

Ben was shaken, but he wasn't really hurt. He'd got a cut on his forehead at some point, which someone had stuck a band-aid over.

He turned himself around on the bench, putting his legs under the table. He suddenly remembered the wart and his hand went to his chest. Someone had buttoned his shirt back up.

Monroe wasn't acting scared or freaked out. Maybe Dawn hadn't told anyone.

Are you going to be a problem? he thought at it.

Ben had a sudden fear that the thing might lash out at Monroe, like it had at Eve.

He covered it defensively with his hand. After several seconds had passed without fresh violence, he pulled his hand back and peeked down at the growth. No movement.

The thing must have been sitting under his shirt for the whole walk out of the city without attacking anyone. It hadn't even made an aggressive move in the bathroom when it had hissed at Dawn.

He slowly lowered his hand back into his lap.

"So," Ben started lamely.

"My name isn't really Monroe," Monroe said suddenly.

"What?"

"My name. It's Derek. I don't even work at your company. I just come in sometimes to use the showers on the third floor after I go to the gym at lunch. I was a real asshole to the desk guard the one time he clocked me, and after that, he just assumed I worked there and let me pass."

Ben held up his hands, palms out. "Okay."

The electric door chime went, and Ben twisted to see Hayden entering the diner.

"You're up," she said, tossing a camping shovel onto a table.

Hayden wasn't looking at him weirdly either, not like he was infected, or a threat. She didn't even glance at his chest.

"I guess I fainted?" Ben asked.

"Dawn says so. Eve was some kind of alien, huh?"

Ben nodded weakly, turning back to the table. He was suddenly hungry. He got up and found the food he'd plated up earlier.

"We're calling them demon zombies," Monroe said.

"We're not calling them that," Hayden said. "I just got finished burning what was left of... her."

Ben started tucking into banoffee pie.

"Look, I know no-one's up for more walking, but we're losing daylight," Hayden said.

Ben pushed his plate away, idly scratching at the itch in his chest before he remembered what was there and pulled his hand back.

They packed up their stuff, along with a little extra food, and congregated on the highway outside.

Ben had his pack over one shoulder and held his camping hatchet in his other hand, though by then, he trusted that none of the others were demon zombies, unless they were a variety with more chill than Eve had shown.

The gas station had a handcart piled high with bags of firewood, and Ben offered to empty it out for Monroe to ride in, but the man waved the offer off. He was in pain, but apparently he could still walk.

They set off in the opposite direction to the city, heading out towards Bowen's Bridge.

Over the next hour the sun sank towards the horizon behind them, breaking free of the clouds and painting the sky orange-gold.

They caught sight of the shelter before they even broke tree cover. Lights in the sky.

There was some kind of sleek white craft hanging in the air above the woodland ahead. As big as a battleship, its shape was equidistant between dolphin, cuttlefish, and slime mold. The smooth porcelain skin of the craft was dotted almost at random by dark circular windows, and a band of scintillating white lights ran its horizontal circumference.

The group stopped in the middle of the road just to stare at it for a minute. Nobody spoke. That sight, more than anything, rammed home the idea that Earth was now inhabited by aliens. There was life out there, and most of it was awful.

Dusk was rising in the eastern sky when the highway finally broke tree cover, and they saw the shelter they'd been headed towards.

Past the old colonial bridge, the Bowen's Bridge Visitor Center was a single-story complex made up of four or five connected buildings, with a food stand and a parking lot off to the side.

There were people standing around outdoors, some human, others unnaturally tall figures in seamless white armor with the same look as the vessel above.

The white-armored figures, and even some of the humans, were carrying what were unmistakably weapons — sleek white rifle-looking devices in some cases, boxy green metal rods in others.

"Looks like it's aliens all over," Dawn said.

As they reached the old wooden bridge and started to cross, one of the figures in white spotted them and moved away from the structure, heading towards the shelter-side of the bridge.

From the way the regular people were just standing around outside, Ben reasonably assumed that he'd finally reached a place of relative safety. But with the suspicious way the distant humans were watching the armored figures, and being guarded closely in return, he decided that this was probably going to be complicated.