The run through the streets was breathless and disorganized.

At some point, they'd picked up another straggler, a brown-haired woman in her thirties who'd been hiding under a car. She had a messenger bag hanging over the shoulder of a denim jacket, with a graphic tee of a horror movie Ben didn't know. She moved with a weird calmness and wore a barely suppressed smirk on her face, like she found the whole alien invasion thing funny.

They ran in single file, bent over with their upper bodies practically parallel to the ground, going as fast as they could without turning the patter of their footsteps into a sound that would carry.

Ben went first, with the four others following behind.

Appearing to know what was going on when the other employees first ran into him had dressed him in a thin, patchy coat of authority. It was inevitable that it would vanish when he started talking, but for now, they followed him, even though he was only running as blindly and senselessly as the rest. Where was he going? Run. Why were they even moving? Run.

A hundred yards from the office, the street was just as messy. Some cars had rolled to a gentle stop, like the driver had just vanished. They passed a hybrid where the engine was still running, keys hanging from the steering column with all the doors locked. Other cars had swerved in panic, crashing into each other, lampposts, walls. Some were crushed, or torn open, or had been tossed into unlikely parking spots at odd angles.

After a couple of minutes of running, they were forced to stop. A starfish alien sat in the middle of the road, twenty feet ahead. If they hadn't passed a break in the crashed cars that just happened to line up, they might have been on top of it before they knew it was there.

It looked like it had settled down. The thing had rolled on its face and tessellated its legs together, making a flattened ball shape, like a wet, slippery autumn squash. It wouldn't have looked out of place sitting in a straw basket in an Instagram photo of a thanksgiving dinner, assuming the dinner table had been sprayed with thick, mucosal slime beforehand.

Ben stopped and crouched down, taking cover behind a flatbed truck. The others seemed to take that as a sign that they were going to have a conference, since they clustered around him with expectant expressions.

"There's a starfish up ahead," Ben whispered. "What do we want to do?"

The older woman with the up-do glanced at the row of buildings behind them.

"I want to find someplace with strong doors and supplies, and bunker down until help comes," she said.

"There might be teardrops in the buildings," Ben countered.

"What? There might be what?" The intern interrupted. "What are teardrops?"

"The spider balls," Ben said. "The ones that chased us out."

"Oh. I call them harvestmen," the intern said. "In my mind. That's what I call them. They're these little headless spider things you get in the country. They look like them."

"That's too much effort to say," Ben said, "They're teardrops."

"I've been calling them daddy longlegs in my mind," the younger woman from the office said.

Ben waved his hands like he was fighting off a swarm of flies, falling back on hand-talking as if he were in a boring afternoon meeting and not in a flight for his life.

"No. Can we please stick with teardrops?"

There was a round of silent agreement.

"I'd rather run into a teardrop than a starfish," the woman with the up-do said.

It was easy for her to say that. She hadn't seen a teardrop eat someone.

Ben found that he was suddenly shaking. He put a hand to his forehead, covering his eyes.

He was suddenly back in that tight, cramped office. He was looking into Mr. Cunningham's tortured eyes.

In his memory, Alan was whispering to Ben, pleading for help. In his memory, Alan hadn't died. He'd been eaten alive, continuing to shout for help from inside the thing in a voice that came from the bottom of a laundry basket.

That hadn't happened in real life, Ben told himself. Alan had died quickly. He'd seen him die.

The woman with the up-do reached out and grabbed Ben's hand. She squeezed it. Her touch, awkward and clammy, sent emotional lightning down his arm. It put breath back in his lungs.

He held her hand back with a desperate grip. The memory faded.

He was back in the moment, feeling the breeze on his neck, tasting salt on his lips, smelling gasoline and burning tar and the blood that'd splashed in the gutters.

He looked around the group, his gaze going face to face. The intern was looking away awkwardly. The younger woman was staring at the balled-up starfish over the hood of the truck. The woman they'd picked up on the journey was staring at him, giving him a wide smile that showed all her teeth.

"So, where do we want to go?" Ben asked when he'd recovered.

~

It turned out they wanted to go to the nearest place with open space and steel doors, which ended up being the brown-brick loading dock of a Target on the next street over.

The younger woman from the office had had an offline map of the local streets on her phone – she'd been at the office for a job interview – and she pointed out a route through an alley that would let them get there without getting near any starfish.

They talked on the way, speaking in whispers no louder than their footsteps.

Ben found out the older woman was called Dawn, a name he recognized from Leith Dynamic Intelligence as a silent entity who'd presided over email chains, and a person of interest in a few client relationships, but not someone he'd ever communicated with directly before.

The younger woman was called Hayden. She didn't talk a lot.

The intern said he was called Monroe, but neither of the other two really knew him, and he'd failed to answer to it once, and it was such a weird name that Ben thought maybe he'd made it up on the spot.

The last one, the woman they'd picked up on the way, said her name was Eve. She'd said it with a smile, but hadn't spoken apart from that. She was even cagier than Hayden.

It took ten minutes to work their way through the alley, which opened out at the back of the Target, meaning they didn't need to risk finding out what was on the far street in order to get access.

They all stopped at the steel shutters of the loading bay.

The truck parking area was empty of vehicles, but there was a gasoline generator sitting in one corner, and a stack of white breeze blocks on a pallet by the chain gate.

Two of the rolling metal shutters were closed, but the third was open a crack. About a foot-and-a-half-high band of darkness showed underneath the bottom of the shutter, opening on the dark interior of the loading dock.

Ben got close to the floor a good six feet from the shutter, looking through the gap.

"Anyone got a light?" he whispered. In the eerie silence, it carried to the others.

Hayden turned the flashlight of her phone on and passed it to him. He stared at it a second and tried pointing it at the shutter. It did exactly nothing to light anything. He passed it back.

Eve appeared in Ben's field of vision, staggering towards the shutters. She had an unsteady, unbalanced gait that made her seem drunk. She cupped her hands around her mouth and he realized what she was about to do a second before she did it.

"Hello!" she shouted. Her voice was loud enough to make the entire shutter rattle in sympathetic vibration.

She burst into laughter as Hayden rushed her, trying to put a hand over her mouth.

"Hello! Hello!"

Ben dealt with the now surely incoming monsters by lying down flat on his back and closing his eyes. The blacktop was hard on the back of his head, the ground cool.

He could be debris. He was inanimate, like the breeze blocks and generator. Not a living thing to be consumed. He breathed slowly. Silent, shallow breaths, as he waited for something to come and kill them.

He felt a poking in his side. He opened his eyes to see Dawn crouching on the ground, squinting down at him.

"You had a bad time, didn't ya."

Eve had stifled her giggles. She was sitting on the pallet of blocks, Hayden sitting next to her with what was probably meant to be a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Ben sat up.

"Do you think, if there were something in there, it would have come out by now?" he asked.

"That's logical," Dawn said.

"Okay," he said, taking a breath and looking at the shutter. "Okay."

He twisted to get on his hands and knees, then started crawling towards the gap. The light inside was dim. He could see maybe five feet into the space.

He put his body close to the ground and pushed himself forward, slipping his head through the gap under the shutter to the sound of an "oh noo" from the intern behind him.

After a few seconds his eyes adjusted and he could see to the back wall. It looked empty. He remembered that the teardrops liked to hang from ceilings, so he looked up. The ceiling was also bare. To all appearances the loading bay was completely empty.

He twisted, looking back out at the others.

"It looks okay. I'll try and find the door switch."

The concrete floor was cool and smooth. Traction was an issue. After a second of screwing around on his belly, Ben rolled onto his back and used his shoes for grip, his weight on his feet and elbows. The ceiling slid into view above him as he inched through.

"I'm in. It's clear," he said a minute later, bent over to speak through the gap.

He stood up, looking around the space.

The room smelled of sawdust and cigarettes. The edges were cluttered: hand-carts, pallets, cardboard boxes, but nowhere big enough for a teardrop to hide.

There was an old beige-box computer set up on a messy workstation in the far corner. A screensaver running on the slightly more modern flat-screen was the only source of light.

A double security door stood at the far end of the room, probably leading to the main part of the store, and there was a second door on the right-hand wall. Both doors were shut tight.

He turned and scanned the wall until he spotted a dark shape against the slightly lighter background. He reached out to press the button for the shutter.

He realized he'd made a mistake when his fingers made contact. Instead of the square corners and plastic surface of a switch box, he touched something soft and tacky. It yielded under his fingers, lumpy and squirming, like a bunch of grapes wrapped in a wet handkerchief.

He snapped his hand back. An animal hissing came from the spot, then something thumped into his chest with the force of a thrown apple.

"Hey, are you okay?" Dawn's voice called from outside.

Hands and arms flew. Ben slapped at his chest and flailed in the air, trying to shoo off something completely lost to the dim light. He thought he heard something slap to the ground nearby, another hiss.

The light from outside dimmed as someone approached the gap, and then the shutter was sliding up, metal rattling as it rolled along tracks on the ceiling.

Daylight flooded into the room. Hayden was standing there, hands pushing the bottom of the shutter up.

She stopped when she saw Ben and jerked a thumb at the mechanism. "I think this is the manual type."

"There's uhh– something," Ben said, ignoring her and scanning the far edge of the room. "Like a bat, or a rat..."

Dawn looked him up and down.

"Something got you?"

Ben looked down at his chest, then patted his body down. No pains, no blood, no broken skin.

"It was hanging on the wall," he said.

"It wasn't a spider was it?" Hayden asked.

Ben felt the thing under his fingers again. A hand-sized blobby mass. He shook his head.

He turned and headed in the direction of the sound he'd heard before, cautiously shifting boxes and equipment, looking around the edge of the room.

After a few seconds, someone found the light switch, and white strip lighting flickered to life, casting the room in hard white light and sharp shadows.

There was the sound of the shutter closing again and the character of the light changed as daylight was shut out.

"See it?" Dawn asked.

"No. No sign of it," Ben said.

"Well, if it didn't kill you, maybe it's just their version of a bug."

"Don't like that."

Over the following minute, the others spread out across the room, finally finding a second of relative calm to rest.

The intern quietly opened up a folding chair that'd been leaning up against another of the shutters and sat on it. Hayden sat down on a short stack of wooden pallets and pulled out her phone, doing something offline on it. Eve walked slowly around the outside of the room, letting her hand brush along the bare brick wall, presumably grounding herself in sensation.

Dawn stood next to Ben, looking from one person to the next. She half turned to him and spoke in a confidential tone.

"Two of us have shit our pants. I'll let you try to guess which."

Ben followed her gaze for a second, looking around at them.

Dawn stepped away, making for the computer in the corner of the room where she sat down on the wobbly desk chair. She tapped a key to clear the screensaver, then started clicking around the cluttered desktop.

She brought up a window showing the outputs of six grainy security cameras. They showed the main area of the store. Shelves and empty isles and random products scattered over the floor.

"Looks like this is on the security network."

Ben leaned down to look over her shoulder.

"You seeing this?" she asked. "Got maybe eight harvestmen on the shop floor."

It took a few seconds for Ben to make them out. Dark teardrop shapes, standing on stacks of cans and hanging from the shelves like disturbing, alien promotional displays.

"There could be more above, too," Ben said. "These cameras point down, but they can climb."

Dawn pressed a key, bringing up another page of camera feeds. This page only had two images, one pointing out front showing the main street, the other giving an overview of the whole shop floor. There were two more of the shapes hanging off air conditioning ducts in the ceiling space.

"At least the street looks clear," Dawn said.

Dawn leaned back and a crumpled cigarette appeared in her hands. She stuck it between her lips and lit it with a blue-flame jet lighter, which went back into her suit jacket pocket afterward. She breathed in then filled the air with the smell of nicotine smoke.

"Does ANYBODY know what's going on here?" the intern said suddenly, breaking into the silence with a voice loud enough to make Ben glance nervously at the double doors.

Dawn rotated on the chair and shot him a withering glare. She flicked her hand at the doors to the shop floor.

"We've got about a dozen harvestmen through there," she said, quiet, but loud enough to carry.

The guy's eyes popped open wider. He got it. He lowered his voice.

"Does anybody know?" he repeated, quieter.

The intern and Dawn both turned and looked at Ben.

He shrugged. "Alien invasion?"

"These things didn't fly any spaceships," Dawn said. "They're like animals."

In the corner of the room, Eve started quietly laughing to herself.

"Maybe they're here by accident, like rats on settlers' ships," Hayden said, speaking while still messing with her phone. "Or maybe it's like national parks releasing wolves to get deer populations down, and they've been dropped here to hunt us."

"Do you have internet?" Ben asked Dawn. He could see an active network symbol at the edge of the screen.

She brought up a browser and tried the address for a search engine, then a couple of news sites, and a couple of message boards. Every attempt just came back with a site blocked message from some security company.

"Corporate firewall's got everything blacklisted," Dawn said. "Looks like we've got email though."

She hit an icon and the email client popped up. There was one unread message sitting at the top of the list.

Hey Zoanne. We're out of A-79811055 (overnight diapers) & ANGRY customer won't leave un-diapd. This is HER BRAND. Got anything your way? Couldn't get through on phone. Watching emails with bated breath.

Kind regards,

Carl

"This is from fifteen minutes ago," Ben said, leaning into Dawn's space to read off the time sent. "Maybe this is all just a local thing? Ask if he's got any teardrop aliens there."

"If you can think of a way to ask that, be my guest," Dawn said. She rolled the chair back and got out of it, muttering, "Alien invasion. I'm done sending emails."

Ben sat down and immediately hunched down over the keyboard.

Hey Carl. Quick question. Do you have any monsters there?

Kind regards,

Ben

He read the message over. He considered trying to be clearer or adding justification, or including some context, but really there wasn't any context he could add that would make sense. He sent it.

A reply popped in less than a minute later.

oh my fuck yes. What the fuck is going on. Zoanne? What's happening there?

Kind regards,

Carl

Ben replied.

This isn't Zoanne. She's gone. I'm Ben. What do you have there? Do they look like teardrop centipede things? If so they hunt by sound. Stay absolutely quiet and they won't see you.

Kind regards,

Ben

Another almost instant reply.

Fuck. fuck. Yes. They look like spiders. One of them ate Jerry. Oh god I can still hear him screaming. screaming from inside

Kind regards,

Carl

Dawn walked up behind Ben, looking down at the screen.

"We got life?" she asked.

"It's not local. It's happening at least as far as West Village. The other side of the city," Ben said, double checking the sender's email address. He was quiet for a minute. "My dad lives in Sherbrooke. Wonder if it's happening there. He's pretty quiet. He'd be at home."

He typed up another reply while Dawn read over his shoulder.

Okay, Carl, here's some things that might work:

They go for sound, any sound, so your phone playing music, a radio etc.

I think they go for the loudest sound. If you can set your building alarm off it will distract them and you can sneak out.

If you get outside, watch out for giant starfish! They can tear metal and will suck you up like an oyster.

Kind regards,

Ben

Dawn put a hand on Ben's shoulder.

A reply came in a minute later.

Okay. Thanks. Im going to do it. Ill try the fire alarm thing. Good luck man. If you see Zoanne can you tell her I always kind of had a crush on her? I know shes probably not interested but its the end of the world right. Anyway let her know. Okay. Im going now.

Kind regards, Carl

That turned out to be his last message. Ben hoped he'd got out, but in all likelihood, he'd never find out either way.

He was screwing around in the computer's files when he found a floorplan of the building.

"Dawn, look, I've got a map."

She came back over, looking over his shoulder with the cigarette held up by her head.

The loading bay's small door looked like it led to a corridor with a bathroom and a couple of offices, and a fire door at the far end. The double doors opened on a stockroom that hadn't showed up on the security feeds, and that had another pair of doors that led to the monster-infested shop floor.

"You want to loot a stockroom?" Ben asked, spinning on the chair.

~

Twelve-inch camping hatchet. Thermos hard plastic canteen. Child-safe pocket walkie-talkies (ten packs). Breathable waterproof rain jacket. 350-meter black steel flashlight. Pocket-sized windup FM radio. Glove-compartment first aid kit. Duck tape.

Ben was ready for a night screwing around in the woods, or an alien invasion.

Dawn had tossed a few bottles of mineral water and packs of nuts into a duffel and swapped her office shoes for a pair of box-new sneakers. Monroe the intern had copied her, and also found a hockey stick from somewhere. Ben wasn't sure that would be any use. Eve had picked out a foot-long carving knife from the kitchenware shelf and nothing else.

Dawn had torn some yoga mats out of their plastic wraps and was sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor in a circle with Eve, Monroe, and Ben.

Hayden had been screwing around in the stockroom for a few minutes after everyone else had finished, and the group looked up expectantly as she emerged.

"Damn, Hayden!" Dawn said, watching her return to the loading bay.

She was wearing a pair of belts across her chest, taped together to create loops, and loaded with half a dozen Molotov cocktails; little artisanal bottles labeled Silver Patron with the cut-up arms and legs of baby onesies hanging out of the necks. There were vertical red blocks of what looked like lipstick painted on her face, running down from her eyes, and she was carrying a pair of improvised flamethrowers, each one made out of a lighter stuck to a can of WD-40 with electrical tape. The runner's pack hanging across her shoulders was stuffed practically to explosion with bagged snacks and soda. Her hair was tied up in a neat bun.

"We're sitting?" she asked, putting the twin cans down on the floor and sitting down on a yoga mat.

"Ben's trying to get a radio signal," Dawn said.

Ben continued fiddling with the pocket radio, the volume turned way, way down.

None of the preset channels were working, nothing but static or silence. Now he was edging the manual tuner around, sweeping the signal bar through its range a fraction of a millimeter at a time.

He went at it for a few minutes, nobody wanting to speak, until a coherent sound appeared in the hissing static, and a male voice started trickling out of the speaker.

"To anyone left alive, temporary shelters are being organized. Make your way to the following locations. In Lewiston: Central Maine Community College by Lake Auburn, and the Auburn-Lewiston airport off route 202. In Brunswick: Brunswick Station. In Augusta: the Augusta State Airport. In Port Cardigan: Bowen's Bridge Visitor Center."

"Bowen's Bridge is what, ten miles from here?" Ben said, speaking over the rest of the list the tinny voice was reading out.

"Shush," Dawn snapped, turning up the volume on the radio fractionally.

"The creatures that have appeared are all dangerous and should be avoided if possible. The round spiders hunt by sound, and can be distracted by sound. Use firecrackers or portable stereos. The starfish creatures seem to follow scent and ground vibration. The use of cars and vehicles is not recommended."

"The mutants are also extremely dangerous and cannot be reasoned with. The holographic people may seem normal, but can be dangerous. Please, please check that anyone traveling with you physically exists. Make your way to a temporary shelter if you can. Tell anyone you meet on the way. We are getting help. This message repeats."

Ben and Dawn shared a long glance. She reached out to mush a hand against his face at the same moment he put a hand on her shoulder and shook it.

"Do you think that's what he means?" Ben asked.

Dawn drew her gaze across the others. Her expression was half checked-out, half immensely unimpressed.

"Hey Eve, give me five," Ben said, holding a hand out to her.

She looked up from the floor and fixed her flat eyes on him.

"Can you give me five?" he repeated.

Eve's smile expanded. "Five what?"

"Just, touch my hand."

Her smile didn't waver as she reached out her free hand – the one not holding the knife – and touched his fingertips. Her skin was cold and clammy. Feverish, Ben thought.

He repeated the question to Monroe and Hayden. Monroe wound up and slapped his hand too hard, leaving his palm stinging. Hayden slapped his hand, then did a high-five, then a low-five, and then too-slowed him.

"Holographic people?" Hayden said, looking around wearing a grimace of disbelief – or maybe pained belief.

Ben shrugged, idly scratching at his chest through his shirt.

"So what do we want to do?" Ben asked. "I vote we toss a walkie onto the street, make some noise to clear the harvestmen out of the store, and bunker down here for the night. We can make for Bowen's Bridge in the morning and see what's there."

"Why wait a night? We can get there by dark," Hayden said.

Everyone except Eve looked at Ben. He held a breath for a moment then let it out.

"I don't want to go out there right now," he said. His voice was pained, sad, approaching desperate.

"I think we should go now," Dawn said. "They're saying there's a shelter? They're saying they're getting help? Maybe the military? Why are we still sitting here."

"I think– I think we should stay here. It'll be so– so safe," Eve said. She started breaking down halfway through the comment, like a disastrously drunk person trying to suppress laughter while they told a joke.

Everyone stared at her for a long moment.

"I think I changed my vote. Let's head for Bowen's Bridge," Ben said.

It ended up being unanimous, at least among those who were putting on a show of having their shit together. An intense moment of eye-to-eye contact between Ben and Dawn carried the silent agreement to exclude Eve from the democratic process going forward.

Everyone got their looted belongings packed up, bags shouldered, improvised weapons in hand. They gathered around the closed metal shutters, Ben scratching the skin on his chest where he was sure he was breaking out in hives, Monroe snapping the tags off his rack-fresh pair of jeans.

Dawn dropped her cigarette and crushed it under the heel of her sneaker, and Hayden bent down to grab the bottom of the shutter.

The metal door rolled up with a gut-wrenching squeal of protesting metal, and the five of them stepped out into daylight.