Jim Thorn - Arrival - A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

The alien shoved Maya back against the wall, crossing her arms until they formed an X over her head. She gritted her teeth and pushed back, but she couldn’t break free.

“Let me go—”

Releasing her left wrist, the alien wrapped its pale, gray hand around Maya’s throat. Like it had with her wrists, the creature began to squeeze her larynx until the pressure cut off her air supply. Maya gasped. The alien pulled her forward until her nose was almost touching the tip of its mask. Up close, it sounded as if the mask had an internal oxygenator of some kind, a device that mechanically regulated airflow. In a strange moment of clarity, she wondered if the Earth’s air was toxic for the aliens, and if that was why they had to wear masks.

It lifted her up off the floor another foot until her eyes leveled with the alien’s. Another flicker, and the darkened glass morphed from opaque obsidian to a smooth, clear surface. She gazed into the creature’s beady, solid eyes. They shimmered in their sockets like pools of blackened motor oil. And as Maya felt her brain clouding over and the edges of her own vision darkening, she thought she saw delight in the creature’s eyes—a satisfaction as it squeezed the life from her.

Her vision blurred further and then doubled, and she began to lose feeling in her fingers and toes.

This is it. This is how I’m going to die.

Maya thought of her children. If the world somehow survived this insanity, the courts would award custody of Laura and Aiden to their father. They’d be stuck living in his filthy bachelor pad with his twenty-something ditz of a girlfriend. She felt tears welling up in her eyes as the black edges of her vision crept inward. Maya wasn’t scared of dying, but she didn’t want her children to have live with Gerald.

The pressure on her throat disappeared then, and she felt weightless. It wasn’t until her shoulder struck the opposite wall that she realized she could breathe again, and that the alien no longer had her by the wrist. Maya slammed down onto the floor, cold water hitting her face and snapping her back to reality as she gulped as much air as she could get into her burning lungs.

Water was shooting out from the supply line that had been connected to the toilet; the shattered porcelain fanned across the floor and chunks had caught in her hair. The door of the bathroom stall hung at an angle on a single remaining hinge.

The alien roared and then ripped the stall door completely off, tossing it toward the front of the bathroom. It stood over her then, purring.

Maya rubbed her throat while still gasping for air. She looked down and saw blood running in crooked rivulets down her arm, from a gash near her shoulder. But the burning pain wasn’t what made her body shake. That was caused by the alien towering over her, its hideous eyes staring right at her. Through her.

“Stop playing with me,” she said, her voice heavy and thick.

Again, the alien tilted its head as if trying to understand what she was saying.

“Kill me!” she screamed, spittle flying from her lips. “Just do it already!”

The alien’s head jerked. It looked upward and let out the most high-pitched, shrill wail Maya had ever heard, the sonic equivalent of a multi-car pile-up on the highway—scraping, hot metal.

Maya rolled onto her side and covered her ears, but it did little good. The volume and intensity of the creature’s cry put enormous pressure on her eardrums and made her dizzy, the sound so powerful that it rocked her equilibrium. She felt for something on the floor, anything she could use to make it stop. Her arm brushed against a hunk of metal, and she noticed the toilet tank cover sat next to it. Maya grabbed the edges and stood as the alien finally stopped screaming.

Take this, you son of a bitch.

Maya cried out as she swung the hunk of heavy ceramic, lunging forward and connecting with a perfectly-placed blow to the alien’s mouth. The lid snapped in half on contact and the creature stumbled backward. It slid down the wall, bringing its gray hands up to its face. Maya swallowed hard as she looked at the alien.

She had knocked the mask off.

The alien looked up at her, and again those eyes made her dizzy. She saw that the steel grid at the bottom of the mask had covered a human-like mouth, although the thing’s lips appeared to be dark and unnaturally thin. There was a split second when the creature sat perfectly still, and then it let loose a violent howl, writhing on the floor and tearing at its face with long, sharp nails.

Maya looked at the broken mask on the floor and then back at the alien.

It can’t breathe without the mask.

The alien screamed and thrashed, clawing at its own face the entire time. The creature’s mouth opened and closed like a dying fish dropped on dry land.

Maya ran out of the crumpled stall and to the door. The fluorescent lights above flickered, casting an uneven strobe light on the debris below. She raced out of the bathroom fully expecting to find more aliens infesting the Shed and tearing its inhabitants to pieces.

But instead, a man with a shotgun waved at her.

“Follow me! We’ve got the others down!”

Maya ran into the office after the man as the scream from the bathroom faded away behind her.

Maya collapsed after rushing back into the office. She gasped for air as people gathered around her.

“Jesus,” said Carly, crouching down beside her. “You’re bleeding.”

Maya leaned back against the wall, her head spinning as she continued taking long, deep breaths.

“Someone grab me a towel or something I can wrap around her arm!” Carly said as she put her hand on Maya’s shoulder. Someone handed Carly a clean t-shirt.

“Sit up.”

Maya leaned forward to allow Carly to get to the wound on her shoulder. As the woman wrapped the shirt around her arm and applied pressure, Maya scanned the room—it held about half as many people as had been in the group before.

On the other side of the room, Daniel’s mother had her arms wrapped around her son. Daniel had been staring at Maya when she turned to look at him. The woman rubbed the boy’s head and mouthed the words ‘thank you’ to Maya.

Kenny lumbered over and squatted down, looking at Maya’s shoulder and then at the swollen red marks on her throat. “What happened?”

“I was heading back this way, and one of those things chased me into the bathroom. It could have killed me, but for some reason, it didn’t. It toyed with me instead.”

“How did you get out of there alive? We thought for sure you were dead.”

“So did I. But I hit it in the face with the toilet tank lid. That—I killed it.”

“Bullshit,” someone else said.

“We’ve been firing round after round into those things out there.” Kenny put a hand on Maya’s arm as if she were a naïve child. “Those damn things have killed half a dozen of our people while taking serious gunfire. And you’re telling us you killed one in a bathroom stall? With part of a toilet?”

Maya shook her head, which brought up a sharp pain in her shoulder. Carly tightened her grip on Maya’s arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood from the wound.

“I knocked its mask off. Once I did that, it started screaming and writhing around on the ground.”

Kenny looked at Carly, and she gave him the look—the unspoken message from wife to husband that says, “Shut up.”

Maya continued. “I’d been able to hear it breathing behind the mask, but it didn’t sound natural—like there was some device regulating the air, or filtering it. I think they need the mask to breathe the air. Our atmosphere must be toxic to them.”

“How are we supposed to get close enough to them to get their masks off?” someone asked. “You happened to be in a tight space while that thing was playing with you.”