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A round, frosty lump the size of a coffee can tumbled out of the freezer, fell to the floor, rolled to a stop two feet away from me. I stared at it, stared into the open, empty freezer. I steeled my courage-

-then turned and ran my ass off.

I stomped toward the exit, made it in three flying strides. A half-second before my hand would have ripped the knob off the front door, I happened to glance out the window and see a sedan parked out there where none had been before. Plain white, but too many antennas.

Cop car.

Somebody getting out.

Morgan Freeman.

He walked toward the front door, ten feet away from me. I spun around, searching for a back exit and seeing a slim door leading out of the kitchen. It would mean stepping over the possessed jar or whatever that had rolled out of the freezer, which was now sitting on the tile, steaming faintly, rocking back and forth. I saw now the thing was a bundle of duct tape, something wrapped in layer after layer of the stuff.

No thanks.

A look back outside. My cop friend was coming this way, pausing to turn and look back over his shoulder at something, I couldn’t see what. What would I say when he came in? I can usually cobble together a pretty good lie if I have a couple of hours to plan it and rehearse in front of a mirror. If I have to make something up on the spot I just start babbling, over-explaining. Once, when I thought I was on a break with Tina, I started making out with this sophomore redhead at a party, a beanpole volleyball player named Brandi. Tina had walked in and-

Pock!

A hollow snapping sound, from the freezer jar. The thing hopped an inch off the floor and so did I when I heard that sound. Now that was freaky. It did it again, jumped higher. Shit, like something trying to punch its way out from inside-

Snap. Ka-chunk.

That’s how I spell the sound of a doorknob turning. Morgan was just two feet away from me now, on the other side of a door-shaped piece of imitation wood, coming in. I ducked down, looked at the jar now with hope that the leprechaun or demon or whatever jumped out of it would distract the cop from asking the rather obvious question of why the hell I was here after walking out on my interrogation. I braced myself for what was sure to be one of the more awkward moments of my life.

The doorknob snapped back into place, released from the other side. I risked a look through a living room window and saw Morgan looking away, toward the gravel driveway and this time saw what he saw: a white van pulling in, parking next to his cruiser. Big logo on the side. Channel five news. A guy stepped out of the driver’s seat, hauling out a camera and a folded tripod, a pretty black reporter emerged from the passenger side. Not only was I about to be discovered lurking around a restricted crime scene, but my arrest for said offense was about to be broadcast on live television. It would literally be the worst job of secretly sneaking into a restricted area in recorded history.

POCK! POCK!! POCK!!!

There was a bulge now on the side of the jar or whatever it was, strands of duct tape fibers popping out in the center, giving under the strain. All of a sudden being arrested didn’t seem so bad and I should have ducked outside with my hands raised high in surrender. But fear kept my ass velcroed to the carpet. The jar convulsed again and again I wished I had a weapon, preferably a flame-thrower.

Outside, I could barely hear cop and reporter having a terse forced-politeness contest, probably nods and fake smiles with the muffled professional-sounding bullshit I couldn’t quite make out. My guess was she wanted inside the trailer, though they’d be disappointed that they missed their shot at the really good, messy pictures. But then she’d be pleased to capture a live shot of whatever was about to happen to me.

Here’s exclusive Channel 5 video of a local man having his brain eaten by a winged gremlin. Local gremlin experts warn that-

FOONT!

The jar erupted, ejaculated, gave birth in a cloud of stringy tape bits. A shotgun-hole blew out from the guts of the can and a little blur of an object zipped out and bounced off the paneled wall above me. The offspring fell to carpet, bounced and landed next to my shoe.

A little shiny metal canister, the size of a pill bottle. Not moving or growling or glowing. Just sitting.

Waiting.

I stared dully, then forced myself to crane my neck up and around to see the scene outside, the cop turned right toward me, gesturing. I threw my head back down out of the way, sat down hard on the carpet with my back against the wall.

He saw you. Did you see the flicker of surprise on his face? He caught a glimpse of your head looking out from the trailer window. Dumbass.

I looked warily at the little metal vial, scooted back from it. Are those footsteps I hear outside? I raised my foot to kick the vial away, then reconsidered.

You know what’s in there, right?

Nope. No idea.

You know Robert had a stash of the shit that infected John...

Faint voices, from outside. “I said no comment!” Closer than before?

...and if he had a stash, he couldn’t just cram it under his bed. That black shit moves. It has a will, an attitude. It bites.

And then I realized, all at once, what I had come here for. John led me here, of course. When I was on the stuff, the little hit in my blood stream I got when it attacked my thigh, I could communicate with-

-the dead-

-with John. When it wore off, I could not. My one chance to save him lay inside the bottle, wicked as it apparently was. It was decided, then. Just like that. I picked up the bottle, cold as an ice cube. I found a seam and twisted the top half off, expected black oil to ooze out.

Instead, out tumbled two tiny, cold pebbles. Perfect and black in my palm, like two coal-flavored Tic-Tacs. The same stuff, I figured, in convenient capsule form for those who are afraid of needles.

You’re afraid of needles.

So?

If it had been a hypodermic, you wouldn’t have even considered putting it inside you. How convenient.

I closed my eyes, steeled myself like the first time I did a shot of whiskey.

It knew. And what is it you’re doing, exactly? For all you know, this stuff oozed out of a crashed meteor. You’ve found it in the home of a dead man, after following a trail of dead bodies to get here. So go ahead, put it right in your mouth, dipshit.

I noticed I was bringing my hand up to my lips. Absent, casual, just like popping a couple of Advil. No big deal. There’d be time to work this all out later. No time now. No time to think.

I hesitated, felt an itching in my palm where the capsules sat. I could hear nothing from outside, fed a little sprout of hope that maybe everybody had just left.

You’ve always wondered how heroin addicts can keep shooting up, even after they’ve watched one friend after another drop dead. You’ve always wondered what addiction feels like and now you know. It’s not a little voice telling you to do one thing or another. It’s a little voice telling you that you don’t have a choice in the matter, that there are no choices, that it’s not even worth thinking about. But you do this, there ain’t no turning back. Somehow you know that.

I felt the itch again, a crawling sensation. I looked down and saw the capsules sitting innocently and then, I saw them move. Wriggling in my hand, like a couple of fat, black maggots. I flung them to the carpet, flailing my hand around like it was on fire, stumbled to my feet. The things twisted, changed, grew tiny little black limbs.

Two flat appendages grew out of one of them, began to twitch, move, flap. A blur now. Wings. The thing made a terrible, insectile fluttering sound against the carpet. Then, the Tic-Tac launched itself at me, a faint, dark streak.

I didn’t realize my mouth was hanging open until that moment and if I had known I would have closed it, I assure you. In an instant the thing was skipping off my tongue and landing as a horrible, twitching tickle on the back of my throat. I coughed, hacked, convulsed. The thing crawled down my esophagus with steady, ant-like purpose. I felt its little tingly legs all the way down to my gut.

I opened my eyes, looked desperately for the other one. Hard to spot on the dark carpet-

There.

It buzzed, it flew. So fast it vanished from my sight. I clamped my lips shut, slapped my hand over my mouth for good measure. The thing landed on my left cheek and without thinking I brought up my other hand and swatted the thing like a mosquito.

Pain. An acidic burn, an iron from the fire jammed into the soft skin under my eye. I suppressed a scream, brought my hand away from my face and found it bloody.

The stab of agony in my cheek became a bright, broad ache that seemed to radiate down to my toes. A pain so big my mind couldn’t wrap itself around it, mixed with a weird, buzzing itch that comes specifically with tearing flesh, the feel of whole nerve endings torn from their roots and tossed aside.

I tasted the copper flow of blood in my mouth, felt something moving over there...

OH SON OF A MOTHERFUCK THE FUCKING SOY SAUCE IS DIGGING A FUCKING HOLE INTO MY FUCKING FACE

I fell flat on the floor, thrashing and rolling like a seizure. I forgot where I was, who I was, everything in my mind vaporized by a hydrogen bomb of panic.

OH THIS HURTS THIS HURTS THIS HURTS I CAN FEEL THE THING CRAWLING ACROSS MY TEETH NOW OH SHIIIIIIITTTT

My face and shirt were wet and sticky with blood. I felt the second intruder crawl across my tongue and down my throat, felt my stomach wrench with disgust. I heard footsteps just outside the door now, felt relieved, knew I would throw myself at Officer Freeman and beg him to take me to the emergency room, to pump my stomach, to bring in an exorcist, to call in the Air Force to bomb this whole town into radioactive dust and bury it under sixty feet of concrete.

And then, calm. Almost Zen.

That’s what came next, a complete, leveling inner cool. I again felt that sensation from the police station, that Soy Sauce feeling, the radiating energy pulsing from the chest out like that first swallow of hot, spiked coffee while standing outside in the dead of winter.

The doorknob began to turn. Morgan was coming. Hell, Morgan was here. I wanted to run, to duck, to act. Frustrating. The body is slow, so slow. A sluggish, wet mechanism of muscle and bone that creeped even as my mind flew. The body was a mortal nuisance, a proverbial anchor around my proverbial neck-

And so, just like that, I stepped outside of it. Time stopped.

It was so easy for me, I almost laughed. Why hadn’t I caught on before? I had a full 1.78 seconds before the detective would step through the door. The only reason we would normally perceive that span as being a “short” amount of time is because our slow bodies simply can’t accomplish very much in that span. But a supercomputer can do over a trillion mathematical equations in one second. To that machine, one second is a lifetime, an eternity. Speed up how much thinking you can do in two seconds and two seconds becomes two minutes, or two hours or two trillion years.

1.74 seconds until confrontation time now, the body of myself and my nemesis frozen in the moment, on opposite sides of the door, he with his hand on the knob, me on hands and knees in suspended agony.

Okay. I needed a plan. I took a moment to mentally step back, to assess my situation. Think.

You are standing on the thin, cool crust of a gigantic ball of molten rock hurtling through frozen space at 496,105 miles an hour. You are in a situation that could threaten the nature of said existence on said molten ball, depending on which decision is made.

But wait. There are 62,284,523,196,522,717,995,422,922,
727,752,433,961,225,994,352,284,523,196,571,657,791,521,
592,192,954,221,592,175,243,396,122,599,435,291,541,293,
739,852,734,657,229 subatomic particles in the universe, each set into outward motion at the moment of the Big Bang. Thus, whether or not you move your right arm now, or nod your head, or choose to eat Fruity Pebbles or Cornflakes next Thursday morning, was all decided at the moment the universe crashed into existence seventeen billion years ago because of the motion and trajectory of those particles at the first millisecond of physical existence. Thus it is physically impossible for you to deviate-

I never finished this thought, as I suddenly realized I was no longer in the trailer.

Sun. Sand. The desert. Was I dead? I looked around, saw nothing of interest except brown and brown and brown, spanning from horizon to horizon. God’s sandbox. What now? I thought of John’s ramblings his first hours on the Sauce, saying he kept falling out of the time stream, everything overlapping.

I saw movement at my feet. Not my feet. Somebody else’s. Dusty snakeskin boots. A beetle is what I saw, trundling along. I figured this might mean something, so I watched it, followed it as it inched along the desert floor. This went on for approximately two hours, the thing heading steadily in one direction. I had begun to form a theory that this beetle was some kind of Indian vision spirit guide meant to lead me to my destiny, when it stopped. It stayed in one spot for about half an hour, then turned around and began crawling back the other direction.

Somewhere else now, just like that. In a blink. A chain link fence. Brown, dead grass. People around me, in rags, like refugees. This was getting ridiculous. I stood there for a moment, baffled. I remembered John again and was determined to keep my head, to hang on until the stuff wore off. I looked down and saw I was holding a fork, my hand stained with a gray dust, like ash.

A little girl approached me. She was deformed, filthy, a good chunk of her face missing. One eye. She studied me, then ran up, kneed me in the groin and wrenched the fork from my hand. She ran off with it, and when I looked up-

-White. And noise. Mechanical sounds, like being inside a car engine. I was in a large building, very clean, a man in front of me in a blue uniform watching a small computer screen on what had to be an assembly line. To my left I saw a massive red sign that said “NO SMOKING OR OPEN FLAME ON THE PRODUCTION FLOOR” with a cartoon explosion underneath it.

I stepped forward, noticed the guy had one of those Far Side flip calendars next to him. It was badly out of date, the current page a couple of years old. I stood there for a moment, feeling like a kid who has walked into the wrong class.

Not expecting to get a response, I said, “Uh, hey.”

The guy stirred, turned. He wasn’t anybody I knew and for just a moment I thought I saw his eyes meet mine. I was about to continue speaking when his gaze swept around the room, seeing nothing. The man apparently decided he had imagined it and turned back to his monitor.

I thought that my plan did not seem to be progressing well, then remembered that I had no plan. I looked around the large room, realized it was full of people at various machines, further realized that none of them could see me. Everybody had security badges and the many warning signs told me that a stranger wandering into a facility like this would have drawn plenty of attention. I was here, but I was not here. I looked down and, sure enough, could not see my feet.

You’re out of your body, my friend. That’s what this is. You’re detached from your body and floating in the breeze...

My feet, I knew, were still in a trailer in Undisclosed, on a Saturday afternoon. I focused all my concentration on getting back there, to that spot, to that time, to my body. And in a blink, I was back in the trailer, on the floor. I breathed a sigh of relief, tried to remember what I had been doing, when the cop stepped through the door and stopped cold at the sight of me.

Damn. I suck at this.

I looked up, climbed awkwardly to my feet with my hand on my bloody face, my pants stinking of Robert Marley’s feces. The detective who looked sort of like Morgan Freeman but not really looked right at me and I saw he had two red plastic gasoline cans with him.

He’s gonna burn this place down, I realized, with perfect clarity. And he’s gonna burn me with it.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.