short story

At first, I thought I was in between rem sleep and being awake, floating to that place my subconscious has built until winter’s kiss startles me. My eyelids rip apart and the sound of a muffled scream clears. My husband is calling out to me from above my head, but under my feet I gape at my bedroom becoming smaller the further I’m floating away from it.

  I reach out to grab onto something. A tree branch. A piece of air. Nothing is around me except for a giant beam of light gently carrying me off the ground.

Shock washes over me, yet stillness of total confusion causes me to only look up into the light that suddenly swallows my husband. It’s beautiful and induces a sense of peace as my stirred mind thinks of it as God’s hand lifting his children out of the hellish world. Once I reach the light, I stretch my arms out in hopes of touching his fingers, but he puts me back to sleep.

  “Please God. Help us!”

“What is this?”

 “It burns!”

  Ear piercing cries for help, the coolness of winter replaced with throat clogging humidity, and the stench of burning carcass. Did I wake up in hell?

  Looking around the room, I find myself hog tied by wires and hung mid air on a hook with hundreds of others stripped naked and tied like myself. Some thrash around in hopes of slipping from their hooks while others scream. It’s all they can do besides just hang there. My bottom lip shakes and my heart repeatedly slams against my chest bone. The pain in my shoulders is growing intense by the second from my own body weight, but there’s nothing I can do. Hundreds of us are in a large room. Four steal walls and an oval roof surround us and not too far up ahead, I can see a glow of a reddish-orange light.

            “Fire.” I whisper.

            “This is it, my friend.” A stranger next to me cries. His face is soaked with sweat and tears as his eyes are fixed on the roof, narrow in the same agony I feel being hung. “This is the day that we’ve become cattle. Do you smell that? Blood and death.”

            I yelp and immediately freeze as a long creature moving on eight limbs like a spider creeps up behind the man.

“No. No, please don’t.” The man screams. The creature stands on two legs and extends its four other arms outward to touch those that surround it as if to feel who was the plumpest. Its onlookers scream in terror and those who are being touched by this black, long-limbed monster with blood red eyes the size of marbles vomit. I cant look away. This can’t be real. I’m still dreaming. Where is my husband?

The creature then wraps all four arms around the man’s waist to keep him from thrashing about on the hook and moves its bulbus head inches from his neck. He lets out one last scream before he’s suddenly muffled out by gurgles in his throat. I felt the pinch when it happened and recoiled at the sight of a long black needle sticking directly into his neck from the creature’s mouth. It hangs tight to him and raises its hind legs to freely hang from its victim who’s becoming thinner and thinner as his blood is drained.