We

Well, first some news. Red States is on hold for the foreseeable future. It is very much a collaborative work and collaboration is the sort of thing I prefer to do in person whenever possible. As my co-author has moved to California, I doubt this will be possible for quite some time. However, it would be unwise to assume that my muse has left me. Indeed, I have begun a new project called We. It's an interconnected series of short stories taking me back to my most beloved of genres: horror. It's the tale of a small town in the Southeast as it grapples with visitors from beyond the stars who harbor a horrifying secret that will challenge everything they know about the world and themselves.

I actually based this on some day dreams I had as a child. You see, I've always been fascinated by aliens and UFO sightings, and despite my skepticism and rational beliefs, I truly do want to believe in them. While I harbor an extremely idealistic hope for whatever aliens might be out there, anyone who tells you they have no *fear* of what might lie beyond our world is either a liar or else they aren't quite cognizant of the implications of what they're pondering.

Anyway, as a child I was in the third row seat of my dad's Plymouth minivan as we returned home from the local Winn-Dixie. As an adult looking back on the event, I'm sure what I saw was the bright lights that the grocery store used to illuminate the store-front parking lot reflecting against the tinting of the window next to me. However, at that young age I truly did believe it to be an alien craft. How could I not? After all, my good friend Levi, with whom I am still in contact, and I frequently discussed aliens and UFOs. It was a subject that was frequently on my mind in those dreamy, youthful days. Unhindered by my cynical adult skepticism, my subconscious was free to spin many a dream and nightmare about what those lights might portend.

Though it's no longer a cornerstone of my life and fascinations, I still hold a deep interest in aliens. It's always been something that I've wondered about and wanted to write about, but until recently I just didn't know how to approach it. I hope you're all please with the direction in which I'm taking this story, as it's long been a dream of mine to write some truly great alien abduction horror.

I invite you, now, to read the first part of this new horror opus: Mike's Story.


I'm awake now. I am terrified and I am awake and I am far more terribly and horrifyingly sane and lucid than I have ever been at any moment in my life. I know so much now. I know so much more than I ever wanted to know about our place in the universe. I mean all of us. You and me. 

I used to sit awake at night and dream of all the things that might be out there. I used to wonder all about the stars and the many rocks spinning around them and all the stories that might at that very moment in time be unfolding on all those tiny little spinning specks of dust around all those twinkling dots of light in that great light speckled above. 
And then I met Carol. 

She was a woman of reason and grace. She set my dreaming ways aside and showed me a world of the rational and the real. She was a doctor and a skeptic. She used to sit with me and watch the TV and we'd laugh at all of the phony psychics and the televangelist scam artists. We'd poke fun at the Bigfoot "researchers" and the die-hard ghost documentary crowd. We just found it all so tremendously funny; these feeble minded hicks who were taken in by the unknown and spinning it all into delusional fantasies. I guess we had a pretty twisted sense of humor. 

Oh, and her dogs. She loved her dogs. She had two of them. Two of the sweetest labs you'd ever seen. There was Gemma and Hadrian. They loved to run and jump and fetch and play and if you rubbed Hadrian's belly just right, he'd keep twitching his leg for an hour. 

But, I digress. When the local rednecks began talking about lights in the sky, we... Well, we approached it with our usual humor. We scoffed at the yokels, amusing ourselves with the notion that they might not actually even know what an airplane was. We kept laughing even after the first night.

Even at the time, something didn't feel right about those lights we saw when we spent the evening hours together on our dock. They didn't seem to sit right in the sky. Something about the way they moved and the way they *didn't* move was not too distant from the spots you get when you stare at a halogen bulb for too long. I fancied that it was a trick of the eyes. Perhaps from some unexplained prominence of the moon's light... But it was cloudy. It was cloudy and Carol... She said she saw it too. We gathered Gemma and Hadrian, our ever present companions, and went back to our home. 

The next morning, the dogs were nowhere to be found. We looked and looked all over our property, but we couldn't find the slightest sign of them. Well, nothing of them physically. We found their collars down by the creek bed which fed the pond. They looked... singed. I hadn't seen the likes of those burns in my life, though. There was a strange quality about them. The collars were polyester. The fibers should have melted and globbed, but they seemed frayed. It was as if they'd burned from the inside out, it seemed. But that couldn't have been possible. I pocketed the collars and spent the better part of the rest of the day looking for Gemma and Hadrian, to no avail.

Taking the collars back to the house, I studied them in greater detail. My efforts to determine what had happened to the dogs that would leave the collars like this were fruitless. It was Carol who nervously suggested that some of the local hicks might have shot the poor things. I called Sheriff Woods down in town to let him know to look for them. I guess that's what we came out to the sticks for, anyway. You know, the sense of community. A place where the cops will care about your dogs and stuff. With nothing further to do and a long day of prowling the woods for our wayward dogs behind us, Carol and I returned to bed. 

I awoke with a start. The house was bathed in a radiant white light. Next to me, the bed was empty. I shouted for my girlfriend but was answered only with silence. God, that light. It was blinding. I normally hate guns, but in my fear, I kept a level head and went to the closet across the room to retrieve Carol's grandfather's old service pistol from World War II. I'd seen her shoot the old .45 a number of times and she'd even managed to rope me into it once or twice. I checked the clip and the holes in the side indicated that all seven rounds were in place. Racking the slide as I'd seen my girlfriend do so many times, I left our room. 

Despite being windowless, the hallway from our room to the staircase was bathed in the same blinding light as our bedroom. I raised my right hand to my eyes, parting the fingers so as to shield myself from most of the light, tightly clenching the aged gun in my off hand. It was so quiet. It was so damnably quiet. As I turned to mount the staircase, I saw them in the hallway, heading to the door. 

There was Carol. She was just... She was following them. I... They looked like people but their proportions were all wrong. They were so tall, but they were impossibly thin. I don't even know how they held themselves up or supported their large, bulbous heads. And she was... She was going with them. And I don't know how they heard me. I don't know why. I just know that Carol turned. She turned right at me and looked up and smiled. "Come with us." She said. She smiled and beckoned me to come with them. 

Then, her horrible minders turned to me and stared to me with black, dead eyes. My god, their eyes! They were so big and they were so unblinking and they were so cold! They looked at me! I don't know how I know what they were looking at but I know it was *me!* 
I squeezed the trigger of Carol's grandfather's gun and I closed my fingers over my eyes and I screamed I screamed and shot again I fell in the corner and cried as I heard the most horrible of sounds. I can't even describe them! My God in heaven, those sounds!

I awoke hours later, crumpled under a table at the top of the stairs. The front door was off of its hinges and nowhere in sight. I looked all around the house for Carol but she's not here. I looked all around the woods, despite my knowing that she wouldn't be there. I tried to call the Sheriff but my cell phone won't get signal and the landline is dead. Town's too far to walk, my car won't start, and I have the most horrible  suspicion that I wouldn't make it anyway. When I came back in, the entryway to my house reeked of gunpowder and another, more subtle burning smell. I returned to the table where I passed out and saw the gun I had used last night at the top of the stairs. I checked the clip and saw five rounds within. I know they're coming back. I know what I have to do. I just hope I have the courage. 

I don't want to be here when they come back for me.



Anyway, there it is. I hope you all enjoy it, and I encourage you all to let me know what you think. Honest critique is appreciated, as usual. This is only a draft, mind you, and a rather rough one at that.