I only managed to get a few blocks down the street before pulling over into a mostly empty parking lot.

  Home felt like a million miles away, and I convinced myself it would help my nerves if I had just a little nip off the bottle now. My hands were shaking so hard they were almost making my teeth chatter.

  I felt my body take the cap off the bottle, press the open mouth of it to my lips, and felt myself tip the bottle back.

  It was much more than a nip, and deeply I drank like it was the first drink of water after being trapped in the desert. The warmth snaked its way into me for a few minutes and then I took another swig before replacing the cap.

  It wasn’t self-discipline that had me putting the cap back on the bottle and putting it under the seat - it was convenience. I could drink in peace at home.

  With a deep breath I started the car and drove towards the condo I barely shared with Troy. The alcohol was already going to work calming my shakes while giving me the false sense of comfort I yearned for.

  The world was still a bit blurry, but I cared a bit less about it. I was no longer a witness outside myself, but felt the numbness creep its way throughout my body and mind.

  The liquor store I went to was out of the way and not close to my neighborhood. I had chosen it thinking if it were far enough away then I would be hesitant to find my way there.

  Really it was so that there was less of a chance that I would run into any of the workers outside of the store. Home was still a few miles away and already felt more relaxed.

  The drive gave me time to think about what Troy had said to me before closing the door. The sound of his voice crackling with venom and heat.

  “I wish it had been you!” His face boiling with rage.

  My foggy brain distorted the memory of it, making his face grow until it was fully covering my field of vision.

  I heard the words all the way to my bones and it kept reverberating off the marrow. The words kept repeating, but slowly his face faded away, replaced by Trisha. Her face was now twisted in an anger I had never seen on her before.

  It made her features take on an alien shape as she accused me with every word. My eyes were full of tears now, my face raining down on my lap. I tried to shake the image of her away, tried to shake the words off of me.

  “I just need to get home,” I said out loud, my voice a hoarse whisper. “I’ll be ok once I get home.”

  An impossibly bright flash of light burst the sky open and made me squint my eyes. There was a massive, harmonic ‘whoooom’ that followed. My car shook from the wave of whatever chaos was happening in the distance.

  I was caught up, deep, in my self-torture and none of this was capable of pulling me fully out of it. My brain was working too slowly for any of it to do more than cause me to veer, slightly, out of the lane.

  The telephone pole was enough to jolt me out of my daydream, and it was the same thing that put me to sleep.

  I heard muffled voices speaking from down a tunnel a thousand yards away. The sound was so distorted it didn’t feel real. My mind was inside some sort of darkness that was thick like syrup. There was dense fog around all of my senses, coated thick with an unknown weight.

  A ringing sound came from the right of me, wherever the right of me was. I think I was lying down, but I could have been suspended by my feet for all I knew. An urgency was creeping around the edges of my black vision. There was a feeling of immediacy I wanted to ignore.

  Was I supposed to be doing something? Was I supposed to be somewhere? Was I asleep?

  The sounds began to grow a little louder, slowly squeezing in. The muffling started to clear up, and I could hear snippets of words being spoken from somewhere. They were coming from a news anchor and he was saying something about an attack of some kind.

  I was confused because I didn’t remember even turning the radio on in the truck. God my head hurt. I tried to reach up to touch it when my hand stopped abruptly as I heard metal on metal.

  I felt my brow furrow, but my eyes felt like they were glued shut. Not even really glued, but more like someone was holding the lids closed.

  The darkness was parting, and behind that was the memory of leaving the parking lot. Then of the bright flash, and the loud sound that had shaken my car. Then something else…

  I jolted awake remembering the crash, remembering the lights and odd sound. My eyes flew open as I sat up, and I regretted every single inch of motion. My head screamed in agony at the sudden movement. The light and sound that was now rushing in, unabated, felt like torture.

  A layer of panic seemed to coat my entire body as I realized what was holding my wrist from moving. I was handcuffed to some kind of bed. Looking around with my hazy, half hungover vision, I saw it was a hospital bed.

  “What the fuck is going on?!” I yelled, pulling at the restraints.

  I was acting out of pure adrenaline and confusion. I was in a large room with three other beds that sat empty. There didn’t seem to be any medical staff in the room with me but looking at the translucent door leading out, I could see shapes of people rushing back and forth.

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  There seemed to be a lot of chaos, and voices shouting all at once. I wasn’t sure if that was normal or not. I wasn’t sure of anything outside of being restrained and confused.

  My head throbbed in a way that no hangover could accomplish. I frantically looked around for some sort of clock or indicator as to how long I had been in the bed. Looking outside told me next to nothing aside from the fact the weather had turned, and it was now raining.

  It was daylight but through the grey it could be early morning or late afternoon. This was not good. How long had I been there? And why was I handcuffed?

  Something on the tv caught my ears, the sound piping through the bed controls near my feet, and I turned to give it my attention.

  “… like this. There just isn’t any sort of precedence to this type of event. I mean what do we even reference for preparation? Movies? Just what the fuck are we supposed to even do? This is a global wide invasion –“ an erratic, male anchor was momentarily cut off, and a woman was brought into focus. Was this a skit?

  “We apologize for the language folks. This has caused quite a stir here in the newsroom,” she said.

  In the background I could hear the anchor from before screaming incoherently as he was seemingly led away.

  “As of right now we don’t know that this is an invasion,” she continued. “We don’t know what this means, overall. No contact has been made with any of the ships that have entered our atmosphere. We are told attempts have been made with no success.”

  Ships in the atmosphere? What the hell did that mean?

  The screen flashed to an image that my pulsing brain was having trouble understanding. She continued to speak as the image remained. I realized it was a live feed of some sort and I could see military helicopters moving around the… thing, whatever it was.

  “For those just joining us: we are not alone,” the news anchor said, holding every word. She was a tight faced brunette woman that seemed to be doing everything she could to keep it together. “What you are seeing here is first contact. I repeat: this is first contact with life that is not of this world.

  “We understand this is difficult for some viewers to grasp, but we want to assure you, this is not some sort of elaborate prank. At approximately 9:15 AM this morning we - as in the people of earth - experienced a mass unidentified aerial phenomena on an unprecedented level,” she finished.

  I had no idea how she was maintaining her composure while describing this. My gummy eyes strained for more as I remained completely fixated on the screen. The images were coming clearer to me as I continued to watch, all of my previous concerns completely disappeared.

  The screen changed to multiple locations and each one was the same. A massive object of some kind, the size of multiple football fields, was hovering over densely populated epicenters in different cities. I recognized some of the cities, but most of them seemed like they could be anywhere.

  The objects were so large and alien they were almost impossible to take in. They were roughly cubed in shape with Swiss cheese like holes dotting the metallic surface. There were lights and cables and vents and piping all twisting around the different parts of the thing.

  Layers and layers of 3-dimensional mazes all branching off and interconnecting with each other. I couldn’t see any sort of propulsion or engines at all.

  They just seemed to be totally still, floating above the cities like some kind of insane painting. Amongst the helicopters were jets swooping around them like tiny insects swarming around a light fixture.

  “At this time military leaders are urging everyone to stay indoors, and to avoid travel. They are also cautioning against using electronics such as cellphones or wifi enabled devices since we are not sure what type of entity we are dealing with.

  We have been told to wait for updates as they arrive. Just know that our government is working together with foreign leaders to try to determine the motivation behind these visitors.”

  She paused and her eyes started blinking in rapid succession. Some sort of event was happening behind the scenes. She became stiff, and the feed cut away to an emergency broadcast announcement. I tried to listen to what it was saying, but I was still trying to digest the earlier message:

  We. Are. Not. Alone.

  That just can’t be possible.

  I was jolted away from staring blankly at the screen by the realization that I didn’t have any clothes on. Or, at least, I didn’t have MY clothes on. I had been stripped of my clothing, and a hospital smock that felt like it was made out of construction paper replaced them.

  I was looking down at my legs and arms like they weren’t mine when I noticed that the ends of my fingers had dried blood on them. What the hell had happened?

  The realization that I didn’t have my phone slapped the hangover out of me.

  “Shit!”

  I had left it at home along with my wallet, my license, and my insurance card. I’d taken up the habit of carrying only cash in my front pants pocket to make paying for my scotch habit easier.

  When I had taken Troy to school I hadn’t grabbed any of that stuff because I didn’t think I was going to be gone that long. If I were being honest, it was because I was still a little drunk from the night before and didn’t think about it. The panic turned up a notch when I realized that I didn’t have a way to get into contact with Troy.

  “Hey!” I screamed at the passing shapes outside the room’s door. “Hey! I need some help here!”

  The little box near my feet the TV sound was coming through also controlled the bed. Looking closer at it, I could see it had a nurses call button on the side too. When I reached over with my toes to try and pull the remote closer, I felt sharp pain in my left leg.

  A yelp escaped my lips and I was scared it was broken. If it were broken then it was weird it wasn’t in a cast or something. Maybe I hadn’t even been really helped by anyone yet. Had they just taken my clothes, cleaned off the worst of the blood, and then dumped me in a room somewhere? I felt the panic start to boil more.

  “Hey, what the fuck?” I screamed louder.

  I began to flail a bit with my feet trying to get the remote box closer to me. I couldn’t reach it with my hands because of how they were handcuffed. My foot finally caught the cord a bit and I was able to pull the remote up a little closer to me. I started slamming my heel down on the thing, hoping I’d hit the call button somehow.

  My heel seemed to connect with everything but the damn button I wanted. Instead the volume went up then down and the channel changed again and again.

  Finally, I heard a beep behind me and saw the call light had come on. I stopped abusing the remote and lay back down, out of breath. The channel had moved to a different station, but I had hit the mute button so I couldn’t hear what was happening.

  What was I looking at? That looked like Troy’s school. It took a second for my brain to catch up to the destruction I was seeing. No that wasn’t Troy’s school – not anymore.

  What I was looking at was what was left of it. Now it was nothing but rubble and parts of a sign and parts of a staircase in an otherwise massive gaping hole where his school used to be.

  The panic turned to terror and I screamed at the top of my lungs.