Alien

The glare of my high beams was the only thing cutting through the absolute blackness of the desert night. The I-10 was a long, straight ribbon of asphalt, and for the last hour, I’d been on autopilot, letting the white lines on the road hypnotize me as the miles slipped by. The only company I had was my mom.

“And you haven’t forgotten to water the fern I gave you, have you?” she said cheerfully. “It needs a lot of light, you know.”

“Yes, Mom, I heard you,” I said, my voice carrying a note of tired patience. “You don’t have to keep hassling me about it.”

“Well, I just worry it’s going to die. I could come over and water it for you next weekend,” she offered.

“No, no, don’t,” I said, a little firmer. “I can do it myself. Don’t worry about it.”

“Promise?”

After a pause, I let out a sigh. “Yes, I will.”

She started to say something else, but her voice began to crackle, turning into a fragmented buzz. “Mom?” The line was filled with static, a weird, unsettling sound on this part of the highway. I held the phone closer to my ear. The line was filled with a weird, unsettling static that choked off her voice. “Mom, can you hear me?”

Then the sky lit up.

A brilliant, searing flash of light tore across my peripheral vision. It wasn’t lightning. This was too bright, too focused. I instinctively swerved, my tires screaming on the asphalt as I pulled away from the light and the deafening shriek that followed it. My car slid sideways, the headlights sweeping across the dark, empty desert floor. I gripped the wheel, trying to correct, but it was too late.

The tires caught on the dirt shoulder, and then the world flipped on its side. Metal groaned in protest as the car rolled, once, twice. The sound of glass shattering was everywhere. My body slammed against the seatbelt, then the roof, then the dashboard. The phone flew out of my hand. A moment of nauseating weightlessness, then a sickening thud. The world spun to a halt.

My head hit the steering wheel, and a hot wave of pain washed over me. I heard a hiss, the sharp tang of something metallic and hot filling the air. My vision was a blurred mess of stars and darkness. My last thought was a simple, stupid observation: I hadn’t planned for this. Then everything went black.

A loud bang, sharp and sudden, jolted me awake.

My head was pounding, a deep, throbbing ache that pulsed through my entire body. I was hanging upside down in the dark, held in place by my seatbelt. How long had I been out? Minutes? Hours? The world was a mess of odd angles and broken glass. Hissing and popping sounds filled the air, and a hot, metallic smell reached my nostrils, sharp and acrid. Heat radiated from the front of the car, a hot whisper against my skin. Panic, cold and sharp, shot through me. The car could catch fire. It could explode.

I unbuckled my seatbelt, and the world came crashing down as I fell, landing hard on the roof. My body was a symphony of aches and scrapes, but I pushed through it, scrambling on my hands and knees toward the passenger side. I shoved at the twisted metal of the door, but it wouldn’t budge. My breath came in short, panicked bursts. I tried the other side. Nothing.

Finally, I kicked. The glass from the back window spiderwebbed, then gave way with a satisfying crunch. I pulled myself through the jagged opening, cutting my hands on the sharp edges, and fell onto the desert sand. My chest was heaving. I could still hear the hissing of the car behind me.

I stumbled a few feet away and turned to look back. The car was a mangled wreck, a twisted piece of metal half-buried in the sand. It looked like something from a nightmare, a tangled piece of junk that should have killed me.

I ran my hands over my body, my mind a blank slate of shock. My arms and legs were covered in scrapes and bruises, and a small cut on my chin was bleeding, yet I was otherwise okay. Unscathed. It was a miracle.

I looked up at the empty highway. Had anyone seen the crash? Would anyone come? I had to call for help.

Frantically, I slapped my pockets and then searched the ground around me, my hands scrambling through the sand and broken glass. I needed to call 911 before the hissing car became an inferno. I found it eventually, its shattered screen reflecting the faint light of the distant stars. I pressed the power button, but the phone was dead, completely smashed and unusable. My stomach sank with a cold, desperate dread.

What the hell do I do now?

Then, a loud bang, a deep THUMP that vibrated through the ground, jolted me out of my daze. It came from behind me. I spun around, my head throbbing with the sudden movement, and stared.

Down the embankment, maybe a hundred feet away, sat another wreck. It was bigger than my car, a mangled mess of metal twisted and torn into unrecognizable shapes. Flames erupted from it, a violent, roaring inferno that turned the black desert night into a vibrant orange spectacle. A memory, fuzzy and hot like the air around me, clicked into place. The crash. The bright flash of light that had hit the road right before I lost control. It hadn’t been a flash of light. It had been this.

My legs moved on their own, carrying me toward it. I didn’t think about my own aches or the hissing coming from my car. All I could think about was the possibility of a survivor, though a dark part of me doubted anyone could have lived through that.

At about fifty feet away, a wall of heat stopped me in my tracks. It was a suffocating, unbearable wave that felt like it was trying to cook me alive. I couldn’t get any closer. I held my arm up to shield my face from the light and the scorching air and started walking in a wide arc around the wreckage, trying to see if I could find anyone on the other side. My eyes strained through the shimmering heat.

And then I saw him.

A man, standing perfectly still. My first thought was a surge of relief—a survivor. But as I got a better look, my relief turned to cold confusion. He was completely unharmed. No blood, no burns, no torn clothes. It was impossible; no one could have walked away from that. My mind spun, struggling to reconcile the evidence of my eyes with reality. And as my gaze moved from his body to his skin, I saw that it was unnaturally pristine, almost glowing in the light of the fire. The chill I felt then had nothing to do with the desert night.

What the fuck?