“It’s been talking! It’s been talking to him this entire time!”

TWO DAYS LATER, BOB LIES on a cot in the medical tent. They have removed the IV drip since he is once again eating solid foods, drinking all the fluids they give him. He begins today’s tedious regiment of exercises, prescribed by the army doctor, to stretch and energize the muscles, revitalize the strained organs of his body.

Members of his team have come and gone, intermittently and without pattern. Joanne has visited the most, stayed the longest. In a way, the team needed some time to recoup as well, given their around-the-clock efforts to free him.

Daniel, oddly, has visited only once, and as part of a group. Bob noticed the communications expert looking at him warily, as if cautious. Or suspicious.

Or afraid.

Alone now, wearing white medical scrubs, he runs through his series of light stretching and strength exercises. As he huffs and sweats, he continues to replay—over and over—the things the alien had told him.

The philosophy of perspective; how humans can only see what their minds are capable of seeing. Their senses hampered by the limits of what a body of flesh-and-blood can acknowledge. Can understand.

If you could see sound, or music, as I can, your perceptions of your world would change forever. To you, my shape is amorphous, an auditory rendering of a foghorn instead of a sonata. If my shape were human, would my ability to consume energy be any less repugnant? My way of devouring nutrients and absorbing thoughts, memories, genetic code less horrifying? Would I be less of a threat if I had teeth or tentacles?

I think not.

Bob counts his knee-bends. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen ….

Your people wonder about my existence here, in the universe. Why I came to this world to feed. The secret, Bob, is that I only come to worlds that are dying. Or, in your case, worlds that are already dead but don’t yet realize it. Like the light from a distant, long-extinguished star, the fate is written, waiting for perception to catch up.

Bob, sweating freely, begins to do push-ups, his palms flat against the cool concrete floor as he counts. One, two, three ….

When I devour this world, crossing the floor of oceans, feasting on the largest cities, toppling the deepest forests, consuming all the life which exists, I will grow to such size that the planet itself will feel my weight upon its surface. And then I will burrow, Bob, crushing the core of this world, and the continents will collapse, and the seas turn to ash. The atmosphere you breathe will wither and the planet will erupt into dust and rock, flung out into space as meteoric detritus.

The same as I’ve done countless times, to countless other worlds such as yours.

And then I will split into countless pieces, and each part of me will nestle within these galactic travelers, these meteors of your world, and through them I will expand further across endless space, absorbing new species, new planets. I’ll go on and on, until I am spread across the breadth of the cosmos, and all of it is ME, and all of those species will be part of what I AM.

It’s all so glorious, Bob … it’s all so glorious.

Can’t you see?

Bob finishes his push-ups. He stands, plucks a towel off the back of a nearby chair and wipes his face.

A nurse enters his room holding a tray of food. He watches as she sets it down but makes no move toward it.

Instead, he steps, silently, behind her. She turns, surprised, but does not cry out. Does not scream.

His raises his hands slowly, rests his open palms on the sides of her face, almost tenderly.

“Dr. Cronus?” she says, her gaze steady. “What is it?”

He looks deep into her eyes, and she smiles awkwardly. Prettily.

For the nurse, this is not the first time something like this has happened, and by men less handsome than this one. She knows what he wants, of course, but is happy to play the game. “Aren’t you hungry, Doctor?” she says, reaching behind her to rest a hand on the edge of his dinner tray.

Then her cheeks begin to burn, as if his palms have transformed into blistering-hot irons. She wants to scream now, but it’s too late, and her breath catches in her throat as the searing heat eats through her cheeks.

The dinner tray clatters to the floor.

As she stares at him—her mouth hung open and filling quickly with wet, hot flesh—his bright blue eyes appear to bleed. But it is not blood that trickles out from the corners of his eyes, that runs down his cheeks in thin tendrils.

And when he grins, a fat, pink tongue pushes outward from between his gleaming white teeth, and divides.

And when he speaks, it is the voice of multitudes.

“I’m ravenous.”

SERIAL NUMBERS

JIM RAN INTO THE APARTMENT, slammed the door behind him and leaned his weight against it, as if his meager 170 pounds could keep all the possible dangers of the world from entering: the cops, the dead, the dozen or more finger-pointing witnesses.

Dripping with sweat from the long sprint through alleyways and semi-hidden stairwells, he dropped the heavy, army-green canvas bag to the floor, ripped off his jacket and knit cap and tossed them carelessly aside. Then he turned and, with a tension-breaking exhale, slammed home the heavy deadbolt, securing the door.

He’d done it. He’d pulled it off!

Allowing himself a relieved grin of victory, he picked up the large, lumpy bag and strode through the small apartment’s main living space to enter the bedroom.

It was in here that he would fulfill the fantasy.

The small room was stifling, the warm air heavy with moisture. Jim had heard news that a thunderstorm was hovering ever closer to the city, but for now the weather was more densely heated than an iron stove, stoked by late summer’s dying fire. He crossed the bedroom to the lone window and jerked it open, welcoming the cool air drifting inside, the breeze permeated by honking cars and the drone of the train only a few blocks away.

It had been no more than a few minutes since he’d tossed the dismantled gun, and what bullets remained, into a sewer drain (along with the mask and the overly large Salvation Army overcoat he’d been wearing to conceal his clothes, face, and body type), but now that he was safely home, it felt like a different lifetime.

Laughing out loud, almost giddy now, infused with the gleeful knowledge that he was—amazingly, unbelievably—a wealthy man, Jim turned to the bed, unslung the sack’s straps from his shoulder, and plopped the heavy bag down atop the double-bed’s fitted white sheets. His fingers caressed the hard teeth of the inviting—and still sealed—zipper.

First things first.

Humming an upbeat pop song (one of the hot hits of the summer), Jim slowly removed, piece-by-piece, his sweat-sodden clothes.

Shirt. Undershirt. Pants. Underwear. Socks.

He stripped himself down until he was bare as a newborn baby boy, and then (finally!) began to fulfill that long-wished-for childhood dream, a simple act he’d held onto all these hard years, until the arrival of this very moment.

Relishing a soft cushion of soot-scented air against his heated skin, Jim yanked the bag toward him, slowly unzipped it from one end to the other, then unceremoniously dumped a massive hoard of bills—mostly 50s and 100s—on top of the sheet. He dropped the empty bag to the hardwood floor and, like a child playing with a pile of leaves, pushed his hands into the mass of paper, messing up the tightly packed bundles (fluffing them! tossing them!) until he had a healthy mound of loosely strewn bills, about three-feet high and equally wide, to leap into.

His breath quickening with a borderline erotic-level response, Jim yelped out a boisterous, “YEE-HAW!” and dove, arms spread wide, into the mass of paper money.