When human society toppled around the world, it was not because of climate change, terrorism, economic crises, or any of the hot-button issues of the day. A rock fell from the stars, crashing into the tundra of Alaska. Although every precaution was taken to investigate the crater it created safely, the survey team wore Hazmat suits and other PPE. They knew that the rock was emitting something that was neither a gas nor an energy. It only appeared under the infrared spectrum, and it was like nothing any of the scientists had encountered.
When they set up measuring devices at the rim of the crater, electronics stuttered or failed, frost unfurled in strange fractal patterns across the metal, and nearby small animals were dazed or wandered in spirals as if pulled by an invisible field. The air remained thick, carrying a faint metallic chill, and even seasoned researchers became irritable, plagued by headaches and restless dreams after only a few hours near the impact site. Within days, the phenomenon spread outward, invisible but relentless. First, the survey team noticed odd lapses: a technician tried to feed a field mouse with their own hands, convinced it was a childhood pet, and a veteran geologist spoke in bursts of unfamiliar language before lapsing into animalistic howls. A maintenance worker insisted a crow outside the tent had taken on the face of his wife. The alien presence disturbed electromagnetic fields and penetrated living tissue, subtly and profoundly altering the brain chemistry of animals and people exposed to it—even through layers of clothing or the thickest concrete.
As it moved across the continent, the range of symptoms widened: people began to lose the ability to distinguish their own memories from others', experiencing flashes of animal instinct or emotions that did not belong to them. In some places, confusion swept in like a strange hallucination. One night in a small desert town, a father named Miguel watched his daughter Emily pause mid-sentence and twitch her nose at the air, her hands clenching like paws. For a moment, Miguel felt a memory surge inside him, but it was not his own: he was running on four legs, chasing a deer through the brush, tasting the metallic tang of fear and wind. His own mouth opened, and he let out a throaty bark, shocked at the sound that came out of him. Emily looked at him in terror, but her eyes had changed, wide and wild, as if she did not know him. Around them, neighbors hurried into the street, some howling, some speaking in bursts of unfamiliar language, others slinking away from the light as if it stung. In some, all language vanished, and only raw instinct remained. Some animals mimicked human gestures, standing upright at windows, or gathering around radio interference as if trying to understand the voices there. Most devastating, the alien influence eroded the unconscious ties of community: fear overtook trust, and whole towns dissolved into pandemonium as mothers could no longer recognize their crying children, friends forgot the names of their closest companions, and packs of animals wandered the streets, drawn toward human homes by a craving that neither side could name. Although the investigators were safe by protocol, they didn't initially realize how quickly this alien presence flowing from the rock could spread, or the slight ways it began to dissolve the boundaries between living things and their memories.
That was until a small fishing hamlet called No Chance, some thirty-odd miles away, started pinging every available emergency institution. The village was remote, and nothing in the messages Emergency Services received made any sense. A kind of contagion was spreading, and people were dropping like flies, but the outcome was never properly relayed as medical and military personnel were deployed to assess the situation.
The national news reported that the chief virologist, Doctor Dominic Hinkley, couldn’t identify the cause of the illness. Every morgue, mortuary, and even some meatpacking plants’ freezers were loaded up with bodies. 98% of No Chance had passed within twenty-four hours of contracting the illness.
It wasn’t until the night after all these people died that the true implications of the dire circumstances began to manifest.
Gribble’s Funereal Services were at maximum capacity, and despite the grief and loss their clients generally felt, deaths were good for business. Not this, though. No grieving families were there to pay the costs the facility's director, Kirk Charleston, had been tabulating since the start. Gribble’s was a good hundred miles away from No Chance, right near the Canadian border.
Charleston—38, balding, and ten pounds overweight—worked the books, calculating how much of a loss this would cost the business he had inherited from his brother’s wife’s second cousin twice removed. The truth was that no one wanted to take it over, especially any of the grown Gribble children, so Kirk took over the reins. As a business school dropout with no real prospects, it made sense that he should take on the responsibility. He was barely making any money at it, as it turned out, and this was just one of many additional stressors he didn’t need. He was stewing in his own resentment and hopelessness when he heard a bunch of commotion down in the lab. It sounded like a lot of metal being pulverized. He grabbed a Louisville Slugger he kept near his office desk in case someone came looking to rob the joint, but as he made his way to the stairwell that led to the basement where the embalming procedures were carried out, a ghostly silence met him. The uncanny juxtaposition of raucous rancor turning on a dime into dead calm screamed to the undertaker’s lizard brain that he should be running for his car instead of going any further, like a school bell in his head. Still, there was no way any of the local wildlife could’ve gotten in. That’s when he heard the harsh, heavy breathing and the snarling noises emanating from the darkness at the end of the steps. A stinging chill remained in the air, keen and metallic, eerily similar to the strange cold that had slid through the region after the meteorite strike up north. For a fleeting second, he remembered the press reports about frost unfurling in fractal patterns over steel and glass, the metallic tinge that caught at the back of the throat and made no sense for summer nights. “Bears in the lab?” he thought, but that couldn’t be right. He stared from the doorway down into the dark, and that’s when he saw orange eyes that reflected the light from the hallway Charleston was in. There was tension in the air as more eyes started to appear at the bottom in that mysterious gloom. For a strange moment, the scent of scorched ozone and cold iron reached him, the same odd flavor in the air people whispered about ever since the rock from the sky had landed. He felt like whatever they were, they would come rushing up the stairs at him. Without thinking, he slammed the door shut, locking it, but no sooner had he done that than he heard unearthly growling and the stomping of so many large feet rushing toward where he had just been standing. The door handle turned ever so gently, and he heard what sounded like a dog clawing at the door to be let in begin to intensify from polite little scratches to wood-rending savagery.
Charleston was frozen to the spot, the front of his Chinos darkening with piss. He began to edge away back down the hallway to where his things were. He would run over there. Grab his keys, leaving his jacket and briefcase. His smartphone had been in his pocket the whole time, so that was one thing he didn’t have to worry about, and so he sprinted to his office and grabbed the keys to his pickup that was parked right outside, but then he felt a large, menacing presence behind him at the threshold of his door. He looked back, and the last thing he saw with his human eyes was something out of a horror film: seven feet tall with the proportions of a towering berserker, covered in fur, with the head of a wolf atop its shoulders. Within seconds, its fangs were in Kirk Charleston’s throat, severing his vocal cords and cutting off the scream that would have come out.