Chapter Two: Dissatisfaction
"Listen to this," Nora said into her phone as she pressed it between her ear and her shoulder so she could keep her fingers going on the keyboard. "And tell me if you think I should quit or not."
The chuckle from the other end of the line did very little to make her feel less like she was wasting her time in everything she did, but it was appreciated all the same. Misery loves company and all that. "Go for it."
"We would like to announce our semi-annual Spring picnic! Come out for food, fun, and festivities with your favorite local personalities. There will be pony rides, a bounce house, food trucks, and more fun than you can shake a stick at. Hope to see you there," Nora read, her voice adding all the flourishes that had been present in the voice of her boss when she'd read the monstrosity to Nora before handing her the slip of paper where it had been scribbled down in the woman's inscrutable handwriting.
There was silence on the phone and then, "Wow. That's. Something."
"Garbage, is what it is," she replied. "I can't believe I have to put this on the internet for other people to see. They're going to think we're crazy."
"It's not that bad."
"It's not that bad? How is a Spring picnic semi-annual? How many springs are there? Do they do it at the beginning and end of the season? No, they don't. It's on the first Saturday of spring every year. They just don't know what that means and they want to sound fancy."
"Failing on that count, then."
"You're not kidding. And 'more fun than you can shake a stick at'? Who even talks like that anymore? What does that even mean? Who is shaking these sticks at the fun, and why would you do that?"
Britt was laughing again, and Nora sighed. Her roommate always did fail to take her work crises seriously, but she supposed they occurred with such frequency that some of them had to be humorous or it would just be depressing.
"I have a better question," Britt said. "Why are you still working there?"
The real answer to that was on the tip of her tongue: because I don’t know what else to do, but Nora bit it back because it just sounded too pathetic. Her usual excuse for why she continued to be the social media manager for the City of Pineville was that it would look good on her resume. She worked with everyone from the mayor to the news channel to the Department of Jobs and Family Services, and she knew that when she finally, finally moved on from this place, she would have a lot of people eager to write her recommendations.
Because her job extended past just doing the social media, even though she had the Facebook and Twitter log-ins for pretty much every major group in the city. She fetched coffee, ran errands, offered general clerical help, and gave advice. Last month she’d told the mayor to his face that mustard yellow just really wasn’t his color before he had to go on the news, and he’d given her a gift card to her favorite local coffee place as a thank you.
The connections she was making here would be good for her future, wherever that happened to take her, and she kept telling herself that she could put in a minimum of three years on the job to secure that future for herself. Once she figured out what she wanted it to be.
It was hard, though. When she’d been fresh out of college, worrying about what she would do when she got older, the future had been some blurry sometime that people had all told her she could worry about later. She was young, they said. It was time to relax, they said. And now she was closing in on twenty-six, and she had no better idea of where she wanted to be than she had four years ago.
Apparently that wasn’t a big deal either, since it seemed liked most people her age fell into the same category. There were some who had gone to law or medical school, who already had their next twenty to thirty years mapped out, heavy student debt notwithstanding, but people like her always seemed to be somewhat lost.
And if she was going to be lost, then Nora supposed she might as well make money and connections while she was wandering.
So she stayed working for the city in this strange job that hadn’t even existed really until her father had spoken to the mayor about how the city was growing and thriving and needed to get more hip with the times and did he need someone to help make that happen because his daughter was looking for work and was pretty much good at everything.
“Thanks, Dad,” Nora muttered under her breath, not realizing that Britt was waiting for an answer.
“I draw the line at you calling me Dad, thanks,” she said, accent going sharp with amusement.
Nora rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Good job that you called me then, isn’t it?”
Brittany Scott was, amusingly enough, from Britain, leaving her to be called Britt the Brit by everyone who she knew on this side of the pond. She had been Nora’s roommate for the past year and a half, sharing a nice two bedroom apartment in a building that had been designed by Nora’s father in a part of the city that constantly seemed to be under development.
They had met at the open house for the building, Nora reluctant to move into the building that had her father's name on it, but desperate to get away from her current roommate who didn't seem to understand how doing dishes or cleaning up after himself worked in the slightest, and Britt just looking for someone who wasn't going to end up on the nightly news for having murdered someone.
Nora was pretty sure she could fit those standards, and once they'd gone out for drinks and talked about the horror stories of their past living situations, it had become apparent that they would live together well.
Britt was neat as a pin, did all the dishes whether they belonged to her or not, just because she found it soothing, and Nora could cook, so the two of them got on like a house on fire, to quote Nora's father, who seemed pretty cavalier about making jokes about houses on fire considering what he did for a living.
Whenever Nora was stressed out at work, she ended up calling Britt because she knew that her friend found the whole thing hilarious, and Nora always felt better for venting.
"Seriously, though," Britt was saying, and Nora shook herself out of her thoughts. "Why are you still there, again? It's been two and a half years, yeah? You could move on to the next thing."
"Ugh," Nora said. "I don't want the next thing, I want The Thing. Capital Ts. I want to know what I want already. I'm almost thirty."
"You're almost twenty-six," Britt replied, voice dry. "I'm closer to thirty than you are."
"And you're some kind of heiress, so I don't think your opinion counts very much."
"This is not about money, so let's not pretend that it is, hm?"
“Ugh,” Nora said again. Because, as usual, Britt was right. Nora didn’t want a job that paid a large salary, and honestly, she was probably being overpaid for the job that she currently did considering what her hours were and how comfortably she got to live. Money helped Britt in that she was able to work from home and follow her passion of being a writer without having to worry about paying the bills, but she knew that the money wasn’t why Britt had that passion. “Fine,” she conceded. “You’re right. It’s not.”
Britt hummed, pleased. “Darling, you worry too much,” she said. “You’re going to find what you want. You’re one of the most driven people I have ever met in my entire life, and I’ve met a lot of people. You’re going to be fine.”
“Thanks, Britt.” Nora sighed.
“Now, to the more immediate things. Can you edit that post at all before you send it out to be mocked on the internet by millennials and favorited by wine mums?”
That made Nora snort with amusement and she shook her head. “Nope. There’s big letters at the top that say ‘As-Is’ which is the new thing ever since I changed the wording on that tweet about the puppy fair.”
“Good grief.”
“Mmhmm. Apparently they’re all for creative liberty but sometimes the original message needs to be preserved.”
“If I remember right, wasn’t the original message something about hitting puppies with baseballs?”
“Baseball bats,” Nora corrected.
“Good grief,” Britt said again. “Anyway, just publish the terrible picnic post and then come home. It’s nearly five anyway, and I’m hungry.”
“Altruism, thy name is Brittany,” Nora sighed, but she was smiling. “I’ll be home in half an hour.”
“Cheers.”
She gave her computer screen a once over for spelling and punctuation errors and then scheduled the post to go out in ten minutes. Hopefully she’d be out of the building by then and no one would stop her to ask any dumb questions or ask her to do anything for them.
As she shut down her laptop and then pushed it into her bag, her stomach growled loudly, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that hadn’t been a very fulfilling meal, considering she’d just had a bagel and two clementines.
Maybe she’d stop at the store and pick up something to make curry. That was always filling, and she’d have leftovers for the next day’s lunch if she made enough and Britt didn’t demolish all of it. For someone who was barely over five feet tall, the woman could put away food like nobody’s business.
“Nora!”
She swore under her breath and then affixed a fake smile on her face and turned to see Caden, one of the interns, coming down the hall. “Hi,” she said. “I was just on my way out.”
“Me too,” he replied. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to saddle you with more work.”
That made her breathe a sigh of relief, but she didn’t relax. He caught up to where she was standing in front of the elevator bank, waiting for the one going down to make its way to her. The City of Pineville wasn’t even all that large, not compared to the three cities that were closest to it, anyway, but the City Building was seven stories tall, and seemed to be compensating for something. Nora had been relieved to find out that her dad had nothing to do with this building.
“That’s good,” she said.
Caden was a nice enough guy, but he was annoyingly persistent when it came to pursuing her. She’d turned him down politely and had recently gotten more firm, but he apparently didn’t understand that she really wasn’t interested in him at all.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive. He had that clean cut, frat boy, yacht club look about him with his artfully tousled strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes with the chiseled jaw, and when she happened to glance down, he was even wearing boat shoes, despite them being nowhere near a boat. Or the ocean, for that matter. In her head, she called him ‘yacht club intern’ even though she knew his name, just because it amused her.
Nora was pretty sure that his mother was a congresswoman and that was one of the reasons why he had an internship working for the city, even though it was clear he didn't need the funds that he got for the job, small as they were. It was about 'building character' or some other buzz word that rich parents told their kids so they would get jobs they didn't need that would make them look better.
Or at least, that was what Nora assumed it was about. Her own family hadn't been hurting for money by any stretch of the imagination, but they also didn't have the kind of money that came with being in government and not caring about the people.
...Alright, so maybe she was a little bitter. The point was that she wasn't interested in the intern at all, and when he looked at her with those shining blue eyes, she wanted to turn around and take the stairs down instead. It didn't help that she was one of only three women in the entire building it seemed, and the other two were well into their forties. Clearly yacht club intern wasn't into older women.
Or maybe he just thought he'd have better luck with Nora and her tired eyes and eagerness to go home.
Silly yacht club intern.
"So what are you up to this weekend?" he asked her, leaning against the wall and looking comfortable.
"The usual," she said. "Hanging out with my roommate, maybe dinner somewhere with my dad."
“Oh, nice,” Caden said, and it actually sounded like he meant it, which warmed her towards him a bit. And then, of course, he had to ruin it by opening his mouth again. “Some of my friends are getting together on a boat this weekend, and I wanted to see if you wanted to come with.”
Nora arched an eyebrow. “You’re just...going out on a boat? For fun?”
He shrugged. “Well, yeah. There’s going to be music and food and beer. Probably Brad will sneak some whiskey on board even though he knows Thom doesn’t like it.”
“Thom?”
“It’s his boat. He’s got a no hard liquor rule ever since some girl he took out got too drunk on vodka cranberries and fell overboard.” He said it so matter of fact, like there was nothing shocking about that statement at all, and Nora just sighed internally.
“Ah. Well, as fun as that sounds, I’ve already made plans with my roommate and my dad, so I’ll have to pass.”
“Aw, come on,” Caden said. “Just for a little bit? I’ll show you a good time.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, and Nora could tell exactly what kind of time he was planning on showing her. Apparently subtlety had never been something he’d learned.
“That’s really okay,” Nora said and decided to take the stairs instead.
She drove the short distance to the grocery store, even though she usually just walked to get the exercise. This time she was really in a hurry to get away from the building she worked in and the idiots inside of it, and she figured it would be easier not to have to carry groceries back to the car when she was done.
Her mind wandered as she roamed the aisles, putting things in her cart. Coconut milk and jasmine rice for the curry, some lamb stew meat, sugar snap peas and sweet potatoes from the produce aisle, some new shampoo. It was easy to just drift in and out of paying attention as she moved through the store, listening to the tinny sound of the outdated pop song being piped in over the speakers.
She hummed the song under her breath, remembering it as one of the tunes that had been the most popular during summer when she'd been working at the ice cream parlor. It made her smile as she bobbed her head and picked up ice cream and garlic knots from the frozen section, tapping her foot as she perused.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement, and she turned her head to see someone staring at her from inside the freezer.
Nora liked to tell herself that she was mostly unflappable. That not much fazed her because she'd done so many things and seen so many things that it took a lot to shock her. Of course, that didn't extend to a face pressed against the glass inside of the freezer case, and she wasn't even a little bit ashamed of the way she jumped and let out a very loud swear at the sight.
"What in the world?" asked someone behind her, and she turned to see a stern looking mother with two small children in her cart along with her groceries. The kids were staring at her with wide eyes, having ceased what looked like a tug of war over a box of graham crackers.
Nora made a face. "Sorry," she said. "It was just..." She gestured.
The woman's eyes widened and she took a step back. "I can see why," she said. "What is going on?"
"I don't know," Nora said, a little peeved. Why would she have any idea why there was some weirdo in the freezer? "He was just...there."
And the odd thing was, she was pretty sure that he hadn't been there a moment ago, considering she had walked past that very section of freezer and considered buying the frozen toaster waffles before remembering that she still hadn't brought the toaster oven back inside from where it had been banished after catching fire when she was trying to reheat some leftover pizza. So she'd bypassed the waffles and moved on, and now there was a...man? She thought he was a man, even though his face looked strange.
Where most people's faces had some roundness to them, even if they were angular or square or whatever, this man...thing's face was all lines. His face was practically flat in the front due to his thin, slitted nostrils and thin lips. His eyes were the roundest thing on that face, and they practically bulged out in a way that was bordering on grotesque with the way they darted back and forth, seeming to rub up against the cold glass of the inside of the case while he looked from Nora to the people around her.
His skin was an odd shade of brown, not like Britt's or anyone else that she'd known, but an almost red brown, like the color of old blood, and there was something wrong with his skin.
The thinness that was in his face stretched to the rest of his body, too, after all, he was tucked into a freezer case with the fish sticks and everything else, body somehow fitting between the glass and the shelves, only squishing a few things.
A small crowd had gathered around now, and people were murmuring speculations to themselves as they stood there. A few people took pictures, and Nora knew that this was going to end up on the local news later. She would probably have to write some kind of statement for it for WTGL's Facebook page or something, and wouldn't that be a treat?
"Is there a problem over here?"
The voice made her look up, and she saw a tall, balding man wearing a smock that indicated he worked for the store, and a name tag that said he was upper management. Or as close to upper management as Save a Bunch got.
"There's a thing," a little girl said, pointing to the freezer with a finger that shook. From the look on her face, Nora couldn't tell if she was scared or excited, but she supposed that didn't really matter.
The man frowned. "What kind of thing? If something's been shelved incorrectly, I can point you— sweet mother on a stick!"
Nora wasn't the only one who covered her mouth and laughed into her hand at his language. He'd come closer and taken a look at what the little girl was pointing at.
"What is that?" he demanded, looking around at all the people clustered there like they had put it in the case as some kind of prank and were now all standing around waiting to see the effects of it.
"How should we know?" snapped another patron. "We just turned up looking for freezer stuff, and it was there. Ask your employees."
Nora very much doubted that anyone had put the person/creature there. Or at least, she doubted that anyone who either worked or shopped at Save a Bunch had done it. After all, the thing was very much alive, though judging from how infrequently its breath fogged the glass of the case, it might have been sedated or something.
And it didn't seem like some bored shop employee in a costume looking to scare up some entertainment for themself. If it was, that was a very good costume, and a very thin employee who should probably demand better wages so they could afford food.
The manager peered at the case again and then clearly decided that this was below his pay grade. He pulled out a walkie talkie from his belt and began speaking into it in a low, urgent tone.
"We're going to need you all to clear out," he said finally, waving his hands at the crowd. "Someone has to come deal with this."
That seemed to be enough to get most of the people moving, and Nora remembered that she had things to do herself. She started heading away, trying to recall what else she had been looking for when she came in.
A few stragglers stayed behind to pepper the manager with questions, much to his obvious annoyance, and when Nora turned the corner, she could see a teenage boy bearing a roll of caution tape and a bucket on his way to the aisle.
She didn't want to know what he thought he was going to do with the bucket, and she hurried through the rest of her shopping and then headed to the register.
Apparently, in an effort to save the reputation of the esteemed Save a Bunch franchise, anyone who had been present at the scene of whatever that was, got a twenty percent off coupon for their entire purchase.
"Thank you for shopping at Save a Bunch," said the young woman who rang her up, and Nora smiled at her and pushed her cart to the car.
"You took ages!" Britt exclaimed when she came through the door, laden with bags and looking unimpressed.
Britt was flopped over the couch on her stomach, looking at something on her laptop, which was on the floor with the screen tilted back far enough that she could still see it.
Nora sighed.
She loved her roommate, she really did. The two of them got on famously, and even though they had completely different personalities, they still had enough in common and enough respect and affection for each other that it was hardly ever a problem.
But Nora had had a trying day, all things considered, and it would have been nice once, just once, if Britt could do something more useful than being dramatic.
She usually tried to keep these thoughts to herself because she knew that Britt couldn't help it, and she also knew that she herself was prone to the dramatic sometimes and Britt put up with it well enough. But sometimes she was bad at making the things that she thought in her head not show on her face, and judging from how Britt rolled over onto her back and then sat up, this was one of those times.
"Sorry," Nora said immediately. "It was just a long day."
Britt smiled at her. "It's fine, silly. I know I'm a pain. Do you need help with anything?"
Nora smiled back and told her there were more groceries in the car.
Between the two of them, they got everything unloaded and put away, and Nora washed up and changed out of her work clothes and set to work getting everything ready for dinner.
Britt perched on the counter while she worked, chatting about her day and the stupid emails she'd gotten from the people she was collaborating with for her latest project.
Nora listened while she diced sweet potatoes and then started them boiling while she worked on the rest of the veggies for the curry and then chopped up the lamb she'd gotten to go in it.
The work was soothing and took her mind off of her job and even the encounter, for lack of a better term, at the store. She'd save that story for dinner or something.
"Here," she said, jabbing her spoon in the direction of the pot rack on the wall. "Get some rice going."
"You know, things would be much easier if you'd just give in and get a rice cooker," Britt said, but she hopped down and filled the pot from the twenty pound bag of rice they kept in a bin under the counter.
"You could just get one since you think it's so important," Nora pointed out.
Britt stuck her tongue out at her as she measured enough water to go in the pot and then set it on the stove to boil.
It was a nice dinner, all things considered. The curry was delicious (if she said so herself), and the two of them laughed and talked over the meal. By the time she was getting ready for bed, Nora felt better than she had all day, and she had to admit that even if she still didn't have the career she wanted, she was at least really good at finding people who made her life better.
The night was quiet and dark, and Nora breathed out a low sigh of relief when her brain finally stopped humming. Sometimes it was such a relief to just...switch off at the end of the day and lie in her bed. It usually took her at least an hour to fall asleep, but she didn't mind that.
This was her time to herself. She would lie in bed with her earbuds in and an audiobook playing, letting her mind wander as she listened to the narrator describe whatever was happening in the book.
Tonight's selection was a good one. It was one of her guilty pleasure books, a torrid romance about a young woman far from home and the pirate captain who fell in love with her when he picked her up at a port town. It had action, witty banter, mystery, betrayal, found family, and plenty of romance and smutty scenes, and Nora wiggled under her covers as she listened.
"Captain!" cried the first mate. "We've been spotted. Should I ready the canons?"
"No!" screamed Genevieve, throwing herself at the side of the ship and leaning over the rail to look at the other ship in question. "You can't."
"Why not, Gen?" Captain Solin wanted to know. His arms were folded, and anyone could see that he was not pleased. He had feelings for this woman, his entire crew knew that, but they also knew that he hadn't been satisfied with her answers about who she was and why she was there. Clearly there was more about to be revealed. "Whose ship is that?"
Gen turned to look at him, and her eyes were large and repentant. The bright blue depths swam with unshed tears, and Solin felt his heart ready to break before she had even spoken.
"My husband's."
"Genevieve, you hussy," Nora breathed, making herself more comfortable.
Her earbuds were good at blocking out most of the sounds of Britt getting ready for bed in the next room over, but they did very little to drown out the sudden loud THUMP that seemed to reverberate through the whole building.
Their apartment was close enough to the roof of the building that it wasn’t hard to tell that something had just fallen on it. Hard. A downed tree, maybe?
Nora hit the pause button on her phone, cutting off Genevieve’s impassioned apology for lying to her captain, and she sat up in bed, listening hard.
A few seconds later, her bedroom door flew open, and Britt was standing there, dressed in her pajamas and looking wide eyed. “Did you hear that? What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Nora replied, sliding out from under the sheets and getting up. She fetched her bathrobe from over the back of the chair she’d slung it over and shrugged it on. “Maybe a tree fell?”
“Just out of the blue?” Britt asked. “It’s not windy or anything out there.”
She was right. It was a completely still evening, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
As they stood in the doorway, more sounds echoed from above them. Another crash and then something that seemed like the rumble of an earthquake, only from on high. Someone knocked on the door to their apartment, and Nora wrapped her robe tighter around herself and went to see who it was.
The older woman from across the hall, Mrs. Simpson, was standing there, looking concerned. When Nora looked out, she could see that there were others of their neighbors clustered in the hall, all chatting with odd looks on their faces.
“I just wanted to check and make sure you girls were okay,” Mrs. Simpson was saying.
“We’re fine,” Nora replied. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Well, there’s all that noise on the roof,” she pointed out. “And David went up there for a smoke about three hours ago and he hasn’t come back yet.”
It took Nora a moment to place the name. As far as she knew, Mrs. Simpson’s husband was named Brandon, and they didn’t live together. It clicked after a bit, and she remembered that David was the quiet college kid who lived at the very end of the hall who sometimes did housework for Mrs. Simpson when she wasn’t feeling well.
“Has anyone gone up there to check on him?” Nora wanted to know.
“Heck no,” interjected one of the others in the hall. “Sounds like a stampede up there. I’m on seven, and we’re right under it. There’s a crack in the ceiling up there.”
What in the world? What was up there that was so heavy that it put a crack in the ceiling? “Well, someone should go see what’s going on,” Nora said. “So we know if we need to call the police or something.”
“We could get the super,” suggested another of the neighbors, a young woman with frizzy hair. “Isn’t this his area?”
“I think this is more complicated than fixing the hot water heater, Renee,” someone else said, and the young woman blushed.
“Someone should probably call him, though, yeah?” Britt chimed in, stepping out into the hall wearing clothes now. “If there’s a crack in the ceiling and all.”
Nora huffed a sigh. “Or we could just go up there ourselves and see what’s happening.”
“What if it’s…” Mrs. Simpson trailed off, looking like she didn’t really want to say what she thought it was.
“What? Monsters who came down from the sky?” Nora asked.
“Well, no,” the older woman said, making a face like she didn’t appreciate Nora’s disrespect. And yeah, she could have been nicer about it, but honestly at this point, she was sort of losing her patience with this whole thing, and she just wanted to go back to bed. “But it could be...you know.”
Nora sighed. “I assure you, Mrs. Simpson, I don’t know.”
“Aliens,” the woman breathed and then covered her hand with her mouth.
Britt snorted a laugh, turning her face away so it would seem less like she was laughing, but something gave Nora pause. She remembered what she’d seen at the store that afternoon. The strange man thing that had been staring at her through the glass of the freezer display.
She’d put it out of her mind between the traffic that she’d had to battle on the way home and making dinner and all, but now she was thinking about his face in vivid detail, and she wondered.
“There’s no such thing as aliens, Mrs. Simpson,” Britt was saying. “And if there were, what would they want to come here for? They’re probably way more advanced than anything we’ve got going on here.”
Mrs. Simpson looked irritated, and now there was something uncomfortable squirming in Nora’s stomach. “Look,” she said. “There’s only one way to find out what’s going on up there, and that’s for someone to go up there.”
“David went up there,” Mrs. Simpson pointed out. “And he hasn’t come back.”
“Probably because he’s the source of whatever’s happening up there,” someone else muttered, and the older woman silenced them with a look.
This was getting them nowhere, and Nora was tired. “Give me five minutes to get dressed, and I’ll go up there. Anything to figure this out so I can go back to bed.”
She stomped back into their apartment, closing the door once Britt had followed her in. Her roommate followed her to her bedroom and stood outside the door while Nora traded her pajamas and robe for actual clothes.
“You’re not really going up there, are you?” she asked. “That’s crazy.”
“Someone has to. Otherwise we’ll all just end up standing around all night arguing about it. Ten bucks says it’s David and some of his friends playing some kind of prank.” Even as she said it, she didn’t believe it. David wasn’t the type, for one, and for another, she didn’t know what he could do that would make the kind of sounds they’d been hearing and put a crack in the ceiling to boot.
As if thinking about it had summoned the noise, another loud, thunderous sound shook the building. From somewhere outside someone screamed, and Nora froze.
“Did you hear that?” Britt asked, voice hushed.
Nora nodded.
“Oh god. What’s happening?”
They couldn’t see anything outside, since their apartment’s windows all faced the wooded area behind the building, and the two of them got their shoes on and then headed back out, barely remembering to lock the door behind them as they sprinted down the stairs and to the front door.
At first all they saw was a cluster of people all standing around, but they all looked like they had seen something horrible. They pushed through the crowd and Nora gasped when she looked down to see what everyone else was staring at.
There, lying broken and bloody on the pavement, was David.
He looked like he had been thrown from the top of the building, from the way his body was splayed out, and Nora felt sick to her stomach. She turned her head and looked up at the top of their building, and her mouth fell open.
Perched on top of the building they called home was...well. It could only be described as a spaceship, she was pretty sure, even though it didn’t look like anything she had ever seen in books or movies.
For one thing, as far as she could tell, it resembled an actual ship. It looked like a seafaring vessel to her, but with a domed top instead of sails. There were even port holes along the sides of it, round and tinted, so she didn’t think she’d be able to see through it even if she were to get close enough.
It was very bright chrome construction that reflected the street and parking lot lights from all the way up there, and Nora had to shield her eyes when she tried to get a better look. It was no wonder it had made so much noise when it landed on the roof. It couldn’t even fit on the roof. The middle section was balanced on the top of the building, and either end of it hung off over the edges. The whole thing was the length of several city buses, and while it was narrow-ish, curving up like the bottom of a boat, it still looked like it could hold over a hundred people easily. Oarlike struts made of the same shiny metallic material were holding it up, and she couldn’t get a clear view, but it looked to Nora like some kind of gangplank type thing had been lowered on the side facing away from her, letting someone or something off of the ship.
Probably who or whatever had dropped David off the side of the building onto the hard ground below.
Someone screamed again.
Britt, who was still beside her, swore under her breath. “Now I owe Mrs. Simpson an apology,” she said.
Nora wasn’t really paying attention. She didn’t see how Britt was focused on something like Mrs. Simpson at a time like this, either. There were aliens on their building. Extraterrestrials. Creatures from another planet. Either that or a prank was being pulled on their entire building by someone with too much money and time on their hands.
Before she could do much to contemplate that, there was an unholy screech from the side of the ship that she couldn’t see and something came flying down over the side of the building.
It landed hard on the ground on its feet, and Nora took a giant step back.
She had been expecting to see the thing from the store, but this creature was so much worse.
It was grotesquely mottled, its skin the color of sludge. Its face was misshapen, eyes bulging out of its head. When it smiled, it showed rows of sharp teeth that were yellowed and caked in something that Nora didn’t even want to contemplate.
The thing wasn’t small, either.
It towered over her and everyone else, hunched over and still at least a foot or so bigger than anyone else who was standing nearby.
Someone screamed once more, and the creature jerked its head around to look for the source of it, letting out that same screeching sound that it had made before.
"Oh no," Nora heard someone say. "Oh no oh no oh no."
It was an apt sentiment, she was sure. They had no idea what this thing was, though what it was there for seemed pretty clear at the moment with the sinister way it was looking around at all of them like they were on a buffet line.
When its head snapped back around to where Nora could see its face, it opened its mouth and low, grating words came out, like the sound of stones grinding together. It was in a language that she didn't know and hadn't ever heard before, but her blood ran cold all the same at the threat in the tone.
This was not good.
As if some sort of spell had broken, whatever had been holding them there, transfixed by the sight, dissipated, and they all scattered, running and screaming off in different directions.
Nora took off, running back towards the building. If they could get inside, maybe it would be harder for that thing to come after them. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Britt had the same idea and was at her side.
From above there was a shout. More words she didn't know, this time spoken in an imperial, commanding tone.
There was some acknowledgement from the creature and then the sound of claws scraping against the concrete before the thing was in front of them, blocking the door.
It moved like it didn't take any effort at all, and Nora's head spun.
With a last, sickening grin, it reached out for the nearest thing it could find, long fingers curling and grasping around Nora’s neck.
She heard someone screaming her name, but it was too late. Nora had time to gasp once and then everything went dark.