You’ll Never Guess What Happened
Copyright© 2026 by TMax
Chapter 4: A New World
The quiet of the house woke me. Not country quiet, with bugs and crickets and animals and the odd truck in the distance, but true quiet, as in no fans running, nothing. My alarm clock, a model of the alien from Alien, didn’t display the time, and the light inside its second mouth didn’t turn on. The house felt cold. Goosebumps stood out on my forearms, and my skin turned diamond-hard. I grabbed and held my rock, my fossil finger bone, my reminder of when I still had hopes and dreams.
Something watched me. Everyone gets that itch when something sinister watches them, or at least I do.
Slow, a muscle at a time, I rolled off my bed and onto the hardwood floor. Under the bed, my cat, JJ, stared wide-eyed at me. Eyes bright. She hunched at the wall, as if to pounce or attack, which made the skin on the back of my neck itch. I strained to hear anything, something to give away what spooked JJ and watched me.
Though I knew. Same rotten smell, same ash taste in the air.
Visions of movies, ghost stories, and alien creatures that burst out of your chest filled my mind.
I pressed my hands against the dusty hardwood floor and, as slow as possible, one muscle at a time, pushed myself up. The floorboards creaked and caused the cat to rush out from under the bed. As it approached the door, it vanished.
One moment, a streak of grey fur, and the next, nothing. No cat. Just a smell of sulfur and ozone. That bitter taste. JJ.
Then the stillness. Dead air. And the confirmation that something sinister stalked my house. But where. In the room. JJ would not have run for the door if the thing stood out in the hall. JJ, the stray cat that adopted me when I first arrived. My only friend, who slept on my head for the first week until she accepted me into her house, and then slept at the foot of my bed to protect me.
The air stirred, and I jumped to my feet. Something black, with too many legs, and too short, with wide-mouth-like things over its slimy body. Something alien, that my mind refused to understand, stood inches from me.
My skin tingled, and the bright morning sun disappeared.
A cool night breeze wafted through my bedroom window. The moon hung behind a few clouds, the stars still too bright, something that I will never get used to in this town.
The thing had disappeared. Or maybe I had slept long, or barely at all. But the smell still lingered in the room. Rotten meat, ash, sulfur, and cat piss from under the bed. No JJ. No sounds.
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