They found the truck three days after the storm, engine still warm, doors flung open with obvious brutal force. No sign of blood. No sign of struggle. Just a half-eaten sandwich on the dash and a smear of something black and iridescent on the steering wheel.
The search party combed the woods for a week. Dogs refused to go past the treeline. Radios crackled with static that sounded like whispering. Then a police officer went missing. They called it off.
But this isn’t their story.
This is what happened to the man in the truck.
His name was Jay Burke. Thirty-nine. Divorced. Worked nights at the paper mill.
He didn’t believe in God, ghosts, or aliens. He believed in overtime and cold beer. That night, he was driving home through the backwoods and mountains,headlights cutting through the mist like scalpels.
Then the world went white.
Not a flash. Not lightning. A presence. Like something peeled back the sky and stared down at him.
The truck lifted off the road. Tires spun in the air. Jay screamed, but no sound came out. His body convulsed, then froze.
The doors tore open and they grabbed him, marched him as captive and he rose into the light.
He woke up on a slab of something that wasn’t metal but felt like it. The air was thick and wet, like breathing through cloth. The room pulsed—walls shifting in and out of phase, like they were alive and dreaming.
He couldn’t move.
Not because he was restrained. Because his body didn’t belong to him anymore.
Shapes moved around him. Not humanoid. Not insects. Not anything that should exist.
They were tall and thin, with limbs that bent in too many places, skin like oil on water, and faces that were just smooth bones—no eyes, no mouth, just a suggestion of cruelty.
They didn’t speak. They imposed thoughts. Not words. Feelings. Cold. Clinical. Curious. Then: hunger.
They began.
First, they took his eyes. Not physically. They turned them off. Jay blinked, but the world stayed dark. He could feel them adjusting something inside his skull, like tuning a radio. He saw flashes—his childhood dog, the face of his ex-wife, the moment his father died. Then those memories were gone. Not repressed. Deleted.
They replaced them with images he didn’t understand. A sun that bled. A planet made of teeth. A child screaming underwater. He tried to scream too, but his mouth didn’t work.
Then they opened it.
No pain. Just the awareness of being unzipped. His chest peeled back like fruit. He saw his own heart beating, but it wasn’t red. It was black. Pulsing with something that moved against the rhythm of life.
They reached in. Not with hands. With intent. They touched his soul, if such a thing exists, and tasted it.
He felt them recoil. Not because he was impure. Because he was bored.
They showed him to others.
A woman from Brazil, floating in a tank of green fluid, her skin translucent, her veins glowing like constellations. A boy from Kazakhstan, his brain exposed, still alive, eyes darting in terror. A man from Nigeria, fused into the wall, whispering prayers in a language Jay didn’t know but somehow understood.
They are all the same, the aliens thought. Flesh. Fear. Failure.
Jay realised they weren’t studying humanity. They were weeding it.
Time didn’t pass. It looped. He relived the abduction a thousand times, each version slightly different. In one, he ran. In another, he begged. In another, he fought and broke one of their necks—only to find it had no spine, just a writhing nest of worms.
Each time, he died.
Each time, he woke up again on the slab.
Eventually, he stopped resisting and that’s when they began the real work.
They inserted something into his mind. A seed. It grew quickly, branching through his thoughts, rewriting his memories. He remembered things that never happened: a war on Mars, a lover with silver eyes, a child made of glass. He remembered being one of them.
Then they erased it all. Again. And again. Until he didn’t know who he was. Until he didn’t want to know.
One day—if it was a day—they let him walk.
The corridor was endless, lined with mirrors that didn’t reflect him. Instead, they showed versions of himself: one with no mouth, one with insect legs, one that was just a scream in human shape.
He reached a chamber where Earth hung suspended in a sphere of liquid light. The aliens stood around it, watching.
They turned to him.
This is your home, they thought. It is not yours anymore.
They showed him the future. Not invasion. Not conquest.
Harvest.
They would come in silence. No ships. No lasers. Just presence. They would erase humanity the way you delete a file. Not out of malice. Out of disgust.
Jay fell to his knees. He begged. They opened his mouth for him. He screamed. They let him remember that part, so that when they dropped him back into his body—naked, broken, alone—he would carry the terror like a virus.
But they miscalculated, because he didn’t make it back.
The police officer who vanished during the search? They found his boots a kilometre from the site, still laced, standing upright in the mud. Inside them: nothing but ash.
The town stopped talking about it, but sometimes, late at night, people heard a sound in the woods, like something remembering how to be human, and failing.
Bio:
L Christopher Hennessy lives in Coffs Harbour NSW, Australia, He is the author of poetry, short stories, and novels, and has been published since the 1990s. His writing covers many genres.