I’m going to take a step back from my own narrative. It’s too hard for me to describe the rest of that fight from any sort of inside perspective. And, even then, not from the outside for any sort of coherent description of its developments or how I ultimately mao pull myself back together as me.

  It was like if you took two running wood chippers with their cowls removed and an angry tree, and mushed all three things together, and said, “Now kiss!”

  The tree lost.

  And so did the wood chippers.

  I do have memories now of Seedy thinking, at its st moment of lucidity, that it maybe had a way of turning the tide on me, but that just didn’t happe, at the time, I didn’t even know it was there anymore, or that it was something separate from me, or that I wasn’t it.

  I got fused as to which parts were me, and which parts weren’t, and I’m not sure that the mohat finally floated away from that battle was me at all.

  It fot entirely about Cassy momentarily, distracted by its own wounds, which were myriad and beyond ting, and drifted slightly Eastward with the wind.

  Whatever was me, whatever stituted my identity, memories, and sense of awareness, was just not there anymore. Not in any sort of coherent order, in any case. And re it all took work, and nightmares upon nightmares, which I’m told fshed in the sky like neon lightning, painting the city in spshes of rainbow colors.

  And I think my first coherent thought after that was, “Dammit, I really didn’t want to have e to an end. Now that I’ve beeroyed, what ?”

  I was still in the sky at the time, and about the size of a mountain, as the sun was setting.

  After what had just happened, nothing nearby would dare touch me.

  It was the worst migraine she’d ever had.

  It had e on sudden, with the pain of a thousand worms filling her head with pressure and wriggling, her vision filled with stilting indest noodles shifting and pulsing in sync with whatever was going on inside her brain.

  She’d had just enough vision in her eyes to catch a glimpse of her phone nding on pavement aling onto its face before she’d covered her fad fell backward. And thehing got worse.

  She’d bcked out from the pain.

  Never before had a migraine e on so quickly and so debilitating within seds.

  Maybe within just one sed.

  That’s what it had felt like, and still did as she started to e to, ter.

  Only now, her whole body ached, like she’d been fighting her brothers for a whole afternoon. Her joints all felt torn and swollen, and her muscles were deeply fatigued. Her bohemselves felt like they were full of molten lead, or as if they’d beeied of marrow with a powerful vacuum.

  The pavement under her felt rough and pebbly, and like it was being pushed into her by an hydraulic press.

  She had a scary moment, just before opening her eyes, where she was uain who she was. There was only the memory of past migraines, and the question of who eves migraines like this? Which she was uo answer, not even with a simple, “me, apparently.”

  Panic followed quickly with the likely sario of a stranger or someone asking if she was OK, and then being faced with the o introduce herself.

  People introduced themselves to each other when they met, right?

  She at least uood that. She was someone who remembered having to do that. A person, presumably.

  She blinked, and the ndscape around her glowed with a painful goldehat made her retinas ache intensely. There were still stained gss snakes in her vision. They’d been there with her eyes shut, too, but they were reg to the edges quickly now, along with the pressure in her head.

  As eaake wriggled into the nothingness on the periphery of her sciousness and disappeared, another memory came back to her.

  Maybe this wasn’t the worst migraine, actually. The ohat sted three weeks probably took the cake, holy. This one was ing up faster than she’d expected.

  Her body, however, still hurt so much it was difficult to move.

  heless, upon seeing it, Cassy pushed herself over to try to pick up her phone.

  Hand on the g, trying to figure out how to get her fingers curled u to pick it up, she realized her name was Cassy.

  She looked around.

  There were no people.

  There was a big, torn up hole in the grouo a big low building, and abandoned cars oher side of her ireet she was near. But not a single person. Not even a police officer, a fireman, or ao ask her how she was.

  She began to feel lonely again.

  Deeply, deeply lonely, and fused about what to do .

  Her breath was so heavy, it took all her tration to keep taking it for a while.

  It was nearly 2:00 pm when Greg finally made it to Hayward Grocery, and the parking lot there was full of people. Sihe front of the store faced the West, he assumed that’s where Ayden would be to watch what was happening. And as he’d driven through town to get there, it was being more and more clear that people were stopping everything to watch.

  Sometimes, after an hour of gawking and taking it in, during a small disaster, people would eventually return to their daily routines, occasionally cheg in ng up to see if it was still going on. And, early in this event, there were a lot of people still trying to get pces in their cars, for sure. Much like Greg had been doing.

  But as he got closer to Hayward, it became clear that this was going to be a protracted thing that drew everyone’s undivided attention. The city had e to a plete halt.

  Part of the reason for that were the strange lights and bizarre sounds that began emanating from the pulsating and rolling inky bck cloud.

  He didn’t have to talk to anybody to know that nobody had seen anything like this before. Not on record anyway. Not anyone who was alive. Not anyone who was believed. Maybe there was an at written by some schor in some fotten city in the past that historians argued about or chalked up to embellishment.

  The point was, this was weird.

  And, whe there, it was impossible to pull his truto the parking lot, so he left it oreet, not even in a parking spot there, because there weren’t any. At this point, he was the only person driving for blocks around.

  He couldn’t figure out which ookier, the unholy godcloud taking up half the sky, or the fact that everyone and everything else was so quiet and still.

  People were whispering to each other, cheg their phones, and nudging each other in the shoulder. It was like they were afraid that if they spoke too loud it would overhear them.

  Ayden Jung was easy to spot in his shop apron worn odawful pineapple print button down shirt and khaki scks, his short stature also making him stand out amongst men. His bleached spiky hair and scraggly beck beard framed a ed look etched into a perfeplexion as he held his phoo his ear.

  “Ayden!” Greg called as he rao him, and everyohin earshot started and looked.

  Ayden speared him with panic filled eyes.

  L his voice, he spoke in hushed tones as he approached, “We gotta get in there. That’s where Cassy is. She ’t be anywhere else.”

  Ayden pulled the phone away from his ear and hissed, “Shit!”

  “e on!”

  And they both quickly dashed back t’s truck.

  Except, after waiting for Ayden to run around and pull himself up and io buckle himself in, smming the dreg couldn’t actually drive much further.

  Within a couple of blocks, he entered a crush of traffic leaving the city ter and taking up all o do it, because of illegally parked cars of gawkers and just the sheer mass of people deg on their own to evacuate unaided by any authorities.

  That’s when he looked up to see that the nightmare cloud was rapidly expanding, rolling out as if to cover the whole city.

  He mao pull his truck up onto a sidewalk to park it out of everyone’s way, but pedestrians were making even that hard, and he and Ayden stayed in the cab for several minutes waiting for the crowd to abate. Which it eventually did because there were fewer and fewer people left to run.

  But now they were plunged into twilight as the low, thick, perfectly opaque cloud covered eighty pert of the sky from where they stood, just outside of his truck. What sunlight reached them came in low and stark, but all too dim. And the bizarre, teichtning began to pick up.

  The thunder sounded like the cries of animals long goind fotten.

  His knees buckled and his gut rioted while shakes surged through his body. He felt like he was thinking clearly, but he couldn’t make his body move when the lights and sounds were happening. And then he realized that, no, those weren’t thoughts, they were fears scampering about in his mind.

  He heard Ayden cry, “I ’t!”

  And he wao run, but he gripped the side of his truck as if his hand was an iron vice, and he focused all his will on the o save Cassy from whatever this was.

  In a fsh of neon violet light, he saoli running past him with the raw panic of a tourist who’d actally walked into the running of the bulls.

  The fsh was yellow and revealed a porpoise sized anomalocaris chasing the cop, swimming through the air.

  The only reason he reized the beast was because of versations with his coworkers.

  “Holy fuck, I ’t!” Ayden shouted.

  Or was it his own voice?

  He got bato his trud locked his own door. The retive safety of the giving him the wherewithal to gnce over at Ayden, to shout at him to get inside. Which Ayden then did.

  The car traffic was still at a standstill, and there was o go while iruck, but at least it would provide shelter.

  And they ended up waiting out the worst of it in there.

  The things they saw and heard were founding nightmare fuel, and Greg could feel himself being ged by the experience. And as far as he knew, Cassy was in the middle of it, if she was even alive at this point.

  He gnced over once or twice to see Ayden rec everything on his phone, silent and wide eyed.

  He shook his head, but not in derision. It robably easier to take it all in through the filter of the s, and civilizatioed on the humao dot everything somehow, whether it by void memory or cy tablet. No one would regret the video files of this event, if they could be retrieved.

  And as the city around him became flooded with outsized prehistoric sea creatures limned in vaporwave, he wondered if they were all monsters like Synthia had described and warhem about, or if they were something else.

  Were they just visions his own mind had cooked up from the phrase “Precambrian monster”?

  If he remembered correctly, anything that swam was Cambrian or ter. But maybe he was wrong. That was Ayden’s deal.

  Later, he remembered asking while it was all going on, and Ayden nodding as if that was an answer, face illuminated by a deep blue fsh.

  And by the time they felt safe enough to leave the vehicle, the sun was setting.

  The enormous nightmare cloud had drifted Eastward, bringing a little more light to the blocks surrounding Greg and Ayden, but the light was quickly turning gold and e. The visions, noises, and fshes had long stopped, but they’d petered out so slowly and recurred so randomly that it took a long time to feel like they were truly gone.

  Greg wo how coherent his mind had been throughout the whole ordeal, but when he checked a clock almost three hours had passed and he was bewildered by it.

  He’d lost time.

  He’d zoned out and lost track of the passage of, well, everything.

  It had felt like forty-five minutes of hell at most.

  “I ran out of spay phone,” Ayden said.

  theInmara