Chapter Text
Turns out, it’s not heart disease that gets you. Not a car crash, the second coming, or even a plain old slip in the shower that removes you from this mortal coil.
It’s motherfucking aliens.
Your Uncle Randy would be so proud.
You wake to heat and smoke. The acrid taste clings to your tongue, and grit crunches between your teeth. Your first thought: the Big One finally happened; your apartment has collapsed in the earthquake and you’re stuck in the rubble. You were in bed. That might have saved you from being completely crushed?
Only you’re not on your bed, anymore. Nor are you on a pile of splintered wood and concrete. The floor is cool and disgusting, in a kind of spongy way. You can tell this rather intimately, as you’re naked.
Then the smoke clears, and you’re not in a debris pile. Because there’s a squid-face motherfucker grabbing at you. The ancient, primate part of your brain that remembers loping along tree branches and eating bugs takes one look at that thing, and it starts shrieking.
And that’s when you realize you’re not on something, you’re in something and it’s a goddamn cage and you flail around, buck-ass nude, as Squidward lifts something squirming towards you.
“Fucknofuckthis!” you say, in a long, one-word primate screech.
Squidward jerks its hand and your head slams the back of your cage. Things go a little fuzzy.
More smoke billows into the room, and your cage shudders around you. Squidward is moving fast and frantic. It gives the smoke a hateful glare like the smoke insulted it.
You can’t move. Can’t even blink. Can only pant and wheeze and shriek as it all but smashes what you think is a worm onto your fucking eyeball.
Pain digs in. The little fucker writhes, chewing, flattening itself around your eye. The pain blinds you.
The next time you wake, it’s to the feel of empty space. You cartwheel once. Hit the ground. Pain blasts through your left hip and knocks your breath out. You lie there for a second, lungs spasming and trying to inhale, and it’s like sucking air through a coffee straw.
The floor has the same, unpleasant squishiness. It makes you think of congealed slime, like bare toes sinking into cold cat vomit, and you finally recover enough to gag.
You’re in the same room, you think. You’re not sure. It’s moderately on fire, hazed in rancid smoke that smells like the worst crossover of burning rubber and scorched slugs. You force yourself up—your bad knee miraculously not popping like the hateful bitch it is—and find yourself alone. Except for dead Squidward.
The ship is large. A lot of it is made of cat vomit floor, and the doors are people-sized buttholes. You find a room which sets off your “xenomorph from Aliens” phobia. And inside, you find the intact body. It’s another human, a large man dressed up in some kind of SCA reenactor’s clothes. They’re not crusted in blood or anything else, and it’s way better than running around with your tits flapping. After a struggle that leaves your out-of-shape ass flushed and panting, you slip on an off-beige tunic. It comes down to mid thigh.
So now you’re in a large, on fire alien butthole ship, still defenseless and alone, dressed like medieval Winnie-the-poo. It’s an improvement.
You find an H.R. Giger box. You almost don’t open it. But your white women ancestors reach out through you, and your hands are fiddling with the thing before you can think, “Hold on.” Inside is some weird shit: a slug in a jar, a funny rock, and—is that gold? What the fuck? There’s also a little voice whispering in your mind, that you follow over to some slack-jawed dude strapped to a chair. And you know it’s not his voice because 1. it echoes in your skull and 2. the back of his skull is gone, leaving exposed brain.
Your primate brain is having none of that. You end up reflexively slapping the thing when the creepy voice speaks again. You don’t mean to? You probably don’t mean to. You’re high as a kite on adrenaline and shock, and your hand just kind of does the thing. Oops.
“Getting the fuck out of here,” you say to the actually this time dead guy.
You haven’t seen any other aliens. Might be because the whole “on fire” part. Something bad is happening, and a very loud part of you insists you better find somewhere to hide. But an even louder part rages at this entire situation, and it would really like you to find a gun or space laser or a goddamn butter knife please.
Things do not improve in the next room. The far wall is gone. It’s not the vacuum of space that tugs your short hair. Your nose doesn’t fill with what one astronaut described as the “burning metal” smell of low earth orbit. What hits your nose is sulfur and smoke. The outside holds no stars. It’s orange and hazy, with weird, shifting dark slashes. And it’s filled with demons.
The butthole ship is in hell. Actual, literal hell.
Your Aunt Patty May would be so self-righteous right now, the stupid bitch. You really did die and go to hell.
You take a couple of steps and catch yourself on the slimy edge of a wall. You manage not to fall onto your knees.
The ship zooms along what looks like a twisted, red ground swarming with ants. A rush and—is that a dragon—swoops past the hole.
Aliens, you can deal with.
Hell, you can be bitter about.
But dragons? You’re not on anything. None of your medications cause hallucinations. There’s no explanation for this 80’s metal album fever dream. Your brain has just about had it, and fuck if it’s not reaching for the shutdown switch.
Which is when a lizard woman vaults and flips over your head. She lands and twirls, and points a sword at your face. She’s green. She’s in metal armor. She opens her mouth and snarls something at you.
And you…you have no idea what she’s saying.