“To my son, who chose me, of all people, to stick with

as the world went to hell around us. There are strange things you and I have witnessed, I only wish we could witness it all together.”

                                                      CACAPHONY TV

Let me get something out of the way right off the bat. As I tell you about where it all came from and what happened to the world, keep in mind the lesson I’ve known for the longest time, even before all of this,: Nothing is sacred. I’m going to tell you what happened, as it happened, and if you are expecting a happy ending, don’t bother, there isn’t one.

Unless of course, you’re like me, in which case it’s already here.

Seeing as I’m the only one who knows everything there is to know, I’ll give you my entire story, from the beginning, that’s what you’re here for, right? You want to know about what happened to your, our world, what happened to me. Well, prepare to be disappointed, because this all didn’t start with some grand scheme kept under the eyes of something, or even someone, beyond our understanding, it didn’t start from flying saucers coming down, taking people and having them meet the Xenomorph so they could all gangbang and make those things that come out at night now.

It started with, what I presumed to be, an otherworldly fuck up with my TV cable while I was watching The History Channel in a depressed haze of minimum wage and instant ramen.

CHAPTER 1: THE WENDY’S CASHIER FROM SR388.

If you were to have asked me back then if I wanted these events to happen, I probably would’ve said: “Yes, maybe then there could be something more to my life than being an expendable slave to the almighty overseer of processed beef and broken innocence, living in a grey box that no one else wanted only because there was a cheaper, but equally pathetic brown box across town. Jokes on them though, they have neighbors.”

That grey box was my apartment, 3rd floor from the top with almost no other residents in the vicinity, maybe someone died and they found a piece of the body in each room so now everyone's afraid that they’ll find a ghostly pair of lips eating all their Häagen-Dazs at 4: AM, who knows. There’s no point in describing my apartment really, just think “Shitty place owned by someone who’s made poor decisions in life, but up kept as best they could to give themselves some semblance of dignity.” and you’ve got the idea. I had just come home from what I hesitate to call a job and more an assignment, a punishment for wanting to cheat the system. Not quite McDonald's levels of terrible but not exactly where you’d go to meet the in-laws either, yet regardless of where you are, you’re still stuck holding back metaphorical tears and plastering a grin as a woman old enough to be your mother gives you that condescending look that despite coming from a stranger still hits you in your soul every single time.

I bring all this up so you can understand that everything that happened that sent the world on fire happened to some random fuck you’d hear over the microphone playing Team Fortress 2, that sad, broken voice that calls anyone that causes them inconvenience a retard, I fit that type of guy almost perfectly. I, THESHITCOOK88 (Or Drake Tughnout, if you hate edgy usernames), would become the one who’d go down a legend as the harbinger of weird crap in the sky.

Long story short, I fulfilled my daily requirement of doing fuck-all with my time until I was sitting on the couch at 11:00 PM so I could watch a rerun of a World War 1 documentary on The History Channel. It always fascinated me, watching how people are so capable of war, how one day this entire planet could come crashing down because the rich men are too afraid of losing their infernal grasp on humanity. “Regardless of whatever potentially sick reason I watch this stuff, still better than whatever The Big Bang Theory is trying to be.” I thought to myself. I sat down, waited for it to come on after an infomercial for some blanket-hoodie whatchamacallit (That to me just seemed inferior to taking whatever blanket wasn’t big enough for you in the first place and putting it in the oven to light it fire for warmth)and sighed. Sighed in the most comical way you could think of to convey despair, like something out of a silent film.

And then, static.

My TV screen had corrupted into grains of black and white, and with it being the only light source in the room,my walls took on a similar appearance. The room was filled with the soft hum of white noise and clicking. I was ready to accept that the cartoonishly bent antennae above my TV was finally mercifully dying after it was forced over and over again to watch Seinfeld reruns by the previous owner, I assumed.

The white noise got louder.

At the time, going up to a TV blaring white noise seemed perfectly reasonable, now, as I’m sure you know, it’s not the same feeling. When I tried patting the side of the TV to no avail, something caught the corner of my eye, some static clumped together into a shape.

I stared into the screen, trying to find it again.

The last thing I remembered before blacking out was what looked like an inside view of a large intestine, but clearly inhuman, a beak-like structure was at the end of the tunnel, and the symbol, your big mysterious symbol, was plastered on the screen.

When I blacked out, I dreamed, I dreamed of the color grey in thin strands that bent and twisted out of infernal cogs that pierced what looked like the flesh of a human. When you have a nightmare, you’re afraid of things you wouldn’t be if you were awake for reasons I never understood, and never want to now. I felt constrained, despite not being able to discern entirely what I was looking at. All I could piece together was some sort of tormented machine screeching in agony and the colours orange and yellow.

I woke up face down, the first thing I’d see when everything went to hell for me was the imaginary purple and gray color that they use for carpets in condos.

“Damn”, I thought. “So much for getting to see an early 2000’s CGI render of Franz Ferninand.”

I had never really passed out in front of the TV like that before, but I didn’t put it past my sorry ass to have just given up trying to stay awake after lying down on the floor out of apathy towards my own cleanliness. I chocked up the vision of the intestine to thinking too much about the atmosphere of my assignment.

I didn’t pay much thought to that nightmare, you, though, might want to keep it in mind for a while.

It was 10:00 AM, the opportune time to act upon my spite for my employer by going to their competitor for breakfast.

=======================================================

“For every clown there’s a comically underweight little girl who sells their own mix of blended cow uteruses, cunt.” I thought as I pulled up to our local Wendy’s, infamous for that one time a guy came into a bunch of those ice cream cup things and handed them out at the local orphanage less than a mile away, which, if you ask me, is the most insult to injury thing I think a human being is capable of with their own bodily fluids and fast food.(Those orphans were all obese, by the way).

I kicked the entrance doors open and extrapolated that there would be a blue moon in the sky that night since I was almost the only customer in the entire restaurant. My conversation with the cashier went as follows:

“Hi, welcome to Wendy’s, what can I get for you?”

“Yes, I’ll take a number 4 with extra- THE FUCK?!”

“A number 4… do you want that as a combo?”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOUR FACE?!”

“Okay… , drink size?”

“YOU LOOK LIKE THE BASTARD CHILD OF MOTHER BRAIN AND PHANTOON.”

“Okay, that’ll be $6.47.”

I had fallen back on my ass at this point, I was so thrown back and confused that I didn’t get up from the floor until my order was ready. I knew, I knew what I was looking at wasn’t a mask, masks don’t blink, move their mouths or have cylindrical tendrils that sniff the air with hundreds of undulating pores. Any attempts to draw the cashiers attention to their (lack of) face was either ignored or garnered an unrelated response. I took my bag and ran out the front door in a manner that no doubt would’ve made any passerby think I was 3 lines deep in crack and trying to outrun the ceiling lamp.

When I got to my car, I pretty much went through the whole spiel you’d expect when a protagonist sees their first taste of unreality: “Am I still dreaming?”,”Was I seeing things?”, yada yada yada, I’ll spare you my panicked internal monologue. What really poked at my reasoning was the whole “It heard something other than what I was saying” thing, that I struggled to find any explanation for other than “dream”. “Hey, if I’m dreaming, I’ll roll with it, maybe I can get lucid and enact my revenge upon Brad from High School, maybe then I’ll-”

(THUD)

My scheming was interrupted by what was plastered on my front car window.

“By the way, have you tried our 2-for-1 special?”

I futilely screamed and punched the glass before revving out of the parking lot, trying to shake it off, but from what I could tell the tendrils were stuck to the glass, sucking on it like those fish you see in pet stores that kids always try to tap off the aquarium wall. I tried the window wipers, the water and metal prod worked together to agitate the creature enough to get it to loosen its grip, which gave me the opportunity to swerve in a circle and get it off the hood. As I watched it get up from the concrete, inspiration struck upon me, which I quickly converted into 3 metric tons of metal going at 44 mph directly into its torso. I half expected it to just explode into a bunch of gore that would splatter the entire parking lot, instead it just tumbled underneath my vehicle, followed by the sound of a skull cracking and splintering with some tomato sauce sprinkled in.

I got out of the car to get a look at the aftermath, mainly because I couldn’t ignore my curiosity of what that thing looked like on the inside. I wasn’t able to get a really good look, something, perhaps several “somethings” started writhing within the creatures cranium. I could see something escaping from beneath a layer of skin, piercing through like the skull was an egg, the brain the fetus.

I got into my car and drove back home, my breakfast now thrown into my trunk. I stuck with Cheerios that day.