Written by: GrimmInker

SUGARCREEK, OHIO, USA

August 29, 9:50 PM

Jacob leaned back and nursed a beer. It should have been an iced tea or lemonade, but Bess wasn't here to nag about it anymore. She meant well, but what his daughter didn't know wouldn't hurt her. He might have given more of a shit if there wasn't an unearthly large plate of who-knew-what floating above the sky, if the earth itself wasn't in total disarray about the whole thing, if the neighbours weren't screeching their heads off about this conspiracy or that one.

The evacuation notice had been the final straw for Jacob. They were all going to die, it was obvious. What difference would one beer make? Better to die with a happy, drunk stomach than scared and full of piss.

He drained the last of the can, crushed it against his chest, and hurled it across the street. It didn't take long for his taunt to be heard and answered. Within a minute, he could hear the stomping of overpriced boots and then the slam of a porch door.

Standing fifty feet away, she glared at him, hands on hips, hair held up by a towel. Did she know how stupid she looked? Jacob snorted and reached for another beer. The porch lights flickered and went out for a moment, coming back on to reveal Tammy or Toni or Terry (Jacob didn't care to remember her name) waving a shovel.

"What gives you the right to ruin my lawn, you asshole? I pay to live here!" She shook the shovel. "One more can, old man. I dare you!" Spitting on the dirt that she called a lawn, Tammy-Toni-Terry spun on her heel and thumped her way back inside, causing the lights on her side of the street to flicker with the force of her stomping.

"What gives you the right to be so loud?" mumbled Jacob. He rubbed his forehead aggressively. That dumb city-broad had been making more noise in the handful of months since she'd moved in than anyone else on the street had in the last fifteen years.

The noise was even more obnoxious since the thing had appeared, not that it made any sounds itself. Everything under it had died, miraculously. Bugs and birds and possums alike, everything unfortunate and small enough to be caught under the heavy gaze of the disk in the sky had been so disoriented upon coming back to land that it died sooner after a gravitational shift. Hell, he'd lost a few cows the first day the gravity went nuts, before he had the sense to lock them in the barn and pad the place with as much straw as he could pay Rico to pile.

Of course, Rico had quit almost as soon as he started. Good-for-nothing kid. Who was scared of a little anti-gravity and fucked up electricity? Jacob had grown up during worse. That was the problem with kids like Rico and Tammy-Toni-Terry - none of them had ever suffered through anything a day in their lives. Blasting music from her shiny new truck when nobody on the block owned anything their great-grandparents hadn't would be unthinkable if she actually worked on the land she claimed to own.

Jacob could have grumbled on and on about the music and the new generation of soft-backed wimps society called kids, but the clock on his phone (his only modern weakness) flashed blue and green, before reverting to its usual background of Bess and her kids on the farm. What did she want now?

"I'm not drinking, no need to worry."

"What?"

"Nevermind. What is it, hun?" He stole another sip and stood to go inside. No need to give the neighbor any excuse to eavesdrop.

"Dad, listen, you have to get out of Ohio. The news is saying you're in something called the Midnight Zone. It's not safe! Is it true the gravity is, what, failing? What in God's name does that mean? Carla and Kev are scared for you."

"Mhm." Jacob took a deep breath and tried not to roll his eyes.

Who could be expected to listen to that much that quickly? Just outside the house, he could hear the bounce of the beer can he'd thrown crash against the door. Fuming, he turned to fling the one he held back at the damn neighbour, but his daughter's screech of complaint made him stop and wince.

"Mhm? Really?" Bess' voice cut out for a minute before coming back in, admonishing him for being so careless about his own family's concerns. "...understand why you made Mom so mad. Can't you just drive out here and get back to your blissfully ignorant life when this freaky stuff passes? Better yet, I'll drive. Save you the excuse of not showing up."

"And go where? You have a house I don't know about in Kansas? Did that good-for-nothing loser leave you a fancy hotel in Las Vegas?"

Another can gone. Resisting the urge to launch it, he remembered what happened the last time Bess had found out he'd been drinking. On second thought, if they were going to die soon (The Midnight Zone - he could have laughed. Nobody in the old movies ever lived in something called the damn Midnight Zone), what was the point in avoiding his daughter's anger?

Compressing the can against his chest, he remembered the days when a good time involved a bunch of mellow-minded folks gathered around a field to sit on the hay, someone strumming a guitar while another handed out cold drinks. No speakers involved, no cell phones to ruin the natural ambience. No pushy daughters to ruin a perfectly good evening, alien bullshit aside. The ship above him, miles in the sky, could have been a Godsend.

"Is that a beer? Really, Dad? Why do I even bother..." When Bess' voice came back, she had finished her loud words and handed the phone over to one of her kids. It made for an amusing transition.

"Poppy? Mommy says you're a lousy drunk but I still have to say goodnight."

"Who's this little tyke?" Jacob smiled in spite of himself. Bess may have been a hardass just like her mom, but she and the crap-excuse for a husband she had the sense to leave had made for three sweet children.

"Abby. What's lousy mean, Poppy?"

"It ain't nothing but a bad word, hun. You tell your momma to watch her mouth for me, okay?"

"Are you going to die out there?"

"No, hun, I'm not going anywhere."

Standing in his kitchen in the dark, Jacob suddenly felt alone. He wasn't, was he? This was his house, had been his father's house, and his father's house before that. Nobody had left in all those years, not even when the war had come and gone or the money in the banks had dried up.

No, Jacob wasn't going anywhere. He sniffed and rubbed at his nose, cursing the allergies. The mess in the sky may have cleaned out the pollution from stupid trucks like the neighbours, but when the humming kicked in at midnight and set everything floating again, every flower and tree in the area tipped all of the damn pollen over the house.

"I miss you, Poppy. Carla and Kevin say you're - what? Leggin? Oh! - a legend for staying put. What's a legend?"

"I gotta go, Abby doll. You give your brother and sister a hug for me and go easy on your momma, alright?"

"Kevin told me he'll hit me if I touch him."

"You hit him back, darling. Good night."

Talking with Bess' kids always made him feel sentimental. She knew it, too, dammit. Grumbling to himself, Jacob angrily scratched his eyes and went upstairs to get ready for bed, trying to ignore the music that had started up across the street.

***

He woke up at 11:50, the humming louder than hell. Every window rattled in its frame and the silverware had started shaking. He looked at the clock and waited. It wasn't smart to stay in bed, but the beer had clogged his brain and made him sluggish. What was the point? He wasn't going to the west coast or the middle of who-the-fuck-knew-where Oklahoma just to avoid the mess that he was in. And he sure as shit wasn't moving in with Deborah again, not after he caught her with her boss in his bed.

"I told her, I'm staying put," he slurred, standing up and rolling himself into a bathrobe. He stumbled down the stairs, nearly toppling over when the humming turned unbearable, the very bones of the house threatening to burst free from their constraints. When they held, he snorted in triumph. "Good bones! Daddy made some good bones."

Before the gravity clicked off, Jacob liked to watch the black plate that passed as the sky for a few minutes. Anyone else would have locked themselves in the cellar with a padded coat around them just in case, or just driven out of town. As it was, Jacob and Toni were the only ones left. Toni made her presence obvious by the horrible noise coming from inside her house, something that Jacob vaguely recognised as some boy band bullshit. Bess had been obsessed with them when she was a teenager, and Jacob hated every word that came out of their mouths.

"Hey!" He staggered to the middle of the road and held in a belch. "You still alive in there?"

"What do you want?" The porch creaked and the dark-eyed Toni emerged, a bottle of Jack in her hand and an ice cream halfway out of her mouth. At least she had her priorities straight. For a second, Jacob considered asking her if she wanted to share a drink, but then he heard the stupid chorus of a song rattle her windows and he reconsidered.

"You think those idiots sound better in space?"

Toni gave him a hard look. "That's what you're interrupting my end-of-the-world time for?"

"I'm just curious," he answered, swaying in his fuzzy slippers. "You think we can convince our friends in the sky to throw a party for them?"

"The only party anyone's throwing is when you finally get sucked up and probed by the freaks." She smirked and stuffed the ice cream back in her mouth, little rivulets of caramel dripping onto the porch.

Jacob simmered. The disrespect! It could have been the beer that hadn't left his system or just the weeks of growing resentment but he had finally had enough. If the aliens were going to kill them all, if those stupid blue numbers that flashed on his phone every night and up in the sky were really counting down the days they had left, then what was the point in trying to make peace? Might as well get one last good memory stored away before he was killed in whatever dumb, sci-fi way the aliens had planned up their green asses.

He stalked inside and went straight to the fireplace, dry and unused since the summer had hit. A shotgun, cleaner than anything else in the house, gleamed in the night. Jacob was going to shoot that smug look off her face, and if he could get the bottle out of her hands, that would make it even better. He could die happy!

By the time he made it outside, though, Toni was gone. Jacob would have guessed she just went back inside to finish getting drunk before midnight hit, but her front door was still open. He walked closer and squinted. Her Jack was still on the porch, sitting down right next to her ice cream, as though she'd set one down and dropped the other where she stood.

"Oh, where'd you run off to now? Gone to blast some more music in my face?"

He raised the shotgun and tried to load a bullet, but the gravity made everything feel backwards, and it slipped from his grasp where it went... up. Straight up in the air, like a kid with a string had snatched it away. His gaze followed the little round and he saw the blue numbers, blinking bright enough to startle the remaining cows from even inside the barn. Their lowing could be heard way out here, panicked moos as they followed the same path as the bullet. The tip of the shotgun went up, and then the barrel, and then Jacob's hand, slowly. He stared stupidly at it, mouth hung open and eyes wide.

Was it really already midnight? The numbers on the big, dumb metal plate in the sky were too bright - he could have read the numbers if his glasses were on, but the glasses only got in the way. They were probably on his bedroom ceiling now, crushed under a chair or the bed. Along with the blue light, another set of lights were shining in his face in erratic swinging lines, but he was too distracted to pay attention. An alarm blared at the end of the street, a horn from some car some idiot hadn't locked up in the garage yet.

Jacob realised he'd been pulled up in the sky, too. He was floating! By God, he was really floating. The shotgun slipped from his grip and floated beside him, not rushing past like the bullet but going the same damn speed he was, somehow. Behind him (or was it under him?), his house had started up the rattling sound again, as though every bolt was straining to remain where it was.

That's a damn good house, he thought, even as he went up like a balloon. His slippers came undone and made their ascent in a peculiar circle around him. What did the aliens want with any of this shit? Were they making a mural of the good ol' American life in that huge disk of theirs?

As he continued, the lights that had been moving in a dizzying pattern became too bright to ignore. He turned his head to see the source of the car alarm, too: a truck, a familiar blue truck with wheels he had installed himself just last summer was speeding towards him, going up and up and up until there was no space left between Jacob and the headlights. As he braced himself for the impact, he heard a voice crying out, a sobbing voice that reminded him of his daughter. Before he could think about giving her one last call, the truck collided with him and carried him on its violent ascent into the sky, sailing past the slippers and the shotgun until all that remained was a faint cry in the distance.

***

Hunched in the corner of the ceiling, a pillow tied to her chest, Toni wondered if the old asshole across the street had made it inside in time. He might have been as annoying and stereotypically cantankerous as a human could be, but she didn't want him to die. Who was going to take care of the cows? Toni sure wasn't - she didn't know the first thing about farm life.

The rumbling went on for another ten minutes or so. When it finally stopped, the shower curtain fell slowly back to the floor, and Toni floated down with it. Even with the pillow, the air was still knocked out of her as she bumped into the rim of the tub, bouncing her stomach on the porcelain. Groaning, she made her way back to the front of the house, her porch lights flickering in the eerie darkness. There was no more sunset, not here. None of that beautiful country sky could be seen from under the ship.

She peered outside, but there was no sign of the old man. That was a relief. He'd been drunk and stupid to be out so late, so close to the shift. Toni looked around, hoping her whiskey had somehow got stuck in the rafters of the porch and been saved. There was no sign of the ice cream. She sighed and walked out a little farther, just in case the shift hadn't quite ended and wanted to snatch her when she wasn't prepared. Nothing. No noise came from the old man's house, either, not even the clatter of furniture that invariably came crashing down.

Toni stepped out a little farther and looked up. The clock on the ship, or so the news said, had been counting down for a month now. The number that blinked now said 2 in a great ominous blue. She checked her watch and saw the same thing. Maybe by the time it hit 0, she would have wished she left town, but she couldn't give the son of a bitch across the street the satisfaction of seeing her leave.

The silence was deafening. No more crickets, no more mosquitos, no more cows. No more neighbour. Toni felt like she should have been happy about that, but when a shotgun came floating down just a foot in front of her, like a sign from heaven, she knew there would never be another sound across the street. She moved to turn and head back inside for another Jack, but floating down right where the gun fell came a shower of blood, a thousand thick, dark droplets that fell hypnotically, slowly, until Toni was drenched in a silent bath of crimson mystery. She blinked at the mess for a long time before turning wordlessly inside, red footprints dissolving into the dirt road. 

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Find more stories by GrimmInker on Wattpad.

Wattpad's resident ghost, you may have seen Eli under the floorboards a time or two. Writing about alien craft isn't exactly their forte, but they look out for any excuse to flex their horror skills. They've been scribbling on Wattpad since 2020, winning a Watty for horror that year, joining both the Stars and Creators program along the way, and jumping into a ton of fun projects (like this one!). 

When not writing Gothic horror and paranormal fantasy, they can be found watching (debatably) scary movies, making another cup of tea, or getting slaughtered by rabid dogs in Bloodborne.