The horrible things crawling inside me bulged out from beneath the surface of my skin.

The creatures wriggled up and down my veins as effortlessly as a fish in water. In rhythmic motions, they pounded their tails against my innermost flesh and worked their way up my bloodstream. Those familiar thin textures on the exterior of human skin molded like clay to their movements.

Despite my nausea, I was too tense and shaky to even attempt sitting down on the ratty hotel couch behind me. I remembered one time that my son Robert was suffering from a fever and I had told him that being in the middle of any kind of sickness made it impossible to remember what it was like being healthy. I remembered the way his deep blue eyes would look at that statement and turn it around in his little genius mind, pondering it deeply.

I realized now how correct I had been in stating that. The bizarre sensations echoing through my body seemed restlessly eternal. It was as if they had always been swimming around inside me.

A burst of pain slashed into my side, as if a colony of fire ants had all bitten me there at once. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that the swarm of creatures had thrown the entire weight of their collective bodies against my abdomen. I dug my hands underneath my shirt and felt the cold, smooth touch of my stomach. Luckily, it seemed that the skin had weathered the impact.

“Surrender yourself, Rex Fletcher,” the millions of creatures chanted in a way that prickled through me like sharp needles; “Resistance to us is nothing but a path to inevitable doom.”

Their words were vaguely phrased and said without any accent or intonation. I suppose that, technically, they didn’t actually talk. No; they were content to merely channel some kind of pathway into my brain and speak to me as if their words were my own thoughts. I would have felt schizophrenic if not for the fact that the threats that these alien beings made against me were all too real.

This intimately personal connection they had to my brain allowed them to read my mind and anything I may be thinking of. I also had some vague, symbiotic sense of their hive-like brainwaves but it felt as if I was hopelessly spinning an unknown locker combination every time I tried to peek in. The odds were hardly in my favor, since they knew everything about me and I knew little about them, except for the fact that they were slowly cycling through my memories, masticating on my cerebral cortex and clawing away every brain cell all at once, like a group of teenagers attacking a fresh pizza.

To fight back, I struggled to remember what had lead to this situation in the first place. To do this, I had to first remember who I was.

My name, as you may have gathered, is Rex Fletcher. Before all this started, I had been an award winning journalist and happy family man with a wife and three kids. At this present moment I was in a hotel situated around the Rocky Mountains, doing research for what was supposed to be my first novel. The novel was to have a focus on the human fascination with death, a subject that I’d had a morbid interest in for many years. I have to say, in all my years of wondering about death, I could have never predicted that I would die in this hotel room.

I stumbled over to the sink and washed my face with heavy, ink-stained hands. As I dried myself, I noticed that large chunks of dark facial hair were in the towel. Mixed in with the hair was flakes of dry skin. The collapse, both physical and mental, was coming upon me faster and faster. I swallowed a lump in my throat that I could only hope wasn’t my tongue.

It all had happened so fast. Only an hour ago, I had been taking a stroll outside, my head filled with casual, creative thoughts. It was then that something pulled my body to the ground and fused me into the grains of dirt under my feet. Seconds later, millions upon millions of these tiny creatures had entered into every orifice of my body. I had blacked out and awoken back in my hotel room with an intense, burning pain inside me.

“You know what we are,” had been the first thing they had said to me.

At first, this statement seemed entirely inaccurate; I had no idea what they were. Soon, though, it all became far more lucid. These creatures, whatever they were called, were not born on this Earth. I couldn’t figure out if they were from another planet, another plane of existence or, for that matter, just how long they’d been on Earth…all I knew, was that they were not from here. The sooner I was able to brush aside my preconceptions about life outside this planet and just accept the truth, the more menacing it became.

The trouble with this extraterrestrial force was that their power wasn’t just a physical one. While the creatures inside me were, if separated individually, nothing more than spongy, blob-like forms about the size of an insect, this shape was nothing more than a shell. A kind of powerful, shared consciousness was shared by all the little blobs; the creature’s attacks on my body were more a mental channeling of energy than a material attack.

Corporeal or not, though, every assault took a very, very heavy physical toll on my body.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried out, suddenly realizing how strained my voice had become.

“Do not concern yourself over such matters. You, Rex Fletcher, as a human being of this planet, are unimportant to our plans. Only the termination of your body matters, as a gateway.”

I felt the monsters digging through my mind, tunneling away at everything inside me. I struggled to probe into their thoughts, struggled to use whatever mental strengths I still had within me.

“Resistance will only make the struggle worse for YOU, Rex Fletcher, not for us.”

I grit my teeth, clenched my hands into fists and focused myself on thoughts of my own identity. I was distracted, though, when my fingernails began to slide right off, hanging only by a thread.

“You must understand,” the hive of aliens said with a voice that burned like hot wax on my larynx, “Us taking over YOUR body is nothing more than a coincidence. To quote one of your species’ phrases, you were ‘just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ We will take over this physical husk, destroy it and then WE WILL BE RELEASED.”

Millions of prickly, insect-like legs seemed to crawl up my throat and cut holes through the sides of it. The voices then took control of my mouth, so they could speak to me through my own body parts.

“Your death is all we seek,” my mouth now spoke their voice instead of mine, “Your weak ego and individualist pride are holding you back from accepting your fate and surrendering to our power. It won’t change the upcoming death of your son Robert Fletcher, your daughters Samantha Fletcher and Beatrice Fletcher, or your wife Deborah Rickman Fletcher. There is nothing you can do to save them or yourself.”

I wanted to scream out in anguish, but that ability had been taken away from me. I no longer had control over almost any part of myself. My privacy was forever gone. Still able to use my hands, I searched through the open suitcase on my bed and dug my hands through all the layers of clothing. I pulled out a framed photo of my wife and kids.

“We are aware that you are now wondering exactly what we may mean with our statements. Just know that they will die, soon after you do. Your death will be responsible for theirs. Accept this.”

I choked up, running my fingers against the glass of the frame. I knelt to the floor. I thought of my son Robert’s happy face and how joyful those blue eyes had been only a week ago, when he had first learned how to ride a bike. A grin, a small yelp of glee as his two small feet peddled onward to the future. No more. No future.

Then there were my daughters, who had called me earlier today to say they had drawn me a picture. The picture was drawn in crayons. They had said in excited voices that they were looking forward to showing it to me when I got back home.

Deborah…my wife, Deborah. The woman I had met 15 years ago that had swept my heart away. She was the only person who I had ever felt truly comfortable with. She had allowed me, as a writer, to open up my mind and pour out my deepest emotions and creative thoughts to her in a way that no one else had ever done before, or ever could.

“Until now,” the creatures said through my voice, “Now, WE know more about you than anyone else ever has. We know the thoughts that lurk within you; we know the paranoia, the worries, the darkest thoughts you would never admit. We know about both of the ex-wives you were with before Deborah Rickman married you, and your infidelity to each of those wives. We know the people you’ve misrepresented in your writing. We know the ones you have attacked and slammed in various articles, fairly or unfairly. We know the guilt you feel for all of these events, and we are feeding off this guilt. You disgust us and yet we can’t help but be…fascinated.”

I grit my teeth. This was a mistake; all of my front teeth became loose and brittle. They effortlessly fell out of their roots and collapsed onto my tongue. My gums bled ferociously, poisoning my mouth with the rich, sickening taste of fresh blood.

These…things had taken away my ability to speak. They had stolen my uniqueness, my pride and my individuality. They had stolen my privacy. They had ripped away my very humanity and stepped on it.

“We know the way you had so desperately wished to write this novel. Just like your father and mother wanted to write. Both of whom were unsuccessful and died in a manner befitting their useless lives.”

I forced a scream out of my lungs, and felt several of my ribs shatter from the strain. I looked at my arms; on every bulging vein, I could see their tiny bodies crawling. The hair on my limbs and chest was falling right off, in a way more rapid than any razor could ever hope to achieve.

“Their death, their mutual suicide by way of poisoned drinks…oh, how it still torments you, Rex Fletcher.”

I threw my head into my throbbing hands, as images of my parents’ corpses cycled through my head. I had never actually been able to see the corpses, as they had specified in their will that they wanted to be cremated and this had been done before I had the chance to see them. Some part of me, deep inside, felt as if maybe, just maybe, they weren’t really dead. Denial, I suppose.

The final tears I would ever cry slid down my face. My jaw snapped apart and the tight skin across the back of my skull tore open. Blood poured down my face.

“They were really dead, Rex Fletcher,” the voice was now beginning to gain a malicious tone to it, “Just like you will soon be.”

I reached for the phone, to make a final phone call. I felt the skin across my forearm split open, revealing the muscle underneath. It looked just the same as it did in any human anatomy book.

“We see that, in your mind, you ask what purpose your death serves. Think of it this way. The minute that we completely take over and devour your living body, our mental, astral forms will then be released. This will cause a chain reaction, as we then will all take over every human across the planet.”

I desperately crouched down, shivered, and tried to regain control of my thoughts. For the first time, I found some kind of light in the tunnel. I had the mental image of myself turning a silver key in a doorknob, just one click away from unlocking.

“Yes, Rex Fletcher, world domination, and then destruction. You will never know the REASON why we are demolishing your planet, nor should you know. You don’t deserve such information. Give up and let us take over.”

My flesh split open across my back in a way that left long bloody stripes, resembling the stripes of a tiger. The red lines traveled down my now-hairless chest in a symmetrical pattern. I felt my hearing start to die and my vision darken.

I again plunged into my thoughts, and this time, the mental door was unlocked and thrown open. I approached some secret buried deep in the consciousness of these alien creatures. A deeply hidden fear covered in a bushel of thorns. I saw an image of all of them rushing forward, trying to stop me.

“NO! NO! DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!”

I had discovered what their fear was. The one and only way they could be stopped. They tried desperately to tear apart every last brain cell they could before I could act, but I was now moving too fast for them.

You see, the secret the aliens would never reveal is that they needed to take control of me to be released. If I died of any means other than their takeover, then the result was that they would all die with me, ending their invasion as well as their lives.

The skin was ripped almost entirely off my body, and every muscle inside me was dripping off of the bones. I reached into the hotel room’s kitchen drawer and grabbed a serrated knife.

“You’re random, you’re UNIMPORTANT!!”

I thought of my kids, my wife, my friends…I thought of everyone living across the planet, all those people who depended on my next move for survival; a next move they would never know nor care about.

I violently plunged the knife into my heart and fell to the floor.

The screams of millions of creatures dying inside of me echoed through my brain. With one last shiver, I regained control of my own voice and sighed. Then, slyly, I whispered out my final words.

“Well, damn, I guess you picked the wrong random guy.”