It was a sight that instantly annihilated twenty-odd years of human common sense.
The full moon still hung pallid in the sky. Yet, looming behind the moon, deep space revealed a silhouette that didn't belong to this dimension.
His retinas couldn't focus. His brain couldn't extract the geometry. It was an ashen mass that devoured all light, defying every law of perspective. It was so impossibly massive it blotted out a quarter of the stars.
The moon was nothing but a cyst parasitic to its form.
In that agonizing minute where time seemed to cease, Arthur's mind didn't go completely blank. From within the darkest depths of terror, his residual sanity thrashed wildly, desperately trying to apply every ounce of logic he had ever learned to explain what he was seeing.
A hologram? A classified military weapon? Mass hallucinogens? But these fragile concepts shattered in less than a second against that blasphemous scale. A singular realization crystallized in his mind: We are being eaten. And that thing doesn't even care we exist. The moment Arthur truly saw and comprehended that sight, disaster struck.
His fragile human mind simply wasn't built to process it. Mere visual contact overloaded his nervous system like a blown fuse.
"Aaaah—!!"
Arthur tried to scream, but no sound escaped his throat. His airways felt welded shut with molten iron; his lungs couldn't draw a single molecule of air. It felt like a white-hot steel spike had been driven straight into his brain, churning through his gray matter. Agony twisted his facial muscles to their absolute limit.
Drip. A drop of warm liquid fell onto the back of his hand.
He clawed frantically at the edge of the window, his fingernails bending back and snapping, yet he felt no pain. A deafening screech erupted from deep inside his skull. Capillaries ruptured en masse under the pressure. Warm fluid simultaneously burst from his tear ducts, nostrils, and ear canals. Blood mixed with tears hit his hands, the bitter, coppery taste of rust flooding his mouth.
Beneath that horrific gaze, his blood vessels were undergoing catastrophic failure.
Alongside his physiological collapse came a tsunami of auditory hallucinations. The agonizing shrieks of tens, hundreds of thousands of people being flayed alive simultaneously erupted in his ears, mixed with a wet sound of grinding flesh echoing wildly inside his skull.
His mental defenses were like glass struck by a thousand-ton hammer, webbing with cracks, utterly severing. He was seconds away from becoming a raving lunatic, or a mindless heap of minced meat.
Just in the final second before Arthur's consciousness plummeted completely into endless madness.
12:01 AM.
Seattle's geography saved his life.
A biting gale howled off the Pacific bay. Pushed by the wind, Seattle's signature, perpetually hanging dense cumulonimbus clouds drifted over slowly and resolutely, like a moving black mountain.
The dense black clouds drew across the sky like a curtain.
The cloud cover completely obscured the moon, shielding the massive tentacles lurking behind it. The instant the line of sight was severed, the pulverizing pressure and the shrieks of the flayed masses receded instantly like an outgoing tide.
Arthur kicked his door wide open, half his body spilling out of the cab.
"Hrk—!"
His stomach seized in violent spasms. The double burger, the greasy cheese sauce, the scalding black coffee he had just inhaled, spewed out onto the flooded asphalt.
Powerful stomach acid burned his throat, leaving it raw with the sour stench of half-digested food and a sharp, stinging pain. Slumped between the steering wheel and the open door, he convulsed, retching up pure bile while blood and tears dripped uncontrollably from his face.
The world resumed its normal function.
The crash of waves against the rocks returned to his ears. In the distance, the tires of an occasional passing heavy truck hummed over the highway—a sound that now felt profoundly beautiful.
Smack. A pea-sized raindrop hit Arthur's back. Immediately, the torrential downpour resumed, washing over the filthy, lucky city.
The shock of the cold rain dragged a shred of sanity back into Arthur's mind. He took ragged gasps, inhaling the rain-scented sea breeze. Gripping the steering wheel—now smeared with vomit and blood—his arm muscles flared as he forced his dead weight back into the cab, slumping hard against the leather seat with a dull thud.
Beep-beep-beep— From the passenger seat, the dispatch terminal pierced the silence, its screen flaring with a cold, inorganic light.
Slumped in the seat, Arthur's chest heaved. With massive capillary ruptures in both eyes, his vision was no longer clear, draped instead in a murky blood-red filter. The halos of the streetlamps warped and stretched across his bloodshot retinas into crimson smears.
Through his crimson-tinted vision, the rain-soaked streets looked entirely normal.
Clutching the fabric over his chest with an iron grip, Arthur stared at the puddle of his own expelled fast food outside the door. A ragged wheeze scraped from his throat as he muttered neurotically to himself:
"Fuck me... I don't even touch weed... That goddamn burger... Fuck... Did I get food poisoning or what..."