When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
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ONE YEAR AND FIVE MONTHS EARLIER
I'm mad. I'm going mad. I have to be.
Was this how Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole? Spiralling out of control with every step, every decision, every word?
Everyone I meet looks distorted. Picasso paintings with twisted Cheshire Cat smiles. Their features are too large and misplaced. Their voices are too loud and harsh. Their laughter is the coldest I've ever known.
I want the warmth of his laughter. I want the sound of his voice, soft and lyrical, like birdsong in springtime. I want his face.
God, his face.
I think about him too much, I know, except it's never the good stuff that lingers. When I'm lying in bed at night, listening to the maddening click of the hands of the clock, it's never his touch I remember. Or his eyes. Or his cute ears that he hated so much, but which I loved snagging with my teeth. I'm stuck in limbo, frozen in the moment of his death, unable to move forward.
But, how do you move on from a nightmare you cannot escape? Where do you go?
Outside frightens me. The people. The strange looks. The whispers. The name-calling. The darkened alleyways and the open streets. The great expanse of sky above my head where even the stars seem sinister to me now.
And yet, being inside frightens me more.
Inside, I have nothing left but the truth, and the truth terrifies me to the bone.
I miss Tom. Of course, I do. I ache for him every second of the day, but my grief has turned into a molten mess of paranoia and fear. I listen for people walking the corridor outside my apartment and spend way too much time looking out the spyhole in the front door. I think I see shadows moving when there's nobody there. I hear voices where there are none. I stand by the windows where the mould bleeds down the damp walls. I watch people go by and wonder which ones are real and which ones are not. I wonder if I'll wake up one day and the whole world has been taken over and I'm the only human left.
I've gone from fighting Tania and her lynch mob, to fighting what I know to be true and that scares me more than Tom's sister ever could. I know what I saw. I know that evil exists. That monsters are real. And I don't want them to be. I want to go back to living in that blissfully ignorant world of what I thought I knew; that world where creatures like the one I saw only existed in the wild imaginations of story tellers and film makers and the conspiracy theorists we'd humour for believing in little grey men and flying saucers and invasion of the body snatchers.
I want this to be madness. I wish this was just simple insanity more than anything. Somehow, madness seems easier to deal with. They could chuck me into a pristine bleach-stinking facility and shove pills down my throat. Put me through assessment after assessment. Humour me, the way we humour the alien conspiracy theorists. In time, maybe I'd get better. Maybe I'd be allowed to leave and live again, without the image of Tom's heels hammering against the floor. Without the sound of those awful wet gurgling sounds as he choked.
