The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 2 - SYDNEY

Sydney wasn't really sure what one was supposed to do after a visit from aliens, so she fell back on her favorite strategy for dealing with the inexplicable; she googled it. A few hours later she had fallen far down an Internet rabbit hole of blurry images and conspiracy theories.

I'm not crazy, she told herself after reading several bizarre stories on an alien abduction forum. She said this not as an affirmation but more as a ward against an uncomfortable possibility. The people posting on these blogs sounded crazy to her, but then her recent experience would sound no less crazy if it was being told to her rather than having lived it.

Maybe she really was crazy. Perhaps the stress of her cancer diagnosis had caused a psychotic break. She got her anti-nausea medication from the bathroom and searched the web for possible side effects. Hallucinations was not among them. Ironically, nausea was. Maybe that explained why it wasn't helping her with her chemotherapy.

"I should just go buy some pot," she said aloud.

Zoe looked up from her spot on the sofa and gave a quiet meow.

"Don't get judgmental on me. You were all over that catnip toy less than an hour ago."

She set the pill bottle on the coffee table and stared at it like it was a wise oracle ready to impart vital truths.

"I'm not crazy," she declared to the pill bottle, but with less conviction than she'd been trying for. The pill bottle, while providing no wisdom, was at least polite enough to not contradict her.

Sydney stood up and began pacing around the sofa. Since she rarely left the apartment, pacing accounted for a large part of her physical activity, to the point that she had worn a pattern in the carpet. Her landlord had even complained about it.

Her landlord. A thought tickled some neurons in the deep recesses of her brain. She had never liked her landlord. He was creepy, and she worried about him using his master key to sneak into her apartment at night. That thought had become obsessive until she'd set up a webcam attached to an old laptop. She hid it on one of her bookshelves and aimed it at the door. For several days, she started each morning by pulling the SD storage card from the old laptop, plugging it into her desktop system, and reviewing the video. Of course it showed nothing but her cats running around. Gradually, her fear subsided until she all but forgot about the webcam.

Now she held the laptop in her hands, fearing what truths might be stored in its flash memory. She carefully pulled the tiny SD card and walked to her desk with it cupped in her hand. She plugged it into the card reader and held her breath as she started the video playing.

A view of the closed door and her desk next to it. She saw herself sitting in her desk chair in front of her laptop, just as she was now. She resisted the urge to raise her hand to see if the image on the screen did the same. She had configured the system to record a full day of video before deleting older files to record new video, so she had to fast-forward through several hours before finding the critical moment.

This was it. She was on her cell phone at her desk, then she was getting up and walked to her reading chair. She was still talking as she sat, gesturing with her left hand as if in front of an audience. Was she always that animated while on the phone? This had to be close to the time the aliens had appeared. Or when she had suffered a psychotic break. She wasn't sure which possibility she feared more.

Sydney let out her breath in a gasp as the aliens appeared on the screen. They stood there, in all their nude mannequin glory. Sydney watched the video version of herself drop her phone. Clothes eventually appeared on the aliens, and they walked over to the sofa, nearly disappearing from the scene as they sat down. Only their finely dressed legs showed. Zoe made her appearance. The aliens eventually disappeared. All just like she remembered.