- Please lie down on the couch. Close your eyes. Relax. Everything will be peaceful. You've been chosen. You rushed to the door, foolishly, instinctively. But the two men were already there. Their hands were like traps. Soft but inescapable. They put you on the couch. The straps - where did they come from? - were digging into your wrists and ankles. One of them knelt right on your chest, heavy but not vicious. Like the wind that presses before a storm
- We don't want harm," he said. - This is a scientific necessity. Your house is an experimental group. You are all essential elements. And you've already been sold. You try to scream. He leans closer to you, so that you can smell the strange metallic odor of his breath
- His name was George Wilson. District manager. He was fully compensated. You know that name. George Wilson. The one - from the local authority, always smiling, always saying everything was under control. You want to wake up. But you're awake
You wake up to a strange, visceral silence. No sound of cars outside the window, no screams of children from the neighbor's yard. Only a deafening, pressurizing vacuum, as if the whole world had stopped breathing. You go to the window and your heart skips a beat. Black panels loom over the house. Huge, like the roofs of skyscrapers, but devoid of even a hint of structure - just smooth planes hanging in the air, as if part of someone else's geometrically correct will. They move... slowly, almost imperceptibly, but getting closer by the hour. As if they were clutching the house in a huge palm, the fingers of which had not yet closed, but were about to do so. You can't get out - the door just won't open. Nobody does. All the neighbors are talking about it. There's no cell service. Electricity died the first night. Radio - just silence. The world outside the walls became unreachable. It's as if it no longer exists. You don't eat. You hardly sleep. The horror eats away at you like acid. Some people in the house started raving, one old man from the fifth floor tried to break a window with a chair. The glass cracked, but it didn't come out. Like it wasn't really glass anymore. And on the second day, they came. You heard the door slam in the upstairs neighbor's apartment. Too steady. Too quiet. Then footsteps. There were three of them. Tall, almost identical. Skin the color of dusty silver, eyes narrow, vertical pupils like predators. The smile was slow, impassive. One of them looked into your room, as if into a fishbowl, and said in a voice that had no intonation: