Then she froze as she heard the unmistakable pump-action of a large gun followed by cold metal pressed against her head. She instinctively grabbed the barrel with her left hand and pushed upward. It fired, missing the top of her head, the plaster of the ceiling above her exploding.
With a strength she didn’t know she had, she yanked on the gun. The shooter cried out and released his grip. She dropped the sword, turned the shotgun around and pointed it at her would-be alien shooter. She didn’t hesitate, shooting him in the face, propelling his body backwards in a stunning spray of blood and sinew.
Jocelyn awakened to the face of a companion. Despite a splitting headache, she smiled. As the veil of sleep lifted, she noticed her bed mate’s face lying in a pool of blood. She screamed and discovered the head was severed from its body.
Jocelyn lay in bed with a dead body!
Horrified, she jumped out of bed but tripped, landing on another dead body without its head.
Jocelyn got back up on her feet and took in her surroundings. She was in a bedroom, with four dead bodies—three with their heads cut off, one with a serious hole in his. Amidst the carnage lay a bloody sword and shotgun.
Fresh blood smeared her hands.
Where am I? What am I doing here? Her head spun trying to make sense of it all.
She instinctively picked up the sword. A moment of thought made her realize the shotgun was a better weapon, but she didn’t want to waste precious time. Who knew what danger lay in wait for her?
Navigating around the bodies, trying to be as silent as possible, she peered out into the hall from the bedroom doorway—no one there. Slowly, heel-to-toe, she traveled down the hall toward an open door to . . . where? . . . Her memories slowly started to return to her. She entered George’s empty bedroom and walked over to his closet. As she opened it, it made a high-pitched creak, and she worried that the sound carried throughout the house. Inside, there was nothing but hung up clothes.
At first, she couldn’t remember why she was in George’s house. The vigil . . . The snowstorm . . . It was all coming back now.
George dead, come back to life. She killed him.
Then the aliens—the bodies in the other bedroom—intruded. She had killed them.
Canvassing confirmed no more people, or aliens—alive or dead or undead—occupied the house. Afterwards, she went back to the bedroom—the scene of the slaughter. Jocelyn had done all that. She had killed all those people.
Aliens. They were aliens . . . right? But they didn’t look like aliens—they looked human.
Oh, no.
Jocelyn’s mind started to clear, and as it did, her memory returned. Lucid now, she realized she had suffered a psychotic break. That final dose of her meds must have kicked in while she slept. The last thing she remembered was shooting the final person in the face.
Holy shit, she’d mistaken these people for aliens from another planet.
She became angry at her illness. When in the throes of a psychotic break, she was always one hundred percent sure of her distorted reality. Thought not real at all, it felt incredibly real. At the time, there was no doubt they were aliens.
Returned to sanity, she realized how her diseased mind, once again, leaped to a conclusion with no rational basis. Now, she was one hundred percent sure of her reality—the actual reality.
They weren’t aliens, and not even infected like George, but everyday people with lives and families.
And she had butchered them.
She had never harmed anybody during prior psychotic breaks. This one proved different.
She wept, her sobbing turning into an outright bawl. “Oh, no, oh, no,” she said with eyes closed, as if saying it would make it all go away. Maybe she was hallucinating right now. Maybe there weren’t any bodies. Maybe no one had come to the house. Maybe when she opened her eyes, she’d realize it had all been a nightmare.
But it wasn’t a nightmare. Although everything seemed real in a psychotic break, this reality was definitely the correct one. She likened it to a dream. While dreaming, you didn’t question the reality of it, but when it was over, you knew the difference between the waking reality and the dreaming reality.
She had to get out of that bedroom.
Once in the living room, as her crying subsided, Jocelyn sat down on the couch, blood smeared on her clothes and sticky on her hands. The pile of blankets that had covered George’s body was no longer there. That made sense—his visitors had removed it. She looked out the rear window and saw the blanket pile on the patio, large enough for the body to be under them.
She realized she should talk with her spirit guides, particularly Saint Michael, but he and Skunk hadn’t been available for a while. They had turned their backs on her, and damn them to Hell if they did the same now.
Overwhelming sadness and guilt began to take hold. She had spent four years controlling her illness as best as she could, proud that she could function as a member of society and finish her PhD. But, ultimately, she failed. Her control of herself was only an illusion, due merely to her not being in a stressful situation.
She felt like the lowest form of life on Earth. She didn’t deserve to live,
