I don’t necessarily have much time left. It is my deepest hope that this attempt to explain what has happened here isn’t in vain. I hope that someday someone is able to read this and know what happened here. I hope that someday, humankind can guarantee that this will never happen again. I hope so—but right now I’m not quite sure if that’s even possible anymore.

   It all started about a week ago but I guess I should start a little earlier than that.

   My name is Asher McKinley and I’m a first-year at Yale. I don’t really know how I got to where I am now. I came to college last semester and took an astronomy course expecting it to be a blow-off course about the zodiac and other such nonsense. However, when we started talking about the solar system and other galaxies, I realized I misunderstood what astronomy was.

   But I liked it—so I declared a major and went full force into my studies. This semester I worked as a research assistant for a cosmology professor—Professor Lasky. Laksy was an odd woman with frazzled white hair verging on a bluish tint. She had spent the past thirty years working on trying to figure out the taxonomy of extraterrestrial organism, of which she had a small amount of organic samples that she showed to no one. Most of us had come to the conclusion that she was institutional, but something about her got to me. Maybe it was her confidence.

   One day in February she called me with a hurried, urgent tone of voice. I figured she would have me come in to do some typically banal task, like filing her worksheets or calling grants for additional funding. However, when I finally arrived at her office, she had a metal box no bigger than a toaster. The metal was blackened and rough around the edges.

   She explained that the box had fallen from the sky the night before into her pool. After rattling on about how while she was baking pie late at night she heard a sound that scared her neighbors and caused her to go investigate, she claimed that this was the key to the largest scientific breakthrough ever. Against the common sense I had always prided myself on, I actually believed her when she said that this may have been extraterrestrial.

   The box itself had something that looked like strange writing in Russian but completely undecipherable. I reached out a hand to try to dust away the blacked ash from the writing when suddenly the box disintegrated. In its place lay a lump which looked like a seven month old fetus. After Lasky scolded me for attributing too anthropomorphic of traits to this, what she called, alien, she hurried off with it to her lab.

   The weeks that followed her discover, Lasky had quit her job, fired me as her assistant, and removed herself completely from society in attempts to find some sort of genome or any other biological data to understand this creature. That was until last week.

   I was walking through the halls of the science building on campus when I noticed blood spilling into the hallway from under the door to Lasky’s office. I burst into the room to find what I could only describe as an angel without wings. I mean I had always been agnostic in regards to religion and God and all that stuff—but this looked almost exactly as I would have imagined an angel to look like. The creature had grown into the image of perfection as a human. About six feet tall, muscular and toned, a beautiful face, however completely genderless.

   It spoke in desultory English and claimed it was here not to destroy but to purify. The calmness and smooth rhythm in its voice engendered a terrifying fear in my voice. It was too calm—to satisfied in every word choice. It spoke of apocalypse and of better worlds far away. It spoke of peace and a complete end to suffering through death.

   I would have stayed locked in one place out of the fear in my heart had it not been for the other students who began to walk through the hall. One saw me standing over the shredded body of Professor Lasky with this creature who I had just realized had hands covered in blood.

   Within an hour, everyone on campus knew what had happened to Professor Lasky. Within two hours, I had become the one who people blamed for her death. I was forced to find somewhere to hide. I found a weathered, fore-closed bar on the edge of campus and have been living in the basement now for days.

   Occasionally I have gone out for some more food. All the stores in town have closed down as this creature has gone through—room by room and house by house—massacring everyone it encounters each in a way more gruesome than the one before. People have tried shooting it, but the bullets do nothing. People have tried cutting it, but all that does is leave open wounds that seem to not even phase it. They even tried blowing it up, but it walks through fire as if it wasn’t there.

   I haven’t seen many other people around lately. I only come out when necessary and with the shelter of dark nowadays and walk from shadow to shadow. I’m not sure who else is still alive—I’m afraid to call for help. I don’t really know if the thing is still out there.

   I know I will die here. I don’t know how or when but I know that I will never be able to leave this town. I know for me there is no way to abate this situation. I just hope that someone somewhere can stop it. But most of all, I hope that someday we will stop looking for other places beyond our own.

   One more thing—I love you mom.

(All stories are copyrighted to the Collaborative Learning Center and are not available for redistribution without explicit conset. For more information please e-mail PapeD@ripon.edu. The 100 Words Projcet is property of the Collaborative Learning Center, Ripon College, Ripon WI. All rights reserved.)