Living in one of those fifteen-story domino type apartment buildings on the outskirts of
Cheongju, South Korea. When I went to bed at night, I could hear screams in the walls. All over
the apartment. I sometimes walked each floor, one end to the next, listening for reverberations
against the metal apartment doors, but nothing. No sound at all. Once back in bed, the screams
kicked up all over again. Men screaming, women screaming, children screaming, like a
collection of lost souls. I couldn’t tell if the screams resulted from shock, or were begging for
mercy,

            No one knows why the aliens decided to land off the coast of Costa Rica.

            Landed is the wrong word. They hovered above the ocean, the space between the base of their vessel and the water below unreachable. David and Venus had seen photos taken from a distance, the vessel looked like a hole in the image, a shard of obsidian or onyx dropped onto a page. Had they landed in the water with any force, their ship would’ve flooded the small beaches, driving out the tax-evading locals and bronzed ex-pats selling woven jewelry and knick-knacks from folding tables,