What Are They Doing To Us?

I came to on the kitchen floor, choking on nothing. Each breath scraped my throat like glass. I blinked hard against the fluorescents. I tried to remember where I was, who I was. The lab coats. The needles. Were they a dream? The fragments were there. Everything hurt. But not in any way I’d ever known. This wasn’t bruising. This wasn’t soreness. This was wrong. Like my body had been repossessed. My skin felt too tight, drawn thin over bones that weren’t mine anymore, like I’d been rebuilt with the blueprints of something else. “Hello?” Something wet hit the floor. I turned my head and saw it. My tongue. My own damn tongue, twitching against the linoleum like it was trying to crawl away. Panic swelled. I tried to rise, but my arm folded under me. Collapsing in on itself. The bones were gone. I looked down and my legs were missing too. No stumps, no blood. Just... gone; and in their place: pale, wet coils of segmented flesh, twitching spasmodically. My skin, or what was left of it, had gone translucent in places, revealing a grotesque theater underneath: veins turned black and ropy. Beneath the surface, something moved. Something tried to push through. I scrambled back, and my palms left a smear, a puddle of mucus. Pain barely registered. It was eclipsed by the deeper horror, that I was inside something I didn’t understand. My body wasn’t mine. It was a costume that had melted in the sun. I caught my reflection in the oven door, warped by grime and heat and horror. And there I was. Or some version of me. My eyes were bulged too wide, they were lidless and raw. My nose had collapsed into a flat ridge. My lips had vanished, leaving only a trembling slit of muscle. And then, the knock. A calm, almost polite rapping at the front door. And a voice: “Hey, big boy. how ya’ doin in there?” I froze. There was a window there, and he was watching me. He made some kissing noises, like you do to call a dog over. I fought it but I couldn’t help but follow him.