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What is a man? What do you think a man is? What do you think we are? What do you think your relationship is to us?

You believe in a spirit, or a soul What do you think that is? It lives inside your flesh, but only your flesh can interact with the world, only your flesh can speak and eat and fight and fuck and reproduce, and ultimately the soul must obey the impulses of the flesh What, then, is the soul but a prisoner of your flesh? An undying yet constrained energy, bound and enslaved within a shuffling, steadily rotting suit of tissue and savage needs? By virtue of your birth, you make a prisoner of a soul An enslaverunts and stench and the spilling of squir fluids

You recoil in horror at the idea of the parasites, these creatures who against your will can co your mind behind a repulsive monstrosity that can co every aspect of your being with its own alien desires until it becouish your own personality fro invisibly inside your body Until nothing that is truly you remains

Now, you understand

For us, man is the parasite

So and too cold to get the scope of it, the way that froround, the curvature of the earth just looks like a straight line The shadow peoplein on an island ofAll those glowing eyes, little pinpricks of light floating on dark, featureless faces

John said, "Dave … do it Dave Now"

"Do what?"

"Focus! Focus on the er"

But that wasn’t right A nuclear explosion would not work here Fire would not work Violence would not work That was the energy they were made of Shadows aren’t repelled by the dark, they’re repelled by the light--

The shadow ht up to A, "NO! NO! NOOO!" in short, barking bursts, the single word over and over again

Amy’s outstretched ar right into her left hand My stomach turned as I watched her hand dissolve and vanish coone forever But, no, that must have been the confusion of the one, the accident and all that

I raised the furgun, pointing it right at the "chest" of the shadow man It was in his chest

My rabbed Amy’s other, frozen hand and squeezed I closed my eyes

I need to think like Aer, a face popped into my head The face was the same one that would have come to probably 75 percent of Americans, if put in the saination of so like a Middle Eastern Jew I suddenly remembered two dozen horrible kid shows my adoptive parents made me watch on VHS, where in the final scene the main character always turned toward the camera and said some variation of, "I knoe’ll solve this proble worked When terror drove everything out of my mind, I fell back on the iconic face and all I could picture in , that shitty velvet Elvisey Jesus that had hung onin the trunk of John’s Caddie for all I knew

I squeezed the trigger

A flash of white light poured forth from the device in my hand The whiteness condensed down to a shape S there before us, inswiveled, facing the dark hordes The eyes on the face of Velvet Jesus burned hite fire The mouth opened, and let loose an inhuman roar

Velvet Jesus faced a shadow man to my left Laser beams fired froain, and fired Another shadowturned in ht, clearing swaths through the shadows, piercing the blackness with a glare that was soht that I kneould leave ht chewed through the shadoith a sickening righteous energy that genuinely made me pity them I suddenly kne the scientists of the Manhattan Project felt the first ti the power of what they had unleashed, the reflection of the light off of the surrounding sand bright enough to blind athat it becale" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>