They looked like corpses.

  That was Mike’s first thought as he and Eric staggered up the cracked sidewalk, boots scraping, breath puffing white in the cold air. Dead weight was dead weight, no matter what planet the armor came from.

  Eric had one of the armored figures slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The thing wasn’t just heavy — it was unevenly heavy, like every plate of armor had its own opinion about gravity. With each step Eric took, the limp knight’s gauntlets swung and smacked against his back, armor rattling like distant chains.

  The second knight Mike was helping with was worse.

  Eric had one arm hooked under its armpit, dragging it across the ground. Mike handled the legs, lifting them just enough to keep the armored boots from catching on every crack, curb, or misplaced chunk of asphalt. The legs were limp, swinging uselessly with each tug, making the whole body twist like a tangled marionette.

  Mike’s lower back was already screaming.

  “You good?” he muttered, trying not to sound winded.

  Eric’s voice came out rough. “Been better.”

  The understatement of the year. Eric looked like someone had run him through a blender and then sprinkled panic on top. Mike didn’t look much better.

  Coyote Hills at night should’ve been noisy — occasional traffic, snippets of music, a neighbor yelling at their dog, a group of teenagers trying too hard to be cool. Tonight all Mike heard was wind and the unsettling metallic scrape of the knight’s armor dragging over concrete.

  He hated how quiet it was.

  Quiet meant people were listening. Watching. Staring out windows but too nervous to intervene.

  Great. Just what they needed — an audience while hauling two unconscious medieval techno-gladiators through town.

  “You see anyone?” Mike asked.

  “No,” Eric said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not seeing us.”

  Mike snorted. “Well, if they are, they’re getting a hell of a show.”

  Eric didn’t answer. He just kept walking, shoulder sagging under the weight of the first knight.

  They crossed beneath a flickering streetlight. The dragging knight’s armor caught the glow, flashing bright silver, then dim again as they passed into shadow.

  The whole scene felt… wrong.

  Not Halloween wrong. Not “someone got drunk and bought a costume” wrong.

  Wrong wrong.

  Wrong in the way Mike had learned to recognize overseas — the kind of wrong that made the back of his neck itch, the kind that said you are not prepared for what this night really is.

  He swallowed and shifted his grip on the limp legs.

  “How you holding up?” he asked.

  Eric gave a bitter half-laugh. “Really? You wanna check in on my feelings right now?”

  “I meant physically.”

  “Oh. Then no. Not even close to good.”

  Mike believed him. Eric’s breathing was uneven, shallow, controlled only because he was forcing it to be. No sane man could get thrown through a building and stay upright, let alone haul two armored bodies home.

  But here they were.

  “Stairs,” Eric said grimly.

  Mike looked up at the apartment building’s exterior stairwell and winced. “Oh, this is gonna suck.”

  “Sucks more if we stay out here,” Eric said.

  Fair.

  They reached the first riser. Eric took the brunt of it — the knight over his shoulder slumping dangerously as he climbed. Mike struggled with the legs of the dragged knight, trying to lift and guide them upward while the upper body sagged like a sack of bricks.

  The metal armor clanged with each awkward step.

  By the time they reached the second flight, Mike was sweating through his shirt.

  “Good God,” he muttered, “whoever made this armor hated the idea of mobility. And my spine.”

  Eric managed a grunt between breaths. “Feels… heavier than it should.”

  “Did you miss the part where I said GOOD GOD? That was the part where I agreed with you.”

  They finally reached the top landing.

  Eric’s door waited at the far end of the corridor like a reluctant friend.

  He propped the knight on his shoulder more securely and dug into his pocket for the keys. His hands were shaking hard enough that the keys rattled.

  “Here,” Mike said, shifting the legs to one arm and reaching out.

  “No,” Eric said.

  He forced the key into the lock, missed, cursed softly, tried again.

  The lock clicked.

  Eric pushed the door.

  It stuck.

  Mike rolled his eyes skyward. “Not the time for this door to be a bitch, man.”

  Eric shoved harder, shoulder slamming into the wood while the knight bounced on his back like a floppy dead fish.

  On the third try the door gave way.

  The two men staggered inside with their unconscious burdens, leaving the night behind.

  The apartment felt too small the second the knights crossed the threshold. The living room was already cramped on a normal day; tonight it felt like the walls were closing in.

  “Kitchen,” Eric said.

  “Why the kitchen?” Mike asked.

  “Tile floor,” Eric said. “Easier to clean.”

  “Comforting,” Mike muttered as he followed.

  They maneuvered the knights into the narrow kitchen, the buzzing fluorescent overhead making everything look washed-out and stark.

  Eric dropped the dead-weight knight off his shoulder with a grunt of pain. The body slumped to the floor with a metallic thud.

  The one Mike had been helping with sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Eric braced his hands on the counter, catching his breath. Mike stood still for a moment, rolling his shoulders and flexing his hands to remind them that they belonged to a living person and not to the armor they’d just hauled across town.

  “Chairs,” Eric said, voice hoarse.

  Mike dragged two chairs from the kitchen table.

  The second he set them down, Eric got to work — not neatly, not politely, but the way someone ties down cargo they really don’t want shifting mid-flight. Rope wrapped around arms, torsos, ankles. Knots tightened with jerks sharp enough that the rope fibers squealed.

  The knights didn’t react. Not even a twitch.

  Just the sound of armor plates clinking as Eric repositioned limbs that refused to hold their own weight.

  Mike leaned his shoulder against the doorway and watched.

  “You’ve done this before,” he said quietly.

  Eric’s hands paused just for a second. “Something like it.”

  “Want to elaborate?”

  “No.”

  Mike sighed. “Didn’t think so.”

  The second knight was hoisted into the second chair. Their head slumped forward. Armor rattled softly.

  Eric yanked the knot shut.

  Then he stepped back.

  The sight in front of them was surreal — two armored bodies tied to mismatched kitchen chairs, their helmets reflecting harsh light, their limbs hanging limply like they’d been puppeted into place and abandoned. Contrasted with the rest of the apartment, which was already shambles in slow motion, only served to highlight the absolute strangeness of it all. Mike was sure more now than ever before that whatever life had in mind for himself and Eric, it was going to test everything he'd ever been through just to keep his wits about him. That, and a thirty-six pack or three.

  Mike rubbed the back of his neck.

  “This is insane,” he muttered.

  “Yeah,” Eric said.

  Mike slid into the chair across from the knights, elbows braced on his knees. “Now what?”

  “We wait,” Eric said.

  “For what? For them to wake up and kick our asses?”

  Eric gave him a look that wasn’t quite humorless and wasn’t quite a flinch. “We need answers.”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “But we also need not to die.”

  Eric didn’t respond.

  The silence stretched. Only the hum of the fridge and the buzzing light filled the space.

  Mike studied the helmets. Sleek, silver, unfamiliar. Too smooth. Too perfect. Nothing about them screamed cosplay. Nothing about them screamed human, either.

  “We should… probably figure out who they are,” he said slowly.

  Eric’s eyes flicked to the helmets.

  Mike raised an eyebrow. “You good to do the honors? Or you want me to take first crack?”

  Eric hesitated.

  It wasn’t fear — not the kind normal people felt.

  It was the hesitation of someone who already knew they weren’t going to like the answer.

  “We take them off,” Eric said.

  Mike nodded. “Yeah. We take them off.”

  He pushed himself to his feet.

  The kitchen felt too quiet.

  Too expectant.

  Eric moved toward the nearest knight.

  Mike swallowed hard.

  ***

  Manny’s Liquor looked less like a store and more like a crime scene from a movie—except none of the officers on site had enough imagination to invent what actually happened.

  Floodlights blasted the shattered storefront with harsh white glare. Brick fragments littered the sidewalk. The big front window was gone, glass blown outward like icy shrapnel. A deep, unnatural fracture radiated from the point of impact, spiderwebbing through concrete and cinderblock.

  Sheriff Dalton Reeves stood quietly with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, surveying the damage with grim patience. He was a big man, not in the bulk sense but in a way that filled a room—calm, weighty, immovable. His eyes missed nothing.

  Next to him, Lieutenant Michelle Calder swept her flashlight beam over the rubble. Her jaw was tight; her posture, rigid. The night air carried a faint smell of ozone and dust.

  “This isn’t a gas leak,” Michelle murmured.

  “No,” Dalton said. “It’s also not a car crash. Not a bomb. Not lightning. So unless God decided to try out amateur demolition, we’ve got ourselves something that doesn’t fit in the manual.”

  Michelle’s light paused on a ripped tarp, peeking from beneath fallen bricks.

  Her stomach knotted.

  “Dalton… that’s Mike’s stuff.”

  Dalton stepped closer, squatting beside the collapsed lean-to. The tarp was shredded, crushed inward at the center. A battered sleeping bag, old milk crate, and a few personal scraps were buried beneath brick debris.

  No blood.

  No body.

  But definitely a life—someone’s fragile, patchwork existence—flattened like it had never mattered at all.

  Michelle swallowed thickly. “He wasn’t here… or he moved fast.”

  Dalton stood again. “Or someone moved him.”

  She glanced toward the yawning hole in the wall—the perfect outline of a human body’s destructive arc.

  Inside the store, Manny sat on the back of the ambulance, blanket wrapped around him, hands shaking so hard the foil crinkled.

  Michelle approached him carefully. “Manny… can you tell us what happened?”

  Manny’s eyes darted to the ruin again. “It— it was like— I swear to God, Lieutenant, the air went still. Like the whole world held its breath. And then—”

  He snapped his fingers near his ear, flinching at the sound.

  “—this flash. A ball— of lightning? I don’t— I don’t know. No thunder. No sound. Just— pressure. And then the wall— it exploded outward. And Eric— Eric flew out like— like a cannon fired him.”

  Michelle’s throat tightened. “You’re sure it was Eric?”

  “Lieutenant… he got up.” Manny’s voice cracked. “He stood up. After going through a wall. He couldn’t even walk straight, but he stood up. And he wasn’t dead.”

  Dalton watched Manny closely. “You see who attacked him?”

  Manny shook his head. “Armor. People in armor. Tall. Silent.” He pulled the blanket tighter. “They weren’t from around here. And they weren’t… normal.”

  Michelle and Dalton exchanged a long, heavy look.

  Dalton broke it first. “Michelle. You trust him?”

  Michelle didn’t hesitate. “Manny doesn’t lie. Not like this.” Her voice dropped. “And he’s not the type to imagine things.”

  Dalton huffed out a slow breath. “Alright then. Get moving.”

  She blinked. “Sir?”

  “Go check on Eric,” he said. “If he survived what Manny described, he’s either hurt, hiding, or causing more trouble. And he’ll talk to you before he talks to anyone else.”

  Michelle hesitated only long enough to pull her jacket tighter against the cold.

  Then she turned and headed out into the night, steps quickening the farther she got from the ruined storefront.

  ***

  The kitchen was too small for this.

  Eric stood between the two restrained knights, staring at them with an expression Mike couldn’t read. Not fear. Not curiosity.

  Something deeper. Something old.

  Mike didn’t like that one bit.

  “You sure you wanna do this?” Mike asked.

  Eric ran a hand through his hair again. “We don’t have a choice.”

  He stepped behind the first knight and searched for the release clasp. Mike leaned in, watching the armor like it might suddenly wake up and bite him.

  There—

  A near-silent click.

  Eric lifted the helmet free.

  Hair tumbled out first—dark, long, tangled. It framed a face that was far too clean, too symmetrical, too… something. Skin a purplish hue shone with a blueish light like sheen, and if that wasn't odd enough horns parted the hair at the crown.

  Human...ish. But not like the humans Mike was used to seeing dragged out of bar fights.

  He didn’t get to process it.

  Eric had already moved to the second knight.

  Click.

  Lift.

  Rich auburn flowed free in a river of silk as Eric removed the helmet. A face far too delicate to be easily imagined in pieces of a bulldozer greeted him. A face far too delicate, and infinitely far too familiar. Sharp pointed ears slowly relaxed, slightly swollen and raw from being pressed up against the helmet. Dormant memories came raging to the surface of his already rattled psyche, and they brought with them each and every trauma they could muster.

  Mike’s voice came out quietly. “Eric… what the hell.”

  Eric didn’t look at him. His eyes were locked on the faces.

  Recognition flickered across his expression like shadows from a distant fire.

  Mike’s stomach dropped. “You know them.”

  “Nope, But I'm sure we'll be just the best of friends soon enough,” Eric lied.

  “Okay,” Mike said slowly. “You wanna start explaining?”

  “No,” Eric said. “But I will. Just… not yet. Not until—”

  Three sharp knocks exploded against the front door.

  Eric froze.

  Mike froze.

  They exchanged a look — the kind that carried entire conversations in silence.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  Knock.

  And a familiar voice called through the door:

  “Eric? Open up. It’s Michelle.”

  Mike mouthed a silent shit.

  Eric moved.

  ***

  Michelle stood on the outdoor walkway, breath fogging in front of her. Her hair had loosened from its ponytail; she looked exhausted, irritated, and deeply worried all at once.

  Eric cracked the door open only a sliver, slipping out and pulling it mostly shut behind him.

  Michelle clocked that instantly. Her eyes narrowed.

  “What’s with the half-door crap?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

  "You think I should let the cold in?" He asked with the snarky tone that comes with fake nobility.

  Michelle looked at Eric for a moment, face unreadable. "Eric, why do you always make things more difficult than they need to be?"

  Eric stiffened, memories of past arguments and meals left untouched in anger or loneliness played out across his face. Every love story is a tragedy if it lives long enough, and Eric's seemingly figured out how to speed-read theirs into the ground.

  Eric swallowed. His voice came out thin. “Michelle… now’s not—”

  “Eric,” she cut in, tone dangerously steady, “I just came from Manny’s. I saw the wall. I saw the destruction. I talked to him. I talked to Dalton. So you can cut the ‘now’s not a good time’ bullshit and start telling me the truth.”

  Eric flinched.

  Michelle noticed.

  Her expression hardened.

  “Move,” she said, stepping forward.

  Eric stepped in front of the door instinctively.

  Michelle’s hand went to her hip.

  “Eric,” she said, voice dropping low and sharp, “if you don’t let me in right now, I swear I will—”

  Inside the apartment, something metallic clattered.

  Michelle’s eyes snapped to the door gap.

  “What was that?” she demanded.

  Eric raised his hands, palms out. “Michelle—”

  “Move,” she repeated. “Right now.”

  “I can’t,” Eric said.

  Michelle’s jaw tightened. “Why not?”

  Inside the apartment—

  A groan.

  Low. Weak. But definitely human.

  Michelle’s hand snapped up, her gun clearing the holster.

  “ERIC. MOVE.”

  Eric’s breath hitched. “Michelle, please—”

  Another groan from inside.

  This one louder.

  “Uh— Eric? We got a problem! The aliens are waking up," Mike called out as ran to the door tripping into Eric hard, causing him to lose his handle on the door as he fell against the door frame

  Michelle’s eyes widened.

  Eric looked torn in half.

  And the door behind him shook as one of the chairs scraped violently across the kitchen floor.

  Michelle took a step back, gun up, adrenaline spiking.