The Artifact

Bill took one final drag on his cigarette before flicking it into the darkness off his backyard. He turned, opened his screen door and started to walk inside when he heard a thunderous WOOSH overhead.

He spun around to see something trailing a thick cloud of smoke careen out of control past his home and over the nearby woods. The object was losing altitude rapidly. Bill her a distance breaking of branches & trees, he dropped to the ground anticipating a huge impact...but after a moment he heard nothing. Perplexed, he ran toward the back of his yard to a path the led into the woods.

Bill moved cautiously but quickly. The path was littered with a significant amount of debris. He stepped over large branches, bits of twisted smoldering metal and at one point half of a tree that was sheared in two.

He entered a small clearing and found the object. It wasn't a meteor as he expected, it was some kind of craft, heavily damaged but there was no crater. It was floating about 4 feet about the forest floor. There was an unpleasant low frequency hum emanating from it. He approached the craft slowly, suddenly the frequency of the hum sputtered momentarily went ear splittingly high pitched and ceased. The second the sound stopped, the craft dropped to the ground with a dull thud and the upper hemispher split open. There was a muted reddish light within and a slight mist flowed from the opening.

Bill crept closer to the ship. "This is a dumb idea Bill." He thought. He held his breath not wanting to ingest whatever that mist was and peered inside the ship. There was a blinding flash, searing pain and after that glimpses of consciousness. Bill remembered crawling back from the ship, stumpling half blind through the woods, his back door and this his bed.