"Whatever you do, don't look at them. Keep your face down!"
Nicholas heard the advice from another man shuffling in the crowd. How did he end up here? Just last night, he was falling asleep when he started having nightmares. He had to piss so badly, he remembered getting up to go to the bathroom. And that was it.
Now, he was standing in a giant red hallway, like some Grand Central terminal of the damned with crowds of young men, pushing their way toward an exit.
Suddenly there was a squeal of noise, as if the largest steam kettle in the world was whistling. Coming through another portal was a black and gray thing. Nicholas blinked, trying to understand what he was seeing. It was a giant black and gray squid, shiny and slimey, the size of a house. But a squid did not have eyes like that! At the top of it were an array of five spider-like eyes. This blob squirmed, its surface shimmered, and its body turned, making more steaming noises while its tentacles punched and waved through the air.
The crowd panicked, pushing away. Some people cried out in fear. At the closest to the crowd, the alien turned and grabbed a man by his arm. He screamed and tried to pull away, but tentacle after tentacle snapped out to grab an appendage. He was dragged toward the alien's undulating torso when a darker, red gaping maw opened up. The crowd grew quiet and watched in horror as the man was pulled inside, and the mouth closed.
"The flesh!" Someone yelled. "It eats human flesh."
Nicholas was horrified at what he had just witnessed. His knees were weak. He didn't notice that he had pissed himself.
"Kid," a man looked down at the puddle of piss at Nicholas' feet. "How old are you?"
"I'm 18." Nicholas replied. "This can't be happening to me. I'm dreaming."
"This is real." The man shook his head. "These aliens. They eat us. We're food to them."
There was a long sound, like a trumpet. The crowd tried to push again toward one portal, but 2 more alien blobs came out and prodded the crowd to scatter. They expertly herded the men. Nicholas found himself being pushed with a smaller crowd into another direction. They were a panicked pack of them, desperate to live.
Their shepherding alien began to spray them with a fine yellow mist. There was a stinging sensation, and soon the men were pulling off their wet clothes as it irritated the skin. The alien then sprayed a blue mist over them - the stinging stopped and Nicholas detected a light smell of disinfectant. He looked at the twenty or so men in his crowd, naked and huddled, and he morbidly thought of those old Holocaust photos he saw in History class.