This happened in March of 1996. I'm calling because I need to know if anyone else has experienced something like this. I had a heart attack. Massive one. I was 34 years old, completely healthy as far as I knew, and one morning I just collapsed in my kitchen. I was alone in the house that day. My husband had already left for his shift at the mill. I wasn't breathing. No pulse. The neighbor heard something fall and came to check on me. She's the one who called 911 and started CPR. The paramedics told her later I'd been gone for almost four minutes before they got my heart started again. Four minutes. That's a long time to be dead. I spent two weeks in the hospital after that. The doctors ran every test they could think of. They couldn't find anything wrong with my heart. Nothing that would explain what happened. They called it a fluke. A medical mystery. Sent me home with a prescription for baby aspirin and told me to take it easy.
The first time I saw one of them was three days after I got home from the hospital. I was at the grocery store, just trying to get back to normal life, you know? I needed to feel like myself again. Needed to prove I could do regular things. I was in the produce section, picking out tomatoes, when this woman walked past me. Middle-aged, wearing a blue cardigan, pushing a cart. Nothing unusual. Except when I looked at her face, it wasn't a face. It was gray. Smooth gray skin, almost like rubber. No nose, just two slits. Eyes that were too large, too black, taking up half the face. No expression at all. Just blank. Staring. I dropped the tomato I was holding. Made this sound, I don't know, a gasp or something. The woman looked right at me with those black eyes and then just kept walking. Like nothing happened. Like she didn't notice me staring.
I thought I was losing my mind. I mean, I'd just died and come back. Maybe my brain got damaged. Maybe the lack of oxygen did something to me. I didn't tell anyone at first. I just went home and tried to forget about it. But then I saw another one. Two days later, at the bank. A man in a suit, waiting in line. Same gray face. Same black eyes. This one had a slightly different shape to the head, more elongated, but otherwise identical. He was talking to the teller like everything was normal. She was smiling at him. Laughing at something he said. She couldn't see what I was seeing. That's when I started paying attention. Really watching people. And I realized they were everywhere. Not everyone. Maybe one in every thirty people I'd see. At the post office. At the gas station. Walking down the street. All of them with those faces hidden underneath.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]