I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE

I had to run home and write this as soon as I could; something is going on out there and I really don't know what they are. I say 'they', but I guess what it is could be 'its' rather than 'they', but you get the idea. Anyway, right around eleven this morning, this really powdery like ash stuff started falling from the sky. I'd never seen anything like it outside of California when my wife and I were on our Honeymoon and the forest fires were ripping through the trees back in '99. It looked then like really light snowflakes and they were all over the place. This was so similar to that that I almost chalked it up to a fire somewhere, but Michigan just doesn't get them that much... especially not around here. At any rate, I went outside to check it out, and when the little fluffs landed on you they almost stung! It felt just like a little bug nipping you! It definitely made me want to wipe the things off right away. I brushed off the rest and went back inside. We looked out the front window that faces the road and thousands of the whitish-gray flakes were landing all over the place. As soon as they hit something solid, or maybe just not human, they popped open with a puff of maybe smoke or something, and flipped over. Worst of all was how they looked after 'exploding': like little crabs; stone crabs maybe, but without the big fat claw... just two littler ones. They started scrambling all over the cars, the sidewalk, the parking lot... shit, we could hear them scratching at the roof! No one wanted to go out to investigate, for obvious reasons, but it was apparent that they could be relatively easily smashed, as the passing, honking traffic was splattering them all over the road! They didn't look like they had blood, per se, just a bunch of green ichor that erupted a blast of some kind of foul green gas. Anyway, after about fifteen minutes of them pouring down from the sky, the rain stopped. Well, getting to the car wasn't exactly a simple task as no one wanted to get any one of them on themselves, so, we grabbed the snow shovel and just cleared a path. I jumped in the car, kicked two out that had climbed in the open window... I think I got them all, though I thought maybe one had gotten into my soc--- -

DIG by Douglas Waltz

Awakening he disoovered that his head was throbbing, he was in a crouched position and in some sort of crude tunnel. A nearby lantern with a candle flickered and kept the darkness at bay.
A quick glance showed a tunnel that extended behind him and one that went a little ways in front of him. There was some sort of crude digging implement near his left hand. A touch to the back of his hand came back with blood. A nearby rock with blood on it confirmed that he had been struck by it.
So, he had been struck by a rock while digging a tunnel. Now, he had no idea why or even who he was. How did he get here and, more importantly, why was he here?
Was he breaking out from jail? Did he have some bizarre reason to be in this tunnel? And where did the other end of it lead to? Too many questions and it made his head throb.
Then he heard the scuttling off in the darkness. Way off down the tunnel there came an unearthly sound. He strained his ears to listen, to see if he could discern what it was. Did he have a partner in this tunnel? It would explain the absence of dirt from digging, but something made the hairs on the back of his head prickle with fear.
In a panic he began to dig.