The flickering panel-lights in the vaulted ceiling indicated a severe drain on the power grid.  Time-space stresses had opened a rift to a reality where horror lived, where gravity crushed, and the air pressure was monstrous.  Bludgeoning winds spilled in through the white-glow rip that hovered mid-air between the left and right, ultra-cold, quantum coils.  Lab machines rose in tiers that ringed the oval chamber.  The hardware whined with uncertainty, warbling with alarms, crackling with burning, popping circuits that tainted the air with whirling blue smoke.  As air pressures equalized, fresh smoke thickened, huddling above various stations.
            The good news; the rift wasn’t growing any bigger. 
            The bad news; something alien had come through. 
             Falling, Dillon skidded across the floor.  The tray fell from his hands, clattering on the glazed stone floor, spilling his lunch across what looked like two-foot trunk roots in need of soil.  The roots wiggled like sluggish snakes.  Dillon picked himself up, eyes rising from the roots, up the trunk of a blue-gray, tentacled beast that loomed a yard and a half away.  Its eye had a single, bright iris—a plate-sized aquamarine crystal surrounded by a soft blue field with cobalt veins.  The eyelids were wood-like shutters, poised up and down.  There were four nostril slits that pulsed.  Its blue-green, mottled flesh looked damp, rubbery, wrinkling where the many arms sprouted from an elongated trunk.  Its open mouth was framed with an orange beak that spilled gibbering oscillations that might have been language.  
             He was trapped with a creature that shared his dismay. 
Dillon scrambled backwards, rolled to get his legs under him, and rose.  He ran up a flight of stairs past tier after tier of high-tech equipment.  But there was no place to run to; security plates above the doors had dropped to seal the space. 
             Grasping tentacles stretched closer, branching suddenly as addition segments extended.  The beast was making a forest of itself.
             Dillon ducked behind some of the equipment, duck-walking to keep a low profile.  His heart pounded.  His breath came fast.  Adrenaline hit his bloodstream, bringing emergency energy to survive.  Having flanked the beast, he darted across another flight of stairs, staying on the same tier of the theater-sized space.  A quick glimpse of the glossy creature showed it spinning to search with its single eye.  It’s glassy, vine-like limbs curved through the air, seeking him out.
            Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…  I’m going to die! 
             The beast’s vocalizations came with large chunks of silence wedged between.  Its turning truck wobbled slightly, its balance somehow compromised.
             Head down, Dillon kept moving along the tier, approaching another flight of stairs that radiated from the lowest level, up to the surrounding wall.  Leaving wasn’t an option; he couldn’t hide forever.  And hiding was a temporary measure, not a fix.  Only one thing made sense.
             I need a weapon.
             There was a lot of damaged equipment, but no loose fragments to take in hand.  There were no tools lay handily about.  Not even a mop or broom.  Not even a chair to throw.  He slunk down the flight of stairs toward the creature that seemed to be looking elsewhere.  Despite his fear, Dillon returned to the lowest tier, his gaze on the abandoned tray and the plastic spork lying beside it.  The beast was turning.  Soon, it would se him.  He had to act—Now!
            He darted into the open, running, still hunched low—a good imitation of a raptor.  His foot squished a pot-sticker.  He slowed a step, hand dipping to the ground.  His grasping fingers sent the spork spinning away.  Straightening, he snatched up the tray.  The mysterious silver-white light of the rift glared at him.
             The creature rotated.  The terrible eye of the Beholder found him.  The shutters of its lids clacked together once in surprise at his nearness.  Its fanned limbs began to contract, reabsorbing the extra branches it had grown.  In moments, the thing would be able to snatch him up and use that squid beak to bite off his head.
             Dillon shoved with his legs, pistoning harder, driving himself ever faster.  Speed was his only advantage.  That and many hours spent in the park, playing catch with his golden Labrador, King Henry who was overly fond of other people’s chicken.  Dillon spun while running.  Muscle memory took over as he flung the tray like a Frisbee.  The tray hit edge-on to the crystal eye.  The creature flinched back, clacking its lids shut in reflex.  The trunk of the beast quivered, shuddering in pain.
             Then Dillon’s running turn completed itself and fell face-first into the rift.  Cold-beyond-cold knifed into him, icing his breath, stinging his eyes with unshed tears turning to icy.  A universe of cold white light was marred by his presence, and then he was in another world, falling across a round, vacant table.  He skidded and pulled the table over on top of himself, scattering several plastic chairs.  He rolled on the floor, greeted by excited murmurs and exclamations.  The air was thick with cooking oil, oriental seasoning, and the smells of chow mein and fried brown rice. 
             Home, sweet home!  Malicious fate had scooped him, but had also brought him home.  In one piece.  He looked back around the table, and saw the rift shriveling, closing, and then it was gone.  Dillon slumped, closing his eyes, happy to be back in the Mall’s food court, at the Panda Depot.  Of course, now he’d need another lunch.