Somewhere far away from there, General Marshall was hunched over a monitor seeing his F-22s being blown to bits and he murmured under his breath,
‘Holy Shit! We are fucked’.
Chapter 5
Doomsday
LRC Quarters
Hampton, Virginia
23rd Jan, 2019
Alex had just received a frantic call from Susan, his younger daughter. The ship above their college had gone berserk and had started attacking the students at the university campus. Susan had stayed indoors but Carrie had gone out with a bunch of her friends to a ‘Welcome Aliens’ party and there was no news of her since then. She was not reachable on her mobile and neither were her friends.
Alex asked Susan to take refuge indoors and wait for him. He turned on the TV and frantically searched for news from Florida. At last, he found a channel broadcasting pictures from the Florida University campus. Apparently, the ship over there had started attacking about an hour after the first attack on Pennsylvania. There were reports of at least thirty deaths, and about hundred or so were still unaccounted for.
Alex tried calling Sienna but calls to her mobile went unanswered.
He had to do something. He could not just sit idle at home. He decided to make the trip to Florida. Soon, there will be no order, no law and no government. If his assessment was correct, total chaos was imminent. He had to be there with his girls. He packed his Apex Guerini shotgun and a 9mm Walther pistol with a box of rounds for each and jumped into his KIA Sorento. He planned to avoid the highways as much as he could and therefore picked the off-roader over his car. He called Sienna’s number yet again but with the same result.
He switched on the TV in his car and turned up the volume. At least communications were still on.
‘…under attack. It is understood that the President narrowly escaped the attack and she is being currently held in an undisclosed location. We have just received visuals of the wreckage of two helicopters that were shot down by the alien ship. The wreckage is strewn all over the White House lawns and the adjacent roads. We do not yet have any news of casualties. The news received is that the President was not part of this convoy and she is holding court in a safe-house, having escaped barely minutes before the attack on the White House.’
Alex was immediately seized with concern for Sienna and he dialed her number again. The phone kept ringing but she did not pick up the call. He hoped and prayed that she was not in one of those helicopters.
Things had gone crazy since that morning. Alex looked up at the ship hovering still in the sky above Hampton. It had not shown any signs of activity yet. But with ships going crazy all over America, it was only a matter of time before this went berserk too. It was probably not a good idea to come back here. Alex rushed back home, picked up whatever loose cash and food he could find in the house and along with a change of clothes, hopped back into his truck.
He decided to get to Florida, get Susan along, search for Carrie, and get them out of there. He was worried about Sienna and hoped that he would be able to contact her in the meanwhile. Or else, he would have to drive back to Washington for her. There was no way his daughter Susan could look after herself. She was all alone there without Carrie. She needed him more than ever. He just hoped that Si was all right, and that she would call sometime soon.
He cursed yet again, looked up at the looming ship in the sky. How did this happen? How did doomsday happen on them all of a sudden? There was no warning at all. Yesterday was just like any other day and today the whole world was fucked! Was it how everything was going to end? Was Earth and life, as he knew it, going to be destroyed by a race of marauding aliens? Life on Earth was always on notice. There was global warming, overpopulation, nuclear war, terrorism, bio-terrorism, threat of a viral pandemic, asteroid collision, solar flares, mega-volcanoes, physical oddities like quasar radiation and a hundred other things which could spell doom for Earth and its inhabitants but that it would be as hurried and as cruel as this, was beyond his imagination.
Alex also thought how things could have been different had he still been in Army. He finally would have had a war that had some meaning. Having spent the best years of his life fighting for causes alien to him, had led to a disillusionment and a desperation that had in some ways led to the bar incident not so many years ago. Not that particular fight with the soldier, but that incident in general. Alex had served during the US ‘intervention’ in North Korea in 2016. History had repeated itself once again. They had come to rid the country of a despot and had instead killed thousands of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. The leaders of the nation failed to learn from lessons past, the dogs of war barked on, the military juggernaut kept rolling on and soldiers like Alex kept losing their faith. Now when the nation probably needed him most, he was out of the thick of it.
Or maybe not.
This war was not in some foreign land against some foreign despot. This was not about greater good, was not about liberating hapless tortured foreign citizens. This was not also about bringing values of the free world and democracy over to another nation. This was not a war for oil, or for influence, or world domination. This war was for survival, being fought against the American people on the American soil. This war was being fought for mere existence and such existential conflicts tended to be all-encompassing and all-inclusive, bound to touch the lives of each and every one of them.
Eventually, he would have to fight in it, directly or indirectly, or directly.
These were the thoughts that crept up into Alex’s mind, between worrying for his two daughters and his wife, while driving towards Florida. He still could not bring himself around to the possibility that something bad had happened to Sienna. He hoped and believed that he would see her again, soon.
He decided to stay away from the I-95. That meant taking a longer route but, I-95 was bound to be choked with people fleeing their homes away from the ship in Hampton at that time. Moreover, Alex felt it would be safer to stay away from crowds. He filled up his truck with gas and filled up two reserve drums for the long road ahead. It normally took about twelve hours for the trip. This time it would take him definitely longer.
He called up Susan again and told her to stay put indoors and stay out of harm’s way. Until now, the ships had not attacked homes or buildings and he hoped that it stayed that way, until he reached Susan.
He called up Sienna yet again, but there was no answer.
He rode across the bay into Norfolk and into Chesapeake, and up until Plymouth through the Dismal Swamp Wildlife Refuge. These roads were not empty that day. Many others had figured out what Alex had, and had decided to stay off the Interstate.
He made good time through Greenville, Jacksonville and Wilmington, reaching Georgetown by evening. There was a large stream of people pouring into Georgetown from Charleston, where an alien ship had parked itself and had started attacking people since that afternoon. There were warehouses for naval weapons in Charleston and the US Army strategic weapons Center in Charleston, which Alex learned was completely gutted in the attack. As with the other places, the Army and Air Force offensive had been useless against the alien ships.
‘They just kept falling like ninepins…right outta sky’ said a survivor from the Charleston attack. He was referring to F-16s and F-22s from the 21st Flight squadron of USAF that had taken flight to fight the ship over Charleston.
The survivor also talked of alien pods that had amazing flight maneuverability and could fly up, down, sideways and diagonal, changing directions on a moment’s notice. They shot beams that were hotter than a welder’s torch and which evaporated tissues and sometimes whole people on contact. There were also large horizontal, platform like alien crafts, which hovered in the sky, scooping up people using harpoons and claws. These machines were efficient and indiscriminate, killing, culling and scooping up anyone they could.
Another survivor had an unusual tale of the machines not sparing animals either
‘They to
ok my wife and my daughter and took two fine lads working in the farm today morning…and the bloody things took my cattle too. Just pierced their hearts with and hooked them up like we hook ‘em fish in the rivers.’
Many others had similar tales of large planes gathering animals and humans alike from the streets and farms around Charleston. Alex read horror on their faces as they recounted their tales. All of them had lost some near and dear ones and yet the grief had not sunk in yet. They were just plain mortified with fear, and yet relieved at having escaped the terror that they had witnessed.
Susan was still holed up in her hostel with her friends and the ship had yet to attack any buildings. She updated him on what was happening there. There was no word of Carrie still. Most of the roads were empty and deserted, people having taken refuge indoors. The military was waging a losing battle against the alien vessels and two of the military crafts had crashed inside of Florida University, one having crashed into the empty stands of the University Football stadium. Debris was strewn all over the town.
Alex still thought indoors was the best place to be and advised Susan to be inside her hostel until he got there. There was still no news from his wife. She had not called back yet. He yearned to see some TV but there was no reception in the one in his car. Susan had told him about the attacks on the helicopters in White House, being shown in news on TV. There was no news of any casualties or about who was on those copters. It was however known that the President had escaped and had been moved to a safe location.
That meant that there was no new news on that front. He had heard the same news bit that morning, before he had started for Florida. It was not enough for Alex and he had to go find his wife, after getting Susan and Carrie. He hoped to hear Sienna’s voice on the other end of his call, and kept trying every hour, but to no avail.
He did not have much time to spare and he decided to drive on, backtracking and going inland, skirting Charleston and on towards Florida.
Chapter 6
Captured
Florida
24th January, 2019
Alex reached the outskirts of Florida by morning. He had driven all night and all day, having only stopped at an abandoned deli to help himself to some dinner, which he had to make himself. There were still vegetables strewn across the floor and bacon pieces on the board. The deli had obviously been abandoned in a hurry. Alex did not find any signs of an attack in there. The building as such was intact. Only the inhabitants seem to have left in a hurry.
That was the story of much of every town that Alex crossed that night and more so as he neared Florida. The Eastern Beltway would be closer to the University and Alex hopped on from a short stint on the Interstate Four on to the Beltway. There was an eerie silence as he neared the University. The skies were ominous, darkened by the disk over the sun causing almost a total eclipse of the sun, an eclipse that he had noticed the day before, and which had lingered on until today morning. It had been like that continuously since yesterday. The Sun was seen only as a rim of brightness peering around the disk, which pretty much covered most of the center of it. The only light that filtered through was from the ring of sunlight and that made the sky gloomy and dark. All that gloominess had made its way inside people Alex met on the roads, all of them touched by a dreary sense of impending doom.
Alex decided to go around and enter the Central Florida University from the southern end, being closer to Susan’s hostel from that side. The roads were deserted and Alex could see signs of the carnage that had taken place there earlier. There were large craters in the road and the buildings on either side of the road bore the brunt of the attack.
There were occasional sounds of gunfire that still pierced the silence of the gloomy morning sky. As Alex crossed the University Boulevard towards the Colonial drive, he heard a low grumpy sound coming from the west. It was coming from some distance away and only the lower bass-rich thumping tones carried over to Alex. It was as if some heavy machinery was churning and tossing, doing some real heavy-duty work, grumbling under the loads that it was ferrying. There was the occasional screeching of metal and the loud crack of wooden boulders snapping in two. Nothing could be seen beyond the trees on the roadside to his right. His hand instinctively felt the handgun strapped to his waist and his foot pressed on the accelerator as he raced to get past the area. He knew he had to get to Susan as fast as he could.
But that decision was soon taken out of his hand. As Alex raced across the road, an alien pod just swam into the sky over the tree line from Alex’s right. Alex instinctively swerved his truck right and immediately felt the bump as his truck bounced against the pavement and onto the fields on the side of the road. He drove on, bumping along on the uneven field, as he headed for the tree line. His KIA Sorrento bumped along the rough field, its SUV sturdiness not measuring up to the jumpy terrain. The alien pod paused in the sky and turned back on to the road, hovering over the road, lighting up the road with beams of light, searching for the noise from the road. Alex was already within the tree line and had switched off his engine and headlights. He just waited there, measuring his breaths as he saw the hovering pod scanning the road along its length. He felt like a rabbit, waiting in the bush, holding its breath, waiting and hoping and willing the wolf to move on.
‘Shit!’ he cursed mutedly, wishing the pod to just hover away on its way away from there.
The second pod materialized from the left of the road, coming in from the University side and immediately spotted Alex and his truck, hiding amongst the trees. A beam of light from this pod lighted up Alex and his truck and a laser beam fired at him, missing him narrowly. Alex jerked his truck to life, pulling away through the shrubbery and the undergrowth of the trees. Both the pods followed, taking shots at his truck. Alex was driving in wild arcs, avoiding the trees and dodging the laser shots at the same time. The tree line was about to finish and Alex had nowhere to hide once he was exposed out in the open, beyond the tree line. He jumped from the truck letting it run on to the fields beyond the tree line before it bumped and stopped against the pavement of the road on the opposite side of the thicket. The pods followed the truck, shooting at it until one of the laser shots caught the truck, and it burst into flames, literally being tossed up in the air with the intensity of the blast. The pods hovered over the truck, searching for him and when they found no signs of him, turned back to the tree line, lighting it up with searchlights. Alex took refuge behind a tree, barely breathing, his arms drawn within, afraid of casting his own shadow in the lights.
The pods hovered over the area, searching for a while before gliding away from there. Alex ventured from behind his cover to look at the macabre sight that lay ahead of him. The source of the thumping noise, that he had heard earlier lay right in front of him. A huge alien harvester ship was hovering over what looked like a cemetery, with rows of tombstones arranged in neat rows and columns all the way till his eyes could see.
‘Must be the Chapel Hill Cemetery’ Alex thought. He remembered seeing an uprooted signboard for the Cemetery half a mile behind.
The hovering platform ship was making a lot of racket as it tore through the Cemetery below, digging at the ground below with all the might it had. There were long metal cranes that spewed from beneath the ship, shifting Earth from the Cemetery, laser beams that cut through concrete and metal and oversized tongs and claws that pried out mutilated bodies from the grave, hauling them into the ship.
‘Holy Shit!’ Alex cursed involuntarily as he grasped what was happening there ‘These monsters are prying out bodies from within the graves.’ That was as ghastly a sight as he had ever seen, and he had seen his share in the wars he had been in.
Alex gasped as the hair behind his neck stood up at the horror of what he was witnessing.
‘These bastards would not stop at anything.’ Alex’s mind was racing with these morbid possibilities and he felt the bitter of the bile drawing up inside his mouth.
He wanted to turn and run but just then, he felt
a searing pain on his left arm, convulsed, and was thrown to the ground in front of him. The last thing he noticed was a deep bleeding gash on his left arm, and an alien harvester hovering over him. An oversized pair of tongs drew from under the alien pod and scooped up Alex in its grip, slowly drawing him inside it. Alex held his injured arm tight with his other hand, his legs and his head flailing in air on either side of the tongs. The pain was bordering on unbearable and he slowly slipped into unconsciousness.
***
It must have been a while before he opened his eyes, Alex had no idea where he was. His arms sought and found the cold metal of the walls around him. It was probably a metal bunker of some kind, with no lights, save for a thin sliver of light filtering under what looked like a door on the far side of the room. His hand instinctively went for his arm, which was not bleeding anymore, blood having dried up on the gash there. It still hurt however, and the hurt alerted him more, sharpening his senses. He felt a bit groggy and the pain made it better, whipping his mind into alert consciousness.
He could hear many different noises outside. Some of it was machinery moving but some of it was speech.
Yeah definitely that - speech.
He strained his ears hard and heard a squeaky kind of conversation punctuated by guffaws, the likes of which he had not heard before.
He could not hear or comprehend what was being spoken, the sounds being too distant. He got up on his feet, dragging himself towards the door. He stumbled on something, a someone, who was lying in front of him. Alex fell over, his fall cushioned by the soft form of someone else.
Exodus (The Domus Series Book 2) Page 5
