Matt sprang upright, holstered his sidearm and swiveled the rifle strap around to the front of his chest, raising the scope to his eye to take aim at the object.
With all the dirt and smoke in the air, it was hard to see anything clearly. Another barrage of drop-pods could be heard impacting the fields on either side of the road, the nearby screams of fleeing people rising above the unfolding chaos.
Everything was jarred and shaken, but the one thing Matt could get a good look at was the four mechanical legs that had clawed up out of the torn earth. Each of the three appendages were planted at equal distance points around the circumference of the pod to stabilize its upright position. It rested there for a moment, as if the climb out of the crater had somehow exhausted it. Then, a hatch blew open on the side of the pod, steam hissing and curling from inside. As it began to clear, Matt glimpsed a dank, organic-looking interior fused with some kind of tech.
And something else.
A figure.
Humanoid.
Tall and spindly, wearing macabre, black-boned armor.
The figure appeared to also be holding something that resembled a sleek metallic weapon; a long black snout was attached to the end of it which was ribbed. There was possibly some type of ornate engraving or design etched into the weapon too. Then, without hesitation, the mysterious figure began firing on the fleeing crowd of people.
Blue lances of searing-hot plasma raked the crowd. Lines of people were cut down within an instant, the air misting with clouds of ash and blood. Those hit simply evaporated.
Slack-jawed, Matt watched as a thirty-something man who was cowering nearest to the road exploded into a crimson sherbet, his wife screaming in terror as she too was struck next, foolishly covering her head as if it would somehow offer some protection. She vanished within a blink.
Matt couldn’t even register what was happening. It was beyond comprehension to see these people no longer existing. What remained of their bodies wafted to the ground.
The full-fledged panic that had been building in the crowd erupted into a blood-curdling crescendo. Everyone took off running across the fields, bolting from their hiding places, screaming in absolute terror.
Matt whirled to see more pods hitting the ground nearby, with another small rabble of these mysterious attackers now approaching from the opposite direction in the field, their milky-gray eyes glowing as they funneled the panicked crowd into a kill box. Within seconds, the crowd was overwhelmed by the brutal authority of these otherworldly attackers, the sound of their weaponry so deafening and ceaseless, it had morphed into one prolonged interrupted pulse.
Matt had seen more than enough. He pivoted to the nearest invader, sighted along his rifle and rattled off a burst of semi-auto fire.
The rounds sparked off its strange armor, which from what Matt could make out, was some type of exo-suit that had been fused into its limbs. The second the invader was struck, it spun around and returned fire on Matt.
He leaped behind the parked car as streaks of plasma cleaved the air.
Joel dropped to his knees and scuttled around to the rear of the vehicle, screaming as Matt returned fire, the air now echoing with the crackle of conventional gunfire.
When Matt slumped back down to swap out his magazine, he shot a look to Joel, who was just gaping at him, blinking wildly. The hardened and nihilistic demeanour he sported only moments earlier, had now been replaced with the confusion and terrified child.
“We need to move!” Matt yelled, fumbling through the supply pouch on his ballistic vest to dig out a fresh magazine.
“Yeah-yeah, OK,” replied Joel, nodding ferociously. When another hail of plasma strafed the car, he began shaking his head. “Nah-nah, fuck that. I don’t think I can move, man.”
“Listen to me,” Matt said, speaking directly to Joel’s paled face. “You stay here, you’re dead. You try running off into that field, you’ll be struck down like the rest of those people within seconds.”
“So what’s your plan then?”
“When I start firing again, you open the back door and get in. I’m gonna drive us outta here.”
Joel looked at Matt breathlessly, his mouth agape. “That’s it? That’s your plan? We’re gonna just drive off into the sunset?”
“Hey, you’re more than welcome to come up with something better,” Matt replied.
Suddenly, they were both forced to snap their knees up to their chests when another barrage of alien fire cracked into the road in front of them, asphalt exploding into their faces, showering the car with a hail of tiny rocks.
“Jesus!” screamed Joel. “The fuck are these dudes?”
Matt dropped down to his stomach and peered under the car to see a pair of metallic legs approaching them, about thirty meters out. Armored boots clacked along the road with each step. This being, whatever it was, knew they were hiding behind the vehicle. Matt got to his knees and frantically checked his weapon over, then readied himself, feverishly massaging his trigger’s pull distance. “Soon as I start firing. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you. But how about you give me that other gun?”
“I’m starting to like your sense of humor, Joel.” Matt popped up and began unloading wildly on the mysterious assailant, bullets strafing the smoky air that now eerily glowed blue from the distant muzzle flashes of alien weaponry.
The gunfire was deafening as Joel peeled open the passenger-side door and leaped into the back seat of the vehicle, crawling on his elbows over a bed of shattered glass.
Matt kept the trigger on his weapon fully depressed as he continued to fire, draining his magazine, but the being kept advancing through the hail of bullets. As it drew closer, Matt sighted a thin join between the armored-plating on its right leg, so he tilted his aim slightly downward and shot across its shins.
The being collapsed onto the road, but it was far from dead. Its entire body began to shimmer, like the air around it was somehow lensing. Then, it completely vanished, like it had activated some type of stealth-mode. However, it was very much still there.
It returned fire on Matt, forcing him to duck low behind the car again as hot javelins of plasma cut across the hood, splintering metal. When the radiator suddenly exploded, the blast caused the car to begin rolling lazily back along the road.
Hobbling on his knees, Matt awkwardly moved with the vehicle, popping the driver’s door open. He dived in head first as the door’s window pane exploded, showering him with glass.
Now the windshield above him exploded, chunks of glass dropping onto his back while he fished the keys out from one of his leg pockets. His gloved hands were shaking so badly, he struggled to properly insert the key into the ignition slot. Joel’s back seat screaming wasn’t helping the situation either. Seconds seemed like hours before he finally managed to do it. When the car reluctantly spluttered to life, Matt threw it into reverse and pressed the accelerator down with the palm of his hand.
There was a tortured scream of rubber as the car backed along the crater-pocked road, now sounding like some lumbering beast, steam gushing from its hood.
Matt yanked hard on the steering wheel and spun the car into a one-eighty twirl. He then threw the car into drive and punched the accelerator. The car roared off blindly down the road, moving away from the chaos.
Matt gingerly peered over the dash to see where he was going. He could see the relentless bursts of plasma streaking past his peripheral vision like tracer fire, so he began to swerve and fish-tail across the road until the line of sight was broken when he steered the vehicle around a sharp bend.
He sat upright in his seat and took proper control of the wheel, turning around to see Joel still laying on his stomach in the back seat, quietly muttering to himself, eyes vacant and wide with shock. “Oh god—oh god—oh god—oh god…!”
With his own panic barely subsiding, Matt turned and kept his attention on the road ahead, leaning forward to see through the choking smoke. The road was now caked in a thick film of blac
k ash. He wondered if he was driving over the remains of people. The air that whistled through the windowless vehicle stunk with a mix of burnt flesh and sulfur.
Matt looked at the vast cornfields that were ablaze out there, alien pods still dropping from the sky for as far as the eye could see. They were literally driving through the apocalypse. Matt had no idea whether his teammates were still alive, or what had become of his wife and child. He had to find a way to make it back home to them.
When they reached an intersection in the road, Matt cut the wheel hard, hitting the on-ramp to the interstate highway, which now looked like hell’s biggest used-car lot.
A sprawl of burning cars radiated outward from the rim of a giant blast crater. The cars that were not burning were littered with the skeletal remains of their occupants, all fixed into sickening heat-blasted poses, wispy fingers of smoke still curling from their charred flesh. The highway had been reduced to a wasteland of fire and ash.
Matt slowed, steering the car along the shoulder of the highway, weaving around destroyed vehicles and rubble, careful not to venture to close to the huge, ruptured chunks of asphalt that slanted steeply towards the crater’s edge. Some of the undamaged cars had been left on the side of the road, abandoned, their engines still purring.
Joel took in the desolation with grim awe. There were no people to be seen alive anywhere. Not a soul. “This is it… this is the end, isn’t it?” he muttered in a shaky voice.
Matt flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror to see Joel was now sitting up in the back seat, chest heaving, bordering dangerously close to a full-blown panic attack.
“Could very well be,” Matt replied.
Those were words Joel had never heard spoken before with such earnest. His breathing began to quicken, tattooed hands shaking uncontrollably. “Fuck… I can’t be here— I can’t be here, man—”
“Neither can I… look, there’s still a chance the military is figuring out how to respond. Maybe— you know, maybe they’ve set up a base somewhere close by.”
“A base? Dude, take a look outside your window. There’s no fucking base!”
“You don’t know that.”
“Have you seen any fighter jets or tanks? Huh? Any Humvee’s rollin’ along the interstate? Cuz I don’t see shit out there, ese’. All I see is death and a giant-ass crater!”
“That doesn’t mean no one is—”
“Those things that attacked us back there? Did you not see the weapons they had?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then tell me - how’re we gonna survive against that, man? They were shooting goddamn laser beams and shit!”
“Joel, you need to calm down while I think.”
“Admit it. We’re fucked, holmes! Fucked!”
“Hey! I said calm down. You want to make it back to your girl alive? Then you need to calm down. I want you to try and breathe. Deep and slow. Do it!”
There was a moment of tense silence between them until Joel deflated back into his seat and started regulating his breathing, taking slow breathes through his nose.
“Look, let’s just find a way to get off this road in one piece,” said Matt. “We’re not dead yet.”
Joel scoffed and raised his cuffed wrists up so Matt could see them in the rear-view. They were now red-raw from where the hard, composite plastic had rubbed against his skin. “You mind taking these off me, or do you still plan on driving my ass to jail?”
Matt watched him for a moment, his mind churning. He then fished out a small device that looked like the remote flicker to a garage door and tapped it.
There was a clicking noise as the cuffs immediately loosened around Joel’s wrists. He winced while sliding them off. Once free, he tossed the open cuffs onto the front seat next to Matt. “What were those… those things, man?” he said in a hushed whisper. “Were they…”
Matt just looked at him again in the rear-view, unable to bring himself to actually say the word alien.
After a moment, Joel’s puzzlement gave way to an understanding of what Matt’s silence actually meant. Clearly, the answer was a big resounding yes. Joel turned and looked out his empty window, the wind stinging his bloodshot eyes while he mentally struggled to grasp the implications of what was happening.
Matt leaned further over the dash and looked up while he drove, his eyes searching the bruised sky above.
The ghostly outlines of large, ominous shapes bristled among the torn slivers of clouds, silhouetted against the blackened sun. These things were huge - easily larger than any aircraft carrier the U.S. Military was known to possess, and they were everywhere in the sky, even though they were only partially visible. The eeriness came from the fact that they appeared to just be sitting there in complete silence, watching the destruction unfold below on a thunderstruck population. Matt couldn’t help but feel this was all a prelude to something much worse, yet to be revealed.
He averted his eyes back to the road, catching the glimpse of a wrecked housing estate in the distance that sat on a hill behind an untilled meadow.
Entire rows of houses had been completely decimated, the surrounding trees stripped bare, towering into the sky like amputated limbs. Some homes appeared to have been sheared from their very foundations as if something had reached down from the heavens and swiped them away. Behind the estate, many more columns of fire and smoke could be seen churning into the sky.
Matt thought of his own house, wondering if it had been completely destroyed or somehow spared from all this carnage. Had these invaders even reached his neighborhood yet? he thought, tapping the small console on his forearm to call home again.
Still no signal.
He tried Karen’s cell, and then his parents home.
Nothing.
He reached over and flicked on the dash-tablet, thumbing through the screen to find an app for a radio station. He opened it and was greeted with a blast of garbled static. Everything was down.
He then turned his attention back to the road and began to slow down when he spotted an obstruction ahead.
There was a large cluster of scorched vehicles piled in the middle of the highway, and rising out from the center was an upturned semi-trailer, which looked to have been raked with plasma fire. It rested lopsided amongst a debris field that extended ahead for at least a hundred yards, flames billowing from the charred cabin.
“Why are we stopping?” asked Joel, his voice still weak from shock.
“We can’t go any further. There’s too much debris blocking the road.” Matt cut the engine and swung his battered door open with a loud creak. “We have to continue on foot until we reach town.”
“What if more of those things turn up?”
Matt ignored the question, walked around and popped Joel’s door open. “Out. I’m not leaving you here.”
Joel climbed out of the car and took in the wanton destruction before him. The highway was a sprawl of blackened steel. It was also unearthly quiet now, seemingly devoid of any life apart from their own. They may as well have been standing on another planet altogether. “There’s nobody around, man. Where is everyone?”
“Where do you think?”
Joel turned to Matt with dread, not wanting to believe that answer. “So we’re it? We’re all that’s left?”
Matt checked his weapons quickly and began to walk. “I don’t know, Joel. Let’s just start walking. We can’t be here.” Suddenly, Matt heard a noise - like someone bashing metal against metal. He stopped, raising his rifle to his eye, scanning the highway for the source of the noise.
Up ahead, a vague figure churned through the gloomy haze. It was a man, hunched next to an upturned vehicle, his soot-stained T-shirt was wrapped around his head in an attempt to protect him from the smoke and stench of burning flesh. His bare arms and torso were smeared with blood and ash, and the legs of his pants were torn. From what Matt could see, he was attempting to pry open the passenger-side door with a crowbar.
Matt kept his rifle raised as he ap
proached. Joel followed closely behind. “Sir, do you need help?” Matt called out.
The man continued on and did not answer.
“Sir? Can you hear me?”
When the man whirled and saw Matt and Joel approaching, he nearly leaped out of his skin. He was in his late fifties, possibly a little older. It was also obvious he was in shock and frantically trying to reach whatever was inside the partially crushed vehicle. He staggered towards Matt, his wild eyes ablaze, brandishing the crowbar.
Matt stiffened his aim. “Please stop right there, sir.”
“My wife—it’s my wife— she’s in the— I can’t get her out— you gotta help me, officer!” he yelled, pointing to the car behind him.
As Matt went to lower his weapon to go help the poor man, a strange mechanical grinding could be heard; rhythmic and precise.
“Sssshit!” hissed Joel.
Matt turned to Joel, whose eyes had narrowed, looking beyond the highway towards a wooded embankment in the distance. Matt spun around to follow his gaze.
Something big was lurching towards them, crunching its way through the smoky treeline to meet the asphalt. As it drew closer, it took form, looking akin to some type of giant mechanical spider. A gaggle of those armored beings stalked closely alongside it, cradling their strange weapons as they scanned for fresh targets.
Before Matt could even warn the man, who had gone back to prying open the door of his upturned car, the invaders spotted them opened fire. There was a brilliant flash that momentarily blinded Matt and Joel, followed by a shriek of torn metal and a huge explosion. They were both catapulted off their feet as a flurry of plasma rays pounded the man, incinerating both him and the car into a plume of fire.
Matt and Joel hit the asphalt hard once again, the back of their heads cracking with a dull thud. Matt’s eyes swum as he desperately tried to shake the daze from his throbbing head, reaching out to pull Joel away from any direct line of fire.
Joel was sprawled out on his back, moaning while he dipped in-and-out of consciousness.
Matt knew any second these things would be on top of them, so he fought through the blunted pain and grabbed Joel by the scruff of his neck, dragging him behind an abandoned car. When another barrage of fire strafed the road behind them, Matt’s attention was drawn to a small chain-link fence that separated the highway from the woods. They had to try and reach it.
The Invasion Page 5
