Shattered

Introduction

"...And the armed forces seem to be drawing nearer every day. This is Jim Hendrickson, and this concludes our evening segment. I bid you farewell, and good night."

"I told you they would catch up!" Grandpa Tom yelled from the kitchen. (He talked rather loudly when he wasn't wearing his hearing aids.)

Grandma Lucy and I were still sitting unresponsive on the old, tattered sofa in front of the living room television, too shocked to move. I realized that I was sweating with nervousness. "Are they really that close?" I wondered as I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. "How could they already be past the country border?"

By the time I returned to my spot on the sofa, Grandpa had already hobbled into the living room and made himself comfortable on his recliner. He brushed cookie crumbs off of his plaid shirt, then looked at us.

"I told you they would come," he said in a somewhat quieter voice. Grandma turned the TV off, then turned to both of us.

"This is really serious," she said. "We're not safe here, and the old shelter won't work."

I turned to face her. "What shelter?"

She took a deep breath, as to prepare for a really long explanation. "A while back," she said, "maybe thirty or forty years ago, when Tom and I could still move around, we built an underground shelter for situations like this." Grandpa scratched his chin and looked stumped, like he had no idea what she was talking about. (Knowing Grandpa, this was very likely.) "You know, this isn't the first incident---"

"I know, I know," I interrupted Grandma. Both of my parents died during an invasion similar to this one. I didn't like to think about the subject of my parents. It always brought up way too many questions, and too little answers.

"Anyway", Grandma continued, "we had a shelter somewhere in the woods. It was a small wooden shed leading underground, but it has long since collapsed..."

Grandma was interrupted by the sound of a putter of a vehicle coming to a stop. We peered across the room through the faraway window, which was almost completely black with night. It was a motorcycle. Motorcycles never drove around here. There was an awkward moment of silence as everybody listened for further clues.

A sudden shriek from outside broke the silence. My heart jumped out of its chest. A gunshot was heard from far away. Then another, then many in rapid succession, seeming to get louder.

"Get in the basement!" Grandma yelled. "Move! GET IN THE BASEMENT!" The gunshots got louder and louder as another motorcycle drove down the street. Quickly, we moved across the living room around couches and last week's newspapers. The gunshots were almost deafening. We were opening the basement door when a deafening gunshot boomed, and everything went black.