California Under Attack: The Tragedy of Kassie

Chapter 1

"To be or not to be?"

That's the one question I bear to the boy lying inanimate beside me. It's more rhetorical than anything, seeing that he's not all too equipped to reply. They never are, come to think of it. Coming across strangers in the desert leads to the same vicious cycle. It has for the last fifty or so times at least. I didn't realize it was happening initially, and it's so routine that I'm heinously less fazed from it. The cycle is simple: We meet, I invite them to stay for a while, my companion offers his salutations, and as we're all settling on the ground to look up at the mothership in the sky, I ask them that famous question.

Social situations nowadays are too predictable.

It should be an easy answer. After all, we are in the middle of an alien apocalypse, and we have remained somehow in tact through three stages of most unfortunate death and destruction. To be, of course. What else?

Apparently, the answer changes somewhere in the cycle. Today, my new stranger suddenly forgot how to use his voice. Otherwise preoccupied with that knife lodged in his chest, I'm assuming.

I put it there.

"Let me take a guess." I peer at the new red stains soaking into his olive green shirt. It reminds me sickly of Christmastime. "Not to be, right?"

The only person around me who's tangible and breathing and able to laugh at my joke is me. I nearly force myself to. Laughter, even when it is fake, is good to come by. It fills the silence otherwise surrounding my sad little existence; I've learned to relish in it as long as possible.

"Not to be," I repeat. It blubbers off my tongue like a hysterical giggle. "Not to be. Because you're dead now. You make it through a power outage and a tsunami and a global disease, but you can't make it through a little scrape? Oh, you tragic hero."

Shakespeare has ruined my life.

Well, to be more accurate, the Others ruined it first. But that's a given. The Others have ruined every person on Earth's life with over the past few months. They struck with three attacks that I like to think of as bombs, more than anything. Bombs of darkness. Bombs of water. Bombs of blood. That seems much more fitting to me than than the term "wave" that's used more often. A wave, you can duck under. A wave, you can surf.

But you can't run from a bomb. It hits, and you're gone.

The accumulative devastation of these bombs is the only thing I'm positive of. Whether or not the rest of my world also has Shakespeare to thank for the aftershocks, I'm not as sure. Despite my uncertainty, I can settle on the fact that the Other's bombs were tremendous--far more tremendous than the some fifty kills I've so begrudgingly committed over the past couple weeks in the desert.

Before this whole murderous, Shakespearian flare started really coming out of me, Earth's humble visitors managed to brandish their three distinct stages of annihilation, which were atrocious in their own right. I only started killing people in the third one, but it didn't come out of no where. The Others have a funny way of making every little thing they do in the process effect your ultimatum.

The first bomb took my family of six and I by surprise. It fouled us up before we could even begin. Like most densely-populated states, us Californians were pretty skeptical about our visitors from the start. I mean, we weren't stupid--we'd created the action movies the world loved so much in our own Hollywood backyard. There was some real research put into those films, and our studies showed that aliens were probably more likely to start wreaking havoc in places like New York and LA before they even so much as considered more deserted areas such as Montana or Wyoming.