The wet, rough, cold gravel under my skin is the first sign that something had gone terribly wrong. The second thing is the strange lack of sound. Or more, the ringing in my ears. But the worst part is when I opened my eyes to see the horror that awaited me.
Next to me in our driveway is my father. His dead eyes are clouded and empty, his neck obviously broken. My superhero isn't going to get up. Not this time. The wetness on the gravel, which I had previously thought was rain, is blood. Thick. sticky. Coagulated blood.
I sit up carefully, checking inventory. Save for a few bruises and abrasions, I'm alright. This isn't my blood. I look around and see a massacre of sorts.
The once peaceful suburban neighborhood now looks like the forgotten set of some slasher film. There are bodies everywhere. Mostly the elderly. Or the decrepit. There are a lot of animals too, loyal pets protecting their families until the end. Everyone else had been sedated and taken. I guess everyone thought I was dead. Lucky me.
We didn't believe the reports. It was April Fools Day. No one did. Not even when the reporters were being taken or killed on live TV . . . this was America. Elaborate hoaxes were to be expected. But when they came, with their strange machines and their murderous appetite, we finally believed. But, by then, it was too late.
Aliens had been spotted, in Roswell of all places. At least, the general population thought they were aliens. Some thought they were robots. Hell, they might even be a mixture of the two. I didn't care at this point. The reports came faster and more frequently. They stopped being segments on the news and became all the news.
Questions began to arise, such as ,What were they? Did they come in peace? Should we try to contact them? Should martial law be declared? Doomsayers or whatever you call them, started to prep, bought all sorts of nonperishable food items, and hid away in their bunkers like bears in the winter. They were the smart ones. Or so they thought.
A few days later the looting began. People stocked up on guns and ammunition and holed up in Wal-Marts and Sam's Clubs like ancient pharaohs in their tombs. Within a week, America had plunged into chaos. And the real terror hadn't even begun.
Eight days after the arrival of the aliens, they started doing something strange. They would travel around in machines that looked sort of like the head of an octopus attached to a giant metal daddy long legs. They were bulbous on top and had a slight iridescent sheen and let off a low humming sound. They travelled all over the continent, and news reports from other countries reported similar activities.
It got to the point where there was one every five kilometers along the edge of the Americas. Radar reports had confirmed that. The news was rippling with questions and theories, every station had a reporter stationed near one of the machines.
Then, at 3:47am on the twelfth day of April of 2015, the creatures, who had stayed still for two days, began to move again. This time giant ships, invisible before, appeared above them. Each one five kilometers wide. The aliens began snatching up anyone healthy and aged sixteen to thirty. The aliens killed everyone and everything else. No one left knew what the aliens were doing with the people they took. The remaining people only knew that those creatures were closing in, and fast.
I was in Colorado. They were almost done. They had almost harvested all of the states. All of the provinces in Canada, and all of south America had already been taken over. In a matter of days, the planet will be taken over.
It doesn't matter how many alien movies there were, nothing came close, nothing that I knew of. No one was prepared for this. No one.
