The Forest and other short stories

The aliens

My eye was  tearing up as if someone had rubbed a pepper over it but I  could not, would not let them see! I said good-bye to my parents a many of my friends were doing to theirs. Before, we had always been hoping to contact aliens form outside our home planet but now that it was actually happening, I would have given anything for it to be over. Our parents would be bravely meeting these inhuman invaders who had so ruthlessly captured and killed many of our kind. Didn't they know that sunlight killed us? We dried out and shriveled up when exposed to it;s treacherous glare before finally collapsing in on ourselves and turning to dust. we would stay, hidden in the catacombs below, until we were summoned by our parents. Everything we owned was with us,  being securely sealed underground. we had no idea a all whether we would be in hiding for an hour, a day, a week or for all of eternity..

Snail-back was the fastest way to travel and we had to cover a quarter of the country and find a resting place before the first rays of of the illustrious yet forbidden rays of sunlight overtook the plains. 

we squirreled into our camp just as the first rays of the scorching sun blossomed in the East and lit up the sky a most foreboding blood red. One of our companions,  who had not been hidden quite so well as the rest of us from the sun, fell to ashes before our eyes. The invaders, although unknowingly, had taken yet another of us. How many more would they take before peace was finally reinstated into our land?

The next night,  as soon as the sun had set,  we continued on our somber way. The wind whispered all around us. " War is coming, Death is coming." it breathed. The noise slowly filtered into our heads, our bodies, and our souls. casting us down into the deep wreaths of despair. Gradually, the laughter and chatter stopped-a sense of foreboding and dread overtook us, along withe doubts.

Three days later, our group morale had noticeably risen again and we were all singing together on snail-back as the invaders' camp came into view.

It certainly was a bizarre sight, there wire many of the same, upright, fur and tail lacking...things. They were all yelling unintelligible things at each other. they seemed to have lots of the same strange, silvery shiny substance that they has shaped into various shapes, some of which they then proceeded to disappear into. Metal, I supposed it was,  some of my friends had told me about it.

One of the moving metal things came right up to us, and the being inside of it shouted something at us.