Miracle City .

Chapter 3 - Another Perspective .

"Private Blake Aaron's POV"

This is Private Blake Aaron of the U.S. Special Forces, I'm stationed outside the city of Los Angeles with what is left of my original squad and I am recording the events that I have just witnessed in the hopes that someone finds this report if we don't make it out of here.

This report itself will be dedicated to my fallen comrades and my big brother Dan Aaron, who I suspect is dead.

Dan was a news reporter doing a story on the very event I'm going to talk about before he was attacked.

We are dealing with dangerous beings that possess powers no military force could have prepared for because they're not of this world.

The information on these attackers is said to be classified, but let's face it, no one knows what the fuck they are.

My experience started after my team was scrambled at sundown and sent to L.A. after a supposed riot broke out, and we were to take control.

A large S.W.A.T. team had been sent in before us, and these "rioters" had overwhelmed them, and it was our job to save the day.

We expected to get the situation under control in no time, but when we arrived at the scene by nightfall, the whole place had already been transformed into a chaotic battleground after only a few hours.

Buildings and cars were on fire, there was barely anything left of the S.W.A.T. team, and there were tons of citizens out on the street yelling and screaming.

Our first instincts told us to get those people to safety, so we tried to establish order, but we soon found out that the people on the streets were actually our enemies.

My squad and I all of a sudden started to hear shouting from people who had barricaded themselves into the nearby buildings, and we realized they were warnings, saying that the seemingly ordinary people outside were evil, and that we should engage them.

As you can imagine, this caused a lot of confusion, but that's when we looked around and noticed the remains of the squad that went in before us. It had been a riot-control team, and riot-shields, helmets and pieces of body armor littered the streets.

Some massive force had to have done this, and the only suspects around were harmless-looking citizens.

We all thought we'd show up on the scene guns blazing, but we just stood there with no plan. Suddenly, shots were fired into the crowd from three surviving squad members that had been hiding behind an over-turned van.

Since they were on riot-control, the bullets in their guns were rubber, so the crowd wasn't too affected.

Then I saw a frail, old woman walk up to the three troopers, open her mouth and let out the worst noise I've ever heard, followed by a blast of energy that shot out of her body and reduced them to ash.

Our team leader, Frank Hobsen, then gave the command to open-fire before he too was vaporized by another member of the crowd.

I held down the trigger on my machine-gun and instinctively grabbed a riot-shield as I ran for cover while more blasts of energy came my way.

Four more members of my squad were gone in seconds, and the rest of us took cover behind wrecked vehicles of all kinds.

Tobey Gearhart, my squad's second-in-command, immediately radioed for back-up, and emphasized that tanks and helicopters were needed.

The rest of us took shots at the crowd, and although some of them were going down, it didn't seem to do much good because more of them were coming from a portal that had opened up far off in the distance.

To make matters worse, the ones that had been shot started to get back up, and although it was hard to see through all the smoke from the nearby fires, they didn't seem to have any bullet-wounds.

You read correctly, these living weapons came from a portal that just opened up without warning, that's the only way I can describe the phenomenon.

The eerie light that shoots out of their eyes and mouth would be astonishing if it wasn't so terrifying, it's a very interesting method of attack that simply should not be possible.

What's even more interesting is their appearance as human beings, and they must have been studying us for a very long time to mimic us so well.

There's another thing about their appearance that's even harder to believe.

I was blindly shooting at these things, pointing my gun through the car window that I was hiding behind,

but then I decided to look up over the car,

and that's when I saw the face...

of my wife.

Alisa Aaron, the woman I've been married to for six years, was standing amongst the crowd of invaders, screaming my name and crying with joy.

I released the trigger, and so did two others when they also saw people they recognized in the crowd.

Her presence in the battle-zone was impossible, but for some reason my mind didn't even question it. The urge to drop my gun and run over to her was almost too much to resist.

I would have given in to this urge if I hadn't noticed that the faces of the other people were constantly changing depending on who they were looking at.

It then became all too clear that their plan was to beat us by getting into our minds and playing with our emotions through shape-shifting.

I remember calling out,

"It's a trick, they're not our loved ones!" to my comrades before putting a hole in my wife's head, who just returned fire in my direction moments later.

Despite this, some of my comrades still refused to fight, one of them being none other than Tobey himself, the toughest bastard I'd ever known who surpassed me in every military training session I could think of.

The guy literally stood up, dropped his gun, and abandoned us because his emotions would no longer allow him to shoot at people that looked like those he cared about.

With two of our leaders gone, I volunteered to become the new team leader, even though I knew we would be fighting a losing battle.