As Matt and Joel drove closer to Frankfort, they began to see farm fields ablaze. It was as if they were approaching the mouth of a raging forest fire. The wind whipped the flames across the highway - burning embers swirled and danced in front of their windshield like fireflies. A suffocating quilt of smoke blanketed the sky, turning the sun into some perverse resemblance of a Harvest Moon. On the horizon, they could see several barns and homes engulfed in flames. Something had struck the area. Something big. Something immensely powerful.
As Joel drove, his eyes darted to his left side. Dark shapes began to flash past his window - human figures bathed in smoky shadow. “Man, I think there’s people out there,” he said.
Matt turned to Joel’s side and peered out into the gloom. “Where?”
“Out there, man. On the side of the damn road.”
“Pull over.”
Joel glanced at him with a concerned look. “You sure you want me to do that?”
“I wasn’t asking.”
Joel pulled the car over. Matt leaned forward between the two front seats and pressed the handbrake on. “Gimmie the keys.” Joel cut the engine and pulled out the ignition key from its slot, then handed it to Matt.
Matt hoped out of the car to assess the area, his sidearm still drawn as he stood in the middle of the deserted road. The only thing he could see surrounding him in the distance was a wall of fire. He turned his attention to the cornfield that ran parallel to the road, peering down into a dirt trench that separated the road from the corn.
He could make out the shapes of people hiding among the stalks that were yet to burn. They were watching him silently, the whites of their eyes glinting through the haze. A great fear bristled among them. Some stood, but most were crouched or laying on their stomachs, clutching their children and loved ones closely.
Where had all of these people come from? Matt thought. Had they abandoned their vehicles from the Interstate? When he went to yell out to them, he was abruptly cut off by another thundering boom overhead, which caused him to look up at the sky. Everyone else did too.
Through the smoke, an enormous, nautilus-shaped craft of black steel shimmered through the clouds, silhouetted by the sun. It was clearly hyper-advanced, yet in some ways, it also looked ancient, like some hulking relic that had spent eons aimlessly hurling through space to arrive here.
The fleeting glimpse lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was enough to slacken Matt’s jaw as he stared up at it, dumbfounded. Matt could hear the others hiding in the fields begin to whimper and sob.
Then, a terrible screaming of metal rang out as hundreds of missile-shaped objects violently detached from the dark underbelly of the craft before it vanished. Each missile was the size of a small vehicle.
Matt watched them rapidly streak towards the surface like a meteor shower, peppering the surrounding fields with huge fireballs of blue-plasma as they struck the ground. It looked as if they were carpet bombing the entire area.
The people hiding now began to scream in panic. Matt also saw a bigger crowd surging through the cornfields, heading towards the road where he stood. It was sheer pandemonium as the crush of people ran across the road into the opposite field, heads ducked low as they scrambled to find some form of new cover. Whatever semblance of calm there was before was utterly gone.
KER-BOOOOOM!
Suddenly, Matt was violently jolted from his stupor when one of the missiles struck the middle of the road, just meters from where the car was sitting. Fire, dirt, and rock spewed into the air as he was blown off his feet by the impact - which was so powerful, it caused the surrounding asphalt to spiderweb like a sheet of ice.
Matt skidded along the road on his back, a thick cloud of debris wafting over him. Coughing on the smoke and dirt that filled his nostrils, he whirled around to see that Joel was now standing by the car, gawking at the impact crater with the expression of someone who was struggling to comprehend what he was witnessing.
“Go! Get out of here!” Matt yelled at him. “Just go!”
But Joel raised his cuffed wrists, shook his head, and began to back up against the car. His eyes had flicked to something behind Matt. “Um… the fuck is that?”
Matt pivoted back around to face the crater. He immediately felt the color drain from his face.
The onslaught of metallic objects raining down from the huge ship above were not missiles. They were drop-pods of some kind.
Matt sprang upright, holstered his sidearm and swiveled the rifle strap around to the front of his chest, raising the scope to his eye to take aim at the object.
With all the dirt and smoke in the air, it was hard to see anything clearly. Another barrage of drop-pods could be heard impacting the fields on either side of the road, the nearby screams of fleeing people rising above the unfolding chaos.
Everything was jarred and shaken, but the one thing Matt could get a good look at was the four mechanical legs that had clawed up out of the torn earth. Each of the three appendages were planted at equal distance points around the circumference of the pod to stabilize its upright position. It rested there for a moment, as if the climb out of the crater had somehow exhausted it. Then, a hatch blew open on the side of the pod, steam hissing and curling from inside. As it began to clear, Matt glimpsed a dank, organic-looking interior fused with some kind of tech.
And something else.
A figure.
Humanoid.
Tall and spindly, wearing macabre, black-boned armor.
The figure appeared to also be holding something that resembled a sleek metallic weapon; a long black snout was attached to the end of it which was ribbed. There was possibly some type of ornate engraving or design etched into the weapon too. Then, without hesitation, the mysterious figure began firing on the fleeing crowd of people.
Blue lances of searing-hot plasma raked the crowd. Lines of people were cut down within an instant, the air misting with clouds of ash and blood. Those hit simply evaporated.
Slack-jawed, Matt watched as a thirty-something man who was cowering nearest to the road exploded into a crimson sherbet, his wife screaming in terror as she too was struck next, foolishly covering her head as if it would somehow offer some protection. She vanished within a blink.
Matt couldn’t even register what was happening. It was beyond comprehension to see these people no longer existing. What remained of their bodies wafted to the ground.
The full-fledged panic that had been building in the crowd erupted into a blood-curdling crescendo. Everyone took off running across the fields, bolting from their hiding places, screaming in absolute terror.
Matt whirled to see more pods hitting the ground nearby, with another small rabble of these mysterious attackers now approaching from the opposite direction in the field, their milky-gray eyes glowing as they funneled the panicked crowd into a kill box. Within seconds, the crowd was overwhelmed by the brutal authority of these otherworldly attackers, the sound of their weaponry so deafening and ceaseless, it had morphed into one prolonged interrupted pulse.
Matt had seen more than enough. He pivoted to the nearest invader, sighted along his rifle and rattled off a burst of semi-auto fire.
The rounds sparked off its strange armor, which from what Matt could make out, was some type of exo-suit that had been fused into its limbs. The second the invader was struck, it spun around and returned fire on Matt.
He leaped behind the parked car as streaks of plasma cleaved the air.
Joel dropped to his knees and scuttled around to the rear of the vehicle, screaming as Matt returned fire, the air now echoing with the crackle of conventional gunfire.
When Matt slumped back down to swap out his magazine, he shot a look to Joel, who was just gaping at him, blinking wildly. The hardened and nihilistic demeanour he sported only moments earlier, had now been replaced with the confusion and terrified child.
“We need to move!” Matt yelled, fumbling through the supply pouch on his ballistic vest to dig out a fresh magazine.
“Yeah-yeah, OK,” replied Joel, nodding ferociously. When another hail of plasma strafed the car, he began shaking his head. “Nah-nah, fuck that. I don’t think I can move, man.”
“Listen to me,” Matt said, speaking directly to Joel’s paled face. “You stay here, you’re dead. You try running off into that field, you’ll be struck down like the rest of those people within seconds.”
“So what’s your plan then?”
“When I start firing again, you open the back door and get in. I’m gonna drive us outta here.”
Joel looked at Matt breathlessly, his mouth agape. “That’s it? That’s your plan? We’re gonna just drive off into the sunset?”
“Hey, you’re more than welcome to come up with something better,” Matt replied.
Suddenly, they were both forced to snap their knees up to their chests when another barrage of alien fire cracked into the road in front of them, asphalt exploding into their faces, showering the car with a hail of tiny rocks.
“Jesus!” screamed Joel. “The fuck are these dudes?”
Matt dropped down to his stomach and peered under the car to see a pair of metallic legs approaching them, about thirty meters out. Armored boots clacked along the road with each step. This being, whatever it was, knew they were hiding behind the vehicle. Matt got to his knees and frantically checked his weapon over, then readied himself, feverishly massaging his trigger’s pull distance. “Soon as I start firing. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you. But how about you give me that other gun?”
“I’m starting to like your sense of humor, Joel.” Matt popped up and began unloading wildly on the mysterious assailant, bullets strafing the smoky air that now eerily glowed blue from the distant muzzle flashes of alien weaponry.
The gunfire was deafening as Joel peeled open the passenger-side door and leaped into the back seat of the vehicle, crawling on his elbows over a bed of shattered glass.
Matt kept the trigger on his weapon fully depressed as he continued to fire, draining his magazine, but the being kept advancing through the hail of bullets. As it drew closer, Matt sighted a thin join between the armored-plating on its right leg, so he tilted his aim slightly downward and shot across its shins.
The being collapsed onto the road, but it was far from dead. Its entire body began to shimmer, like the air around it was somehow lensing. Then, it completely vanished, like it had activated some type of stealth-mode. However, it was very much still there.
It returned fire on Matt, forcing him to duck low behind the car again as hot javelins of plasma cut across the hood, splintering metal. When the radiator suddenly exploded, the blast caused the car to begin rolling lazily back along the road.
Hobbling on his knees, Matt awkwardly moved with the vehicle, popping the driver’s door open. He dived in head first as the door’s window pane exploded, showering him with glass.
Now the windshield above him exploded, chunks of glass dropping onto his back while he fished the keys out from one of his leg pockets. His gloved hands were shaking so badly, he struggled to properly insert the key into the ignition slot. Joel’s back seat screaming wasn’t helping the situation either. Seconds seemed like hours before he finally managed to do it. When the car reluctantly spluttered to life, Matt threw it into reverse and pressed the accelerator down with the palm of his hand.
There was a tortured scream of rubber as the car backed along the crater-pocked road, now sounding like some lumbering beast, steam gushing from its hood.
Matt yanked hard on the steering wheel and spun the car into a one-eighty twirl. He then threw the car into drive and punched the accelerator. The car roared off blindly down the road, moving away from the chaos.
Matt gingerly peered over the dash to see where he was going. He could see the relentless bursts of plasma streaking past his peripheral vision like tracer fire, so he began to swerve and fish-tail across the road until the line of sight was broken when he steered the vehicle around a sharp bend.
He sat upright in his seat and took proper control of the wheel, turning around to see Joel still laying on his stomach in the back seat, quietly muttering to himself, eyes vacant and wide with shock. “Oh god—oh god—oh god—oh god…!”
With his own panic barely subsiding, Matt turned and kept his attention on the road ahead, leaning forward to see through the choking smoke. The road was now caked in a thick film of black ash. He wondered if he was driving over the remains of people. The air that whistled through the windowless vehicle stunk with a mix of burnt flesh and sulfur.
Matt looked at the vast cornfields that were ablaze out there, alien pods still dropping from the sky for as far as the eye could see. They were literally driving through the apocalypse. Matt had no idea whether his teammates were still alive, or what had become of his wife and child. He had to find a way to make it back home to them.
When they reached an intersection in the road, Matt cut the wheel hard, hitting the on-ramp to the interstate highway, which now looked like hell’s biggest used-car lot.
A sprawl of burning cars radiated outward from the rim of a giant blast crater. The cars that were not burning were littered with the skeletal remains of their occupants, all fixed into sickening heat-blasted poses, wispy fingers of smoke still curling from their charred flesh. The highway had been reduced to a wasteland of fire and ash.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
