Lost Days Short Story, #1 "Sodom and Gomorrah"

[JayRay]

The alarms were going on and on, non-stop now, no longer wailing is sad wail every five minute, but a steady stream of low and high wails, proof that this day, this event, wasn't just some sick fantasy of some scient fiction writer, or some hollywood movie. This was the real thing, the end of it all. No one knows who actually fired first, if it was us or the Russians. Some even said it was a glitch that fired it, others say some gamma microbursts from something in the sky set off the systems, but whatever it was, we were going to have a heap of trouble. We weren't even having problems with each other.

People just kept talking about the comet, the comet, the big freaking comet, and how it shouldn't be slowing down, and how it shouldn't be altering its course... When it started taking out satellites like a redneck takes out flying beer cans with his hunting rifle, we knew we weren't alone.

The russians said the 'aliens' were seen in Vladivostok, and then we started seeing them in Anchorage. Huge landing parties, maybe two to three thousand. Shocktroopers, the first wave.

The critters were only a little more advanced, sure they had those deathray guns, those phaser things, but they bled just as well as we did... Those ships though, wow!
When you see a Howlitzer fire on one of those things practically point blank, and it doesn't even dent the thing, you get a pretty sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, like when you took a stick and decided it would be cool to whack a hornet's nest a few times, and then the little critters start coming out... the pit of your stomach.

So, huge rounds didn't work. Missiles just seemed to make them fall, but when they did, they just sat there, in their own little crater, like a kid in time-out, and in a few hours, they were off and blasting away at the cities.

Seattle was the first city-death, then Tokyo, then Portland, Kyoto, and more. We had discussed sending nukes up there, take them all out, and maybe the decision was made...

But, all those nukes, we were still targeting each other.

Decades of hardcoded targeting systems, with back-ups and failsafes, and even more back-ups, it's like the missiles were manufactured to only go to one place and one place alone, like Missile L-25 just HAD to be in Atlanta by 8:00PM.

It was at 9:06 PM that we heard that a "significant fraction" of our nuclear weapons had been fired, and that Russia's had also reported a firing of "not a lot" of their weapons as well. What's a 'significant percentage' anyway, two? three? We wanted to fire one, right at the big hovering mothership, not 20... wow.

so here I am, former Marine, once charging across dusty plains with a M16 in hand, now standing in a line in a bunker in the soft limestone somewhere near Kansas City, waiting for the duty sargeant to say my name. It seems like I've been standing in line for well over half an hour. My two little kids and my wife are.... they were... were... they were HERE! Where are they! What's that light at the other end of the tunnel! That's not, no!!! Why!


I awoke with a scream, the radioactive fire washing over my dreams, ripping my flesh and melting my eyes, I look around quickly, as my tent-mate looks up from his wool blanket, his old eyes scolding me for disturbing his sleap. The eyes belonged to Higgs, an old codger, probably in his eighties, whose best days were during an era of time he calls 'The seventies'. I apologized and nestled back down into my bunk, the four of us took two bunkbeds and turns an old shipping container into a little barracks within Fort Dalton.

Who are we, you ask? Some guy named Dominic put us together, called us his Spear, bits and pieces of everything from old police officers, National Guard, mercenaries, even a few guys that were still wearing the uniform when the fires came down, all Sodom and Gomorrah and scat.

Right now, we're just biding our time, watching over Fort Dalton, keeping those dang coalition scrubs of their turf, watching out for more 'pod-people' and waiting for the earth to heal itself again... but that's neither here nor there... Oh the times we have forgot, when we embrace the Lost Days.....