Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

And those we deploy there from orbit we cannot recover quickly , the High Priest thought. Getting them down was easy. Getting them back up was much harder. The logistics alone argued against further deployment, but with the preparations for settlement, they had to strengthen their position. The human insurgency had swelled up again and additional soldiers were needed. Moving one unit of warriors from an occupied and — supposedly — pacified area meant that it very rapidly turned out not to be pacified after all. Some genius of an Inquisitor had decided to take all the children from a small town to be brought up in a religious training centre… and the entire town had risen in rebellion. They had all had to be slaughtered.

The situation was even worse in the Middle East. The natives there were even more bent on protecting their religion than the Americans. They came at the occupying forces, dying in vast numbers… and yet they kept fighting. Warriors who’d never experienced real fighting found themselves learning on the job… and discovering how much their training hadn’t prepared them for. They were learning fast, and plenty of humans were dying before they could pass on their own lessons, but it was still becoming well past uncontrollable. He was confident that, when settlement began, they would bring the area firmly under their control, but the humans there were so unreliable. They had kept oil workers working — for them — only to discover that a handful of them had betrayed their new employers. It meant that developing the entire region would take time, time they didn’t have.

“We need to respond harshly and decisively,” the High Priest said, firmly. The use of nuclear weapons against his forces was a dangerous threat… and one that had to be prevented, whatever the cost. If the humans got the idea that they could use nukes without any serious consequences, they would start smuggling them into the footholds and destroying them… and the war would be within shouting distance of being lost. If they started to use their nukes on the settlements, they would slaughter thousands of settlers, even the females. “None of our prior wars have been anything like this…”

He looked over at the War Leader. “We will strike them hard,” he said. “I will order the Inquisitors to take out one of their cities. They will not be permitted to use nukes without a mass slaughter of their civilians in response.”

Washington just wasn’t what it had once been, Patrolman Keith Glass decided, as he ambled down one of the streets. In some ways, the city was safer than it had ever been, patrolled not only by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, but by countless neighbourhood watches, guardian angels and self-help protective associations. The streets might have been almost empty of traffic, but they were also empty of drug dealers, thieves and rapists. In theory, none of the associations had any law enforcement powers, although some of them had been deputised by the police, but in practice they tended to drive away undesirable people. The streets had never been safer and children, enjoying the quiet streets, played freely with their friends. As Glass passed a park, he waved cheerfully towards some of the other patrollers, receiving everything from a wave to a salute in return.

He checked his gun and other equipment out of habit as he turned down a new street. The people who’d lived in about half of the houses on this row had deserted the city and gone to live in the countryside, where they’d had relatives who farmed. Looters had tried to steal their worldly goods in the chaos following the invasion, but they’d been arrested and shipped to prison camps somewhere outside the city. There were high-priced lawyers arguing that the looters hadn’t received a fair trial, which was true enough, but Glass, who’d been there when they’d been arrested, wasn’t sympathetic. As far as he was concerned, if the looters spent the rest of their lives in a work camp, they deserved everything they got. They hadn’t needed the televisions, computers and jewels that they’d tried to steal, but had merely wanted to sell them on the black market. They were hardly starving misguided kids.

The noise of a passing car caught his attention and he smiled. The police were still allowed some of their patrol cars, but not many of them, while only the fire and ambulance services were allowed unlimited fuel. Civilians didn’t get any fuel unless they had a really pressing need, while the handful of Army vehicles in the centre of the city — he believed — got as much as they needed. Glass didn’t begrudge them that, even though he rather missed his own car; if the aliens landed in Washington, they were going to need all the fuel they could get. He looked upwards, into the clear sky, and shook his head. There hadn’t been any aircraft flying overhead since the invasion had begun. It reminded him, too much, of the days just after 9/11.

His radio bleeped once, a noise he hadn’t heard outside the drills; air raid alarm . A second later, the sirens that had been rigged up started to blare, warning that the city itself was under attack. Glass threw himself to the ground, remembering Rome and how the entire city had been destroyed, and crawled as fast as he could towards shelter. There was no bomb shelter, as far as he knew, in the area, but if he could just get some cover…

The shockwave blasted over his head. If he hadn’t been sheltered, it would have killed him, either directly or by picking him up and throwing him against a wall. The fury seemed endless, and, before he could even catch his breath, the firestorm roared past. He found himself praying, desperately, as the storm raged past him, his mind summoning up visions of radioactive poisoning and worse. It ended, suddenly, and a torrent of noise crashed into his mind. He could hear and smell burning…

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his body tremble, and stopped dead. The entire street was devastated. Buildings had been shattered, windows had been smashed, cars had been thrown over and set on fire… the sight was impossible to grasp as anything, but a collection of separate images. Burning vehicles, smoke and flame rising from all over the city… and a towering mushroom cloud, billowing up in the air. The aliens had spared the White House in earlier attacks, for some reason, but now… now, unless he was wrong, the aliens had chosen it as ground zero. The damage was so absolute, the entire city reduced to rubble, that he couldn’t even see where to begin. As far as he could see, he was alone in the city, the only survivor of the blast. He checked his radio, hoping against hope that it would work, but it was dead. Either the EMP or the landing on the ground had knocked it out.

It was agony to move — he’d been wounded by the shockwave, although not badly — but he managed to walk down towards the end of the street. It was growing harder to breathe as smoke and flames built up, fires spreading rapidly from house to house, while there was nothing to stop them. He remembered vaguely that nuclear blasts sent out a wave of heat that set everything on fire, or thought he did; it was hard to think of anything practical in the midst of so much devastation. He might have been completely wrong; perhaps the nuke had simply triggered off horded fuel, or maybe…

The screams pulled him back to himself. They were coming from only a short distance away and he forced himself to run towards them. When he reached the house, he discovered a young black girl, her face brutally scared by… something. Blood ran down her cheeks, marring what remained of what had once been a fashionable outfit, while one eye looked to have been sealed shut. Glass was no stranger to violence on the Washington streets, but he’d never quite seen anything like it, not even in a horror movie. The movies couldn’t detail the sheer horror of a nuclear blast against unprepared civilians.