J. Mitchell - Midnight City

They’d made it to this abandoned farmhouse after a frantic run from Fort Connor in the family car, before it ran out of fuel and stranded them on a deserted rural road. They weren’t alone long, though. In the sky, shapes moved.

Flickering lights, like airplanes, darting along the horizon at impossible speeds and angles. Yellow pinpricks flared from them, streaming toward the ground. Wherever they hit, fire blossomed up in the distance.

And they were coming closer. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe, flying through the air, those flashes of yellow pummeling everything. Flames shot upward where they hit, followed by the sounds of explosions, a percussive string of pops and bangs.

They had run, panicked, the roaring of strange engines growing louder behind them, until Emily spotted the farmhouse, and they dashed for it, made it inside as the machines buzzed over.

Now those things were blowing up every house in the landscape. They saw the destruction through the window as it happened. But why did they leave this one alone? They definitely saw it: the light had lit it up for a full minute. Holt didn’t know the answer.

Holt, Emily, and their mother moved through the abandoned house until they found the kitchen. Holt’s mother picked him up and placed him on the counter. Emily wet some rags and wiped his face, cleaning off the tearstains and the dirt. He tolerated the cleaning without complaint.

Their mother flipped on a small TV on the counter, tuned it to a cable news channel. The picture wasn’t very good, it was choppy and grainy and the feed kept cutting in and out, but Holt could make out a headline running across the top of the fragmented screen.

NORTH AMERICA INVADED.

As the silent video flashed on and off, Holt tried to read the ticker tape news items scrolling across the bottom.

CONTACT LOST WITH WASHINGTON, MIAMI, HOUSTON, DENVER, BISMARCK, PHOENIX, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO….

UNCLEAR IF OTHER COUNTRIES ARE BEING ATTACKED, INTERCONTINENTAL COMMUNICATION IS DOWN…

NEW YORK CITY IN FLAMES…

UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT PRESIDENT GISONDI WAS EVACUATED FROM THE WHITE HOUSE TO AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION….

IDENTITY OF INVADERS STILL UNKNOWN, BUT SEEM TO POSSESS ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY AND SUPERIOR NUMBERS…

GROWING NUMBER OF EXPERTS BELIEVE INVASION MAY BE OF ALIEN ORIGIN….

And there it was.

Alien origin. The world ground to a halt at the weight of the idea. Even though he was young, even though he had nothing to confirm the thought, Holt knew it was right. Nothing else made sense. The glowing clouds, the huge, dark shape that slammed into Denver, the aircraft that moved at impossible speeds, the yellow bolts of light…

Suddenly, from outside, came a low thump. Deep and powerful.

They were all instantly alert. The hair on Holt’s arms stood up. What could make a sound like—?

Two more thumps, a little louder. Three more, louder, closer. Plates in the kitchen cabinets shook ominously at each impact.

The thuds were coming in threes, and they began to sound like something… walking. Something big. And mechanical.

A thought occurred to Holt: Maybe the airships didn’t destroy the farmhouse on purpose. Maybe they knew it wasn’t abandoned. Maybe whatever was outside… was coming for them.

The footfalls grew closer, louder, deeper. Whatever it was, it was huge.

The boy’s mother grabbed her children, ran for the living room. There were stairs heading up to the bedrooms, and they climbed them quickly, peering out a window on the top floor.

Outside, the shadows moved.

Giant forms marched across the fields beyond the farmhouse. Too far off to see clearly, but they were coming.

The woman’s breath quickened in fear. She saw a hatch set into the ceiling, and grabbed the string, yanked it open. The ladder to the attic descended, providing a stairway to the pitch black interior beyond.

The footfalls were growing closer.

Strange chirpings and whistles sounded from outside. Back and forth, from different directions. The sounds were electronic and distorted, and it only made them more frightening.

Downstairs, the windows exploded inward. The front door blew apart as something punched through it. Emily screamed.

Their mother didn’t look; she pushed her son and daughter up into the attic as fast as she could. When they were in, she told them to hide, told them to find a place in the back, out of sight.

Emily cried louder, begged her mother not to leave them, but the woman insisted they move back, move and hide.

Holt looked from his sister to his mother, unsure. More crashing from below, something big and powerful was searching the lower floor.

Their mother told them everything would be okay. She told Emily she had to stay strong for her brother, had to take care of him, told her she was counting on it. The idea seemed to get through to the girl. She put her arms around Holt, started pulling him back and away.

Holt’s mother watched them disappear into the dark for as long as she dared. Long after, Holt remembered the sight of his mother’s eyes, the way they seemed to commit every detail of him to memory before she finally nodded, smiled sadly… and shut the attic door.

Above and outside, the sound of engines pushed into the house. One of the aircraft was hovering over it.

The stomping of machines again. Much louder, much closer.

Emily and Holt kept sliding in the dark until they hit the wall at the back. There was nowhere else to go. Holt hugged his knees and Emily wrapped her arms around him.

From outside came new sounds. The sound of someone shouting. Holt couldn’t make out the words, but he recognized the voice. His mother.

The stomping of gigantic feet went silent. More yelling, more shouts.

The entire house shook as explosions rocked the ground. Emily gasped, hugged Holt tight as the roof threatened to cave in. More explosions, some kind of mechanical scream and whirring.

They heard their mother shout again, heard her strained voice start to fade into the distance as it grew more frantic.

Whatever was outside, however abhorrent it was, their mother was trying to lead it away. She was using herself as a distraction… and it was working.

The stomping returned. Faster, heavier… and trailing after their mother. The roar of the engine above them grew louder a short moment, then buzzed away also.

A minute or two later, the sounds of more explosions. But farther away now, much more distant. Whatever had been outside, it didn’t return.

Holt and Emily hugged each other in the dark the rest of the night and through most the following morning before they worked up the courage to step out of the farmhouse.

When they did, the landscape was black and charred as far as they could see. Houses and barns were smoldering ruins on the hills. And most shocking, in the distance to the north, sat something foreign and awful.

An impossibly colossal black shape rose up from where downtown Denver used to be. What was left of the burning skyscrapers were completely dwarfed by the huge structure. It looked like a giant black wedge-shaped tower, and it was so tall, its top disappeared inside dark storm clouds in the sky. Even from this distance, they saw the lightning that crackled around it.

And at the bottom, where the immense black thing met the ground, dark, meandering lines stretched back from it all the way to the horizon, winding toward the tower from all directions. Holt instantly knew what they were: People. Tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, all for some inexplicable reason marching toward and into that giant, vile structure in the distance.

It filled Holt with dread. It was so much like a dream, a part of him expected to wake up soon. But he knew he wouldn’t, knew this was real, as impossible as it seemed.