Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

He pushed down on the switch, hearing an ominous click. His hand felt as if it were drenched in sweat as he gunned the engine, sending the van forward faster. The aliens hadn’t bothered to put up a gate, merely a pair of guards. He saw their ugly forms and pointed the van right at them, wondering if they had the sense to jump out of the way. It wouldn’t save them, though. There was enough explosives in the van to reduce the entire building to rubble… or so he’d been told. Maybe they’d lied to him…

There was a popping sound. It took him a moment to realise that they were shooting at him. A burst of pain spread over his chest, sending him flopping backwards against the seat. It was suddenly very hard to think. His chest was warm… blood was pouring from a hole… he slumped forward, his hand falling off the switch. He had a second to realise that he’d released the switch… and then the world went away in a flash of white-hot flame.

London

United Kingdom, Day 15

Robin and Constable Riley had been parked in a police car when they heard the explosion. It was thunderously loud in a city where most noise had dimmed away to almost nothing. The cars that had once produced a constant backdrop were silent; no massive jumbo jets flew in and out of the city. Indeed, it had been so quiet that Robin had wondered if the penny was ever going to drop. And the massive fireball rising up in the distance suggested that it had. Someone was striking back at the aliens…

“Start the car,” he ordered, grabbing his radio. The aliens had allowed them to use them, although Robin suspect that they intended to use them to monitor their collaborators. “This is Zulu Bravo; we are heading to the incident site. I say again, this is…”

“Trouble,” Constable Riley commented, as he flung the police car around a corner. “They were doing something at that college…”

Robin stared, not quite believing his eyes. There had once been a large building, home to a technical college producing graduates with degrees that should get them good jobs in the computer industry. It had been smashed by the explosion, along with several other buildings nearby. A number of cars were burning brightly — he keyed his radio to summon the fire brigade — and an alien armoured vehicle had been tipped upside down. It was a weakness in their design, he guessed; their hover-cushion gave an unexpected blast the leverage to throw the vehicle right over. He doubted that it would happen to a human-built tank.

“Dear God,” he breathed. There seemed to be hundreds of people caught in the blast. Most schools hadn’t reopened in the days following the invasion, but the aliens had been very interested in the technical college. No one had quite been able to figure out why. “How many people did they kill?”

“It really makes you wonder,” Riley said, as they climbed out of the car. The whole scene was overwhelming, worse than Buckingham Palace. “Which side are we supposed to be on?”

Robin glared at him. If he’d been alone, if no one else had been in danger, he might have joined one of the resistance cells being talked about on the internet. But there was his wife… and there was the simple fact that innocent civilians were going to be caught in the midst of the fighting. The police existed to protect civilians… which didn’t change the fact that they’d effectively started working for the aliens. But if they hadn’t, who knew what the aliens would do in response? If they used live ammunition to respond to broken bottles, what the hell would they do in response to a bomb that had slaughtered upwards of twenty of them?

“Call ambulances,” he ordered. He wasn’t sure where to begin. With the wounded — or with two bodies that were very clearly not human? The aliens didn’t seem to have survived the blast. Maybe they had some wonder-technology that could resurrect the dead, but he wouldn’t count on it. “Call medics. Call everyone.”

He shook his head. Where the hell did they even start ?

Fatima had been trying to relax when her pager went off, alerting her to a medical emergency. It had come just in time. Her stepmother had been boring her again with more suggestions for suitable boys, even though they’d lost touch with the old country. The internet said that India and Pakistan had nuked each other in the wake of the invasion and, despite her best hopes, she suspected that it was true. Too many sources were repeating the same claim time and time again.

She picked up her overnight bag and ran out of the door, glancing down at her pager to see where she was going. A massive plume of smoke was rising up over London, reminding her of the hellish first days when the aliens had arrived. At least they’d managed to get most of the wounded to their own homes, she told herself as she started to run. Five minutes later, she saw an ambulance and flagged it down, hoping that the driver would have time to stop. He did, allowing Fatima to climb onboard before he gunned the engine again, heading towards the plume of smoke. She felt sick as she realised where they were going. Gilmore Technical College had played host to several of her friends, back when they’d dreamed of careers. And now it was just a pile of rubble.

A number of Incident Coordinators had arrived and taken charge, thankfully. They’d been missed during the desperate attempt to treat the wounded in Central London, during the invasion. Fatima didn’t even bother to throw them accusing glances — they were collaborators, after all — as she scrambled down from the ambulance and ran towards their position. Police and firemen were helping the wounded away from the fires, trying to get them processed and into the queue for medical treatment. She closed her ears to their screams and pleas, knowing that there was little she could do to help. God alone knew if they had enough medical supplies on hand.

She rapidly found herself assigned to triage. It wasn’t something they’d practiced before, outside of a pair of paranoid exercises they’d done before the invasion. She glanced at the first casualty, swiftly assessed his condition, and marked him down as category two. He had a broken leg and was probably in shock, but he’d survive without immediate medical treatment. It broke her heart to leave him without help, yet there was no choice. The next person, a young girl barely out of her teens, was too badly wounded to live without immediate hospital treatment. Fatima marked her down, knowing that she would probably never be taken to hospital and receive the treatment she needed. At least she was too badly injured to be aware of her surroundings. If God was kind, she would pass away without ever waking up.

The hours seemed like days as they tried to clear up the mess. Over two thousand humans had been in the building when the bomb exploded, along with a number of aliens. Most of them were dead, or so badly wounded that the only thing the doctors could do was inject them with painkillers and watch them slip away. One of the bodies, plonked down in front of her, was clearly inhuman. She forgot her fear and helpless anguish as she stared down at the alien body. The inner bone structure was very different from a human skeleton, as far as she could tell; despite their great size, they seemed almost weaker than the average human. But the internet insisted that the aliens had an advantage in hand-to-hand combat… their leathery skin, far tougher than human skin, might help hold them together. Perhaps they were less used to trauma than humans.

A leathery hand pulled her away from the body. She jumped… and found herself staring up into an alien face. The alien pushed her aside with casual ease, allowing two of his — she assumed that it was a male, although there was no way to tell — comrades to pick up the body and cart it away to one of their floating trucks. They weren’t bothering to tend to any of the human wounded, or even help moving away the dead. As far as she could tell, they only cared about themselves.