Christopher Nuttall: Their Darkest Hour

“They’re trying to snipe from the windows,” his radio buzzed. “Our snipers are sniping back.”

Chris nodded as he ran forward, into the wreckage of the alien front door. They’d been paranoid enough to set up firing positions inside, but the grenades had wrecked them. A single alien seemed to still be alive, yet he was so badly wounded that there was nothing anyone could do for them. Chris shot him and led the way forward, into the alien base. He’d crawled through Taliban hideouts before, seeing some of the horrors they unleashed upon their own people, but there was something oddly inhuman about the interior of the alien base. He laughed at himself a moment later. Of course there was something inhuman — it had been built by aliens who needed more space than their human counterparts. Their rooms and doors were far larger than anything a human would build.

There had been no way to get an accurate picture of the base’s interior layout, but he headed towards the centre on the assumption that the alien command staff would be in the safest place on the base. The aliens seemed to have vanished, leaving the soldiers glancing nervously from side to side, looking for the next threat. It came in a burst of alien gunfire as the Leathernecks sprang an ambush, taking down two soldiers before they were forced to retreat by Chris and his men. Chris unhooked a grenade from his belt, tossed it into the side room, and headed inside as soon as the grenade had exploded. One alien was dead; the other, somehow, was completely unharmed. His shot missed Chris by bare millimetres. Abdul put three bullets into the alien head, shattering his skull.

One by one, the remaining rooms on the lower level were swept. Some of the rooms were completely bare, with nothing to show what the aliens had done in them. Others were packed with alien equipment, sleeping cots and other gear that was vaguely recognisable. A handful of aliens tried to surrender, but there was no time to take prisoners. All they could do was gun them down. Chris knew that it would bother him later, yet there was no time to worry about it now. They had to keep moving.

“I think this is the way up,” one of the soldiers called. He’d kicked down a plastic door, revealing what looked like a bumpy ramp leading upwards. Chris had visions of disabled aliens trying to make their way up the stairs in wheelchairs before realising that the aliens probably found human stairs uncomfortable. There had certainly been some reports of aliens either becoming trapped or simply ignoring the upper floors, although no one had been quite sure why. “There’s a blockage at the far end.”

Chris smiled. It would have been an effective defence against the aliens, but humans were smaller and nimbler. Grenades cleared the way, allowing them to get up to the second floor and start pushing the aliens back. They didn’t seem to be particularly well coordinated, reminding him of the times that headquarters staff had found themselves in contact with the enemy in Afghanistan. They’d found themselves roughly handled by the Taliban. It stood to reason that the aliens had similar people in the rear. He wondered, absently, if they had their own word for REMFs.

He glanced down at his watch as alien bullets snarled overhead. There had been no way to calculate how long it would take before the aliens started sending in reinforcements from the bases outside London. One theory had claimed that the aliens would wait for orders before doing anything — orders which were never going to come. Chris suspected otherwise; some alien commanders were clearly more capable of acting on their own initiative than others. Assuming that they left their base as soon as the attack began… there were too many variables to calculate any likely ETA. They’d just have to assume the worst and push on as fast as they could.

They punched through a plastic wall and came into what looked like a control room, almost comparable to the stations Chris had guarded while on active duty. The aliens fought back savagely, but it was too late. Grenades shattered the room, leaving most of the aliens dead or wounded. The remainder seemed stunned, unable to resist effectively. And one of them was clearly in charge.

Oheghizh stared at the human, wondering what the humans would do to him. Did they even know his rank? Probably, he told himself. They’d certainly be able to read the gold buttons and know that he was important. But they’d never be permitted to take him prisoner. The Command Triad would simply repeat the threat of bombarding a human city if he wasn’t returned, alive.

Two human soldiers marched him back down the ramp and out towards the open air. There was a brief pause, then one of them produced a black bag and pushed it down over Oheghizh’s head. The command network was down, but the satellites would still be watching… and all they would see, he realised in horror, would be a black mass. They wouldn’t know he was a prisoner…

He wanted to fight, but it was far too late.

London

United Kingdom, Day 55

David Lamb watched the alien convoy making its way through London, led by its tanks. They were clearly out for blood, judging by their response to a handful of pot-shots as they’d entered the city. They’d responded with heavy machine gun fire and even HE shells from their armoured vehicles. But there were only a handful of ways to get into London and head to Buckingham Palace, at least if they wanted to get there directly. They pretty much had to come this way.

He smiled as he reached for the detonator. The aliens had killed millions of humans, without remorse; they probably didn’t know that they’d killed Carol Lamb, wife of David, or their son Thomas. But David knew. He’d been wanting to fight ever since he’d discovered that his family had been caught up in the invasion and cut down in the crossfire. The resistance had trained him and given him a vital role in the counterattack. He had no intention of fucking up and failing to kill as many aliens as he could before they finally killed him. The alien tanks slowed as they spotted the plates they’d left on the road — they looked like mines, if someone was feeling paranoid — and started to move around them. David pushed down on the detonator and braced himself.

The entire world seemed to explode. They’d placed explosive under the road, in two parked cars and in buildings facing the alien position. The blast was terrifyingly loud and the building he was using as a lookout point rocked alarmingly. To the aliens, caught up in the blast, it had to look like a foretaste of the hell awaiting them when they died. He couldn’t hear anything through the ringing in his ears as he pulled himself up and staggered towards the fire escape, knowing that the aliens were likely to be ready to murder any human they encountered — assuming that some of the aliens had survived the blast. Someone had definitely survived. He saw a flash of tracer pouring up into the air, but there was no way of telling if humans or aliens had fired the shot.

He saw something moving out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a pair of alien helicopters, moving rapidly towards the billowing cloud of smoke. They were shooting down towards the ground, aiming at resistance fighters — or maybe civilians who had been caught up in the battle. A missile rose up from the ground and slammed into one of the helicopters, sending it spinning over and down into the ground, where it vanished in a colossal explosion. The second helicopter climbed higher, all the while firing rockets down towards where the missile had come from. David took one final look, knowing that the aliens would never feel safe again in a human city, and then hurried down the stairs to safety. He’d been warned not to linger.