My breath was ragged in my ears as I threw a quick look over my shoulder. Good; the twisting path down the hillside was empty of pursuers even though I could still hear them yelling to each other along the top of the coulee. Heart pounding, I continued on, turning back to the trail as it wandered down the hill towards the lazy silver ribbon that was the river at the bottom.

My quick move at the top had shaken them off my tail, but I knew it wouldn't be long before they found the path. I had a few minutes at most to figure out what to do next.

Staggering around a corner, I stopped and leaned back against the crumbling dirt wall marking the path's hillside edge, chest heaving as I clawed air into my starving lungs. As I did, I felt my entire body shaking. Both with the adrenaline pumping through it and something else. Something I had been feeling a lot since the visitors appeared in our sky.

Fear.

I looked down at my hands and saw that they were shaking. They did that a lot now, too. Funny; before the visitors arrived, they never shook. Now, almost all the time. Man, I am so scared. The world is dying and I've got a front row seat. And what I'm seeing is terrifying me.

Before you start thinking I'm a coward or some kind of lightweight, there's a pretty good reason for being scared. Like I said, the world is dying and I'm front and center. But it wasn't always.

The Arrival

It was pretty much like most weekends. Last month of school, a couple friends over chilling and playing a little Battlefield on the PS4 and trying to figure out what we were going to do with our last summer as high school kids. Kids; even as I remember back on it, only four or so months ago, we were so young and naive, clueless about what was real and what wasn't. All we cared about was whether or not our part time jobs would get us enough cash to buy that used car so we could be cool next year as seniors, get more action with the girls, or even if we could crack the varsity squad.

All that stuff is pretty pointless now. But then, ... then it was the whole of our universe. That is, until our universe got abruptly larger.

"Dude, dude, you gotta check this out," my buddy Kyle called from upstairs. In my family's game room downstairs, I grimaced as I dropped my character behind a bit of cover.

"Hold up. I got this guy merc'ing me hardcore from the top of this building. Gimme a sec to dust 'em," I said as my hands shifted over the PS4's controller to bring up my aiming reticule. If I could just catch sight of him, ... I angled my viewpoint around the corner and, in doing so, caught sight of another player moving in from my right. It was more reaction that sent my fingers dancing over the controller and my character into a tight spin before firing.

"360 no scope. Eat that!" I crowed as the other player dropped dead.

"Liam, come check this out, yo!" my other buddy Jesper shouted down the stairs with a definite note of urgency in his voice. "One of our space probes spotted an alien spaceship!"

That stopped me dead in mid-action. An alien spaceship? Then my screen flashed red as the guy who had been sniping me all game, got me again. Sighing in both frustration and resignation, I thumbed the game to pause. Then I was throwing myself out of my chair to run up the stairs.

"Alien spaceship?" I asked a bit more tartly than I probably should've, still smarting from my in-game death downstairs. Only to come to a frowning stop when I found my two friends standing in front of the big flat screen TV my dad had parked upstairs in the living room. Between them I could see a blurry starscape on the screen with an equally blurry green blob in the middle of it.

At the top of the screen a banner flashed 'Breaking News!' while the bottom scrolled with official statements from the American and Canadian governments, the UN, and NASA, among others.

"What, ... the hell?" I managed, my eyes narrowing as I stared at the screen.

"I know, right?" Kyle, standing on the left, muttered as he shook his head in disbelief and amazement. "They said the New Horizons probe, the one that just swung by Pluto, caught sight of it first. But they didn't release any footage until some amateur astronomer in Europe spotted it with a home-made set up or something and threatened to tell the world. Now the Hubble has spotted it just crossing Mars orbit and NASA is tracking it."

"It's probably fake," said a voice from the kitchen, just around the corner from the living room. That'd be Cam, my older brother by a year, graduating and heading off to the University of Calgary to work on an engineering degree. Which, of course, made him an expert on everything, extraterrestrial or no.

"No way, bro," Kyle quickly retorted. "It's got NASA watermarks all over it." He tapped the image with a finger. "It's pretty frickin' real."

"Yeah," Jesper piped up to say. "I've seen plenty of fake stuff on YouTube and the internet. This is totally legit."

My brother laughed.

"Yeah, sure, scrub. Whatever you say. I'll believe it when the stupid thing enters orbit." Then he fell silent, going back to whatever he was doing before he decided to chime in on our conversation.

Which is to say, ten days later, he was standing in front of the TV with the rest of us before going to school, staring at the TV as every camera in the world watched the glowing green ball dubbed 'the Mothership' silently move into orbit around Earth.

"Well," my dad muttered as he shouldered his satchel filled with plans and timelines for the newest project at work, which was the civil engineering division of the City of Lethbridge. That's where we lived: Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, the biggest little city in the middle of nowhere cool.

"If this doesn't change things, ..."

"It probably won't," my mom, an RN at the Lethbridge Regional Hospital, said in a pragmatic tone of voice, her words accompanied by a smile and a reassuring squeeze of my father's arm. "They'll take a few pictures, realize Earth isn't anything special and be on their way."

"Yeah," my brother added. "We've sucked all the oil out of the ground, ripped apart most of our ozone layer and filled our fresh water supplies with hormones and sewage. Who would be interested in this place?"

"Only somebody's who's world is worse," I said, earning me an eye roll from Cam and a frown from my dad.

"Not helping, Liam," my mom said with that tight lipped look of hers that she gave us when we went a bit too far over the imaginary lines of proper behavior she drew for us in her head.

"What? I'm just saying, ..." I began defensively. Then my dad was stepping past me and heading for the door.

"The mayor has called an emergency session of council today," he said, pulling open the door. "Jerry figures we'll be drafting up yet another version of the Civil Action Plan for them to run over." That'd be Jerry Sato, the city's chief engineer and Dad's boss. "So I might be running late tonight."

My mom nodded, her expression becoming thoughtful.

"I'm on second shift today, so we might be home at the same time," she said, stepping to the door to give my dad a kiss goodbye. My dad flashed her a quick smile before looking back at me and Cam still standing in front of the TV.

"You two keep it together today, huh?" he said, dead serious. "There is some next level stuff going on. But we're Kelsos. We don't get rattled. Today is just like any other day."

"Except ET is hanging like Damocles' Sword over our heads, looking to start something, ..." I muttered, earning me a shove from Cam.

"Like any other day," Dad repeated, his voice hardening as I threw a sharp look at my older brother and found him as grimly serious as my father. "We don't know what they want, Liam. Until we do, we treat this day like any other day! Got that?"

"Yeah, I got it," I said with an annoyed frown. Pretending things were normal had been our routine for the last ten days as the Mothership closed in on us. Now that it was here, I wasn't surprised that he was still trotting out the normality plan. That extra bite in his voice, however, ... that was new.

Looking over at my dad, I wanted to ask him why he was being such a hardass about it. Only to find the words drying up in my mouth at what I saw in my dad's eyes for the very first time.

Fear.

Fear of the unknown, of the unquantifiable, being uncertain of what the future held for us. As a civil engineer, he was practical and efficient, working with numbers and paper every day for the last twenty years. Whatever he wanted to know, he could figure out with a formula or two, whatever he wanted to build, there was a plan.

But that green blob in the sky, that pulsating orb of disruption, had changed all of that. There were no plans he could draw that would build something to make it go away, that would make our lives return to normal. No plan he could draw up that would contain the possibility of chaos that the arrival of that Mothership represented. That frightened my dad, Gary Kelso, the man with the unshakable constitution.

And seeing my dad scared made me scared. So I swallowed my question, stuffing it back into a suddenly dry mouth and throat and nodded instead. Somewhat satisfied that he had instilled some purpose in his two sons, my father gave us a little nod himself before turning and looking at my mom for a long moment. Then he was stepping out the door, closing it behind him.

My mom stared at the door for a long moment, a worried expression on her face. Then she was pushing it aside to flash us a reassuring smile.

"Sounds like we all have busy days in front of us," she said before glancing up at the clock. "You two have your lunches to make before heading off to school. Better get to it, or you'll be late!"

As it turned out, I just made it to school with Cam driving me there, hitting the front door as the final bell rang. I quickly sprinted to my locker and stowed my books before heading to first period gym class. Where I was still thinking about that look on my father's face as Coach Smith was putting us through wind sprints a half hour later.

"You're lagging, Kelso," he called out from the far side of the gym where he was inputting some information into the tablet he was holding. "You don't want Coach Finley to think you don't want to play varsity next season, do you?"

Being the football coach, Coach Smith thought it was good motivation to use veiled threats like that, Coach Finley being the basketball coach and the guy I wanted to impress. I wasn't much for football or rugby, preferring speed and finesse over smashmouth. Made sense to me; I was a straight A student who happened to be good at sports, like basketball and parkour. Taking my head and its precious load of brains and smashing it against somebody else's head, risking concussion, seemed like a epically bad idea.

Unfortunately for Coach Smith, his veiled threats were nothing compared to the implied threat floating high above our heads in orbit. A threat that swiftly became a reality.

I was just finishing my second run at the lines when the lights abruptly went out. No flickering or strobing before switching over to emergency lighting. Just complete and utter blackness in the space of an eyeblink.

"Damn it," Coach Smith hissed from somewhere in the darkness. "Hold up, fellas. Let's see if the backups kick on." Built only a couple years ago, Chinook High School was equipped with a number of backup systems, including a generator for power failures.

But, as long seconds went by and we found ourselves still staring into nothing, it became obvious that the backups had failed as well.

"Well, shit," the coach growled under his breath. Since swearing by teachers was against the rules at Chinook High, and Coach Smith was a stickler for those rules, hearing him spit one out led me to believe he was more than unhappy with the current situation.

He was scared.

Not that I blamed him. Hell, just about everybody on the planet had some level of fear going today, now that we had a legitimate alien ship in orbit around our planet. One that wasn't responding to any of our attempts to communicate with it.

"Okay, ... let's find the door and get out of here, eh?" he said, suddenly not sounding as sure of himself as he did a few seconds ago.

However, before he could move, a door opened, letting in weak illumination. To our light-starved eyes, it was bright enough to make us squint.

"Coach Smith?" a woman's voice called out. "Are you in here?"

"Mrs. Kennedy! Yes, and I've got a bunch of juniors with me," the coach replied, his voice now coming from somewhere to my right as he moved towards the light, sounding relieved that we had been discovered.

"Okay, good." There was no hiding the relief in the woman's voice either. "I need you to bring them out of there and take them outside onto the quad. "

We got out of the building fire drill style: single file and moving as quickly as the low light allowed. Us and the rest of the school, every single person getting sent outside. The nervous and visibly agitated teachers then gathered us out on the grassy quad that separated the main buildings before clustering themselves in a tight group to discuss in loud whispers what was happening.

I was standing off on my own with a thoughtful frown on my face, watching the teachers and their changing expressions as they continued their discussion when Jesper and Kyle slipped out of the uneasily shifting crowd and joined me.

"Dude," Kyle said in the way of greeting, Jesper favoring me with a nod instead of speaking. "What the hell, hey? ET shooting at us or what?"

"The lights went out, bud," Jesper quickly pointed out as they took stations on either side of me. "No explosions. It's not ID4 or War of the Worlds."

Kyle snorted.

"Shows what you know, Jesper," he retorted. " They did fire at us. But instead of a missile or an energy beam, they fired an EMP and fried our power grid. Everything that ran on electricity is dead." He held up his cell phone, which looked pretty inert. "Like my cell. Went dead at exactly 9 am, about ten minutes ago. A three hundred dollar paper weight."

Jesper fished out his own cell and, after some experimental poking at its buttons, he heaved a sigh.

"Yeah, mine's dead, too," he said before looking over at me. "How about yours, Liam?"

Unfortunately my phone was back in a locker in the change room, waiting for me to finish gym class. But I didn't need to see it to know it was just as dead as Kyle and Jesper's.

Because Kyle was right: we just got blasted with an EMP. One big enough to take out the entire city, if not more. Even as I focused on it, I could hear just how effective the blast had been. No sounds of traffic moving up and down Whoop-Up Drive, the major road that ran past the school, nothing down in the river valley, or anywhere around us. It was completely silent except for the whisper of a low breeze.

To a person that was born and raised in a city, albeit a smallish one, to not hear the omnipresent hum of activity that marked such a place was unnerving to say the least.

Then the silence was being broken by Mrs. Kennedy, the school's principal, talking loud enough for just about everybody on the quad to hear her. A stout, older lady, she nevertheless had good voice projection. I had long suspected some public speaking in the past had helped her gain that skill. Not that it mattered now.

"Okay, everybody. Thanks for staying so calm while we work on figuring out what's happened," she began, her words enough to release another nervous ripple through the crowd. Being mostly juniors and seniors, we weren't kids. But that didn't mean we were adult enough to not be scared, either. Especially when the adults themselves were upset and frightened.

"By all indications, power to the school and the surrounding area has been completely lost. Because of that, we won't be able to continue class today." That elicited a weak cheer that quickly died. "We are in the process of finding a way to let everybody's parents know that you are safe at the school, and are asking them to come and retrieve you. So please stay close so your parents will have no trouble finding you. Hopefully it won't be too long before they get here. In the meantime, our maintenance staff will try to get the backup generator working and some power to the building so people can use the bathrooms."

"Like taking a piss right now is important," Jesper muttered. I glanced over at him, thoughts whirling. The world's been taking a fright piss every day since the eye of doom flew by Mars. Why would today be any different?

As it turned out, it was the better part of an hour before my dad, looking grim and serious, showed up, Cam in tow. Still standing with Jesper and Kyle, along with a good chunk of my basketball team, I spotted them coming out onto the quad while my teammates argued Kyle's assertion that we'd been hit by an EMP.

"Dad!" I said, holding up a hand. Immediately his head turned my way, even though the quad was filled with the low chatter of everybody talking at once. He started towards me as, once again in street clothes, I threw my backpack over my shoulder and turned to my buddies.

"Gotta go, fellas," I said, quickly shaking Kyle's hand then Jesper's before doing the same to the team. "Keep your heads down. Damocles is about to drop." Then I was heading through the crowd towards my dad, leaving the guys looking at me with quizzical expressions on their faces.

Unlike most of the kids, including my buddies, we didn't live in West Lethbridge, where the high school was located. We were North Siders, which was across the Old Man River and quite a distance beyond on the other side. Without a vehicle, it would be a long walk down Whoop Up Drive and over the bridge spanning the wide, slow moving waterway that separated West Lethbridge from the rest of the city, up the other side and back to our house.

Unfortunately there wasn't much we could do about that. So we hung the left off the road going by the school onto Whoop Up and began the journey home. As we walked, we silently looked at the dozens of cars that sat unmoving on the road and the bridge, some crashed into each other when they abruptly lost power and couldn't be controlled.

It was as we started the climb up the other side that I finally worked up the nerve to ask.

"So, what happened, Dad?"

He favored me with a quick look, his expression unreadable. Then once again he was looking ahead.

"The mayor's office hasn't released anything official," he said after heaving a quick sigh. "Not that anybody would hear anyway with the radio and TV stations down. In fact, everything electronic in the city that was active at 9 this morning is now junk."

"It was an EMP," Cam said from where he was a step behind Dad. Dad frowned and threw him a quick look over his shoulder.

"We don't know that, Cam," he began before my brother jumped back in.

"What else could it be, Dad?" he said in a tone of voice that suggested they had been arguing about it already. "A massive energy wave that can't be heard or seen, yet burns out every piece of active electronics in its path. It's classic EMP. And since we're not seeing mushroom clouds anywhere, it's not the Russians or some terrorist attack. It's the aliens in orbit that launched it."

My Dad's thin-lipped expression told me a couple things as he continued striding up the off-ramp that led to Scenic Drive, the road that would take us back to North Lethbridge. First, that he didn't like arguing about it with Cam. Second, ... he knew somewhere in his head that Cam was right. I'd been thinking the same thing ever since Kyle suggested the possibility: it had to be an EMP attack.

Which begged the next question, of course: Why? Logic suggested it was in preparation to attack. But we had seen the Mothership up close. It was nowhere big enough to contain a massive fleet of warships, or fighters, or even ground troops.

Unless this attack wasn't going Hollywood style, with an all-out assault on our forces by their superior technology. I found myself glancing upward, even though the Mothership wasn't visible during the day. Not visible, but I could almost feel it up there, both a symbolic and a literal Damocles' Sword.

What do you bastards have for us next?

_______

Hey guys, it's Shawn J. aka bloodsword sending you a quick shout out about my next project. Commissioned by Sony Pictures in conjunction with the Wattpad Partner program, my new project is a short story being posted exclusively on Wattpad. Called 'Where Shadows Walk', my story is set in the world of 'The 5th Wave', a post-apocalyptic alien invasion book written by Rick Yancey.

You'll read about high school junior Liam Kelso as he reacts to, and tries to survive an alien attack on Earth and it's the horrific aftermath. And here's the best part: 'The 5th Wave' will soon be a major movie thanks to the filmmakers at Sony Pictures. So you'll get to see on the big screen exactly what happens to the world and how a number of survivors try to make their way in a world radically changed by four waves of attack and how they discover what the next wave will be.

Sounds awesome, right? So check out 'Where ShadowsWalk', 'The 5th Wave' and look for themovie coming to theaters in January of 2016. Of course let me know what you thinkof my story. In the meantime, have a good one

- Shawn