Them: Part 3

    A quick blurb because somehow the past couple of days got away from me. Now it's Friday and I don't know how that happened. As in, I don't know how it got to Friday already. Wasn't it just Tuesday? Maybe I can blame living far enough north in the world that right now the days are honestly running together due to only getting a couple hours of dark every night. That seems like a good excuse. ;)

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    Writing went well this week for me, I got a new short story pounded out. It's awesome when the words happen on their own. Editing with my kid is going along even better than I'd hoped. The manuscript she's working on is already improving and she's only finished going through the first three chapters.
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    Quick reminder that I'll be taking the summer off posting new stories. The free downloads for the current story, Them, and all the rest of my completed short stories are available over on my Short Stories page. The next new story will start in September. Blog posts will still happen on Fridays, though. Well... on most Fridays. I'm planning on some time with my kids. I might even see my hubby for more than a half-hour at a time when / if he gets some days off between projects!

​    There's only one more week of school left until I have both kids home for the summer. I'm looking forward to it almost as much as they are. Probably as much as I'm looking forward to having them both in the same school starting in September lol.
    Happy Solstice! Hope you have a great summer! (Or a great winter, for all of you living in the south half of the world.)

3. Truth Erupting

        Panic turned ugly and people were killed. Crushed. Then someone saw it happen, the first strike back at our attackers. The cloud rose like a blossom after the initial flash. Then another. Then another. A Russian pilot still wearing his flight gear screamed at the window for it to stop, pounding his fists into the not-quite-glass. Nobody down on the planet heard him.
        When the small ships returned this time, they moved in a hurried way that we hadn’t seen yet. People were nearly thrown into the cells. The pilots of those ships yelled to each other, to the others who were near to the holding cells, in a language nobody in the cells could understand but out of faces we had all be taught to fear. We saw only captors when they looked at us. It wasn’t until later that we all learned the truth.
        Panic came on stronger than ever before as the view out the windows spun away from our planet to show more great ships – dozens we could see, so possibly hundreds surrounding the whole globe – so many more than in the stolen satellite images we’d seen. All of them were also turning away from the planet. We had been stolen. Like the images.
        Leaders came forward, natural ones instead of elected ones, who eventually exerted control over the panic of the caged people. They assigned duties and kept hands busy so that minds were less free to wander. They saved lives by finding linguists and medics, creating ways of survival and communication. Once we could speak to our captors and understand what had happened, and why, we were freed; unharmed except for the damage we had done to ourselves. Those who had taken us did not return us back to our planet. We couldn’t go back so they instead brought us to a new one and helped us build ourselves onto it.
        Ours was destroyed.
 
Year 18A (eighteen years After)
        The truth was a lot simpler than we could’ve imagined: a fatal fissure to the core of our planet was poised to open under the Pacific. Our technology couldn’t see it properly but it was there, buried under tons of water and rock. Hidden from us. They had seen it as they passed by, but that first ship had been too small to help in any way so the fissure had been noted as a priority and contact with the dominant life on the planet was planned. While they’d been attempting to speak with us, an armada of life boats had been assembled as quickly as they could build. They had come to save us from the end of our world.
        Thanks to us and the tampering and destruction of the probes they’d sent, the magnitude of the fissure remained unmeasured in real time and only observable from what they could see from distant orbit. Our unrequired efforts to defend ourselves during the rescue evacuation had rocked the Earth and then ripped it open, but not before many of us – and stable populations of nearly all of the other species we knew – were able to be plucked up and placed in ships.
        At the end, there was only a quiet explosion where the ocean poured in and the magma poured out and the seas quenched the core’s fire to a point the planet could never recover from. Toxic steam poisoned the atmosphere in clouds that blocked the sun, reflecting nearly all the heat from our nearest star and ending life on the surface. Our Earth – the first one – cooled to dead rock in only a decade.
        Like in the movies, they had come and then the world ended. It wasn’t like that, though. Not looking back from After.

The second message: Your world does die. Fire inside come out. End with cold darkness. End with death. We help come. We will come.