Falling Skies 1. Prologue

_Hear the patter of running feet _  
_It's the old First Cav in full retreat _  
_They're moving on; _  
_they'll soon be gone_  
- Bugout Boogie, banned ballad from the Korean War

* * *

**8 August, 2011**  
**Atlanta, Georgia, USA**

Crickets sang a matins as the sunrise brought another sweltering day to the banks of the Chattahoochee River, where several thousand militamen were once again waiting, more-or-less patiently, for a chance to reach "safety" on the other side.

The underwater bridges had been an ingenious concept. It was something some of the older engineers had learned from various Asian communists; a more-or-less standard bridge built about a foot below the surface of the water. Hard to see from the air and even harder to destroy, it did have it's shortcomings: there weren't many of them, draft animals and some humans had mixed opinions about the whole affair, trucks had to be careful as they waded through the fast-moving and higher-than-expected water, and more than a few had to be towed across when the drivers overestimated their fording depth. Much of the militia would have to be ferried across. Some of the braver men—or those who feared skitters more than they feared drowning—chose to swim for it.

Captain Jackson Hall pondered the presence of all that muddy water as he directed the remnants of his company down a side-road off Fulton Industrial Boulevard. Certainly no one liked the idea of intractable obstacles placed between themselves and wherever they wished to go, but there were some advantages to a slowed retreat. Militia in retreat were notorious for disappearing completely (not that regulars were much better) and the delay in their run did give their heads a chance to catch up with their feet.

That wasn't necessarily a good thing. What was it the pacifists and generals alike used to say? A rational army would run away… certainly he wanted to.

At least they weren't being bombed. The roof of every factory and warehouse seemed to sport at least one machine gun position, many 14.5mm and bigger. Enough to keep them safe from all but the worst air raid. Unless the enemy did something unusual it seemed likely that…

High and to the south, the metalic bluish glint was almost imperceptible against the hazy morning sky. Catching a glimpse of it, Jack noticed several of them rising up like faint fireworks... Or rockets… Oh no…

He yelled out an incoming as he dove for cover.

* * *

Half a mile away, Kate urged her horse onward while Colleen, riding double, fired her Colt 9mm SMG  
at the oncoming skitters. The line of space invaders broke under the depleted squad of horsemen, some skewered on sabers, crushed by hammers and stomped beneath their hooves.

The big American Quarter Horse bounded over the pavement and weaved between dead cars as if unencumbered by the saddle, two riders, their weapons and equipment. He was reaching speeds that would never be matched in the hazard-strewn city under normal conditions. His little herbivore brain couldn't correlate what was going on around him, but nature and training both told him to run away; demons were chasing him.

They were running through the vanguard of a heavy alien ground force moving down Boulder Park Drive and Bakers Ferry Road. Skitters charged forward to overrun the evacuation points while the bulk of the mechs held back to bombard them, something they had learned from the humans. They were never designed for use as mobile artillery and weren't very good at it, but a sufficient number of mechs firing a sufficient number of missiles and rockets could be guaranteed to cause some damage.

5th Brigade had tasked the 11th Georgia and 4th Alabama Regiment to hold this area before withdrawing to Douglas County, and the 11th Georgia Regiment had tasked the Atmarga Cavalry Column with screening and delaying possible enemy approaches. Easier said than done; the approaches to the Chattahoochee had been a gentle terrain of cotton and conifer before it had been vinyl and aluminum; nice farmland, but not inherently defensible.

Gunfire stitched the pursuing skitters as the horsemen came into range of an antitank rifle position and slowed their mounts behind it. It was just a shallow scrape in the ground fortified with sandbags and slabs of slate. It wouldn't last too long against heavy gunfire, but hopefully it wouldn't have to.

* * *

They didn't quite notice the plumes of smoke coming from the direction of the mechs who had for some reason stopped chasing them. They did notice the pillars of blue-tinged fire coming from where the units packed against the Chattahoochee must have been, and started to wonder if maybe they hadn't drawn the short straw when they had been assigned screening duty.

"Run into trouble?" called a one-armed sergeant, the apparent gun commander.

"Yeah, and not just crabs." said Sergeant Gardener "Something weird about those chicken walkers; they're moving faster."

"You serious? How much faster?"

"Making 45 miles easy on straightaways!" interjected Kate.  
"I think they're getting smarter too, trying to fire… uh 'hull down'." added Colleen. The young girl, already a hardened veteran soldier, would probably never live to see a working tank again, and wasn't confident on the terminology.

"New models, you think?"

That would be a problem. Skitters could keep up with horses in bad terrain, and now it looked like mechs could keep up with them in good terrain. Cavalry seldom directly charged their enemies if they wanted to live; they preferred to use their speed for transport and fight on foot as light infantry. But if the enemy was closing the speed gap, where did that leave them?

"Yup" said the sergeant. He cast a glance at the big 20mm Solothorn S18/100 and could only hope that it would still work. If it can still hit them then it should still kill them. Should.

Great, they all thought; now we'll have to start calling them ostrich walkers.


	2. Chapter 1: Xenos (by Thresher)

**Combat Outpost Drake**  
**Scotch Ridge, Iowa **  
**8 August, 2011**

"What the hell has the spiders so riled up?"

Corporal Samantha Pennington pulled herself up and into the lumber-reinforced and sandbag-protected lookout tower, formerly the steeple of Scotch Ridge United Presbyterian Church and now the primary observation post for Combat Outpost Drake. The COP – currently the home of Second Platoon, 122nd Infantry Company (Motorized) – actually had nothing to do with the well-known liberal arts university that had once anchored an entire neighborhood on the north side of Des Moines, but was instead named after a science fiction author from Iowa. The man had apparently been born in Dubuque, fought in Vietnam, gone to law school, then settled down to write science fiction, most of which had an explicit military bent, and much of which involved aliens.

Entirely appropriate to name a combat outpost after the man, given that Iowa was currently fighting for its life against, and partially occupied by, actual alien invaders. Last anyone had heard of him, he was living in the Carolinas, enjoying retirement and still writing when the Espheni ships had descended over American cities. Colonel Nixon – "the Old Man" to everyone in the 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment – was apparently something of a geek, and had taken to naming every other combat outpost in Warren County after his favorite science fiction authors.

All this was far from the front of Corporal Pennington's mind as she settled into the lookout tower next to Private First Class Francisco Sanchez, her assistant team leader and lucky bastard who had watch in the cool of the morning on what was going to be a sweltering August day. His lookout duty partner, battle buddy, and little brother, Private Hector Sanchez, had wormed out of the cramped lookout to allow their fire team leader to take his place.

She was glad he had. The skies over Des Moines were lousy with alien fighter-bombers. Their crescent shaped, otherworldly forms were lazily drawing circles over the occupied city of Des Moines barely ten miles to the north, and the formation was absolutely _huge_. Corporal Pennington hadn't seen anything like it since those first terrible days of the war last year. Just after Christmas, when the alien mother ships had ended their eerily silent stillness over Des Moines and disgorged hundreds of such attack craft to rain death and destruction across Iowa and America as a whole. What the pros in the Hawkeye Regiment called "fast-movers" or "fast air," as if they were the Russian Sukhois or MiGs many of them had trained to deal with when they'd been members of the Iowa Army National Guard or US Army regulars, had flattened Des Moines International with a massive… _something_… that had left the airport and its squadron of National Guard F-16Cs a shallow, glassy crater. She dearly wished Iowa had some of those fighters left, but they, like so much else that made up America's former military might, were a long distant memory.

"How many do you make those, Corporal?"

Pennington's mind raced, eyes drinking in the sight. "Over a hundred," she breathed. "Look, there! More coming up, in twos and threes." She fought down the bile and terror, forcing back the memories of I-35 southbound out of Des Moines when the fighters had strafed and bombed the highway packed with thousands fleeing the capital. She'd just been "Sam" Pennington then. Just an Army washout with a bad leg and a two year old son from a tryst with a fellow MP at Fort Jackson, she had watched in terror from a tree line a mile away as minivans and cars crumpled under the invisible hammer of laser fire and bright blue plasma turned people into winking torches that ran a little ways and then stopped…

She'd been too far away to hear the screams, but _oh God_ they'd been in her dreams every night since. That three-mile stretch of I-35 had become known, and would probably always be known now, as the Highway of Death. It was barely fifteen miles from her parent's property in the farm country just north of 92. She went there every couple of months, whenever she had leave, on horseback to remind herself why sticking with the 12th Iowa as a volunteer, instead of having babies like every other woman her age, was the right thing to do…

So her son could drive the little county blacktops and state highways, through the countryside of his home state, without being burned alive in his truck. To ensure this, she was now Corporal Pennington, Team Leader of Fire Team Bravo, Second Squad, Second Platoon, 122nd Infantry Company (Motorized), 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment. And it looked to Corporal Pennington like the war had started back up after the long summer lull.

"Hector." She cleared her throat. The call had come out as a broken whisper. That wasn't good enough. "Hector! Get down to the barracks and kick Lieutenant Haldane out of his rack. He needs to see this." She heard him scramble out of his position on the little platform just below the lookout and heard the ladder creak as he climbed down it. The position had been occupied, reinforced, and rebuilt enough that the pews had been removed from the sanctuary and replaced with proper sleeping quarters. It was roomy enough that everyone got a cot and a little space to call their own, which was a luxury for a combat outpost on the edge of enemy territory. At the moment, at least half the platoon were in those cots, sleeping before the planned afternoon patrol up to the North River.

She cleared her throat again. "Hand me the optics, Private. I need to glass the floodplain." The optics were repurposed civilian equipment, of course, like nearly all their gear. Only the "professionals" in the Hawkeye Regiment, the 1st Iowa Mechanized Infantry Regiment, got first dibs on pre-war military-grade equipment. Some of it made its way to regiments like the 12th Infantry, along with new production that was just starting to really come online from the dozens of little factories, and hundreds of smaller workshops, scattered around the State. Her BDU pants were newly made, though stitched from materials spun pre-war. The pair of daggers she wore, one on either hip, were freshly forged from steel recovered from the thousands of dead cars on every roadway across the State. The combat load of ammunition she wore, three hundred rounds of 5.56mm armor piercing, came straight from the new ammo plant near Chariton.

But the optics weren't new, nor military-grade. The telescope was a Celestron 70mm, an older bird-watching model, donated by the wife of the pastor that used to preach at Scotch Ridge United Presbyterian. She had still lived with her husband in the little ranch house right next to the church, barely fifty yards away, through all the insanity of winter and spring. The pair of them had provided material help, prayer, and teachings of faith to refugee, soldier, and militia alike. That is, until a rare maximum power plasma blast from an alien walker had gouged the house out of the wooded hillside, with them inside, back in April. Sam really thought they should have named the COP after them. Whether with God or not, Sam wasn't so sure about such things anymore, people that good and faithful needed to be remembered.

Corporal Pennington held the eyepiece up and peered at the floodplain below. The trees on the reverse slope leading down to the North River had grown quite a bit over the summer, shooting up despite the fires and blast damage from the fighting that had rolled south over this same ground in the spring. But enough of the flat, former cropland, one or two miles to the north, could be seen from the high vantage point in the church steeple. She could see from a half-mile south of the river all the way north to the far ridgeline that carried Highway 5 around the city.

What she saw, packed onto that two or three miles of open ground, chilled her to the bone. Platoons of ten walkers accompanied by a score of spiders, advancing in serried ranks across the floodplain, marching south. The early morning sun glint off the burnished, alien metal hulls of the mechanical fighting machines, while the hexapod alien spiders jostled for positions around them. The entire thing was a bucking, writhing mass from a demented alien mind, like something from an H.R. Giger painting.

"Oh shit." She dropped the telescope, slithered out of the lookout, and scrambled for the ladder.

Lieutenant Haldane _really_ needed to see this.


	3. Chapter 2: Disinterred

_"Come, all ye mourning pilgrims dear,_  
_Who're bound for Canaan's land,_  
_Take courage and fight valiantly,_  
_Stand fast with sword in hand;_  
_Our Captain's gone before us,_  
_Our Father's only Son,_  
_Then, pilgrims dear, pray, do not fear,_  
_But let us follow on."_  
-John A. Granade, Primitive Baptist Hymnal #280

* * *

**Somewhere Near Piedmont Avenue**  
**Atlanta, Georgia**  
**10 August, 2011**

The advance patrol, mostly late of the 37th Independent Company and the 9th Regiment's 9th Motorized Squadron, waited in the shadows as aircraft roared over them, off to punish some unlucky pocket of desperate, cut-off holdouts not unlike themselves. They continued to move under cover as much as possible, even as the sound of danger faded.

When the way seemed safe, two of their members ran down the street and scampered up a fresh pile of rubble. Car-sized chunks of stone and concrete had created a giant mound that, with a bit of acrobatics, allowed them to reach the second story of what might have once been an older hotel or apartment. The ruins weren't even remotely stable, but they did offer a nice vantage point.

"You seeing anything up here, bro?" asked Corporal Calvin Payne, scanning the terrain with his rifle scope.

"Not really." Said Private Lucas Isom. "Streets seem a little nicer on this side though. We could squeeze that old Caddy through the back alley over here if it weren't for all the rubble."

"Rubble can be moved." noted Payne.

The private wished his corporal hadn't said that. Yes, it could be done, but it took quite a bit of doing.

* * *

Sweat dripped from Lucas Isom's brow and pooled at his feet as he swung the pickaxe through air humid enough to choke on. Almost an hour had passed and the alley would soon be clear.

It was quiet. The only notable sounds were the drone of alien engines well above the thickening grey clouds, sporadic gunfire in the distance, and the weird mechanical chugging noise of a mech running at full-speed which alerted everyone within a mile and a half of its presence. The things were never known for their stealth, but that was one big disadvantage of their new ability. There was also the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm.

It was going to rain; probably one of those short downpours that typified a Southern summer. Annoying to work in, but it would hopefully help with the sweltering heat of the day. It would also bring desperately needed water to the soldiers working to extract their vehicles from the city, as well as all the wounded whom they were working so desperately to evacuate.

Lucas remembered watching war movies before the falling of the skies, and always wondered if a bunch of bombed-out buildings could really clutter the streets around them that badly. If anything, the moviemakers had probably underestimated the kind of messes made in war. He also remembered going out in the country to do volunteer work with his church in the wake of tornadoes; all those fallen timbers and shattered houses made a hard enough mess for cleanup crews armed with chainsaws, jackhammers, and bulldozers. He could have never imagined the kind of misery that went into purely pre-industrial labour.

But it wasn't all bad. The hotel/apartment must have been the scene of someone's last stand, and they were finding quite a bit of loot as they dug through it.

"Hey, think we could find a place for this on the Sixty Special?" asked one of the soldiers, cradling an M1919A4 machinegun.

"I don't see why not." said Corporal Payne. "Those Detroit Dino's are built like aircraft carriers."

There was a sweet Barrett rifle under one of the slabs—barrel bent but still good for parts. A handful of rifle grenades that they handled with the utmost of care; hard to gauge the quality of those homemade deals. A few small arms…

Including an M14 rifle, still looking good, barrel still gripped in the cold dead hands of the previous owner. Looked like one of the 1960's-vintage models that had still been packed with cosmoline when some "anonymous donors" had sent thousands of them to the Georgia Militia.

Private Isom glanced down at his own FN-FAL, which had been faithful to him ever since he first got it and was clearly superior to some old Defense Department's pet project. Well, someone else might want that thing. He grabbed the stock and was surprised to feel the rather small hand holding vice-like to it.

Rigor-mortis? On a two-days dead body? Got to hand it to the hillbillies; even in death they won't give up their guns. He grasped the intransigent limb and was about to start slicing off fingers when he noticed that the Cold Dead Hands were still warm, and moving.

Zombie!? No, wrong genre. For a moment he didn't know how to respond, not remembering what to do when finding a not-dead body in the rubble.

_"M-M-M-MEDIC!"_

* * *

**9th Regimental Aid Station**  
**South of Panthersville, Atlanta, Georgia**  
**10 August, 2011**

The little dirt access road between Flat Shoals Parkway and the South River saw a stream of blood-dripping stretcher teams and vehicles coming from the battlefields. It never seemed to have a start or stop, just a gradual thickening and thinning that was thankfully starting to lean toward the latter.

The 1976 Cadillac Sixty Special rolled through the dusty twilight like a beast from a dying world. It had been one of the biggest non-limo passenger cars ever built, offering plenty of room for a gasifier, pintle mounts, and racks across the hood and trunk upon which upwards to half a dozen stretchers could be placed. Not the first choice for an ambulance but it beat being drug to the aid station in a makeshift travois, as many wounded were.

Major Robert Clifton weaved lazily around wagons and other slower traffic. He wasn't going much faster; charcoal and wood chips didn't provide much in the way of horsepower, and the monster of a car was clearly having trouble living off such a diet.

* * *

Nursing Assistant Denise Clifton watched as the big sedan lumbered into the casualty drop-off area. What had happened to it was a sacrilege; it hadn't been in factory condition when the skies fell and had aged many decades in the past few months. Windows gone, one door missing, bits of siding ripped off, transmission dying, leaking radiator and shot-out headlights haphazardly replaced, though it looked like, in bad visibility, the driver would have to travel more by faith than by sight. This time next year, that elegant piece of Detroit steel would probably be left to rust in a field somewhere, beneath a thick layer of kudzu.

The driver jumped out and began speaking to the officer on duty. He was so covered in dirt and grime—and she so covered in dirt and blood—that husband and wife didn't even recognize each other. Denise began speaking to one of the corporals as stretcher bearers swarmed the car. She moved from patient to patient, removing the cloth or canvas that protected them from the road and preforming a brief examination of each. It was her job to determine what order they saw the doctors, writing heavily abbreviated notes on each one's head with a sharpie marker. It was a good thing they seemed to understand what she was marking, because she very often didn't.

There was a 15-year old girl, terribly mangled from an explosion, and a boy not much older with full-thickness burns over at least a third of his body. Dead already or very soon to be; little need for examination and she wondered why the medics had even bothered to bring them.

Two others were responsive and weakly moaning for help, meaning they probably didn't need it just yet. So long as pulse and respiration were good they could wait until the others were looked at.

There was a man thrown from a horse with severe head and neck trauma, and another with an abdominal gunshot wound and probable intestinal injuries. Those would be the first in the OR; there were two surgeons on duty right now so it didn't really matter what order she marked them. One man with a bullet lodged in his lung, though the field medics seemed to have done an admirable job of stabilizing him before the journey. He would be number three. And the fourth...

"Corporal, there's no triage tag on this one. What happened to her?"

"At least two days underneath a building. Broken bones, severe dehydration, possible internal bleeding…"

She scribbled on the woman's head then turned to summon a litter team.

"Red tag here. Put her fourth in line and set up a new rehydration IV."


End file.

Falling Skies, Horror, Sci-Fi