Karen’s first thought that night was of murder, as it had been every night since. This was the third time she had awoken, but the first that she deemed it finally dark enough to chance leaving her shelter. For a full ten minutes she lay silent, not daring to move until completely convinced nothing was stirring nearby. When she gained enough confidence that there was no immediate danger, Karen slid gingerly out from beneath her tarp, careful not to dislodge its camouflage coating of dirt, dust, and shattered stone.

    It had rained while she slept, so a rancid, sour smell assaulted her nostrils. Her hovel boasted three walls still standing beneath almost half a roof, but the heat of a summer’s day still hung out in the dead evening air like an unwanted guest at the dining room table and it strengthened the scent of her thriving mildew.

    Karen thought this place might have been an office building, before, but now it was just a burnt and battered wreck. Like everything else left in Mayfair.

    She crawled quickly over the crumbled wall and, dropping down into shadow, scanned for movement amidst the scattered debris littering the alleyway. Finding none, she crept cautiously and quietly along the building’s edge until she reached Broad Street. She sprinted madly across and dove head-first and panting beneath some shrubbery on the opposite side, thinking how a woman really shouldn’t have to do this sort of thing in her forties. What she found odd was the continued urge to stop and look both ways before crossing. As if she’d encounter any traffic that obeyed the rules of the road.

     When nothing reacted to her passing, she took

     A small section of her mind suggested that if the New Plan played out as well as the Old Plan had, she’d almost certainly be dead before morning. She paid it little heed, however- the New Plan had to work- she was sure she’d taken everything into account this time.

      Regardless of her desires, she would need to

    Once she had been lucky enough to stone a stray dog that had been ostracized by its pack, but it had been old and stringy, and provided much less meat than she had hoped.

     Of course, it had been a long time since anything had gone the way she'd hoped.   

     At the end of the original attack, when Karen had come out of hiding for the first time, she had hoped there might be enough food in the ruins of Mayfair to keep her decently nourished for years, if not forever. After all, canned goods were not so exotic a thing, and even if her hometown wasn’t a Mecca of civilization it had hundreds of homes. Not to mention a Walmart or two.

      But the invaders seemed to have systematically smashed and burned every building that they’d entered. She was lucky her husband, Harry, had had the good sense to shout her towards the old ditch outside of town. She knew it well, the two them had cut class and conducted many a make-out session there way back when they were horny high-schoolers. Karen had hated leaving him, hated that she had turn tail and run, but she had no illusions about the possible outcomes had she made a different decision.

     She was so alone then, during those first few days. There were others mulling about the wreckage, small groups and more loners, too. All of them spared by the fact that they’d run in the right direction or been in exactly the right place at the right time, for some stupid reason. What Karen most remembered was that they all seemed to have been sobbing, though thinking about it now, maybe that had just been her.

     There were no recognizable faces among the

     She had found them eventually in the flattened rectangle of brick and glass that had once been Laura’s elementary school. It took her almost a week, and her hands and arms were slashed to ribbons by then from the shards of debris. It was a wonder she hadn’t severed an artery or at least swollen with infection.  

    They were together, that seemed important. Considering the extent of the destruction, there was nothing Harry could have done nothing to protect her, but at least he had tried. Laura had not faced the end scared and alone. Karen wondered how Harry had managed to merely get to this side of town alive. She had never doubted his love for their daughter or his dedication, but it implied a Herculean effort all it’s own. A hero’s tale that would never be told, because Karen would never know it, she had been busy saving herself at the time.

     She came close to killing herself then. She might even have tried once or twice, her memory of that period was still pretty fuzzy. It was difficult sorting out her plans from her actions,  and her body was too scarred offer any reliable clues. Obviously, she hadn’t finished the job, though it’d been a close thing and in many ways still was.

     When she came back to herself she rediscovered her hunger. There had been a local mom and pop supermarket that survived the destruction,  miraculously overlooked in the attack and only partially demolished. Karen had hesitated to approach it. It felt just a bit too lucky. So, she had watched from a distance as the others congregated there. People walking in in full daylight, conversing loudly with one another as they picked over its shelves. All of them monstrously careless and ignorant. She had been then, too.

    The invaders must have been spying from some concealed location nearby, watching to see how who was left, and waiting for the opportune moment when everyone blundered together. The day they finally struck, they were on the crowd so fast she was never quite sure where they’d actually come from. Many of the men were carrying weapons, some had guns, most makeshift clubs or spears. Few of them had them at the ready. One grizzled old-timer had his shotgun cocked and saw them in time to let loose with a couple of rounds, for all the good that did him.

     These weren’t the kind of aliens that flew around in shiny little saucers and zapped you with ray guns. They hadn’t beamed into Mayfair, but charged right down the interstate in an unstoppable wave more akin to the running of the bulls. That first attack had struck the town as unexpectedly as a brick wall might hit a distracted jogger. This second coming only proved Mayfair was still far from prepared for war.

     There were only four of them. Karen hadn’t laid eyes on the aliens before, only heard the commotion and headed the other way. Each was the size of a small SUV, and seemed to have approximately the same top speed.  They were brownish black quadrupeds, all muscled legs and haunches, clawed feet, and dark serrated teeth. They almost looked like some sort of steroid-popping dinosaur, only they moved all wrong, with their joints bending at odd angles in an unsettling fashion before they suddenly darted off in a direction you weren’t anticipating. It stood out to her, for some reason, that their mouths moved straight up and down, as if they lacked any sort of hinged jaw.

     Their skin was hard like stone, and the old man’s shotgun blasts had sent chips of it flying off as shrapnel, but the things came on undaunted. Karen was certain she saw intelligence lurking in their dark, milky eyes. A couple of the creatures even wore metallic helmets bristling with antennas that served some arcane technological purpose.

     They must have been familiar with firearms, because they went for the old guy and the others who held them first, though they chose paths that allowed them to trample the most victims under their massive bladed feet. The old man never got off a third shot, and the scrawny guy who did misfired and hit the woman next to him.

     Claws raked and teeth snapped together, after that one pass there were only five humans left standing. One large trucker-looking sort of guy, dressed in flannel and donning a baseball cap, swung an aluminum bat at an alien’s head so hard that it bent to a right angle upon contact. The thing wasn’t even stunned for a second, it reared up on it’s hind legs and tore him in half with the other two. Some of his intestines flew far enough to land wetly near where Karen was standing, a couple of blocks away. That was what finally sparked her into action. She turned again and ran. 

     The aliens must have been aware of her by then, and it’s doubtful she would have gotten far, had the last woman in the grocery store not been holding a grenade that she had gotten from God knows where. She had managed to pull the pin out an instant before her head was bitten from her shoulders.

     Karen heard the explosion behind her and

    Two of the aliens rebounded off the side of the highway overpass behind them hard enough that they left impressions in the shapes of their bodies. The other pair crashed straight down to the pavement, less dramatically, but no more gently. Karen paused in her flight, her breath sticking in her throat. When three of the creatures staggered uncertainly back to their feet, she stood still no longer. They might have caught her even then, since she had been stupid enough to stop and gape, but when they turned instead to inspect their companion, she had ducked around a corner and ran until her legs gave out beneath her.  

     With the supermarket destroyed she had been forced to dine on rotten, overripe fruit instead. She had found it lying in a shattered ceramic bowl picked from the ruins of a former neighbor’s home. At least the Mulberry River and the rainy season would ensure she didn’t lack for fresh water. She began to sleep during the day and move about only in darkness. It had been weeks until she dared go back to scene of those killings, afraid the aliens might have reset their trap and be waiting for more foolish prey to stumble into it.  

     Her fears proved groundless. When she had

    The alien who had slain the grenade toting

     The rusty hacksaw she had brought with her went bald before it could cut into the skin, even at the joints, but the thing’s skin seemed to have cracked in the heat of the fire that followed the explosion. She was able to remove a section from its right flank that had separated entirely. It was almost two feet thick, with the texture and density of a piece of concrete. She could barely lift it using both hands. The internal organs proved lighter and more pliant, but nothing she managed to scoop out reminded her of anything she’d encountered in nursing school or sophomore biology. 

    Karen had know that to better comprehend her enemy, she'd have to determine what exactly she was dealing with, but she really had no idea what she was going to find. She wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if there was a Russian midget in there, running the thing off a laptop. Still, she’d have felt better if her anatomy lesson had yielded some sort of vital weak point, but she was no scientist and couldn’t fathom which piece of slimy entrails did what. She supposed that this proved that you could kill them by smashing in their entire chest, but she had no idea where she’d find enough firepower to take advantage of that fact.  

     Karen had not seen another human since the second attack, though from time to time she found fresh refuse and other signs of passage. It made sense that anyone else who had lived this long wouldn’t be straying far from cover, either, so she hadn’t completely abandoned the hope that she might have some friend or loved one remaining out there.

     Certainly, there were still aliens around,

      It was probably more luck than savvy that had

     Supper took the form of a mangy alley cat that

     She used her zippo lighter to make a fire by splintering the wood from an uprooted mailbox and stuffing it into the oven at what had once been Angelino’s Pizza Palace. The firelight from the old-fashioned brick oven didn’t reach to the street, but the wind was finally picking up and carried the smell of roasting meat out through the shattered windows.  

     Karen ate quickly, waiting only until the

      A few dogs had smelled her dinner, and she

     The second tremor was stronger and closer, and it did not leave her the luxury of doubt. Patrol! Karen was up and moving a heartbeat, making a beeline for the door to the back alley. She hadn’t completely crossed the threshold of the exit when she heard the alien come crashing through the wall behind her, in all likelihood landing right where she’d been reclining on the floor. 

     She would be no match for the thing in any

     She leapt down a small set of steps and pushed open the heavy door in front of her, painfully kicking aside a basketball-sized rock which had been acting as a doorstop as she passed it so that the door would slam shut and lock automatically behind her. Her pursuer must have lost sight of her and stopped to catch her scent, because after scampering up the ladder laid against the wall she had paused to survey her surroundings before crawling out through the tiny window, but it was still only just smashing down the door as she made her way out onto the rooftops. She pulled the ladder up behind her as she went, she didn’t think it would support the creature’s weight, but there was no point in taking any chances.    

     Karen crossed the roof at a sprint and jumped

    Just as her feet touched the ground, she saw the alien’s head peering out from the window she had just vacated. It seized the sill in its teeth, to hold itself suspended while its powerful front legs bashed a whole in the wall large enough for its bulk to fit through. It stepped out ominously to continue its pursuit, but the roof immediately buckled beneath it.

     It actually hung there suspected for a moment,

     “Hopefully, that’ll slow you down for a second.“  

     Karen cackled triumphantly, but didn’t slacken her pace as she dashed across the street and dove through a hole at the bottom of the fence there. Her rags caught and ripped anew on one of the chain links. A sane woman would have been scared to death, but she felt only a rush of exhilaration as she headed towards the old warehouse. So far everything was going according to the New Plan. 

     A roar behind her alerted her to the fact that

      Karen had left the door to the warehouse ajar,

     The building shook and pieces of mortar rained

     Now came the really tricky part. She had to be far enough away when the alien came broke into the warehouse that it couldn’t quite catch her, but it had to be right on her heels or her plan wouldn’t work and she’d be probably dead anyways. If she misjudged its speed, or her own winded pace, just a smidgen, that would be the end of her.  

Fortunately, she didn’t really have much time to worry about it. She dragged her feet just a tiny bit, then the thing was through the wall and surging towards her and she was hauling ass as best she could. 

     Karen’s lungs burned like she was breathing in acid, but she did not falter as she sped towards the open bed of the eighteen wheeler parked at the loading dock along the opposite wall. The broad, open expanse of the warehouse was densely littered with mashed crates, overturned vats, and industrial-sized pieces of piping, but the path they were treading was as clean as her mother had kept the linoleum on their kitchen floor. If the alien noticed this discrepancy, it gave no indication. Instead, sensing it might have its prey cornered at long last, the beast seemed to summon a final burst of speed.

     She felt a puff of hot breath as the thing’s teeth snapped shut mere millimeters from the nape of her neck, and her legs weakened with despair as the cold certainy of failure took hold in her heart. A near miss, but failure just the same. Then suddenly she was falling, dropping into the tarp covered sink-hole at the edge of the loading dock.

 The alien’s momentum was too great for it to stop, and the depression was barely larger than one of its massive feet, so it merely stumbled over the pit and sailed headfirst into the far side of the truck bed. The impact was deafening, and the parked eighteen wheeler must have skidded a good three feet from the loading dock.     

     Karen didn’t hesitate to gloat. She hopped up out of the depression, flicked on her lighter, and tossed in after her quarry. Quickly, she leaned out over the dock, reaching with the very tips of her fingers- she hadn’t expected the truck to slide so far away- to push a button on the truck bed’s heavy steel door. Hot air seared her face and bringing water to her eyes, but the reinforced steel door slammed shut with a mechanized whir, and saved her from the budding flames. 

     No sooner had the lock clicked shut than the

     The sides of the eighteen wheeler bent and swelled from the pressure changes inside and the alien’s desperate attempts to pound its way out, but since the truck had been a heavy duty refrigeration unit she was pretty sure it would be a while before it gave in to the strain. 

     She ducked back into the sink-hole and withdrew the battered but functional police revolver that she had stashed away in a crevice there. Climbing over the cluttered ground of the warehouse, she hunkered down in a spot where she’d have better cover if the alien did manage to break free. She pictured inside, licked by flame and clawing madly at unyielding walls as its skin cracked and sloughed off onto to the floor. She half wanted the thing to get out of there alive, just so she could put some bullets in it and see how well it liked it.

     Karen had no idea how long the alien’s screaming had been silenced before she became aware of it. When she did, she dropped to her knees and wept for what felt like hours. Once the tears were over, she searched herself and found that the consuming rage was gone as well. Only the hurt remained.