Portland, Oregon

Yesterday

4:50 AM

Laura

It was quiet on the Earth’s last morning as Laura and everyone else had known it. The quiet itself wasn’t unusual. Laura was always up and out for her morning constitutional before the sun. Her doctor said she needed to stretch her legs, encourage circulation, get her knees moving before they got any stiffer. Ever since her husband had suffered a stroke the year before, she’d become more and more sedentary, finding less and less reason to go out and do anything.

But her runs had become an enjoyable, as well as necessary part of her daily routine. They were quiet without being lonely, relaxing without feeling like she was slipping into her grave. Too often she felt other people her age were just trying to get comfortable for their caskets.

Her neighborhood was always quiet at this time: the rows of houses dark, just barely touched by the gray-blue light of the coming day, perhaps a pat of buttery sunlight visible just over their rooftops in the spring in summer. In fall, it was all gray, though. The October morning bit at her with the first hints of winter’s fangs, and Laura was thinking she would start needing to bundle up on her walks.

Something cracked in the distance.

Laura turned and glanced to her side, towards the Willamette River where she had heard it. It sounded like a weak clap of thunder, or maybe a power box having an outage. Nothing followed and she put it out of her mind, and continued along down the sidewalk, arms pumping up and down in exaggerated motions in time with her steps.

It was another five minutes before she heard a similar cracking noise, this one closer, maybe just the next street over. Laura paused again and tried to peer between the houses on her right. The neighborhood was old enough to have plenty of fully grown oak trees, and she couldn’t see much. Something rustled in the branches behind the houss, but she dismissed it as a flock of birds or one of the neighborhood cats.

Crack!

Crack!

Another two sharp sounds ahead of her, just around the corner.

Laura stopped.

The neighborhood was always quiet at this time but it wasn’t just quiet anymore. It was as if the city were holding its breath.

Laura had never been given to superstition. She never even really bothered to go to church outside of social events. But something in her gut was screaming at her to move, to get out of sight, to run her little white sneakers back to her home and hide under the bed.

She backed away from the street corner ahead and hurried onto the nearest lawn, then behind the corner of a two-story home with ivy growing along its side. She stayed there for several moments, her breathing rapid despite her leisurely pace.

Nothing.

Just the stillness of an early morning.

“Going senile,” she said and blushed. If anybody saw her now, a paranoid old woman jumping at shadows and hiding behind a house that wasn’t hers, she’d never get over it. She put her hand on the wall of ivy to catch her breath before she returned to her walk when something moved into view at the end of the street.

It was the size of a horse, and was mostly legs and mouth. Two legs covered in scales, but huge and muscular like a rabbit’s, and tipped with vicious black claws, thumped on the pavement. The legs were attached to a small torso that tapered down into a long, thick tail that lashed behind it. Its front end made Laura think of a carnivorous toucan: a huge beak, hooked at the end, and two beady black eyes just behind it.

Laura thought she was having a stroke, if her husband had seen crazy monsters before he had twisted up like a dying spider and his brain had turned to mush. Except the creature was too real. It had weight to it, it cast a hazy shadow, and every scale on its body shifted with every twitch of its alien musculature. It stepped onto a lawn and the grass bent and squished under its splayed avian toes. It swung its head to the side and knocked a mail box over with a swish of its massive beak.

The creature let out a croaking hiss and stepped further onto the lawn. It raised its beak and Laura heard it inhale from down the street.

“Who the hell is smashing up my yard?” an irritated, masculine voice asked. The creature cocked its head to the side, locked it gaze on the front door of the house the voice had come from, then rushed up the front steps. It used its beak as a battering ram and smashed through the door with ease. There was a guttural cry, then screams of agony and more croaking hisses.

Laura put a pale hand over her mouth, eyes wide as she watched the lashing tail vanish into the house.

Crack!

Crack!

Crack! Crack!

More sounds from all around her, except the way she had come. Laura didn’t stay to see what it meant. She had seen enough. She fled.

5:05 AM

Gregg

It was the screaming that woke Gregg. At first he thought it might be Kelly, perhaps wailing over some stupid thing again: a roach in the kitchen, a stubbed toe, burned oatmeal. Something. He loved her (most of the time) but she had the fortitude of a neurotic chihuahua.

“What in——” Gregg said as he rose and then saw his wife rubbing her eyes next to him.

“Gregg?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. Outside, I guess. Unless Tyson screams like a girl now, or he’s watching a horror movie at max volume,” Gregg said and swung himself out of bed. It was becoming more of a hurdle to get out of bed the bigger his gut got. He kept telling himself he’d get up earlier and do some exercise, but sleep always won out. A knock at the door made Kelly jump and Gregg rolled his eyes at her.

“Dad? Mom?” Tyson asked from out in the hall.

“Yeah, bud,” Gregg said and Tyson opened the door. His face was a white mask hanging into darkness of the doorway.

“Did you scream, Mom?” Tyson asked.

“No, baby. We heard it too, though,” Kelly said. Another sound from outside, a rattling buzz, the distant drone of cicadas, maybe, but more metallic.Glass shattered somewhere in the distance, then another scream, masculine this time.

“What the hell is going on out there?” Gregg asked and threw the curtains away from the window beside the bed. His bedroom was on the second floor of the house and faced the backyard. The fence that separated his yard from the neighbors behind them, the Thompsons, was short enough to allow him to see into their backyard as well, and a little bit of the street beyond.

The trees shook beyond the Thompsons’ house, and something that looked like a black water tower poked above their leafy tops. It had several glowing green orbs around its middle, and the metallic buzzing noise followed it as it moved down the street.

“What the hell?” Gregg asked before movement from the yard caught his eye.

Frank Thompson, his wife Gretta, and their two children emerged from the back door. They were all in their pajamas, but none looked sleepy or disoriented. Their faces were blank masks of neutrality, which was especially odd on the children. They walked single file in lock-step off the back porch and marched with the efficiency and timing of clockwork soldiers.

And their eyes glowed a bright, unearthly green. They followed after the mobile blackish water tower thing and the buzzing metal noise. There was more movement from the street, below the trees. Gregg couldn’t see much more besides legs and feet, but he saw all of them marching in time, in perfect synchronization, all of the following that unnatural metallic drone.

“Gregg?” Kelly asked.

“Something’s going on,” Gregg replied. “I don’t know what, but it’s weird. I’m gonna call the cops.”

“What is it, Dad?” Tyson asked as Gregg picked up his phone.

“I just said I didn’t know,” Gregg snapped and dialed 911. It rang.

It kept ringing.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gregg asked after a full minute of waiting.

“What?” Kelly asked, her voice rising with tension.

“God damn 911 isn’t answering,” Gregg said.

“Try just the police station?” Tyson asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Go get dressed,” Gregg said and looked up the number for the nearest precinct. “In case we gotta get out of here.”

“Do you think it’s something serious?” Kelly asked.

“Kelly, how many times do I have to say I don’t know? Go put on some fucking clothes and make sure the doors are all locked. Don’t go outside for nothing,” Gregg snapped and listened to the line ring. Kelly scurried away to her closet and began to get ready while he waited.

He was about to give up when there was a click and a breathy, “Portland, PD. Hold,” before another click and then hold music.

“What the hell?” Gregg asked. He didn’t have long to wait before the line clicked again.

“Portland, PD,” the same voice said.

“Yeah, I just called 911 and nobody was picking up!” Gregg said. “People were screaming outside my house and, something just moved through the trees, and my neighbors were behaving weird——”

“We know, sir,” the officer on the line said. “We’ve been getting calls for an hour. Just stay inside, barricade your doors. Watch your phone or the news for announcements. Stay inside.”

Click.

“Hello? Hey. Hey!” Gregg shouted into his phone. “Fuck.”

“What is it? What’s going on?” Kelly asked as she emerged in a rumpled blouse and a pair of jeans.

“Something big enough to occupy the whole Portland PD, apparently,” Gregg said.

“Dad! Mom!” Tyson yelled from downstairs. Gregg hurried out of his room and leaned over the banister above the living room. Tyson stood in the middle of the room below, staring outside the front window at the street beyond.

“What is it?” Gregg demanded.

“Some people are coming up the street,” Tyson said. “They’re kinda walking funny.”

Gregg though of the Thompsons, of their mechanical, in-sync movements, and of their glowing green eyes.

“Do they have green eyes?” Gregg asked.

“Uh, yeah, actually,” Tyson said. “They’re going into the neighbors’ place.”

Gregg heard glass breaking from outside, wood splintering.

“Whoa,” Tyson said.

“Get to the car!” Gregg said. It sounded like the green-eyed people were breaking into the neighbors’ homes. They didn’t have time to barricade every door and window. They had to move.

“Gregg?” Kelly asked behind him. She held a pair of his jeans and a shirt, and her eyes were wide with confusion and concern. He seized her by the upper arm and she flinched away from him. For a moment he was irritated. He hadn’t hurt her in over a decade, hadn’t had a drink in just as long, and she was still like this. But he didn’t have time to be mad, or angry with her. There was a high-pitched scream from next door, and more of that buzzing noise.

“Go!” Gregg shouted and yanked her down the stairs as his son rushed to the garage. Gregg caught a glimpse of green-eyed figures approaching the front window of the living room as he rounded the corner behind the stairs and grabbed the keys off the hook by the garage door. Tyson had already propped the door open and thrown himself into their SUV and was buckling in.

Glass shattered just as Gregg hauled Kelly into the garage. He all but leapt into the driver’s seat and waved her in. She was sniffling and crying as she got in the passenger side. Gregg hit the button on the garage door opener as he started the engine.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he said as the garage door lifted up. The door to the house thumped once, then opened and a clustered group of green-eyed strangers surged into the garage, hands reaching for the SUV.

Gregg locked the doors and threw the car into reverse and sped backwards. Kelly screamed as the roof of the car scraped the bottom of the garage door and bent it outward. The SUV screeched as it hurtled into the street, and Gregg sped away. He caught sight of more green-eyed people pouring out of houses behind them, all of them in-sync, and that strange noise droning louder. There was something else behind them, something that looked like walking telephone poles, but it was still too dark to tell.

Gregg decided he didn’t know and didn’t want to, and sped away from his home and the invaders within.