Everything changed when the Karnakian nation attacked.

It started early one morning with persistent rumors; little green men around Jupiter, invasion forces of reptiloid aliens, even hollow earth lizard-men from Antarctica. When that damned ship the size of Manhattan appeared in our star system, the excrement hit the air excitation device almost immediately, long before it had been made ‘official’ knowledge, even whilst said knowledge was in the realm of ‘you’ll have a nasty accident involving twenty seven bullets and sixteen floors, and it’ll be ruled as suicide’.

Upon becoming official public knowledge, it was all over the news on every station. Within seconds, even. It was global before you could say ‘Independence Day’. Aliens, real ones. Live ones. Living, breathing, squawking, sharp-toothed feathered ones. It didn’t take long after that for everything to go to hell. Almost an entire minute.

The first I knew about things was when, at a local cafe for lunch, one of the patrons started screeching like a broken car alarm, arm outstretched towards the television. The next thing I encountered was somebody going off like an automated kiosk with an unexpected item in the bagging area as they held up the entire place with a Chelesa dagger, only to be brought down by several burly bystanders in a convincing recreation of a rugby scrum. The looting of the rest of the high-street at that point was less unexpected than a bad case of crabs from a cheap hooker.

I’d planned to go shopping later that night, but seeing how my favourite shop was on fire I would have to put off that particular trip until much later. I’d been expected back at work after lunch, but, well, world ending and all. I gave myself a little me-time and went home, locked and barred the doors and windows, and hid under my blankets.

I’d like to say everything was rainbows and kittens in short order but, well, it wasn’t. I’m mostly skipping past the attempt to mug me, where a hopeful wannabe with some sort of knife or possibly a spork with pretensions tried to tell me he wanted my wallet. I’d taken a single look at him and just chucked a brick through a store window — one of the few that was still intact — and gestured hopefully at the loot inside. Seeing as how the police were not only outnumbered but had decided that checking up on the quality of coffee in what had swiftly turned into a new garrison was more their speed, money was kind of an optional and would be of dubious use at any time in the near future. I’d made it home with my wallet intact and a new television, but I digress.

I curled up in bed, whimpering, and tried to shut out the world. A day later and if not the world then at least my porcelain throne was calling my name. I reluctantly got up, decided that my impromptu vacation was being extended by a few days, at least until I found out whether I’d have a job past the weekend or whether I’d have to eat my boss to survive a gruelling siege of the end of humanity — there was a lot of him to eat, he’d probably last a few days. I could eat his legs first, it would make his attempted escapes easier to deal with, eat least — and switched on my new sixty-five inch hi-def window to the world.

The news was sketchy, and full of distant motion shots and screaming. I only got the truth of it much later — much, much later. It turned out that some idiot called ‘Hank’ or ‘Frank’ or something had been taking his dog for a walk and had met a small advance group of those honest-to-goodness space dinosaurs, mech-suits and all, and had been neatly bisected via the arms.

People talk about how Neil’s speech from the moon features a mistake, yet it’s so well repeated that we tend to overlook it. It has to be poetic irony that our world’s legacy would be one fat bastard walking some ugly shitrat and getting mauled by space raptors after falling flat on his face.

In the heat of the moment though, I knew none of this. All I knew was that space raptors full of death and mecha were advancing on the last bastion of mankind and turning them into mincemeat.

“Holy fucking christ on a bicycle,” I whispered, eyes wide as I watched the shakiest of shaky cam movies featuring said mechanized space raptors for the first time. They were huge, they waded through the most special of special ops as if our guys were toddlers. They made them look like toddlers, too.

There were very few things one could do at a time like this. I made more popcorn. I mean that’s got to be number one, right? Snacks at the end of the world?

Looking back, there’s a lot of people that would like to blame the karnakians for the chaos that followed. I honestly can’t. Riot police firing tear-gas canisters into the crowds, hooligans in face-masks throwing molotovs back, these aren’t a space dinosaur thing, they’re a human thing. Cults worshipping space-raptor jesus might be a space-raptor thing, but it is honestly also a human thing, as are ugly masks, shotguns and impromptu BDSM parties in the streets. It really made getting a few pints of milk quite an interesting experience.

I’d like to say I remained calmly above it all, but there’s a point at which the absurdity of the end of the world — involving our armies being massively outclassed by the collective stupidity of the lowest IQ denominator ruling every mob as well as the intergalactic technology gulf between us and said space-raptors — but I didn’t. I accidentally kidnapped the clerk from my local pound-mart.

“Ah, sorry about this. I forgot my wallet and, well, I’m not really in the mood to go back for it.” I surrounded Bob with a plastic hose from the gardening section of the mini-mart — a ten quid special, came with its own reel, it was his own fault really for having such a good deal — and did my best to tighten it up. “I mean, I don’t know what kind of gun you’ve got back there.”

“Gun!? I don’t even have a knife. I guess you could count the hotdog buns as weapons, they get pretty hard after a couple of days…”

I nodded thoughtfully. “Could’ve had my eye out with one of those. It’s self-defence.”

“Um, are you going to take me back to your rape-dungeon?”

“Ahh… no? I was… er… hmm. I’m not sure what I was going to do.”

“Only if you are, I think we’ve got some astroglide somewhere on these shelves, you know?”

I stammered a refusal. “I-I-I-I don’t think my barn door swings that way, you know?”

“Mine neither, but crazed rapists do all kinds of strange things and, well, I’d rather it didn’t, you know, hurt. You’re not going to kill and eat me either, then?”

“Umm.” This wasn’t quite going how I’d seen it going. “No? Do you want me to?”

“N-no, I mean, if you were going to, I’d suggest just letting me live in your rape dungeon instead and I’d help carry some tinned food or something.”

“Are you… you seem quite attached to this rape dungeon idea.”

“Just saying.”

“Noted. Umm. I… I don’t think I want to kill and eat you. Or rape you.”

“You could always let me go?”

“And have you call the cops on me?”

Bob looked out the smashed window of his shop. “Er, I don’t think you need to worry about that. Look, how about I help you carry your shopping home?”

Half an hour later and Bob and I were unlocking my front door.

“Make yourself at home,” I said. “I think there’s some popcorn left.”

“Should I put the kettle on?”

“Yeah, there’s tea and coffee in the kitchen. Thanks for all this.”

“No problem. Should I fill the bathtub full of water or something after?”

“Umm, is this about the rape dungeon thing again?”

“No, it’s… isn’t it something you’re supposed to do? I mean the water could go out at any point.”

“Huh. Good thinking. Can’t hurt, I guess.”

I busied myself in the kitchen. True to his word, Bob filled the kettle and set it to boil, then disappeared to the bathroom. I heard the tap running on the bath, then the pitter-patter of Bob’s feet as he re-entered the living room.

“Nice TV,” he called.

“Yeah, just looted it.”

“Got Netflix setup already?”

“Well, uh, yeah, but don’t you wanna, you know, watch them?”

“...Good point.”

The door was swiftly blocked with the dresser and the curtains were drawn, so the pair of us settled down on my ratty sofa to watch the world burn.

It really was burning, too. My city wasn’t, mostly, but across the pond? Yep, quite a few bugout bags had been fetched and personal vaults locked up tighter than a nun’s snatch. That’s not saying there weren’t space dinos in my local area, because there were — I could hear the not-so-distant retort of gunfire, and shouting and screaming, from the streets below my window — but with my door closed and my curtains drawn, we could pretend quite efficiently. However, just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.

The smoke trails of the world’s collection of ready to boogaloo missiles were almost pretty. It was a shame we didn’t get to see much of them before the airburst knocked out the power.

“Aww man…” Bob waved the remote at the television, but it didn’t do much good.

“Oh shit,” I said, scrambling to my feet and dragging Bob with me to the bedroom. “Get under the bed! Now! And no that’s not where I keep the rape dungeon!”

Far overhead, and several minutes ago, everything was going wrong.

Matriarch Nir’brt, almost bald and eternally disgraced, was screaming to a deck full of panicking karnakians as she fought to keep hell contained, her officers from offering themselves to the Great Mother Beyond and as many of the panicking little galaxies in the lands beneath her ship — The Five Paths — from burning along with their world. She’d first welcomed the arrival of the High Lord Inquisitor-Commander of the Eternal Holy Karnakian Crusade And Its Infinite Legions, thinking that surely the representative of the Holy Diarchy would bring sanity to this cluster fluff, but if anything it had gotten worse. Setting fire to a homeworld full of unknown primitives wasn’t something she could just pluck and cast off, like a broken feather, oh no, no, no. She was, therefore, working full tilt to at least scrape some kind of penance for her actions.

“|By the Eternal Soul…|”

Nir’brt was momentarily pulled out of her monologue of orders, counter-orders, status updates and situational reports by the startled, strangled voice of her EM Lord Tck’trt as he kept an eye on the local transmissions. Something had gone dead, something else had gone very much live.

“|Speak, Tck’trt!|”

“|I-It’s the… it’s… multiple targets!|”

“|So they’re firing at us again, so what?|”

“|No, no,|” the distraught creature said, his feathers ruffling, “|they’re firing at themselves!|”

“|What!? How many?|”

“|Five... ten… fifteen…|”

“|Warheads? That’s not—|”

“|Thousand. Fifteen thousand warheads. Confirmation from multiple Nests, High EM Lord confirms. They’re… they’re… they’re going to burn!|”

There was a moment of pure silence onboard The Five Paths, and then everything got even louder.

“|Make them stop!|”

“|FIXITFIXITFIXIT!|”

“|Eternal Soul take me!|”

“|Great Mother forgive!|”

“|Cracked Shells of the Lost Brood!|”

Beneath them, fifteen thousand streaks of light headed first skywards, then turned, inexorably, Dirt-wards.

“|Tck’trt, do something! Anything! Knock them out!|”

“|Ah, ah… shit… orders from High EM Lord, we have a firing solution, this should work... bouncing the standing wave from our recon satellites, boosting power… First Brood let this work! Pulse! ...Five hells! Detonation!|”

Beneath them, for a brief moment, the planet Dirt grew as bright as the distant sun. Lights flickered onboard The Five Paths and sensors reset from overload.

In a sensible world, that would have been the end of it. A dead man’s switch, a final ‘fuck you’ to an eternal enemy, a last gasp attempt at scorched earth, and it would have been over. This time, the small squishy bipeds weren’t so lucky.

“|Is it… did we…?|”

Gasping for breath, Tck’trt started ripping his feathers out, keening a Fr’Nas’prk’an Death Wail. “|We d-did b-but… but…|”

“|But what?|”

Tck’trt gestured, mutely, claws bloody, as fifteen thousand more warheads sped skywards. The initial airburst had already killed tens of millions, injuring tens of millions more. A second barrage? If unstopped? It would be more than the word ‘massacre’ could encompass.

“|Eight Souls Protect… what’s the firing solution?|”

“|We… we don’t have one. Our systems were knocked out. We’re doing what we can… I don’t know if it’ll be enough!|”

Matriarch Nir’brt watched as the clock counted down towards doom on this primitive, broken homeworld. Short minutes later, despite the Karnakians stopping thousands of missiles, tens, hundreds of glowing mushrooms sprouted across the globe.

If they just could have been stopped, things would have been very different.

“|Great Mother…!|”

Seated high above the theatre of disaster spread out before him, the High Lord Inquisitor-Commander of the Eternal Holy Karnakian Crusade And Its Infinite Legions stood up from his throne. Slapping his tail and trilling the Call of Command, he bid the massed fleet to Silence.

“|All ships. I repeat, all ships, this is no first contact. This is no crusade! This is no longer an invasion! This is a rescue mission! These creatures must be saved! Holy Diarchy forgive me, but we will not see any more of these creatures fall! Empty their world! Save them! Bring them home! Protect them from themselves!|”