form of a photograph and a disc labeled 'New Year's Eve.'
Her legs wobbled as she eyed the picture. It showed her wearing that black dress she had found hanging in her apartment the day her memories had been stolen.
In the picture, she stood among a row of people: Lori and Jon Brewer as well as Dante Jones, all of whom she knew to have been close friends of Trevor Stone going back to the earliest days of the invasion, maybe longer.
Next to her, with his arm slung around her waist and holding her close, stood Trevor. All of them smiling together. All friends. And yet, the way he held her so close…the way his arm wrapped around her…the look on her face; an expression of happiness so deep and real she nearly did not recognize herself…
…Evan Godfrey stood at the podium waiting for his VIP guests to arrive so that the press conference could begin. He had come outside early with the intension of gaining the media's trust, of taking control of the event. Instead, he felt uncomfortable and vulnerable.
A commotion pulled his eyes from the pages of notes and quotes and background information. The line of reporters seated on folding metal chairs rose to their feet one after another like stadium fans doing the wave all with wide eyes staring beyond Evan.
The President swiveled around.
A man descended upon Evan Godfrey in determined strides. A ragged man dressed in BDU pants and a black shirt carrying some long object in his hands. A man with eyes locked onto Evan's own.
Trevor. Trevor Stone.
The President's shock stymied any defense, any attempt at escape.
The warrior King who had come to reclaim his throne raised the sword with both hands in a clumsy but brutal downward thrust. The metal pierced the double breasted suit dead center and slowly but firmly plunged into Godfrey's sternum and out the other side.
The victim's knees bent forward while his shoulders and body slumped back. The blade finished its blow by firmly lodging in the ground, pinning President Evan Godfrey in a half-standing position; his arms dangling.
He coughed blood once. An insane smile flashed on his lips. His eyes glazed over.
Video tape rolled, cameras flashed, but no reporter spoke in anything other than gasps.
Trevor Stone gazed at Godfrey's corpse for a moment, and then instinctively shot his eyes up toward the roof of the White House. There Dante Jones stood, watching the carnage below with an unhinged jaw and scared eyes.
Trevor turned around and walked back inside…
…It wasn't very big-maybe the size of a small car-but it made a Hell of a noise. A screaming noise, as if it were a wounded animal in horrendous pain. From a distance, it resembled a stained green sheet wrapped around a ball with the ends of that sheet flapping like a kite trapped in a gale. It made Prescott think of a ghost, a specter, some kind of spook.
However, this 'Spook'-about the tenth so far-rose from the mouth of one of the whale-things. The 'Spook' hollered as it swept over the beach before finding a target and diving as if it were a kamikaze pilot, hitting a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and exploding both of them in a burst of fire, sand, and shrapnel.
'Get those tanks on the beach!' Prescott screamed at Bogart through a radio above bursts of automatic fire coming from the rear patio. 'We have to hold them on the beach!'
Bobby Bogart's voice replied from a tank cupola, 'I've got two more columns coming up. They'll be here in five minutes!'
Bogart's first column of Abrams lined in a row of eight along East Ocean Boulevard. Their main guns fired one after another, slamming into the phalanx of rough-skinned whale-things that served as landing craft, each twenty yards wide and twice as long.
One of the ships suffered a critical hit, listed, and tossed about chaotically on the surf bleeding a type of yellow puss. The others-a hundred of them-continued toward shore stopping periodically to release batches of flying nasties.
Human infantry manned hastily-improvised barricades facing the beach from Ocean Boulevard. Machine guns and light artillery fired toward the Pacific at the mass of ships; or were they monsters?
In reply, one of The Order's own battleships-something like a piece of coral with barrels-launched a bombardment of its own. The big round shells resembled water balloons, spreading a splash of killer acid on men and equipment, mortally wounding both. The disintegrating liquid worked too fast to allow for screams. Prescott saw a dozen of his troops melt away in the blink of an eye.
One of the flying 'Spooks' hit the roof of the museum and detonated. Plaster fell, glass smashed, someone cried out. A smell of burning wood drifted through the room. Prescott ignored the hit and screamed to a radio man, 'Get me a main line back east. They have to-' 'General!' A soldier's shout managed to reach his ears above the sound of battle. Prescott followed the voice toward the patio, only to be greeted by fleeing men. 'Stand your ground! We have to stop them on the beach!' How silly that sounded even to Tom's own ears as he saw the weapon Voggoth had sent against them.
It rose out of the water some five-hundred yards off shore. Rising…rising… impossibly big much like The Empire's own dreadnoughts, but the grotesque form of the beast made it far more hideous.
Prescott wandered onto the balcony, transfixed by the sight. He forgot about the bullets and enemy projectiles whizzing by; the tanks firing; the kamikaze 'Spooks' dive-bombing armored vehicles. He forgot about all that because he knew none of it made any difference anymore. He was already dead.
At that moment, he came to see all their efforts for the last ten years to be in vain; all the battles won insignificant. At that moment, General Tom Prescott understood that someday soon, the Earth would belong to Voggoth.
It stood a thousand feet tall on two massive pillars that functioned as legs, but the thing was far from humanoid. Those legs sprouted from either side of a tube like body that faced upwards with fibrous strands lining either side.
There did not appear to be a head, but two columns of granite-colored spheres that might be eyes lined what could be thought of as the chest. But that was not quite right, for the chest was more like a slug facing skyward held in place by thick tendons wrapped around and around.
Whether to blame his eyes or his mind, Prescott did not know, but he could not understand what stood in the Ocean before him like a walking skyscraper so tall its top tickled the clouds.
The General heard a sound very much like an air raid siren cranking louder and louder. He saw the top of the Leviathan shake and what appeared to be…yes it had to be… gusts of wind sucked out of the sky above and into the creature; the clouds nearly succumbed to the suction.
The tendons along its midsection expanded. Sacs dozens of feet in diameter puffed up all across the body in bubbles of red and brown.
The sound stopped. The world grew eerily quiet.
At first, it appeared to Tom that the creature began to fall. But no, only the upper half of it moved, kind of crouching forward as if peering down at puny ants scrambling around its feet. The top faced forward parallel to the ground; facing its human enemies.
Prescott saw no eyes, no mouth, no features other than a sickly round orifice large enough to swallow an aircraft carrier.
Then came another sound. It made him think of a fog horn.
The building shook. The ocean waters sloshed about in unnatural directions. Every molecule around Prescott trembled as if the air shivered.
Then the wind came, so fast it outraced its own sound; a wide swath of wind that first birthed a miniature tsunami but before the destructive waters could reach shore the supersonic blast sent the remaining tanks flying hundreds of feet into the air; ripped apart every building along the ocean front so thoroughly that nothing larger than splinters remained; and literally tore the skin off General Tom Prescott…
…Nina sat on her knees facing the television screen and slipped the DVD into the player. The homemade movie offered scenes from a party; a New Years Eve party nearly a decade before during the year she could not remember.
The audio offered a range of music including sounds from a piano as well as a larger band and even a polka at one point, or so she thought.
