Chapter Three - Incursion Detected

Incursion protocol is simple. Conventional armed forces can, at best, slow down or stall an Antithesis incursion. That is, most of the so-called ‘models’ between zero and ten can be defeated with regular weaponry with sufficiently concentrated firepower.

This is good. It gives the civilians a chance to find shelter until the samurai arrive.

Hrm? If they don’t arrive? Well, then you’re right fucked, aren’t you?

-- Professor Asimov, Lectures on the Antithesis Threat, New Oxford University 2027

***

I gasped when my vision flashed red.

Two words filled my world.

“Oh no,” Lucy said from right next to me.

I felt her hand fumbling for mine and I squeezed hers as the prompt before me flicked away and was replaced by a loading circle right in the middle of my vision. A new prompt opened up, this one with a map pointing me towards the far end of the museum. A large prompt hovered under the map for a few seconds before both moved to the corner of my vision.

“Oh shit,” Daniel said. He was looking out the windows lining the roof.

I followed his gaze to see huge black things pouring out of rips in the sky. They were long, black, and covered in wiggling bits of flesh, but I could only guess at how big they were with nothing to give me a sense of scale.

Smaller flakes of... stuff shot past the big lumbering alien things, each one only a hundreth the size of the big things.

Then I saw one of the flakes crash into a hovercar trying to get away.

The skies lit up with beams of light and streams of bullets so thick and bright they looked like jets of glowing water. The distant roar of heavy machine gun fire filtered into the museum. Some of the smaller alien pods exploded apart in mid-air.

“Oh shit,” I agreed. The big ones had to be the size of small skyscrapers, and they were coming down to Earth with the grace of bricks doing as bricks did when falling from a great height.

“Move! Move! Move!” Someone screamed. An adult.

I had never given much of a crap about the whole ‘listen to the adults’ thing, but I was willing to make an exception.

We rushed towards where the map was pointing us to go, kids streaming by and screaming, the few adults from the schools around us directing their charges ahead. I tried to spot the kittens, but for a moment all I could think of was to keep hold of Lucy’s hand and make sure I wasn’t trampled as we funneled into a smaller corridor.

I lost track of time as I worked to keep Daniel ahead of me and keep Lucy on her feet. It was hard to breathe as we were squeezed together, and I couldn’t hear myself think over the wails and screams and the fresh scent of piss.

My heart felt like it was going to burst when we came across a huge sign. A stick figure in a home, the yellow-black fallout symbol on one side, the green-black jagged and bug-like Antithesis warning symbol on the other.

We were squeezed in, all of us pushing into a tight doorway that opened up into a large room.

I knew what incursion shelters were supposed to look like. There had been shit cartoons about them on TV since before I was born, and I could remember there being one in my elementary school.

The room we were in was... not a shelter.

There was the reinforced walls, and the little cubicle to the sides where beds and waiting areas should have been, but that was it.

“Where’s the door?” someone screamed.

I turned and looked to the entrance. The large reinforced door was... not there.

This wasn’t a shelter, it was a dead-end.

But it had to be reinforced, and it was a better place to wait than elsewhere. I moved to the side--pulling a dishevelled Daniel who had his hands pressed over a no doubt bruised eye, and Lucy who had lost a crutch along the way--with me until we were out of the way of the surging crowd of kids and caretakers. There had been more people in the museum than I had though. Maybe a hundred in all.

The shelter could support that many, I guessed. Or it could have, were it finished.

“Are you okay?” I asked Lucy.

“Just peachy,” Daniel said.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I shot back.

He gave me the finger, but it was with a nervous chuckle. The bit of levity helped, it made things normal.

“I’m fine,” Lucy said. She looked a little shaken, but looked fine otherwise. “Check on the kittens.”

The kittens, right.

I pulled my friends closer to the side where they would be a little out of the way. The stream of humanity from the shelter’s entrance had slowed down to a mere trickle now. Androids were stationing themselves around the room, spouting pleasantries and bullshit to keep folks calm, not that any of it could be heard over the crying.

I took a deep breath. “Kittens!” I shouted.

Eyes turned my way, and I probably looked like a fool.

“Kittens! To me!”

The twins rushed over, then it was Nemo and Nose, Bargain and Tim. I shoved them towards Lucy who welcomed them with hugs and smiles and lies to keep them calm.

I counted heads. “Spark and Junior are missing,” I said before returning to the middle of the room. “Kittens! Spark, Junior?!”

“Miss Leblanc, your voice’s current decibel level is above the recommended amount, please lower you--” Bitchbot said as she rolled over to me.

“Over there,” I said. “The kids are there.”

“I am in the process of giving you a disciplinary reprimand,” the android continued.

I resisted the urge to swear at the android. “One of the kids is breaking, uh, a museum exhibit,” I said.

The android paused, its one robotic eye focused and unfocused. “That is a priority issue,” it said before rolling off.

Something grabbing my side had me spinning around so fast I almost fell. I came face to face with Spark, the little brat looking at me with wide, nearly-panicked eyes. “Cat,” he said. “Cat, Junior, she fell.” He pointed to the shelter’s exit.

I froze.

The kittens were my responsibility, and maybe Junior was around already. She was just the type to hide at a moment like this to piss me off.

And yet, would she really do that?

I had to tell someone.

A look around the room showed adults dealing with the panic by staring at their phones, or by staring off with glazed-over eyes, a sure sign they had sunk into their eyegear. They wouldn’t be useful. The androids were right out.

It was up to me, or Lucy, or Daniel.

That wasn’t the best.

“Oh, okay, Spark. Listen, tell Lucy that I’m going to go get Junior, okay?” I asked.

The brat nodded and ran off to the others. I moved towards the exit. I would find Junior, and I would drag her back by an ear if I had to.

The floor skipped out from under me.

I joined the others in screaming as everything shook. The lights flickered. One of the reinforced panels along a wall buckled and fell off, revealing it to be no thicker than paper.

“Fuck,” I said.

The lights came back, bathing the room in red. Something crackled and a voice, too calm to be real, filled the air. “Incursion detected in this building. Please seal the shelter door and await further instructions and slash or rescue.”

I think we all--or at least those that had understood--looked to the place where the door should have been.

There were over a dozen floors below the museum. The aliens could be on any one of those.

I heard distant rumbles and could just imagine the city being wrecked from above by alien hordes. I had seen the vids of Antithesis swarms hitting a city, it was never pretty, and this one looked big. I shook my head. That was someone else’s problem. I had to protect the kittens.

Pushing myself forwards, I shuffled out of the shelter.

Everything told me to go back. It wasn’t sane to walk out into the open when there were monsters lurking around every corner.

I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to stop being such a moron. Once I had found Junior, everything would be alright.

The corridors back to the museum proper were a lot longer than I remembered. I crossed a couple of kids who ran by, a few adults herding them along while looking over their shoulders.

The farther along I got, the fewer people I crossed.

Then I was on the main floor and my eyes were dragged to the ceiling above, or where the ceiling had been. A hole large enough to park a bus in was missing from the far end, bits of metal and concrete crushed that entire corner of the museum.

And in that hole, hanging off the side like shit clinging to the side of a toilette hole, was a large pod of fleshy goop.

I slapped a hand over my mouth.

Something moved out of the fleshy mess.

My eye locked onto a large form that flopped out of the destroyed pod and crashed atop a display. It was the size of one of those dogs, the sort macho idiots used to scare people away, but furless and black.

I didn’t get to stare for long as it rolled off the display it had fallen on and disappeared from my line of sight.

Had there only been the one?

The pod looked big enough to hold dozens, but it was partially crushed.

“Cat?”

I looked over to where I had heard my name.

There, some dozen meters away, pinned under the fallen wall of a display that had held some sort of clothes, was Junior. The girl was struggling to lift the display, but she was pinned.

I... I wanted to run away.

There were literal man-eating monsters in the room.

I took a step back.

“Cat?” Junior called out. She had to have seen the pod too. And with the noise she was making. Could they even hear?

My legs shook. My breath caught, acid burning at the back of my throat.

I ran.

My knees crashed onto the ground next to Junior. “Pull it off,” Junior said.

“Shut up,” I said. “Be quiet. Did you see how many there were?”

“Can I answer or do you want me to stay quiet?” she snarked.

It wasn’t the time for it. I think something about my expression told her as much.

“I saw six,” she said.

That was... six more than I could handle. I pushed the thought aside, grabbed the edge of the display and lifted. It was just some thick padding with metal rails around it, but it was large and a bitch to pick up with only one arm. Worse, lifting it made some of the things atop it fall off.

Junior shifted underneath, wincing as she pushed up. She slipped out, on show staying behind.

Face red, I lowered the display. “Okay, now we need to...”

Junior was looking past me.

I turned.

The monster was standing ten paces behind me.