Thirty days.
The countdown has started, North America shivers under the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft, and humanity is hurtling toward an unknown future that lurks at the end of the timer. Somewhere, somehow, the heroes are making their plan...
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SUGARCREEK, OHIO, USA
August 29, 9:50 PM
Jacob leaned back and nursed a beer. It should have been an iced tea or lemonade, but Bess wasn't here to nag about it anymore. She meant well, but what his daughter didn't know wouldn't hurt her. He might have given more of a shit if there wasn't an unearthly large plate of who-knew-what floating above the sky, if the earth itself wasn't in total disarray about the whole thing, if the neighbours weren't screeching their heads off about this conspiracy or that one.
The evacuation notice had been the final straw for Jacob. They were all going to die, it was obvious. What difference would one beer make? Better to die with a happy, drunk stomach than scared and full of piss.
He drained the last of the can, crushed it against his chest, and hurled it across the street. It didn't take long for his taunt to be heard and answered. Within a minute, he could hear the stomping of overpriced boots and then the slam of a porch door.
Standing fifty feet away, she glared at him, hands on hips, hair held up by a towel. Did she know how stupid she looked? Jacob snorted and reached for another beer. The porch lights flickered and went out for a moment, coming back on to reveal Tammy or Toni or Terry (Jacob didn't care to remember her name) waving a shovel.
"What gives you the right to ruin my lawn, you asshole? I pay to live here!" She shook the shovel. "One more can, old man. I dare you!" Spitting on the dirt that she called a lawn, Tammy-Toni-Terry spun on her heel and thumped her way back inside, causing the lights on her side of the street to flicker with the force of her stomping.
"What gives you the right to be so loud?" mumbled Jacob. He rubbed his forehead aggressively. That dumb city-broad had been making more noise in the handful of months since she'd moved in than anyone else on the street had in the last fifteen years.
The noise was even more obnoxious since the thing had appeared, not that it made any sounds itself. Everything under it had died, miraculously. Bugs and birds and possums alike, everything unfortunate and small enough to be caught under the heavy gaze of the disk in the sky had been so disoriented upon coming back to land that it died sooner after a gravitational shift. Hell, he'd lost a few cows the first day the gravity went nuts, before he had the sense to lock them in the barn and pad the place with as much straw as he could pay Rico to pile.
Of course, Rico had quit almost as soon as he started. Good-for-nothing kid. Who was scared of a little anti-gravity and fucked up electricity? Jacob had grown up during worse. That was the problem with kids like Rico and Tammy-Toni-Terry - none of them had ever suffered through anything a day in their lives. Blasting music from her shiny new truck when nobody on the block owned anything their great-grandparents hadn't would be unthinkable if she actually worked on the land she claimed to own.
