Falling Skies Invasion Alone

Confessions

I stood watching Anne patch up Maggie. She was groaning about how she felt like she could barely move.

"You're bloody lucky you didn't need anything more than new stitches." I shook my head at her. "She could have killed you."

"She could have killed any one of us." Maggie got off the table. Anne left the room to tend to Matt who hadn't moved from a spot at the window so he could see when his family returned.

They had gone after Ben and Karen almost immediately, so technically the pair only had a small lead over the group, but Ben and Karen had the spikes to their advantages. They had more strength, more speed. They could have been miles ahead.

"Yeah, but you went ahead and provoked her. You knew she wasn't right, from the beginning. Why would you go in alone?" I threw my hands out in confusion.

"I was trying to protect you! And Hal and Ben, and everyone else here. Because she was just digging her claws in." She grabbed her gun from the table.

"I never asked you to try to shoot her!" I exclaimed.

"I was just doing what you couldn't. You act all big," she shook her head and narrowed her eyes. "But you're just a kid. You'd never hurt a fly."

Her accusations were hurtful, but confusing more than anything. "You have no clue about what I did before I came here, Maggie. But you're not even mad at me. You're mad at yourself. Because you know you acted stupid there, you know that. And you know you've been acting stupid with Hal. That's all that it's coming down to." I snapped at her and stalked off.

I couldn't deal with more confrontation. I couldn't face damaging another relationship. I grabbed a rifle from the armoury, slung it over my shoulder and stormed outside. I wasn't going to patch people up, I was gonna kill.

They came back almost the second I got outside. Tom jumped off the truck and headed for Weaver, once I saw Ben was there, alive, I headed for the barricade of cars. It seemed that there was trouble expected.

And the trouble definitely came. Only moments after the truck had come back, thunderous footsteps of mechs approached, surrounding us, shaking the ground beneath us. We huddled behind the barricade, Hal standing behind me.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yeah." He yelled over the noise of the abstractly placed explosions. The mechs were shooting like shit, all over the place. They weren't meaning to kill us. "We brought back a fish head."

My head snapped round to him. "You what?!"

"We brought back one of the overlords." He repeated. "Figured it was the best way we could get out of this place. Some sort of leverage."

I caught sight of Tom heading towards the back of the hospital and it made sense in my head. The mechs weren't aiming for us, they were distracting us.

We barely fired our weapons before the mechs suddenly froze, stopped what they were doing and turned around, retreating away from us. I had the feeling, though, that they wouldn't stray too far.

Karen appeared, waving a white flag. How symbolic of her. She called out to us, asking to speak with Tom. It was always Tom.

Hal left to go with his father, they walked out to meet her. I inched my way over to where Weaver was.

"She won't hurt them, right?" I checked with him. He just glanced at me nervously and then settled his eyes on Tom and Hal's backs. We couldn't hear what they were saying. After a few minutes they turned back. Satisfied that they were safe enough, I got up from my crouched position and headed back into the hospital.