Canada Under Attack: Where Shadows Walk

Part 1

My breath was ragged in my ears as I threw a quick look over my shoulder. Good; the twisting path down the hillside was empty of pursuers even though I could still hear them yelling to each other along the top of the coulee. Heart pounding, I continued on, turning back to the trail as it wandered down the hill towards the lazy silver ribbon that was the river at the bottom.

My quick move at the top had shaken them off my tail, but I knew it wouldn't be long before they found the path. I had a few minutes at most to figure out what to do next.

Staggering around a corner, I stopped and leaned back against the crumbling dirt wall marking the path's hillside edge, chest heaving as I clawed air into my starving lungs. As I did, I felt my entire body shaking. Both with the adrenaline pumping through it and something else. Something I had been feeling a lot since the visitors appeared in our sky.

Fear.

I looked down at my hands and saw that they were shaking. They did that a lot now, too. Funny; before the visitors arrived, they never shook. Now, almost all the time. Man, I am so scared. The world is dying and I've got a front row seat. And what I'm seeing is terrifying me.

Before you start thinking I'm a coward or some kind of lightweight, there's a pretty good reason for being scared. Like I said, the world is dying and I'm front and center. But it wasn't always.

The Arrival

It was pretty much like most weekends. Last month of school, a couple friends over chilling and playing a little Battlefield on the PS4 and trying to figure out what we were going to do with our last summer as high school kids. Kids; even as I remember back on it, only four or so months ago, we were so young and naive, clueless about what was real and what wasn't. All we cared about was whether or not our part time jobs would get us enough cash to buy that used car so we could be cool next year as seniors, get more action with the girls, or even if we could crack the varsity squad.

All that stuff is pretty pointless now. But then, ... then it was the whole of our universe. That is, until our universe got abruptly larger.

"Dude, dude, you gotta check this out," my buddy Kyle called from upstairs. In my family's game room downstairs, I grimaced as I dropped my character behind a bit of cover.

"Hold up. I got this guy merc'ing me hardcore from the top of this building. Gimme a sec to dust 'em," I said as my hands shifted over the PS4's controller to bring up my aiming reticule. If I could just catch sight of him, ... I angled my viewpoint around the corner and, in doing so, caught sight of another player moving in from my right. It was more reaction that sent my fingers dancing over the controller and my character into a tight spin before firing.

"360 no scope. Eat that!" I crowed as the other player dropped dead.

"Liam, come check this out, yo!" my other buddy Jesper shouted down the stairs with a definite note of urgency in his voice. "One of our space probes spotted an alien spaceship!"

That stopped me dead in mid-action. An alien spaceship? Then my screen flashed red as the guy who had been sniping me all game, got me again. Sighing in both frustration and resignation, I thumbed the game to pause. Then I was throwing myself out of my chair to run up the stairs.

"Alien spaceship?" I asked a bit more tartly than I probably should've, still smarting from my in-game death downstairs. Only to come to a frowning stop when I found my two friends standing in front of the big flat screen TV my dad had parked upstairs in the living room. Between them I could see a blurry starscape on the screen with an equally blurry green blob in the middle of it.