Canada Under Attack: Where Shadows Walk

Part 2

Looking back on it now, I'm not sure if it was fortunate or not. Either way, the aliens didn't make us wait long to find out what was next.

As soon as we got home, my dad and Cam went frantically to work on an old generator my dad had sitting in the garage in case of emergencies. I'd definitely say getting our power knocked out by aliens fit into that category. They had been at it for about an hour with me standing watch when it hit.

Not the craziness, the breaking down of social order. Naw, that had been going on ever since the Hubble spotted the Mothership by Mars. People losing their minds, killing themselves, robbing banks, whatever. Even now I could hear the yelling and shouting out in the street as people, now deprived of running water, lights, and air conditioning were truly and irrevocably losing their shit. That'd be the reason Dad had me standing watch, nervous as it made me. He didn't want anybody rushing the house and catching us by surprise.

You half expect sirens to come wailing up the street as the police move in to restore order out of the chaos the neighborhood had become. But all you hear, besides the shouting and crying, is the wind, it's dry whisper reminding us that we weren't in charge of the world anymore.

Speaking of the police, I had seen cops here and there on our way back to the house, struggling to sort out larger issues, but they were riding bicycles of all things. I realized then with such a limited mode of transport, they were probably focusing on taking care of big issues and trusting that we citizens would keep it together enough to deal with the little stuff. Out of all the organizations hit the hardest by the EMP, it was them and emergency services like the paramedics that got smashed, both in terms of them being able to get around, and the sheer volume of what they had to now deal with.

So, against a background of unrest and shouting and without the cops to help, I watched my father sweating and swearing as he tried to get the generator to start for the hundredth time.

That was when I felt it. A tremor underfoot, nothing big. Just enough to tell me something else had happened out in the world.

At first I thought it was me. I glanced down at my hands with a frown. They would shake now if I thought too much about how the world was falling apart since the aliens arrived. More so, now that they had taken a shot at us.

"Did you guys feel that?" I asked when I saw my hands were steady. I looked around to see hanging things in the garage swinging slightly.

"We're too busy trying to get electricity back, doofus," Cam growled from where he was sprawled on the other side of the generator, hand priming the starter.

My dad, however, paused. He looked at me, then at the swaying tools.

"Earthquake," he announced with a thoughtful frown. "A big one, too, if we're feeling it way out here on the Prairies."

My own frown deepened.

"How do you know?"

My dad returned to working on the generator, talking as he did.

"There's been some big ones in the past, down in California, out on the west coast, that we've felt here before," he explained as he pulled the generator's distributor cap off to clean the leads once more. "Even a couple big ones that sent tsunamis at Japan that we could feel."

"Tsunamis?" I repeated, glancing at the window even though the nearest ocean was thousands of kilometers away.

"Yeah," my dad said, now trying to reattach the cap. "If we're feeling that, somebody's getting wet."

As it turned out, that was a pretty massive understatement. It took us a while to find out, but when we did, it was yet another body blow to a reeling civilization. And a shock to yours truly, who was already having trouble dealing with the collapse of my reality.