Shatters in Space: Stories about Scientific Horrors and Cosmic Threats

3. Planet of the Dragons

It was when the object was detected that the world fell apart. The scientists at NASA were quite sure that the origin of the signal was some off course comet. Even though there was no way of knowing how fast the object was traveling at, many believed that it was going at at least ten thousand two hundred and ten times faster than the orbit of the Earth. That was proven when the object reached earth in the blink of an eye.

The object impacted the Earth with the force of twenty thousand thermonuclear bombs, devastating New York and the eastern seaboard. The explosion was bright enough to be seen from space, and many people were blinded by the resulting light. The death total was inconceivable, an estimated twenty million people were dead. Many were incinerated instantly by the blast, metal was liquidized and evaporated in a microsecond, and many others were killed by the poisonous gas that emitted from the destructed area. America declared a state of emergency, FEMA and the CDC were on the move and ordered that no one enter the Red Zone. That was the name of the destroyed area, the Red Zone.

The people who entered the Red Zone wore Hazmat suits to protect themselves from the deadly radiation that was literally a cloud that hung over the area. People were afraid of what the radiation was going to do to their bodies. The crater was deep, almost two thousand feet down, and was the size of an entire city. The shape resembled a cone funnel. It was littered with destroyed cars, buildings, and even skeletons of people who had been caught. The people at FEMA compared the disaster to the comet that wiped out the Dinosaurs. Scientists gathered around the crater to study it. However, they soon realized that it wasn't a comet.

A day after the impact, some sort of creature escaped from the crater, rising up from the depths. Sources said that the creature was reptilian, like an overgrown lizard. But this lizard had wings, large wings the size of a building. It was big, almost as big as a T-Rex, and it was hungry. It attacked the scientists and soldiers who were studying the crater, swiping helicopters out of the air with its tail and claws and devouring people whole. We thought that it was vulnerable to our weapons, but we were wrong. It had this tough layer of scales that were harder than diamonds, missiles didn't leave a scratch. We shot it with bullets, bombs, missiles, and it didn't even flinch. It flew away from the Red Zone and laid siege. The lifeform was capable of laying waste to the Eastern cities, flying and breathing fire all across the nation. Millions died, cities were decimated, and it went back to its crater. The president issued, as a last attempt to stop it, the launch and detonation of a thermonuclear weapon at it. Finally, it died.

The media referred to it as a dragon.

The world rejoiced and it moved on. After cleanup, we just put it behind us. People remembered it, sure, but the event just passed. Soon, we felt safe again.

Oh, how wrong we were.

It turned out, the creature wasn't the only one of its species. It was followed by its fellow members. A race of extraterrestrial reptilian organisms that flew and breathed fire, moving from planet to planet in an invading armada from space. They travel in one group, billions of them following the leader. We killed the leader. They impact a planet and lay waste to its inhabitants, wiping them out for their own species to flourish. They breed and the offspring go out to seek a new planet to call home. They are parasites.

Soon, we detected thousands of them, all heading towards our planet. And soon, they arrived. It also turned out that the radiation was a form of ecological terraforming, causing our planet's air to become hazardous and even poisonous to our species. They could lay thousands of eggs per day and they overtook the Red Zone, then the United States, and then...

They spread, they attacked, they conquered.

That was five weeks ago. Humanity isn't racing around this planet anymore, it's moving off of it. Extinction is coming, we know it, and this planet isn't ours now. It's theirs. It's the dragons' planet now.