When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
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I saw my husband today.
We locked eyes once, fleetingly - although it felt like hours of torture, the closure of a fist around my heart, an assault upon my ribcage that would splinter bone – and then he was gone again, fading into the backdrop of a fallen city, as if he was nothing but a ghost haunting the ravaged ruins of London.
Seconds. That's all it had been. Seconds that I thought I would never have again. Seconds of his face, handsome still, enough to make me momentarily breathless just as it always had. Seconds of knowing we still breathed the same air. That we still existed in the same city.
We locked eyes and everything stopped.
Foolish really, because you never stop. You never hesitate. You keep going. Keep moving. Keep safe.
It's drummed into us now, this instinct to stick to the new rules, this innate knowledge that if you don't follow those rules, well then fuck you, because you might as well run out into the open, scream at the top of your lungs and light a beacon that'll be seen on the damn moon. If you don't follow the rules, they will come. They will find you.
Keep safe. Keep moving. Don't ever forget.
But I did forget.
Just in that moment, I forgot, because he was there, staring right back at me from the other side of the demolished fountain, where the statue of Eros now lays in the rubble, head decapitated as if victim to Death's vicious scythe and not quarry to the tanks that once rumbled through here, razing Piccadilly Circus to the ground. The great curved advertising hoarding, once blasting out constant brightly-lit diatribe to the hungry consumerist masses, was as dead and as silent as the many fresh graveyards all over the city. Gone were the Coca-Cola mantras to the sugar-addicts. Gone were the L'Oréal demands for super shiny hair – because quite frankly, no one gives a shit about shiny hair now. Gone were the images of the latest Samsung mobile phone to which we had all once become so attached, that we could never keep them more than three inches from our stupid faces. Ironic really, that we all spent so much time looking down, that we never looked up enough to realise what was falling from the skies until it was too late.
We don't look down anymore, of course.
We look everywhere. Every darkened corner. Every open space. Every shadow. Every beam of light.
I had been doing just that when I saw him. I had been following the rules, scouring the streets, keeping my eyes peeled for signs of life, keeping moving, keeping safe and then suddenly there he was.
My husband.
He blinked, dark brows furrowing and casting a shadow across his face. A brief flicker of recognition sparked in his eyes. He knew. He remembered.
And just like that, so did I.
I remembered the blackest of eyes. Skin; hairless, grey and faintly oily, as if covered in a thin sheen of perspiration. I remembered thin, long fingers – too long – and a face almost devoid of features, as if the bones underneath the skin were soft. Flexible. Malleable.
I remembered screaming and feeling a hot stab of pain in the base of my stomach, my bladder desperate to give up at the horror of it all. I remembered Tom sliding to the ground, then the gurgling, choking – as if he was drowning – and the creature's bones shifting, melting under that slick, waxy flesh.
Tom's leg twitching, heel drumming violently against the concrete.
Muffled cries fading into nothing. Wet sounds, thick and squelching, like the sound the sodden earth makes when it tries to suck your feet down into the water-logged mire.
