Synopsis/Details
The story opens on a normal Tuesday morning — sprinklers running, dogs barking, a woman jogging, a man reading a newspaper on a porch,
a teenager on a bicycle — and then three massive alien crafts materialize over the Westfield Shopping Mall.
DAY 1.
The military response is immediate — and fails miserably.
Eleven days later, six survivors have established a siege position in the mall's food court: Sarah Calloway, a ruthlessly efficient project manager now functioning as tactical commander; her brother Jake, ex-Special Forces and badly wounded; their 16-year-old sister Cassie; Tommy Rivers, the mall security guard who knows every inch of the building; Marcus Webb, a young tech enthusiast who came for a router cable; and Elena Vasquez, a pediatrician managing Jake's deteriorating wound.
Aliens — jointed wrong, absorbing light rather than reflecting it — are patrolling the corridors and growing bolder.
The crisis point arrives simultaneously with a breakthrough: Marcus completes a signal jammer that can scramble the aliens' coordination frequency for a few minutes, and Jake's been holding onto a grenade for exactly the moment when the group needs a distraction more than it needs him.
In the story's emotional center, Jake persuades Sarah to take Cassie and the others and run — through the parking garage, into a maintenance tunnel that connects to the old subway
system, ten miles to a FEMA hardened bunker. He uses the grenade to collapse the food court behind them, buying them the time they need.
DAY 11.
The first day of what comes next.
