Posthuman Blues

Another work-in-progress:

1.

The creatures appeared during the summer. We'd already managed to acclimate ourselves to the Object that had coincided with the first sightings. Their eventual mass appearance shouldn't have been a surprise; some, privileged with hindsight, would doubtlessly argue that we should have been expecting them.

The Object -- no one had ever coined a more satisfying alternative to the term heard so often in those initial newscasts three years ago -- had seemed innocuous, a skyborne bauble that almost could have passed for some natural phenomenon if not for its conspicuous, burnished surface. Or the circular pits -- dubbed "portals" by the backyard astronomers who had posted the original images to the Web. I suppose we'd secretly expected the Object to remain as mute and implacable as it had since it had appeared in orbit.

The creatures shocked everyone. Not necessarily because of their appearance, about which little or nothing could be determined at first, but because of their numbers. They took to our streets like a tide of insects, a crush of unyielding alien flesh. It took all of three days for infrastructure to succumb; we knew people were dying even before the telecom grid crashed.

The Web shuddered and fell silent. And then they came for us in earnest.

2.

The abrupt isolation came as a welcome respite. Most Midwesterners had vanished in the first wave of attacks, although I now wondered if the visitors' bid for supremacy qualified as an "attack" in the normal sense. What little I'd seen firsthand resembled nothing less that a serial execution, bodies fastidiously cremated in the invasion's wake.