12 Years After

The end came more quietly than we expected.

They came in the dark, while we were sleeping. By the time the sun set on the rest of the world it rose on our world in chains.

Our alien overlords weren’t that bad compared to the old apocalypse movies. There was no mass genocide, no random killings, no roving bands of evil humans marauding the wasteland…but they were still overlords.

They came for us to use as slaves. And dead slaves aren’t very useful.

The transition was slow at first. Control was very obviously in the hands of the Chitin, who were like a bad breeding of a praying mantis and a cockroach, but 9 feet tall. Any violence against them was quickly squashed, literally, and we were forced to clean up the remains. That’s a pretty effective deterrent for most of us.

But other than that, nothing seemed to change. There was the same food in the grocery stores. The same gas stations. The same school days. Even the same subjects. It was as if the Chitin were a universal boogeyman that no one dared speak of. Until year 2 After Invasion.

They came in force then. Billions of them, I can only assume there was one for every human because there was one for each member of my family. They just appeared on the anniversary of the invasion.

About half—maybe exactly half, I can’t be sure—reached out and touched a human, and they just disappeared.

I lost my sister and my mom that day. My dad attacked the nearest Chitin screaming for it to give them back, and was killed.

My whole family, gone in under a minute.

That was the day everything changed.

The Chitin were no longer the unspoken boogeymen, they became the enemy. No more pretending everything was normal under the new boss.

This was the apocalypse that Hollywood had prepared us for.

With half the population suddenly gone, factories shut down, utilities became luxuries, and schools closed. At least there were no more finals.

But this was no Mad Max BDSM cannibal zombie apocalypse. We had a common enemy. It became us against them. Racism and sexism and classism for the most part evaporated in the light of a much bigger and uglier enemy.

Sure, we were living underground. Sometimes literally. But we had each other. And we fought back.

And I don’t think the Chitin were expecting that.

I wonder if the other worlds they had conquered before ours bowed to their might after the Chitin disappeared half of their population. I wonder if they begged to be taken as well. Or maybe they just lay down and died in the face of their foe.

I’m not sure we’ll ever know, but I do know that when we started fighting back in an organized way we started winning.

It’s been ten years since I lost my family. Ten years of hell. Ten years of war. Ten years of survival. But we are taking back our world.

Every night I look up to the stars and wonder where these bug bastards came from. I wonder if I can see the star where my family is now. I wonder if they’re even still alive.

If I’m honest, I hope they aren’t. I pray to whatever god made these creatures that it’s merciful enough to have spared my mother and brother from horrible slavery on some bug lair of a planet.

And then I reload. Because I stopped believing in God ten years ago.

I look around and see that they took everything from us. They took our families. They took our friends. They took our homes.

But each of us has kept a piece of our past. Ronnie has his dad’s pocket knife. Jen wears her grandmother’s heart shaped locket with her parents’ wedding picture in it. Me? I carry one of my brother’s toy cars. It reminds us why we fight. It reminds us who we are.

They took everything from us. Everything but our humanity. And that humanity is what we fight for, even if it’s all we have left.