Not quite Hollywood after all.

“Jump”, was the last thing I heard before the darkness consumed us. Why it always has to happen in the dark is beyond me. It’s as if Hitchcock is reaching out from behind the veil and mocking our idiocy. “Jump woman, bloody jump”… and now I am jumping into an abyss because I obviously can’t see a thing. I recall an overly obvious trust exercise in school where we had to close our eyes and fall backwards into the ambiguously outstretched arms of Berian the Bully and that girl from down our street with Tourette’s, but this is next level faith and I am renown for my faithlessness.

“I’m going to kill you….”, is all I can muster as I begin to accept the absoluteness of my visual inadequacy. “… and if you don’t pull me up Mike, this bloody night is going to kill us both. Where are you?!” I am screaming this last point as my fingers are losing purchase on whatever the hell they are trying to purchase to. I’ve never shied away from the outdoors but crawling through natures litterbox in the midst of an invasion is less than ideal and certain to raise my ‘gag meter’ several notches.

“Follow my voice Jules and be quick about it, I don’t know what’s coming next”.

Picture it, if you will, sitting down to dinner with your brother and his monster-in-law (I have no idea how any of this materialised) and without warning there is the loudest ‘bang’ that you have ever heard. The noise was so loud that ‘she’ fell backwards in her chair and seemed to die in front of our eyes. Mike was reassuringly blasé about it all and, I say reassuringly as this is his 24-7 approach to life and I was reassured that this ‘noise’ hadn’t rocked him in the slightest, informed me that she had a dodgy ticker, and it was not unexpected. He shovelled another fork full of nut roast into his mouth as I flung myself to the carpet in search of a pulse. He was right. She was gone. I just sat there on his mustard yellow carpet, with his wife’s doppelgänger laying on the floor beside me and watched him finish his dinner. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or his newly deceased diner!

The chaos outside of his suburban semi was unprecedented with shoulder raising, hand waving and raised voices all competing for the next corner-box-open-house. I’d crawled over to the window by this point and watched with a sense of car crash wonder at people’s registering priorities. Of course, I was thinking back to a catalogue of late-night TV and ordering in my head the need to stay low, hide under a table, crawl into the bathtub, hide in the basement, hoard food in my hidey hole and call my senator father. I obviously watch too many American ‘movies’ and am slightly embarrassed by my lack of actual preparedness.

“Can you feel anything? Jules! Pay attention woman and follow my voice. I think I’ve got you, try and pull yourself up using my arm”. Was he serious? I haven’t been able to lift my body weight since we were 12 and our PE teacher was relentless in her campaign for dominance and world supremacy. My motivation in this instance was a little more pressing as I had no idea what was below me and how far below me I would need to fall to find out.

“You’re going to have to be a little more helpful than that you idiot! I’m slipping Mike … Mike …” and he grabs me and starts hauling. We’d been running for about two hours but my legs would swear their black and blueness that we had been at least a week in the trenches. I maintain they get the drama queen inclinations from our mother. The rest of my body is fully paid up to the disenfranchised school of father-cares-not. He left us and I developed proclivities that were not suitable for copacetic living in a rudderless home. It is more than broken now. It’s positively decimated.

“Dignity isn’t overrated you know. We can’t just leave her lying like this”. As I reach over to pull myself off the floor my hand slips and I land at the foot of the chair with my face an inch away from the hem of her old lady frock. “Seriously Mike, she’s got hair growing out of her … I’m never going to unsee that”. He unfolded his napkin, dabbed at the corner of his mouth, and mechanically rose from his meal, pushing his chair back under the table. “Did you just …”, can you believe he seriously just stacked his cutlery on his cleanly-scrapped plate. I despair at times at how nonchalance bagged him a ‘ten’, a staggering career and a fancy home in a so called ‘nice’ area. It breaks my heart to note our differences.

The second ‘bang’ knocked him off his feet and landed me in the monster-in-laws lap. This day was officially the worst ever. “Jules, do me a solid and grab my coat for me please”, so I prized myself out of the clutches of awkwardness and did just that and, after promising to bleach all reminder of the past 20 minutes from my eyes forever, stepped out into the street to join the melee and find out what was a foot. I was intent on standing in the doorway, as per basic Hollywood accord with quakes and the like but found myself strongarmed by the brother and instead was standing shoulder to shoulder with Jones the Bike from next door.

“Think it’s Aliens then Jules, or more terrorists”, his arm suddenly snaking its way around my shoulders and pulling me to an unsolicited embrace. “Could be Jones. Could be”. I’d never been more relieved when the third ‘bang’ came and dislodged me from this personal infraction. “Maybe even terrorist Aliens Jones”, I laughed as he picked himself up, looking appropriately contrite. “Right Jules, right. Best get inside then”, and he was gone. Theme of the day it would appear but at least he wasn’t dead and I didn’t have to retract my twitching face in his groin area.

Our lives had changed so considerably in less than a day. Only a few hours before this we had been sat having that bizarre meal at Mike’s. His wife was suspiciously absent (and I accept no responsibility for that - despite us having shared recycled oxygen on perhaps only a handful of occasions since their nuptials that foggy winter morning some 12 years ago) and obviously hadn’t as much as chipped one of those lacquered talons in the preparation of the nutty offering. The word ‘twin’ had been banned from their home, my relationship with my brother had been relegated to texting on that green app thing he likes and any psychic connection we may, or may not have, was considered taboo. Insecure people irk me. I just loved the fact that she was somewhere high up in the Government because this caused her to go and ‘sit’ in parliament and twiddle away my hard-earned money in their subsidised coffee shop quite often…if she was there, she therefore wasn’t here! An undisclosed ‘Environmental Emergency’ had caused her to down kitchen tools, throw on the black pencil skirt and flee into the backseat of her town car, which had left the three of us grunting over a selection of McCartney delights. Mike and I were flailing around in the dark and running away from ‘everything’ and it looked likely that we’d leave, as we came in, and get liquidated together. The wife won’t be pleased.

“Can you hear something Jules?”, Mike’s hand was suddenly in mine as he leaned into my cheek and traced the words with a whisper. I could feel his fear gripping my hand tighter and tighter whilst at the same time the panic wrapped itself around my chest. My body began to tremble slightly, and it wasn’t me. “Stop it Mike or neither of us are going to be able to move”, I felt his hand go to my mouth seconds before something very big, very heavy, and very loud stopped in front of us.

The fourth bang seemed to echo and vibrate in the air for much longer than the previous three. The people around us were less chaotic now and more frantic as the realisation dawned that something bad was happening. Jones suddenly reappeared in his doorway with the palest face I’d seen outside of my own mirror. “Jules, best get going love. Telly just said those Aliens are real”. He looked shocked enough for it not to be a hoax, “Jonesy - Independence day, Alien 3 or Howard the Duck type Aliens?”. I don’t think that I have ever seen him speechless before this moment. “Mike, get your smart mouth sister out of here. They say the bangs were barbs spearing the Earth core. There’s no telling what is coming but no, Jules, I wouldn’t say it’s going to be a close encounter of anything other than the nasty kind”. I had to stop myself from replying with the million and one B movie quotes and instead leant over the fence and kissed him on the cheek. “Stay Safe Robert”, and my brother and I were hightailing it down his very nice street where nothing, but our own wits, would be enough to save us.

By the time our feet had pounded enough tarmac to get us across the city we knew that there was more that we didn’t. No one was driving their cars and even though there were bodies passing us, obviously I don’t run that fast either now, there were not people stacked ten deep pushing through. We managed to get to the outer wall before the lights went off. 9pm and we should have had another 90 minutes or so of dying light. There should have at least been stars and a moon hanging above us. It was the absoluteness of the switch off that caused us to pause for a moment and question whether we were dead too.

The worst psychological horror, woven through an LA script with paranoia and intrigue, couldn’t possibly incite the same level of terror that I felt at that moment. My breath alone was loud enough to crack concrete and when you add in Mike’s we were in an inordinate amount of trouble. It had stopped inches from our crouching bodies, and I was certain that we had been the reason for that. Tapping out a code into my palm he was telling me that he wanted to run for it. I was stuck in the midst of a freeze frame of Mike being obliterated by Alien laser eyes and us being crushed by its ten-ton toe. My imagination has always been an overachieving ghost writer but no amount of free-flowing prose was going to actualise a trap door or cupboard to Narnia. “NOW…JULES NOW”, and he was gone. The screaming, the adrenalin and his wannabe Hussain Bolt machinations dragged me from my internalisations. I feared more of being alone than of being gone. By the time I caught up to him he was both. I fell over his body before hitting the same wall that he had. Dragging myself up on his chest I felt for a pulse. I knew it was not there before I’d even found his wrist. That heart wrenching panic he had been projecting had left a moment ago. His face felt slack and his head was leaking. I still couldn’t see anything but that must have been some bloody collision. I slipped my hand into his and dislodged his wife’s locket. Its heart shaped metal felt Alien to me despite the circumstances. “As we came in Mike”, and I’d be damned if it was the last thing I’d feel.