​

As I removed the oxygen mask from Mr. Wilder’s swollen face, a pang of anguish and frustration washed over my body. The stillness of her chest was a stark comparison to the commotion of those who remained being hunted like prey outside.

​

Mrs. Wilder tried to warn us

.

All of us were too entrenched in our own selfish dealings to understand the gravity of what was happening. The day the government signed a treaty with the Beings was the day our fate was sealed. Top government officials convinced the people of every nation it would open up a new world of possibilities in the great unknown of space. A promise of new resources and a sustainable future were on the horizon.

​

Mrs. Wilder knew better than that. She saw a future the rest of us were too naïve to consider.

She knew the Beings were not peaceful. Everyone laughed at her morning sermons on the sidewalk. She preached about burning land and unearthly creatures taking our home as their own. People avoided eye contact as they passed her by on their way for their morning coffee.

Residents called her a lunatic each time a delivery of military rations was left at her door. Little did they know her rations were the only sustenance we could rely on when the Beings arrived. The only reason I survived the first wave of invasions in the Northeast was thanks to her and the bunker she created in her apartment.

​

Eventually, it too had been annihilated.

​

The Beings turned back north the day she died. The darkness in the sky over the carnage meant they were coming, and the bunker we fashioned in the lobby of our apartment complex was no longer safe. Mrs. Wilder would have told me to leave without her, but I refused to leave her body for the taking by what lurked outside.

​

My muscles ached and my back was sore, but I carried Mrs. Wilder’s body and some important items down to the parking garage. I rolled her body carefully in an old blue tarp from my trunk and secured the polyester with some hiking rope. Arched on her side over my small vehicle, I strapped her to the roof. It pained me to see her that way, but I was intent on bringing her to safety with me. Bungie cords and frayed rope held her tightly as I began the drive.

As I pulled away, I looked at Mrs. Wilder’s oxygen tank and mask in my passenger seat. A tear slipped from the corner of my eye for the first time in months. The Beings took everything we had, but they could never take the sheer determination of a human to live.