Invasion

It was midday when things started going wrong.

There was no break in the cicadas’ cacophonous choir. The little creek kept bubbling and singing its song.

In the height of summer, time was almost at a standstill in the small town of Saundale. The humidity weighed everything down like molasses. Even the screech of brakes and angry honking of cars were muffled.

Despite the dust, it was quite peaceful.
The world was just slightly off kilter. In the humidity was a tension, an anxious itch.

Anders huffed, trying to get the waistband of his pants over his beer belly. But his fingers were clumsy today and the belt just would not clasp. His gut told him something was wrong. He felt a little panicked. Was he forgetting an important event? He had never missed a deadline in his thirty years of work in the garage, but maybe the customer had been waiting since the morning for the oil gauge to be fixed?

He scratched the rough hairs around his mouth and shook his head. “Must be the heat,” he muttered.

His freshly pressed shirt was already collapsing around the corners, sticking to him like soggy napkins.

The man’s wife, busy at the table with her newspaper clippings, spared him a glance. “You look crazy.” Mirtha, a wiry and gray woman, was not wrong with her comment.
Anders’s left lazy eye swam around in a daze, like a plastic googley eye being shaken by a curious toddler.

“It’s the heat,” Anders defended. “God forsaken summer, can’t even breathe.”

Mirtha gave a noncommittal cluck. “Don’t forget those pepper grinders,” she called out.
A grunt could be heard before the back door slammed shut.

Activity resumed with insignificant white noise, just like every other house in Saundale.

And then bang, bang, bang.

Five hundred miles away, life bustled on in the city of Norkshire. It was just as dusty as Saundale, with extra soot and grime to match, but the flashy signs and high-rises still managed to shine through. The inhabitants of this city didn’t know about and didn’t care about