Disclaimer: I do not own "Falling Skies."

Four: Survival after Death

Ben…

A part of me thought that when I opened my eyes, the cornerstone, rather Mom's gravestone, would be gone. The upturned earth that Hal and I had packed over her body would be as it had been before, mixed in with the leaves and peppered by twigs. I even imagined that I would awake to find her not dead at all, smelling the scent of blueberry syrup and pancakes waft up the stairs as I stumbled out of bed. Hal would still be sleeping and snoring louder than any human should be allowed in his bed parallel to mine.

None of that happened. Instead, I awoke to see Hal wide awake and leaning against a tree. Matt lay between us with his head resting on the ground where it had fallen off of Hal's lap, and his fingers were still entwined with mine just as they had been last night after he cried himself to sleep. The sun had set by the time we buried Mom, and we had no idea what was happening in the world. Everything could have been repaired and been resolved over night as we slowly fell asleep on the grass.

Yet, I knew that hadn't happened as I look at Hal. His expression was grave, not filled with grief over Mom but with anger over something else. He looked like he was about to explode.

"What is it?"

He shrugged, peeling apart blades of grass like string cheese, "Took a walk up to the highway before you two woke up. Half the skyline's obliterated, and the smoke just keeps rising in all directions. I even tried to get the car to start. Hell I tried to get every car to start!" I sat up, catching sight of the bags in the grass poised like sitting ducks in a pond.

"Where are we going?"

"Home…find Dad…"

"What if?"

"We're going home to find Dad!" Hal's voice boomed, and even Matt stirred, groggily wiping his face as he awoke.

"What about Mom!" Matt cried immediately as he came to. "We can't leave her alone!"

"We'll come back. We'll give her a proper burial," Hal informed us, pulling his backpack on and tossing ours to us without meeting our eyes. "I separated the water and food amongst us, and the drugs I randomly just put in bags…"

"But I don't want to go!" Matt hollered, standing to his feet and chunking his backpack at the ground and turning to me. "Ben…Ben, you tell him we're not going! It's only fair to vote!" He demanded.

I didn't know which one of my brothers would kick me harder for not siding with him. Hal was bigger and wore his tennis shoes, but when he was tired, that was usually when I could take him best. Right now, the bags under his eyes were ten times more prominent than mine were I knew. On the other hand, Matt was little and filled with fury. His bony appendages were as sharp as knives, and his feet were like lead whenever he kicked me to get off the couch because it was "his."

It was a choice; I realized—Mom or Dad. Whatever had happened in the last twenty four hours had changed the game. They had obliterated half the board, leaving us with nothing but our own two feet and a mind that governed which way to make them walk. Sniffling oddly, I looked at Mom's grave briefly, wondering if we were going to have to dig another hole. I didn't want to—not at all, but there was only one way to know for sure. I averted my eyes from Matt as I pulled my bag onto my back.

"We need to get started as early as possible," I said, ignoring that I was siding with Hal. Besides, I couldn't help that my choice aligned with his. "It's quite a few miles back to Somerville."

"I'm still not going. Leave me here," Matt said, plopping himself back down on the ground. I expected Hal to grab him and carry him if he had to. Hal simply shrugged and walked off with me following.

"Stay then," Hal called over his shoulder. "We'll tell Dad you said hi."

One.

Two.

Three silent seconds passed.

"Are you really going to find him!" Matt shouted at our backs as we broke through the brush, leading up to the highway.

"Yep, but you have fun with the spiders, and try to make a fire if you get cold tonight!" Hal hollered back to him, and I glanced between him and Matt who stood anxiously in our wake. Hal's little plan had better work because Mom and Dad, only Dad now I supposed, would kill us if we left Matt.

"Fine," Matt grumbled, begrudgingly grabbing his backpack and jogging to catch up. "I'll go on one condition."

"Name it," Hal nodded his agreement.

"You said he's probably dead too, but…promise we'll find Dad…alive," I watched his lips pout out on the last word, and Hal bent down to his level, sticking out his pinky finger that Matt smiled grimly at before shaking with his own little finger. I cringed at the weak smile he gave Matt, reminding me of Mom.

"Promise," Hal agreed.

For a second, I almost believed Hal too. It would be so much easier to be Matt, to be young and naïve, to believe that simply because Hal had promised we would find Dad alive that it would be so. However, it didn't work like that. Things didn't happen because someone willed them to. They just happened like the bombs being strewn across the highway and Boston—the world too—by the spiders. The spiders made a decision just as I had decided to pull my backpack on in order to find Dad.

A part of me wanted to punch Hal for giving the kid false hope and almost pulling the wool over my eyes too, but a part of me wanted to thank him. We had already abandoned Matt once this week. That night we had had the reassurance of the security of our neighborhood and our parents' imminent arrival to prevent anything from happening, but today we had no such assurance. Anything could have happened had we actually left Matt behind. Most likely we would had have returned to find his body shriveled in a cold ball over Mom's grave.

Cautiously, we set forth, walking the length of the highway and never leaving the comfort afforded to us by the trees. Every step seemed longer than the next.

We passed by the abandoned cars on the road like walking through a graveyard. The fires were extinguished, but the devastation was a millions times worse in slow motion than in the chaotic moments in which we fled to woods. More cars were charred than weren't, and the dead lay limply on the ground and cars. They were packed together—men, women, and children. Everyone had been trying to get out of town, but glancing in the direction leading out of town, I knew small cities and towns had not fared any better.

It was like Mom said. It spread outward from the city, and the closer we came to Boston, the more my muscles tensed. The skyline smoked like a furnace, and the tallest of the buildings had crumbled. What had once been short buildings, dwarfed in comparison, were now spires. However, no matter how tall our buildings were, the spiders' crafts flew higher above us than we could imagine.

"What is that?" Hal asked.

"It's an airplane," I replied, seeing the white plane that had nosedived into the woods on the other side of the highway.

"Good god," Hal murmured.

"Yeah," I nodded.

If the cars represented gravestones of the masses then the white plane was like the marble mausoleums in the middle of old cemeteries. It was one of those things that always seemed scary in vampire movies, but there was nothing scary about the plane. It was just unfathomable, and it made me sick to think of the people plummeting to their deaths just as much as I thought of the people being incinerated in their cars or having their necks snapped like Mom. I swallowed the vomit that came into my mouth.

"I'm hungry." Matt whined after a while.

"You just ate chips and a granola bar," I reminded him.

"Yeah, but still…" He sighed. "How much farther is it?"

"Miles, lots of miles."

"Well, how much longer will it take?"

"We might not even get there today."

"What!" He shrieked, and the piercing shrill tone of his voice cut through my ears like glass. "But it didn't take us a day to get here!"

"We were also taking a car buddy," Hal replied suddenly, bending down. "Here, hop on." Matt did, and I rolled my eyes, trekking ahead of them.

Matt was always whining, and Hal was cocky, always trying to outdo me. Nothing would ever change. Bombs dropped from the sky, and Mom had died. Yet, nothing was ever going to change. Hal, Matt, and I were always going to be the same like trying to reconcile putting three male beta fish in the same fish bowl. It would work for half a second like when Dad and Mom had just pried us off of each other, but as soon as we swam around and saw the other one, we knew only one would survive. It was funny because I couldn't remember a time when it wasn't me against Hal or Matt or even them against each other.

I was sick of this—flat out sick of all of it, and I debated storming off alone. I could do this by myself. I could figure out this new reality. It was just like starting a new video game. I never bothered reading the instructions, simply sticking in the CD and hoping for the best. It wasn't that different. I had an objective which was to retrieve Dad. There was an opposing force too in the alien spiders and their ships dropping bombs. The only matter was to weigh my strengths and weaknesses and form a plan.

The trouble was that one of my weaknesses was being afraid of going alone, so I stayed, pressing on as the night drew near.

"I don't want to sleep here," Sometimes, I think I could put a timer on Matt's whines. I could press a button and cue the whine on command.

"It has a bed, and it has a bathroom buddy," Hal reasoned. He was leaning down again, acting like he was Dad or something. He could almost pull it off if he was about twenty years older. He took after Dad the most.

"But what if there are dead people in it?"

I cussed under my breath. When I had suggested sleeping in the RV that had run off the road, I hadn't thought of people being dead inside. Looking at the RV, it seemed fine. There were no signs of fire or spiders walking over it. Only the door had been opened which I presumed meant the occupants had fled like us.

"There aren't dead people," I said in exasperation and hoping that there was nothing more than a spider—the Earth ones—running about inside as I stepped aboard. It was nice and empty, sighing with relief as I checked the bathroom and bedroom. "All clear!"

They stepped aboard tentatively, and I couldn't blame them. It was like walking into a stranger's house. It was wrong. This was intruding, and it was against the law. We'd be considered criminals if we had done this forty eight hours ago, but a lot had changed. I didn't even know if there was a government to come and arrest us. I didn't think so; we had seen police cars and ambulances littering the highway with the other cars.

We walked around like we were touring a museum with Dad or walking through an antique shop with Mom. She said bulls weren't allowed in china shops so we kept our hands to ourselves even now. However, we were tired from walking all day, and we gave in. Matt conked out on the bed with his shoes still on and his bag still on his back, leaving Hal and me to sit. It was never good to leave us be for too long.

"You can take the couch. I'll bunk with Matt," Hal informed me suddenly, stretching his legs out on the leather seat of the dinette table.

"Don't tell me what to do," I groaned.

"Don't be a punk!"

"Well, don't be an ass!"

"Ooh, big man Ben whips out a swear word! Better wash your mouth out before Mom…"

We were both leaned forward from our seats, ready to pounce like always, but at the mention of Mom, he drew quiet with his eyes wide before he huffed into the bedroom. The door slammed behind him, and I hit my head on the window before stretching out on the couch. I might as well sleep on the ground again if I was going for comfort. I didn't want to sleep anyways if it was anything like the night before which entailed a nightmarish series of screams riddled with the soft pop of a breaking neck.

Throwing my bag on the floor, I picked up the remote control, pretending to flip channels. I decided the black screen was a ninja movie, and slowly but surely, I assembled a cast from the hunting magazine that I pulled from the counter in the kitchen. The men all smiled from the shiny pages as they showed off their dead deer and squirrels, looking over ads for gun training and licenses.

Daylight waned through the cracks of the blinds, and eventually even the moonlight was not enough to allow me to keep flipping through the endless stack of hunting magazines. So, I found myself staring into the dark and waiting for the ninjas to come and get me. They never came, but the blue light did. It ran through the blinds like headlights, and I clenched the couch out of fear. It was a craft, and I held my breath as I waited for the explosion.

It didn't come, and peeking through the blinds, I saw the craft whirl to a landing in the parking lot. Another craft landed and another. Dozens of spiders poured out, and neat lines of a dozen or more robots followed respectively behind each spider. Invasion—the word engraved itself into the forefront of my mind. The ground shook with the robots' collective thunderous steps, and Hal's snores ceased in the bedroom. They both came running in panic, and I clapped my hand over Matt's mouth before he could whine.

"Holy shit!" Hal whispered, breathing heavily next to my ear as Matt pried my hand from his mouth.

"Can't they just go away?" Matt shuddered. "What do they even want?"

Neither Hal nor I answered as our eyes were glued upon the scene unfolding before us. Hundreds of small groups of aliens were scattering in all directions. It was unbelievable, and I cringed uncomfortably as the small dot of a person was brought forward from hiding in the building that the parking lot wrapped around. The person screamed mercilessly as more people were pulled from the building. Twenty or maybe thirty people were lined up, shaking with terror as one of the robots turned. Its rounded arm rolled upwards, and the fire reigned down upon the people as the robots' aim moved down the line.

Matt screamed, and Hal and I both tackled him to the couch to get him to quiet.

"We need to go," I said.

"Go where?" Hal growled as he pulled on his shoes. Matt was crying, and I found myself shoving Matt's right shoe on as he tied his left with his fingers shaking.

"Um…I don't know," I hadn't thought that far. I looked around the dark RV, feeling the magazines under my fingertips as I tried to find my bag.

"We can't see out there," Hal shook his head, and we all sat in a row with our bags in our laps and our backs pressed against the cupboards. "Those things can see us or find us or something even in the dark. They can fucking smell us or something! We have to stay till morning."

"Morning!" I seethed. "We'll be dead by then! Damn it Hal!"

"What do you want us to walk out and get killed?"

"No… I—we need guns," I murmured.

"What?"

"We need guns!" I said, and I lost it, feeling around the RV in the dark for guns until I finally gave up. We had to get weapons. We had to bear arms now. "There're not any guns! They have thousands of hunting magazines but not one gun!"

"We'll find guns," Hal's whispered floated in the dark. I didn't have to see him to know he was staring straight ahead.

"We will?" Matt sniffled.

"Yeah, in the morning we'll find guns."

"But we don't know how to shoot them!"

"Ben and I do. Grandpa used to take us and Dad. You were just a baby."

It was decided just like that as we sat helplessly waiting for the spiders and robots to find us. We may be waiting for them to kill us in the night, but in the morning, things were going to change. We had been so very lucky all day, never running into anything as we walked casually through the woods. It had felt more like a long walk home from school than a stroll back to Somerville after an alien invasion.

Cocky, weak, and whiny—I thought those things wouldn't change about us. Maybe, they still wouldn't, but we were still standing tonight which was more than the people in the parking lot could say. We would adapt. We would figure this out somehow because this was only just the beginning. If I were to live a hundred more years, I knew without doubt this was the moment I would look back on as the moment it all began.

I didn't know what was going to happen, but it was coming at us full speed ahead that much I did know. Hearing the distant scuttle of the spiders and swivel of the robots' firing arms, my resolve was solidified. I was going to survive, and I made that my decision. I was going to survive. For Mom if she could hear me in death, I added Matt and Hal into my decision as well. We were going to survive no matter what.

Get guns. Find Dad. Survive. It wasn't a very detailed strategy, but it would have to be enough. Morning couldn't come soon or late enough.