If you asked Dr. Sheldon A. Long, he'd tell you he had seen it all. In his 66 years of life, he'd been in the Marines, then the Peace Corps, and then he even did a stint as a volunteer doctor in Africa for a couple of years until he'd decided that the political climate wasn't suited for his age and it was time for him to return to the states. There he'd moved to the family farm to live with his aging father, who had passed on a few years later and had left him with several hundred acres of cornfields.

It didn't take him long to decide that he liked being a farmer. He hadn't when he was younger – that had actually been the main reason he'd joined the military in the first place – but now that he was older and had seen the world and all the changes that came with life in general, he had to admit that a quiet farm in northwest Iowa wasn't such a bad place to be after all.

And then he and the rest of the world found out in a moment that none of them had, in fact, seen everything. Aliens – goddamn aliens, could you believe that? – had appeared in the sky, spreading chaos and fear across the globe faster than a swarm of locusts could decimate a crop. He'd watched on TV with his 16 year old granddaughter and the rest of the world as the President gave a speech to reassure – although he hadn't believed everything he'd heard and seen – and had then watched as the bastards had attacked France. True, it wasn't the US, but in this kind of instance it didn't matter a mite to Sheldon. They'd attacked Earth, and they had no business even being there, much less hurting and killing his people.

Now, however, the news was saying that there were rumors that the military had met up with an invasion fleet of the bastards somewhere over Australia, and that there had been a huge explosion somewhere out in space – which their experts assumed was the main ship – or mothership as every sci-fi movie and series had ever called them – blowing up. Who or what had destroyed it, they didn't know, but the experts (and Sheldon didn't really think of them as experts since he didn't know how some crackpot living in a van by Roswell could be an expert at anything) said that there was no doubt it had to be the mothership.

His granddaughter turned to him excitedly – which was a lot better than the fear he'd been seeing in her expression the past couple of days.

"Grandpa! Let's go outside and see if we can see any of the pieces of it entering the atmosphere! Like a meteor shower!"

He'd hesitated.

And she'd gone wide-eyed and pleading on him – something he couldn't resist and never had been able to.

"Please, Grandpa? It won't be dangerous or anything, and I've been stuck inside for so looong…"

So they'd gone outside.

The sun was just starting to set, but the sky was still plenty light outside, with only the faintest haze showing the promise of the night to come. Tina had looked expectantly upwards as they'd walked down the steps of the porch and out into the front yard, but Sheldon was looking around, feeling just a little too exposed and isolated for his own comfort.

"Grandpa!"

Tina's cry had pulled his attention away from the cornfield he'd been watching. Right now it was still early summer and there was only a foot or so of green showing, where later it would be plenty high enough to get lost in – he'd done it several times in his childhood, after all.

He looked up and saw, not a lot of small lights dazzling across the early evening sky, but one single ball of flame, far off into the west and heading their direction.

"Is it a piece of the mothership, grandpa?"

"I don't know, honey… it's pretty hard to tell…"

He personally didn't know what to think. It certainly didn't look like a piece of anything. It wasn't all that huge, but it wasn't burning out like it should have been, either. It was getting larger as it neared, and sinking fast. Way too fast, all of the sudden, because it was apparently heading their direction.

Sheldon felt his stomach clench, and he reached out and took Tina's hand.

"Honey, get in the cellar."

"What?"

"Get in the cellar! Now!"

She started to object. She was a teenager, after all. But then she realized the same thing he'd already noticed. The object was almost to them, and it wasn't slowing down and wasn't going to stop. She let out a scared cry and headed off to the side of the house where the door to their storm cellar was located.

Sheldon was right behind her, but moving a little slower because of his age, and because he was constantly turning to look at the thing. Just as he reached the open door of the cellar, there was a deafening boom, the ground trembled enough to knock him off his feet, and the sounds of shrieking metal that seemed to roar through his brain.

"Grandpa!"

He turned where he sat and looked out over the cornfield. There in the middle of it was some kind of aircraft. Nothing like he'd ever seen before, though. It was crumbled in the front and smoking something awful, and looked like some kind of huge tin can that had been discarded negligently into the dirt.

"Grandpa?" Tina repeated, coming over to kneel by him, although her eyes – like his – were glued to the aircraft. "Are you okay? What is it?"

"I don't know…" he admitted, struggling to his feet, painfully. "Go call the sheriff."

"But what do I tell them?"

"Tell them something just crashed in the cornfield," he snapped. "Hurry."

There was no way he was going to be able to move as quickly as she could. She took another look at the smoking craft, and then turned and ran into the house, while Sheldon limped over to the edge of the cornfield. The whatever-it-was was only a hundred feet away or so, but he thought it was probably safe enough – barring some kind of radiation – because there was no way anything or anyone could have survived that wreck.

Up close, it was even more damaged, and even more alien. There was no way this was anything the government had designed – not any government, as far as Sheldon was concerned. There weren't any markings on it to tell him where it was from – or maybe they were on the other side, or on the belly – but he knew enough about airplanes and flying to know that nothing the world had could keep up a plane with no wings or prop of any kind.

"Someone's coming," Tina said from beside him, startling him. He hadn't even noticed she'd retuned to his side, despite the fact that she was breathing heavily. "What is it, grandpa?"

"I don't have any idea," he admitted. "But there's probably-"

He was interrupted by a stifled shriek from Tina as the back end of the ship suddenly opened, revealing a ramp of some sort as it lowered. He felt his granddaughter's fingers digging painfully into his arm as the two of them watched, amazed, as a lone figure stumbled out of the rear of the ship, covered in blood and holding his arm, painfully. The figure fell, slipping on something, probably, and staggered once more to its feet, and Sheldon realized that it was human. Even more, it was wearing military camouflage that was definitely U.S. issued. Sheldon had seen plenty of it, after all – even though he'd been out of the military for so long.

The figure turned toward them, revealing a man of medium height who seemed to be starting to bald. There was no way this was an alien, and more importantly, he was injured. Sheldon moved forward, just as the man crumbled to the ground and was still.