We fled the school to downtown and found a building with several basement levels where we could hole down for the winter. The next month we hoarded food, ammunition, clothing, water, and I grabbed some tools and equipment to make more nuclear batteries. Jones managed to find a foosball table, so we dragged it down to our home for the winter.
We had an uneventful winter, in which I managed to make three more nuclear batteries, mainly limited by the nuclear material I could find. I had already had the two in my suit, and now with the other four we had our own mini power grid. I also added a security system to prevent the suit from being taken. The batteries electrified the steel shell, and I had made a rubber layer to separate the steel from my skin to protect me from the electrical current.
Towards the middle of the winter, we heard a fighter jet fly overhead, guns firing. I was on lookout, and I saw it chasing one of the alien ships, which we called drones. It fired with machine guns, on the tail of the alien craft. The alien craft was finally hit, and crashed into a Starbucks a few blocks away. The jet circled once, then returned to an airfield probably a few miles away. I told the others, and we headed off to the crash site.
If I could get a good look at the craft and its technology, I was pretty sure I could use it for our own good. The ship was badly damaged, mainly from the crash. It was surprisingly light, but awkward to carry. I didn't want to stick around too long, knowing that somebody would be along to pick it up and take it to a base to research. Using some of the debris from the Starbucks, we made a wooden bed to carry the craft between the three of us. We removed the craft from the wreckage and placed it on the bed.
We carried the craft to our house but couldn't easily fit it in the stairwell, so we had to dump it down the elevator shaft. The elevator was, thankfully, up on the fifth story, so it was a straight shot down to the basement level. Once we had it at the bottom, we closed the elevator shaft doors, then went down to the basement to extract it. Once we had it out and off the ground on some sawhorses, I began taking it apart and looking at the interior.
The first thing I noticed is that there was no room for a pilot, or at least a human pilot, and no controls as far as I could see. This craft was unmanned, probably controlled by someone/something from the alien mothership. I started to look at the instruments, which seemed standard for aircraft; accelerometer, gyroscope, altitude meter(altimeter?), and wind speed and direction instruments and stuff. Some of it I didn't understand, but it was definitely modern and advanced technology. The power source was nuclear, but a lot more powerful than my nuclear batteries, and a good deal smaller too. It had several cameras, which I took off to look through. There was a normal camera, albeit with a very powerful zoom, thermal, IR, and another one I wasn't sure what it was. It was a normal camera for the most part, but people glowed green in the lense.
The propulsion system was nothing I've ever heard of or seen before, and consumed most of the power from the generator. I couldn't put it in my suit without using too much power. The generator could replace all six of my nuclear batteries, but the casing had been damaged beyond repair and the geiger counter was clicking more than I would've liked, so I threw it out. The exterior of the ship was very strong and light, but was too thin on the craft to be bulletproof. took the metal and set it aside for later use with the cameras and instruments.
Most of the craft was unusable because it was damaged or I didn't understand the technology. Once I had salvaged all I could, I took the remainder of the ship and stashed it in an old thrift store across the street. On the way back, I saw a convoy of three humvees stopped at the Starbucks. I told the others when I got back, and we prepared to defend our base. Thirty minutes later, a squad of troops entered the building. They cleared the ground floor and then went up, leaving four soldiers to guard the stairwell down. I was behind a barricade with Sanders and Jones, waiting for soldiers to come down the stairwell. The squad cleared the top floors, and then began to descend.
I saw the soldiers shadow through the doorway, about to enter the room, when his radio crackled. "We found it. In an old thrift store a block away. Come over to defend it until the transport truck gets here, " a voice said.
"Right away, " the soldier replied.
The soldiers went back up the stairs and to the thrift store. We cleared the building to make sure there were no soldiers still around, and we watched the troops from the top of the building. They took the craft out of the building and set up a defensive perimeter. A few minutes later, a truck arrived and took the wreckage away. Once it had left, a soldier unloaded a green disk thing from a humvee, set it on the ground and began pushing buttons on it.
"Stop them. That's a bomb, " Jones said as he grabbed his rifle. As soon as he said that, I realised he was probably right. They would want to get rid of the rest of the craft to keep humans from using their technology against them. I brought my arms forward and attached the barrel extensions to make them more accurate. I swung my arms forward and began to fire on the soldiers. Two went down easily, but the others dove behind cover as soon as they realised what was happening. There were about twenty soldiers total, and the one who was arming the bomb was dead. I primed a rocket but Sanders stopped me.
"You might trigger the explosives, don't use your rockets, " he said. I nodded and continued firing with just the rifles. The soldiers were hunkered down behind the humvees or in the thrift store, trying to take us out. It was hard to get hits on them, but we slowly but surely whittled down their numbers. When only ten were left, a helicopter appeared nearby. I hadn't thought of them calling backup.
"Jones, can you take it out?" Sanders yelled over the noise.
Jones brought his rifle around and fired a shot into the helicopter. "No, this ones got bullet proof glass. We've gotta get inside!" He yelled. We left the roof and ducked inside, narrowly avoiding a line of bullets as they stitched themselves across the roof. The soldiers in the street would be free to detonate the explosives, so we needed to stop them. I stopped by a window, but Sanders pulled me along.
"They would've already armed it by now, we need to get to the basement to try and survive the blast, " he said. As we entered the basement, I heard the humvees start up and drive away. We got as far away from the explosives as we could, waiting for the explosion. It felt like hours that we waited.
"Maybe they didn't arm it for some- " I started, but was cut off by a huge explosion. The explosion ripped through the ground level of the building and caused the rest of it to fall down. The explosion was loud, but the building falling was louder. The first and second basement levels were destroyed and covered in debris, but half of the third level was free of the wreckage. Thankfully, that was the half we were on. When the dust settled, we were buried under a building. The tools I used for nuclear batteries and suit upgrades were still intact, as well as the four nuclear batteries and the parts I had salvaged from the crashed ship. The elevator shaft was full of debris, and the stairwell was destroyed.
"Carl, can you build something to get us out of here?" Sanders asked.
I nodded. "I think so. "
I started and attached the lenses and instruments to my suit, and then began working with the metal. It had a high heat tolerance and resisted electricity slightly, so I used that. By running a current through the metal, it began to heat up, enough to cut metal. I made three of them, each powered by a nuclear battery. The fourth I put in a backpack that we would take with us or come back for later.
Using the cutters, we cleared a path to the middle of the basement, where a large grate was. We cut it open and dropped in. We followed the pipes for a long time, I used some of the LEDs to mark our passage. Finally, we emerged under a bridge out of a drain pipe. Now that we had a way out, we could still use our base, but would need to remodel it. We returned after grabbing some food, and began to clear away the wreckage to make the space larger and cleaner. The explosion had actually made it more secure, with only one entrance we could easily defend ourselves and enough air filtered through the wreckage to keep us alive.
A few days later, the cutters were no longer needed, so I disassembled them and melted the alien metal into ingots for easy storage and later use. The nuclear batteries were still used occasionally, but mainly to power our base. We waited out the winter, then prepared to travel north. Before we left, I hid the four nuclear batteries in the wreckage, but attached a quick user guide so whoever found them would know how to use them. We left the alien metal as well, but hid it separately.