War of the Worlds 2.
Like everyone else, I never knew what crashed; it would happen so fast, the invasion of Earth. It started when my mother told me a shooting star was crashing to Earth. I must have made a dozen wishes as it came down before it crashed on the surface of the world like a thunderclap. Not one of them came true, unless, of course, some God twisted them for reasons nobody could work out and had decided all of the wishes meant the invasion would begin.
Dozens of people came and photographed the machines, TV crews filmed the whole scene; the thing we thought was the meteor had crashed and skidded half a mile through the woods, dredging up tonnes of dirt and smashed trees into a pile that served as the buffers of a railway station before it came to a stop.
My mother made sure me and my sisters were kept as far from the meteor as we could. We couldn't have been less than 67 feet away from the thing, but the heat was so intense I might have been in a furnace.
As for the thing itself… when I grew older, I would visit the ocean after I and my sisters were taken in by our aunts, and they loved the sea so much that they lived close to it without being landlocked. I would frequently see whales and even go out onto the sea to see them up close and personal, but when I was a kid and saw the meteor that had crashed so loud it created a minor earthquake.
But the meteor was no whale.
No, it was enormous. At the time it was the most enormous thing that I had ever seen in my life, and even many other adults would agree with me when they craned their necks to look up at the thing as it towered over us. It blotted out the sun without needing to. It was like a giant egg, that had crashed from the stars.
Much of the heat was being held in by some of that dirt which had rolled over the burning hot meteor. Scientists and engineers came and studied the thing, but they were none the wiser.
Hours later, it opened. The meteor cracked like a giant egg, the egg that it was, and the tripods and flying machines came out later that night. But nobody knew about them until they came into the town, their heat rays blazing. My mother and father woke us up and they forced us to dress up quickly and as warmly as they could. There was no time to grab supplies and other bits, and we were forced out…and just in time, because our home was set alight. The war machines, as they were later called, were terrifying.
As I raced out of the town with my family, unaware that later my parents would be killed in the invasion, and I had to take care of my siblings before we were all taken in by my mother's sisters who would look after us until we were grown up, I managed to get a fleeting glimpse of the war machines in that instance.
The tripod was like a giant spider if spiders had three legs instead of eight. Its top was big and bulging with writhing tentacles, which snatched people and lifted them and dropped them inside, but what happened to them, I don't know. Even now, despite the number of years since the Martians invaded us, I don't know how many people got out that night, and how many didn't.
But all I remember was the heat ray blasting away, setting the town on fire, and destroying cars and everyone unlucky enough to not get out of the way alight until they were burnt to ashes. My mother was unfortunately one of the people who were killed in the blasts, and we were left a mess.
But we didn't know that a few days later, our father would be killed while he managed to make sure we ran, and find a place to hide out so the Martians didn't find us.
When the invasion finally ended, and we came out of hiding, our aunts were the only ones in our family who could take us in. Their little home town was too far for the Martians to reach even if many of the townsfolk had left so they wouldn't be caught on their laurels. Our aunts immediately took us in when they got the full story about what happened to our parents, and they've raised us ever since.