Daniel stood panting, his bleeding fist trembling as he stared at the shattered television screen.
The pain in his knuckles was a welcome distraction, a brief, steadying point in the chaos of failure and grief.
He was alone.
The silence of the dead world pressed in on him, a physical weight that made it hard for him to breathe.
The image of Chloe's terrified face, her mouth open in a silent scream, was branded onto the inside of his eyelids.
Over the next few months, that image became both his tormentor and his driving force. A desperate flicker of hope, refused to die out.
Chloe was gone, taken through a portal to a place he couldn't imagine. But his parents? They were at work when it ended.
They were strong, realistic people. Maybe, just maybe, they had found a way to survive.
This fragile hope propelled him through the ruins of their quiet suburban town.
He started with his father's workshop, 'Donald's Mechanics.'
The big roll-up door was bent and twisted, ripped halfway from its track. Inside, the scene was total chaos .
A half-repaired sedan was crushed under a collapsed section of the roof. Tools were scattered across the concrete floor, lying exactly where they had been dropped when the earth began to shake.
He searched the small office, kicking through debris and filth, but found nothing. No note. No body.
Just the heavy silence of a place abandoned in a moment of absolute terror.
His search then led him to the city hospital where his mother worked.
The journey on foot was a tour through hell.
The further he went, the worse the destruction became. The suburbs had been destroyed , but the city center was a graveyard.
Skyscrapers were like skeletons clawing at the sky. Their windows without glass looked like empty eye holes.
The stench of decay clung to the air, making Daniel constantly retch.
The hospital served as a memorial to the massacre.
The sign, 'Mercy General Hospital,' was riddled with what looked like scorch marks and claw gashes.
Inside, the white-tiled hallways were painted with streaks of blood.
Overturned gurneys and medical carts blocked the corridors. Daniel moved through the silent wards like a ghost.
He checked the staff records office, but the files had been ransacked, papers strewn everywhere, offering no clues.
He found no survivors, only more evidence of the swift and brutal slaughter. After days of futile search, a cold reality dawned on him.
He was an orphan.
He lost all the hope he had held on to, and he was lost in the wreckage of his world.
Two years passed. The world, or what was left of it, began to settle into a new kind of order.
The initial chaos of the invasion gave way to a brutal form of society. The human population had been decimated, reduced to scattered pockets of survivors.
A new hierarchy had formed, primitive and cruel.
Farmers, who owned food, which was a valuable resource, became the new nobles.
They fortified their lands, hoarding their harvests and ruling over the starving masses with an iron fist.
And the monsters… they hadn't all left. A number of them remained, establishing themselves as cruel overlords.
They weren't the insect-like creatures he had also seen.
These ones looked almost like the unnatural versions of humans, with skin the colour of old bruises and short, curly horns protruding from their brows.
They had strange weapons and walked through the human settlements with a sense of total power. Just being there was a constant reminder of who was in charge.
Daniel, no longer a boy but a thin, hardened young man was starving.
The last of the canned goods he'd scavenged had run out months ago. Hunger was a constant, biting pain in his stomach. It even numbed his grief.
It was this primal need that finally broke him, forcing him to seek servitude.
He found it on a sprawling farm owned by a man named Jedediah.
Jedediah was a fat, piggish man with a cruel mouth.
Before the invasion, he had been nothing, but now, with his tall fences and well-guarded fields of corn and potatoes, he was a king.
Daniel was given a small, dirty cot in a communal barn with a dozen other miserable souls and was put to work from sunrise to sunset.
The lazy boy who had once slept on a couch all day found a miserable rebirth in the dirt of Jedediah's fields. But old habits died hard.
His mind would drift, his body would ache, and his pace would slacken. The consequences were no longer the mother's strict warnings, but the sharp crack of Jedediah's leather whip across his back.
"You think these potatoes are gonna pick themselves, you worthless animal?" Jedediah would roar, his spit flying everywhere.
"You eat my food, you live on my land, you work! Or you starve! It's that simple."
One afternoon, after a particularly vicious beating for dropping a basket of corn, Daniel limped back to the barn, his back a latticework of fire.
Silas, an older, agile farmhand who was missing three fingers on his left hand, watched him collapse on his cot.
Silas took a long drag from a hand-rolled cigarette made of dried leaves and chuckled without a trace of humour.
"Don't take it personally, kid. He's an equal opportunity bastard." He blew out a puff of foul-smelling smoke.
"At least the beatings are regular. Adds a bit of structure to the day."
Daniel just groaned, the dark humour doing little to soothe the agony in his back.
This was his life now: pain, hunger, and endless, back-breaking labour.
It was just after the two-year anniversary of the invasion that the horned overlords decided to make an example.
A public execution was announced. Five humans, accused of various crimes from hoarding food to insubordination, were to be killed in the main square of the nearest settlement.
Attendance was mandatory for all humans across the globe, requiring many to travel overseas to be present.
Daniel was herded into the square along with the other farmhands. Everyone was scared.
The crowd was massive, a sea of thin faces and hollow eyes, all watched over by the horned monsters who stood on the rooftops.
They held their alien rifles at the ready.
A wooden platform had been erected in the center of the square.
Daniel stood in the crowd, numb, just waiting for the horrible show to end.
The prisoners were dragged out, chained and cloaked in dirty rags. They were forced onto their knees on the platform.
One of the monster leaders, whose horns were longer and more ornate than the others, proceeded to read out their offences in a surprisingly clear and deep voice that made Daniel tremble.
He wasn't really listening, his gaze drifting over the condemned. Then, one of the prisoners lifted his head, shaking the matted hair from his face.
Daniel's heart stopped.
The man was thin, his face bruised and hollow, but there was no mistaking him. The neatly trimmed moustache was now unkempt.
The patch of white in his beard was now dirty and grey.
"Dad?"
Here's a clean, simple version:
The word came out as a choked whisper, swallowed by the noise of the crowd.
It was Donald.
A wave of emotions, disbelief, horror, a sudden, violent rage, crashed over Daniel.
He started to shove forward, his mind blanking on everything but the man on the platform.
"Dad!" he screamed, his voice cracking.
"DAD!"
He pushed against the people in front of him, but the crowd was packed too tightly. They were a wall of bodies, too terrified to move.
He was trapped, a hundred feet away, helpless.
The monster finished its speech and drew a long, cruelly curved sword. Daniel watched in pure agony as his father was forced to lay his head on a wooden block.
For a moment, Donald's eyes scanned the crowd, a flicker of desperation in them. But they never found his son.
The sword rose, catching the sharp light of the afternoon sun. It fell in a swift, merciless arc.
The crowd gasped in unison.
Daniel's world dissolved into a vortex of noise and unbearable pain.
His legs gave out, and he fell to his knees. A wildc animalistic scream tore from his throat.
As his vision was blurred with grief and his eyes moved around the chaotic scene. And then he saw her.
On the far side of the platform, being held firmly by the arm by a horned guard, was a woman.
She was being pushed back, away from the scene, but she had turned her head, her eyes wide with horror.
Her face was thinner, marked by fear and sorrow he'd never seen before, but it was still unmistakably her. Linda. His mother.
Their eyes locked across the square.
For five eternal seconds, the world stopped. In that single, shared glance, two years of pain and loss were communicated.
He saw the shock in her eyes at seeing him, the agony of her husband's beheading, and the loving sorrow of finding her son, only to face this hell.
Her mouth formed his name, a silent, heartbroken "Daniel."
The connection was shattered as the monster guard gave her a vicious shove, forcing her to turn and move with a group of other captives.
She stumbled, disappeared into the crowd, and was gone.
Daniel stayed on his knees. The monsters were cheering and the crowd was whispering in terror, but the sounds began to blur, fading out until they were just a dull roar in the distance.
His father was dead. The final, brutal image of the execution was burned into his mind.
But that noise was soon drowned out by a single image, one that finally lit a fire inside him.
His mother was alive. And she was a slave.
Just like that, the despair that had crushed him for two years vanished. It was burned away, replaced by a new, terrifying drive.