The Aftermath Prologue

(What follows is a series of journal entries by Professor Peter Englemann of Winchester, England. Though his experience details the events from the perspective of the UK, evidence suggests that the series of events happened simultaneously across the globe.)

FIRST ENTRY
''On Wednesday twelfth of December the question was finally answered as to whether or not mankind was alone in the universe. Arthur C. Clark was incorrect when he said that either we are alone in the universe or we are not and that both are equally terrifying; an empty universe would be a blessing compared to what we have inherited not only for ourselves, but for the generations that follow. We barely saw them coming and in retrospect how could we have done? I remember it with more clarity than any memory before or since: I was sitting in a café sipping a black coffee going over the usual Wednesday morning crossword when the waitress turned the sound up on the usually muted television that hung on the wall. A breaking news story said that 'unidentified shadows' had been detected by the Mars Rovers and that the entire of two hemispheres of the Red Planet had been plunged into darkness. It was interesting but could have easily been a hoax if not for what came next: Live footage was broadcast across several nations – Russia, China, America, the UK – each showing the same thing on shaky, amateurish camera-phone footage:  huge megalithic 'things' descending from cloud cover and hovering over major cities. Some showed military vehicles going to intercept, others people simply pointing the sky. Then everything went dead. The television, the coffee machines, the hand-held game a small, bored boy was playing with. My first instinct – and that over everyone around me it seemed, who were looking equally baffled – was that it was a power cut, a temporary outage of power on the local grid. That was until the sound of screeching tyres and cars ploughing into one another rang out in the street. I gazed out the window and saw three cars crumpled together at a cross-roads, smoke billowing from two and fire from the third. The traffic-lights were out and blood was splattered across a bonnet where one of the drivers had been catapulted out through the front wind-screen. Pedestrians were screaming and running everywhere but their cries were almost immediately drowned out as a shadow loomed overhead and the sight of a Boeing 400 passenger jet passed over, its engines utterly silent but the moan of it frantic descent almost deafening. It disappeared out of view behind some taller buildings then erupted it a huge explosion as it crashed into the ground. The shock wave came next, shattering the window in front of me and causing me to duck for cover. When I stood back up the world seemed in chaos. People were running about as one might expect in a disaster. Some people were injured in the café from the flying glass, but they paled in comparison to the dead outside; the people who had been injured by road traffic or the goodness-knows how many people who had died as a result of the plane crash. I wanted to help them, I remember that well but my body seemed to walk me outside on auto-pilot as if a better view was really what I needed. It wasn't. The sky-line was filled with plumes of smoke and fire, buildings were damaged and people were fleeing in all directions. It was odd because there were no sounds of sirens even though one would expect rapid response from the emergency services. That's when it hit me I think. Even among all the trauma and shocked people one thing could explain everything that just happened as improbable as it seemed: They had turned off the power. I reached for my phone and sure enough not only was there no WiFi connection or phone signal but the phone itself was dead. Somehow all the electricity had been scrambled, as if hit by a massive high-altitude electromagnetic pulse. I didn't know how wide-spread it was, with no electricity there were no phones or internet and no way to establish any long-range communication. In the wake of such instant and indefensible destruction it was hard to quantify what came next, but on reflection it makes perfect sense. I remember seeing massive pillars of light far off in the distance, many of them across the skyline beyond the flames and the smoke. They were so bright but thankfully far away, and at the time I was almost ready to chalk it up to being 'something else going on' when I realised the nearest pillar couldn't have been more than five or six miles away. In the thirty or-so seconds the lights were up before vanishing I realised that the nearest one was around the same area as the city of Winchester. Another was likely Salisbury and a third Andover. Whatever happened it had done so simultaneously, and just after the power went off...'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 19.12.12

SECOND ENTRY
''I wanted to write in here sooner but things have been so taxing I've barely had time to take stock and slow down enough to rest. Its been a week and everything is still almost too much to process. After the initial attack people were in shock, not sure what to do or what to expect. The normal procedure of collecting and cataloguing the dead and the injured took longer than it should have as so many people were terrorfied of what might be waiting just around the corner. With no global or national communications everyone was in the dark. Were the 'aliens' coming for us? Where was the military? How wide-spread was all this? Eventually the local emergency services people started to appear all over the village, it was a safe bet that those brave men and women had been there all along, but without the sounds of their vehicles approaching they were a sight less seen. A meeting was called at the village hall on Monday, and the Parish Council tried to organise things but the panic in people's faces was obvious. A local man, Michael Willis, suggested that he may be able to build a short-to-medium range radio with the support of some local people, and that was voted in almost immediately. The rest of the meeting involved mourning the dead and giving people jobs to do in order to start rebuilding the village. We all need something to do to keep our minds off this until someone tells us what's going on....I get the feeling Christmas may be cancelled this year.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 26.12.12

THIRD ENTRY
''It seems like every bit of good news comes with bad, or worse. It took Willis the best part of a week to get the radio up and running and finally get a response signal, and by then the dead had been buried and the most structurally unsound buildings reinforced or pulled down around the village. Another meeting was called, and the numbers were shocking: we'd lost almost half of the population of the village due to the initial accident, injuries sustained afterwards and suicides. Willis took the stand and explained that he had made contact with a man who claimed to be near the borders of Winchester when the lights came down, and that the entire city had been stripped. When a member of the community asked Willis what the man meant by 'stripped', he said he had asked the man on the end of the radio the same question, and that the reply he had gotten was 'of life'. The man had refused to give his name which made a lot of people anxious, and it was decided that a group should be sent out to find out what has happened in the city and what can be done to help. I've put my name forward.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 30.12.12

FOURTH ENTRY
''Happy New Year Everyone! Ha. At least my sense of humour is intact, for what that's worth. Winchester was.....a ghost town. Myself and a collection of six others made the journey which didn't take too long, but it seemed the power-outage was as wide-spread as we'd feared. We found crashed cars and another fallen plane upon our journey, as well as more dead than I would care to count. With nobody to bury them they were beginning to stink and I knew we would have to get people out to take care of them before the risk of disease became an issue. We never did find the man who we had contacted on the radio but it took less than a few moments inside the city border to know it was deserted. With a city that had a population forty thousand that had just 'vanished' it was easy to assume that those ships or whatever they were had abducted them, but a few even more troubling things were tugging at my mind. First of all the ships were gone, and there was no sign of anyone or anything on the streets. There was no sign of damage, cars were merely stationary and not crashed. No planes had hit buildings or the like as if what happened in the village had not happened here. Strangest of all though was a lack of birdsong, and it didn't take long to realize there were no animal sounds at all, not even crickets. It was as if every living thing was 'missing'. My suspicions were confirmed as we went to leave and realise that the grass stopped abruptly inside the city border and I recalled seeing no plants or trees while rooting through the streets. Whatever that beam of light was it had taken every living thing from the city. Or destroyed it. I don't feel well.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 01.01.12

FIFTH ENTRY
''Its been five months. We're on our own. Salisbury and Andover are gone, as dead as Winchester was and I can only assume the same for London, Southampton, Basingstoke.. We found some communities still with people in but everywhere distrust is brewing and survivors are staying in their homes, in their own communities with fear of outsiders. We've heard rumours of raiders and people ransacking homes. Its hardly surprising when I think about it, with no power it was only a matter of time before criminals escape from prisons and less moral people start taking advantage. Nobody is sure what is going on or why the 'Aliens' left as suddenly as they appeared, but most people assume it is something to do with mass abductions. I'm not about to rule out anything at this point. There is talk of heading past Salisbury to Bulford to see if the 3rd Mechanised Division can be contacted, but I've been feeling too ill recently to go; the doctor says I may be suffering from a flu but without the modern machines we're used to she's been giving me mainly antibiotics to fend off the worst of it.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology and Winchester University, dated 07.05.13

SIXTH ENTRY
''Bulford is destroyed. The group came back last night and said that the site had been attacked, but not by any weapons fire they were familiar with. The rumours spreading around the village are that it was the Aliens, and the decomposed remains of the soldiers certainly indicate that it wasn't recent. I've been given a part of one of the soldier's armour to look at as I'm the only person in the village with the necessary knowledge to recognise the damage done to the surface of the chest-piece. Its not easy though, I've been spending more and more time in bed these days and can't keep my food down. I've lost two stone already. My preliminary reports are not much to go on, except that the armour has been hit by a high-intensity yield of super-heated plasma. A tiny impact whole seems to have ripped through the armour followed by a searing of the edges, as if hit by a super-laser. If it is that, I'm sure glad the Aliens are gone.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 08.05.13

SEVENTH ENTRY
''Dear God, they're back. We'd grown so complacent and insular that we'd almost forgotten about the Aliens, but Willis said that he got a radio transmission from just outside Salisbury saying that 'things' had been stalking through the countryside. I'm bed-ridden now so I can only assume I don't have long. I should be terrorfied but I'm almost relieved. I've gotten a pain in my chest over the last few weeks and although I've not told the doctor, I coughed up blood yesterday. I'm leaving this journal to Benjamin Teller, a young man who has been coming to see me on a daily basis on behest of the Doctor; helping me dress and bathe, all those kinds of demeaning things. I only hope that he fends better in whatever is to come, in this Aftermath.'' - Journal of Peter Englemann PHD, former Professor of Archaeology at Winchester University, dated 03.08.13