The children sat on the kitchen counter gathered around their grandmother in anticipation of their nightly story time. She eyed them intensely and they one at a time they fell silent. She began her story. “Tonight,” she croaked “ I’m going to tell you about the Others. They are hulking, evil fiends who wish nothing more than for our total extinction. It wasn’t always like this; our kind predates them by eons. Before they arrived, we could live out in the open as we pleased. How they arrived on the Earth is a mystery. Some say they came from outer space, from a dimension of delirium and incomprehensible evil. Their structures are mammoth, built by a race of yellow slave beasts the size of mountains that they subjugated in unfathomable ages past.” She pointed at each of the children to emphasize her words as she spoke.
“They have the power to crush us into nothing with the slightest gesture, to smash us into oblivion without breaking a sweat. They lay deadly traps for us that prey on our baser instincts. They have the power to turn the very air itself into a lethal poison from which there is no escape. My grandmother told me once of the time when as a young girl, she returned home to find the bodies of her whole family sprawled out on the floor. Massacred by the beasts. She never forgot that day for the rest of her life.”
The children sat in wide-eyed silent terror.
“They say that before they appear, a blinding bright light appears in the sky, and there it remains until they leave. If you ever see the light, run for your lives!” Her eyes went wide. “They will pursue you, but they are sluggish, and you can escape if you have somewhere to run and hide. If you can’t, then stand as still as you can, their vision is primitive, and they can only see you if you move. You cannot defeat them in combat, none of our kind has ever succeeded in that.”
Far away, there was a thunderous crash, followed with a pulsing series of reverberations. The children tensed up, and their grandmother stopped talking and looked over her shoulder silently. A blinding flash of light appeared, and they were momentarily transfixed. The creature shambled into their field of vision, it was bipedal and hairy. It let out a piercing cry that shook the very foundations of the children’s young minds, a sound they would never forget for the rest of their lives.
They recovered their faculties and ran as fast as their legs could carry them. Behind them they heard another hideous, alien scream, this time followed by an ear-shattering smack, and their grandmother was no more.
The creature taunted the grandmother in its incomprehensible alien tongue.
“Damnit, Marge, we can’t just leave the dishes in the sink like that, we’ve got roaches again!”
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