Lazers From The Sky

Not in the vague way panicked people talked - “God’s doing it,” “The aliens are picking” - but in a way his brain could hold without slipping off the edge. He needed a rule, something measurable. A delay. A sequence. Anything that repeated hard enough to bet on.

Another tremor rolled through the corridor, smaller this time, like the building was flinching. The sealed door rattled again, and a keypad panel somewhere down the hall blinked red. Through the concrete, Jimmy could hear the distant, panicked shuffle of bodies moving where they weren’t supposed to be.

“Did you see it?” the voice asked. The speaker sounded older than Jimmy by at least a decade, but fear aged everyone the same. “Did it hit someone near you?”

Jimmy didn’t look at him. Looking felt like giving the moment permission to become real. “Not near me,” Jimmy said. “Not this time.”

“That’s luck,” the man snapped, and then the anger broke into a plea. “Tell me it’s luck.”

Jimmy didn’t answer. Luck didn’t leave a timestamp trail. Luck didn’t arrive with the exact kind of sound that made his teeth ache.

He slid deeper into the storage corridor’s shadow, away from the door’s rattling, and crouched beside a row of stacked crates. Their labels were half-smeared, the ink washed out by humidity. He’d pulled one of them closer earlier, turning it into a barrier between himself and the corridor entrance. The wood felt splintered under his fingertips, cold through his gloves.

He started the recorder anyway. His thumb hovered over the button like it might refuse him.

The next crack came without warning - another violent punctuation mark from the sky. The sound punched through the corridor ceiling, and the air jumped. Jimmy felt it in his ribs first, then in his ears, then in his skull, like someone had struck a bell inside his head.

He hit the recorder.

The strike followed. Not the same direction as before - he couldn’t see out, but the vibration told him where the energy landed. The floor bucked, and a sheet of loose insulation somewhere overhead rained down in sandy sheets. The emergency lights dimmed, then brightened as if the building was trying to decide whether it still had the right to exist.

When the shaking stopped, Jimmy counted what he could count. His mind did it automatically now: crack, delay, impact. He’d been doing it with scraps of time since he’d found the shelter, but today he needed the pattern to stop being a feeling and become a number.

He scrolled the recorder display with one hand while his other clutched the edge of a crate. The screen was small, hard to read in the flicker, but the timestamps were crisp - too crisp to be coincidence. He matched the moment of the crack to the moment the vibration registered through the mic.

The delay was there. Not huge, not variable in the way chaos usually is. A narrow window. His stomach tightened as he fed the numbers into his own memory.

“Let me see that,” the older man demanded, suddenly close enough that Jimmy smelled sweat under fear.

Jimmy froze. He hadn’t realized how much he’d been holding the recorder like it was a secret. He’d been careful not to show anyone. The shelter had become a place where information could turn into a weapon, and weapons didn’t care who they cut.

“It’s recording,” Jimmy said, voice low.

“That’s proof,” the man insisted. “If you’ve got proof, show it. People are dying up there. Proof means we can - ”

“Means what?” Jimmy snapped before he could stop himself. The words came out sharper than he intended, and the man flinched like he’d been struck.

Jimmy swallowed, forced the anger down. “It means we can guess faster,” he said. “And guessing doesn’t stop a lazer.”

The man’s mouth opened, then shut. His eyes flicked to the corridor door, where a thin strip of light seeped around the edges of the seal - light that shouldn’t have been there. The door was supposed to be locked down. Supposed to be safe.

Above, there was another sound - not a crack, not yet. Just a grinding, like something heavy was shifting position through structural bones.

Jimmy looked back to his screen. He had three intervals now, enough to start saying “consistent” instead of “maybe.”

He should’ve felt relief.

Instead, a new kind of panic crawled up his spine. Consistent delay meant the pattern had teeth. It meant the aliens weren’t just lashing lasers at random targets; they were operating on a schedule. A system. Something that could be predicted - if he had enough data.

He needed more. He needed the next crack. He needed to confirm the rule under fresh conditions. He needed to get out of this corridor before the numbers turned into evidence he couldn’t keep.

A scream cut through the corridor - high, abrupt. Then another, and another, as if the building was coughing up fear in layers.

Someone shoved through the corridor entrance, shoulder-first, and the door they’d been leaning against slammed the wall hard enough to shake the crates. The newcomer was a woman, hair plastered to her forehead, eyes too wide to focus. She didn’t ask permission. She grabbed the older man’s sleeve and yanked him toward the corridor’s inner bend.

“They’re moving people!” she yelled. “The seals - some of them are failing!”

The older man tried to wrench his arm free, but the woman’s grip was iron with desperation. “There’s nowhere to move to!”

“There’s always somewhere,” she said, and the words sounded like a lie she needed to believe. “Listen - listen to the sounds. They’re not random. They’re - ”

Jimmy heard it then, under everything else: the faint whine of machinery struggling to reroute power. The shelter’s ventilation system had changed pitch. The air grew warmer, stale and thick, like breath trapped too long.

The corridor lights flickered. The emergency glow stuttered, then went dim enough to steal detail from the walls. In the half-dark, Jimmy could see dust drifting in slow, lazy swirls - until the next tremor jerked them into motion.

The loud sky crack came again, and this time it didn’t feel distant. It felt overhead, immediate, like the sound had been aimed through the ceiling just for them.

Jimmy’s body reacted before his mind could. He slammed his recorder button to tag the moment and lunged behind the crates, flattening himself as the floor shuddered.

The strike hit. Harder than the others. The corridor’s inner bend lit up for a split second with reflected emergency light - white-hot, then gone - followed by a concussion that shoved the air out of Jimmy’s chest.

His teeth clacked. His ears rang so loudly the world became a vibrating shell.

When the noise finally fell away, he forced himself to breathe. The crate he’d used as cover had shifted. A chunk of insulation stuck to his glove like wet paper. Somewhere to his left, something metal had bent and then settled with a groan.

“Jimmy!” the older man yelled, and the shout carried panic now, not anger. “Where’s your - ”

Jimmy reached for the recorder.

His hand met nothing but air.

For a heartbeat, he couldn’t process it. His brain offered him impossible explanations - maybe it had slipped down, maybe he’d dropped it behind a crate. But his fingers found only smooth concrete, gritty with dust.

The recorder wasn’t in his palm. It wasn’t on the floor. It wasn’t clipped to his wrist anymore.

A stampede had hit the corridor entrance while the strike rocked them. People had moved in a rush, and in that rush, his evidence had been torn out of his grip. He could almost feel the moment it happened, like a yank from the universe.

“No,” Jimmy whispered, and the word came out like a cough.

The woman who’d been shouting earlier grabbed his arm and yanked him upright. Her fingers were cold, trembling violently. “They’re pushing everyone deeper,” she said. “If you stay here - ”

Jimmy looked down the corridor. The path behind them was a mess of bodies and debris. Crates were toppled, labels shredded. Dust coated everyone’s clothes like they’d been dragged through a factory floor.

He scanned for the recorder the way you scan for someone you can’t afford to lose. He saw a flash of plastic near a fallen pallet - his device’s dark edge, half-buried.

Hope surged so fast it made him dizzy.

He started to crawl toward it, but the older man grabbed his jacket. “Don’t,” he hissed. “That’s where they’re coming through. You’ll get trampled.”

Jimmy tore free with a grunt and shoved himself forward anyway, one elbow scraping concrete. The floor was slick with dust; his glove slid, and he almost lost his momentum. He fought for it, heart battering his ribs.

The recorder was right there - within reach.

He grabbed it and dragged it toward him, but as he did, a new roar rose from above, not the crack - something else. A deeper structural sound, like the building was collapsing its own spine.

The corridor’s inner bend shuddered again, and for a second the air tasted of burnt insulation, sharp and chemical. Then a wave of movement rippled through the crowd. People surged away from the bend, away from whatever was breaking, and they surged right over Jimmy’s knees.

He clamped down on the recorder, but the pressure of bodies was relentless. Footsteps pounded dust into his mouth. Someone’s elbow hit his ribs. Pain flared hot and immediate.

“Let go,” the woman screamed, not at Jimmy but at whoever was driving the crowd forward.

Jimmy held on. He couldn’t afford to lose it again. The numbers on the screen were the only thing keeping his suspicion from being just another story people told to survive the night.

He managed to get one hand free, then he used it to prop himself against a crate corner. The world narrowed to the recorder display and the tremor beneath it.

His screen was smeared with grit. The timestamp tags were still there - he could read enough to salvage what mattered. The last interval had a clean start, a clean crack marker.

The problem was the intervals he’d built his rule on. The earlier recordings were intact for the first two delays, but the third - his most important confirmation - was corrupted. The display stuttered, the waveform blurred, and the mic tag had been overwritten by noise, like someone had dragged a hand across the data.

Jimmy stared at the broken line until his eyes burned.

He’d turned observation into a measurable rule, and then the shelter had punished him for daring to trust it.

The stampede had taken half his evidence.

Above, another crack sounded - distant now, but it was coming through the structure like a promise - and Jimmy felt the corridor tighten around him. The crowd was moving again, not waiting for permission. Not waiting for him to finish his calculations.

He could either keep trying to recover the lost data from under bodies and debris, or he could move with the flow and risk losing everything else.

Jimmy swallowed dust and stood halfway, recorder clutched to his chest. His ribs hurt every time he inhaled, but the pain was clean compared to the panic.

“Your delay,” the older man said, panting, eyes locked on the recorder like it could resurrect the dead. “You’ve got it, right?”

Jimmy didn’t answer with comfort. Comfort would be a lie. He forced the truth out through dry lips. “It’s consistent,” he said. “But I lost the last one.”

The woman’s face tightened. “So we can’t be sure.”

Jimmy looked down the corridor at the smeared display, at the half-rule he now owned. He could feel the sky’s violence through the soles of his boots, could sense the next strike like pressure building behind a door.

He made a choice anyway.

He shoved forward with the crowd, dragging himself deeper into the shelter storage corridor where the air was warmer and the lights were dying, keeping the recorder pressed to his body like a stolen organ. If the aliens were using the lasers on a delay, he could work with partial proof - if he survived long enough to gather more.

The crack from above hit again, and this time the sound arrived like it had been waiting for him to move.

Jimmy ran toward the next stretch of darkness with his rule fractured in his hand and the timer still ticking somewhere in the bones of the building.

End of chapter one. 40 more chapters and about 101,612 words in the full book.