She had heard the news several months earlier but didn’t believe a word of it.

“Some newly discovered planet is going to hurtle down and mess up the Earth. Right. What a bunch of bullshit!”

Carmen was soon proven to be quite wrong, however. NASA scientists did indeed announce to the world that following summer that a new planet, or asteroid, or collection of space debris, or comet, or something was coming quite close to Earth and could cause all sorts of problems, from reversing the magnetic poles to the Earth tearing itself to shreds from the gravitational pull. What happened in the end was somewhere in between.

Carmen and Amanda were on lunch break, and, as usual, were making their way up Park Street to the little place they always ate. They were trying to bring some normalcy back, some security blanket to help them get through the knowledge that their world could forever change. The sky had a perpetual yellowish cast these days, and the sunsets were blood red. The news was reporting NASA accounts of pre-contact debris in the atmosphere, the foreshadowing of the impending contact with TF109, the asteroid on everyone’s mind.

The tabloids all screamed about an alien invasion in the wake of the space debris or whatever it was, and although Carmen laughed at them in the supermarket check-out line, she and everyone around her was secretly frightened out of their wits. No one could really be sure what would happen when the asteroid passed by Earth, and the entire event was so crazy that aliens seemed just as likely as anything else that had been happening within the past couple of months.

Strange storm clouds ... earthquakes ... the slight wobble in the previously perfect orbit of the Moon ... it was all anyone could do to try and keep a grip on their lives.

So Carmen and Amanda, like the others who still went to work every day, were playing a game – a game of “let’s pretend life is just the way it always was.” The thin veneer of sanity was getting thinner, however, as the skies darkened and the news grew more dire.

The women had almost made it to the restaurant, the place where they could turn away from the sky and pretend everything was normal.

As soon as they heard the humming sound coming from above them, they couldn’t help but look up. And then they heard the screaming from everywhere around them as other people in the busy downtown district heard the humming and looked up as well. Silver ships were in the skies. Silver ovals that hummed and sat still in the sky like some kind of perverted hummingbird. But it wasn’t nectar they wanted.

Suddenly, on the street before them and in seemingly random places around them, creatures appeared within a golden haze. They were like huge insects, their multiple jointed limbs glistening metallic in the weakened sunlight, their faceted eyes taking in the slightest movement on the city streets around them, their scaly bodies and winged backs looking much like psychedelic praying mantises.

At some point, Carmen snapped out of her stunned observation and realized that she should probably run away. She took a step backward, and the head of the nearest creature swiveled around quickly to focus on her.

The thing lunged toward the two women, and before she could think, Carmen saw Amanda grabbed and hoisted aloft by four great segmented arms. She stood there gaping, and before she could recover, Carmen was snatched away as well by one of the huge insects.

Carmen hadn’t remembered fainting, but the next thing she knew, she came to herself in the arms of one of the insect-like aliens. The air was hot, much hotter than she had remembered it, and her head still swimming and threatening to go black again on her, Carmen looked around. They were in the middle of nowhere – no, not nowhere exactly. They were in the desert. The reddish-tan sands shimmered in a mirage, and she could just make out mountains in the distance, past the scraggly sagebrush and sparse rock outcroppings.

But that was the last of the outside world that Carmen would ever see.

Still held in the creature’s arms, they entered a large cave, with other creatures before and behind them, each one carrying a human. She was reminded of a trail of ants carrying food back to the nest ... then she began to panic. Struggling and crying out, she soon realized that the tight grip of the alien was far too strong for her to ever escape. Then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness and she looked at her surroundings.

The hive was enormous, and looked much like a series of lava tube tunnels. She could hear chitinous bodies rub together in the darkness ahead of her, and deeper in the tunnels, the screams and moans of human beings. She was being taken deeper.

The air grew cooler as they traveled, and it wasn’t long before the “ant trail” ended at an immense underground chamber. The creature quickly and neatly sliced off all Carmen’s clothing, which was immediately discarded, then carried her over to one of the walls where a honeycomb-like structure was being constructed to accommodate the human bodies. She was deposited inside one of the cells and, before she could react, was sealed inside by one of the aliens. Rather than a solid wall, like inside a wax beehive, all the walls were transparent, almost like glass.

Carmen was mortified to find herself trapped behind completely transparent walls without clothing. Then she noted that all the other humans were just as naked as she was. She squinted in the dim light, trying to find a way out of her prison, but soon found that the clear walls were just as slick as glass, too.