Invasion Day: An Oral History of the Veech War by Micah Gurley (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

was quiet. Guys were lying all over the place, blood all over. I started to panic—I mean, more so than I had already, but I began making my way to the front of the prison. I must not have been the only one to survive because the doors were open, something I didn't think about at the time. Someone must have just walked up to the guards on the floor and unclipped their keys. A few others were walking around in the cell blocks, their ears covered in blood, but I didn't stop and didn't try to figure out what was going on. I just needed to get out. Some of the guys who were alive seemed to have entirely cracked because they kept walking into things and then doing it again and again. I didn't know any of them and didn't know what I could do. I kept walking and walked right out of the front gate.

After making it outside, I walked down the street awhile, clearing my head and trying to figure out what was going on. I never thought about the police or that I was escaping. I was just confused and thinking about my family. We had heard about the aliens and had seen the ships on the news, so I figured they dropped a bomb on us that must have popped our eardrums or something.

I ran into a few other guys that had left the prison, and even though I didn't know them, there was some familiarity there, so we decided to stick together. We did the whole shouting at each other thing and miming stuff with our hands. We were eventually able to communicate a little. Funny now but not so funny then.

After a half-mile of walking, we borrowed (Gives me a small smile.) some clothes in a local store and found an older car that I could hotwire. I needed to get to my mom, so I headed to Barstow to get on I-40.

The trip to Barstow was weird, man, you know, like from a horror flick. A lot of backroads were quiet. Wrecked cars were burning all over the place, making it difficult to see and breathe. There were dead bodies, hundreds and thousands of them, lying in yards. Here and there, people were running while holding their ears, blood running down their necks onto their shirts. Freaky, man. The trip took about two hours. We had to go slow because the road was so bad, though nothing like I would see later.

By the time I made it to I-40, I was ready to move on. Now, you got to remember that I still had no idea what was going on, not for sure, at least. I kept trying the radio but my eardrums were blown, and I could only hear a noise like the rushing of water, you know, like at a waterfall.

When we get on the interstate, I saw them, the alien shuttles. Of course, I didn't know what they were at the time. One of the guys wrote the word police on a piece of paper, and then the word shiny. I think that guy might have had his brain scrambled. (He laughs.) Those ships were flying all over the place, probably like ten or fifteen of them. They would land and then take off again. I was driving, but the guys kept pointing behind us at the shuttles, the whole time trying to scream at each other.

My timeline is a little screwed up, but I think that was when the Air Force showed up. We saw the jets, dozens of them, maybe more, fly right over us. We didn't hear them, but we felt them rattle the car as they flew by. We got excited. Our boys were gonna get some.

We saw the battle, but couldn't make out what was happening. We saw some of our planes explode, especially when those alien fighters showed up. I tried to keep my eyes on the road but it was hard with the air turning into a massive fight. One of the planes, ours or theirs, I'm not sure, crashed about a mile from us in a neighborhood. We saw the fireball go up and felt the ground shake. We started getting worried again and tried to go faster, but couldn't because of everyone else clogging up the road trying to escape.

Anyway, after only half a mile more on the interstate, I knew we were going to have some problems. The traffic was crawling at that point and getting more crowded all the time. I don't know why all those people didn't leave earlier. I figured they took a while to recover after the noise bomb and got a late start on getting the hell out and away from the shuttles.

The on-ramps were bumper to bumper, and they were pouring on the interstate. We were going like twenty-five mph when another crash happened behind us. Scared the... well, it scared me, so I hit the gas and took off on the median and hopped in the next lane. The median between the westbound and eastbound lanes was only grass, so I just kept going and got in the westbound lane. That worked for about ten minutes, but cars, trucks, and eighteen-wheelers were pouring in on both sides of the interstate. It was a panic, man—panic like you've never seen. I think that if everyone had been calmer and gone about it right, we could have made it using both lanes, but that's not how it happened.

Next thing I know, more explosions were going off behind us. Someone was shooting at us or planes were crashing, I don't know which. The guys with me were panicking, slapping me on the shoulder, almost beating me in their fear. They wanted to go faster, but I couldn't.

The traffic started to worsen. Cars got so close they started scraping each other, knocking off rearview mirrors and even pushing the smaller vehicles to the side. I