By Our Own Hands

By Our Own Hands

Gerrit Blank was the first, but not the last. 

He made the news on that first fateful day, but even then it seemed like just another crazy news flash. 

“Boy hit by Meteorite, and Lives!” read the headlines.  According to Gerrit he saw a ball of light coming towards him at great speed, then felt a pain in his hand, was thrown to the ground, heard a loud boom, like an explosion and pulled himself up to find a small thirty centimeter crater in the road.

“It was like it bounced off my hand”  Gerrit was quoted as saying as he showed the cameras his scar.

The skeptics came out within days of the story breaking.

‘It doesn’t add up!’ they said.
‘How could it hit him on the hand and then “bounce” into the ground.’
‘If there had been a bright light like that, in the middle of the day, then why did nobody else see it?’
‘The sonic boom that he reported would surely have been heard well before the impact.’

But the voices of the skeptics were largely ignored when scientific evidence confirmed that this pea sized, “meteorite” was declared to be without a doubt, of certain extra terrestrial origin.

Gerrit made a bit of money on the sale of his meteorite.  But he went back to school and we all started to forget about the incident.

If only we had listened to those skeptics a little more attentively, we might have seen the signs and we might have been more prepared.  But we didn’t, and let’s face it, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

They say everything happens for a reason, that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  It is my sincere hope that someone will survive, to prove that saying true. 

If I didn’t believe that it were possible for us to win out, then I wouldn’t be using my final days to write this message.  I pray that this record of our experience will help you dear reader, whoever you are, to somehow work out what happened to us.  I earnestly hope that someone will read this, that we might not all be killed and that the human race might live to be made stronger.

It seemed that Gerrit had indeed been saved.  The pea sized metal object that fell to earth was placed in a glass case on display in the private museum of a wealthy German family and there it may well have stayed.  It was two weeks later when another meteorite struck.  This one it seemed, was much more accurate. 

Gerrit had been lucky, perhaps he moved suddenly at just the right moment.  Perhaps our unseen enemy were still calibrating their deadly weapon.  Graham Saunders, London business man was not so lucky.

Mr Saunders was walking the final leg of his jourey to work, when he too saw a large ball of light coming towards him.  He too felt the pain in his hand, although it was more searing than the deflection that Gerrit had felt.  Graham too fell to the ground, he was dazed as a group of Londoners helped him to his feet, as he began to explain what had happened to those in the crowd around him, they looked at his palm to see the pea sized metallic object which had embedded itself there.  They stared dumbstruck as it began to flash with a bright red light.

He began to scream, “it’s getting hotter!” and his whole hand seemed to glow red.

“Then his hand began to raise” a traumatized bystander later explained to a camera crew.  “He weren’t in control of it, it just raised up above his ‘ead and that red light just obliterated them poor people, it musta disintegrated ten of em before it turned on himself and he turned to ash infront of our eyes with a horrified look of helplessness on his face.”

This time of course the press went wild.  The metallic object in Graham Saunders hand had in fact killed exactly ten people, including himself.  Eye witness accounts were not able to confirm the exact number of people who had been turned to dust in front of their eyes.  It was not until we began to learn more of these small metallic balls, after more than twenty of them had been unleashed on our planet, that the same consistent pattern began to show itself.  It seemed that each ball had a limited capacity, always ending on the final shot with the disintegration of the host.

After the incident with Graham Saunders, an Australian was hit in his home the next day.  Neighbours heard the screams from the house and rushed to the scene only to be met by a trembling broken man crouched at the ashes of his family in tears with his hand in the air.  The first five onlookers were met with the horrific red light and disintegrated at his door, when the police arrived only two traumatized neighbours remained at the door after witnessing the deaths of their own loved ones and finally their neighbour, turned to dust by his own hand.

We tried to hide.  But to no avail.  The attacks grew more and more frequent on all corners of the globe.  Perhaps some have managed to find secure hiding places.  I pray that they have. 

I pray that I may never come to know where they are, for this morning as we hid in the basement of our apartment building my own hand was struck and I myself watched three fellow residents die of fear before the red glow of my hand. 

When I last saw the streets of our town they were deserted, I dare not venture there again.  I sit here, alone in the dark.  My greatest hope is that I will die alone in this basement, of starvation, or some other cause, before my last words are found by any surviving member of the human race.