Space Rocks

The sun reflected off the small office windows spaced apart by titanic art deco pillars running up the sides of the stone sky scrapers. It was 10am and the streets were sparsely populated by small clusters of people strolling idly along glancing at shop front windows and making small talk. The nine to five business men and women had by now comfortably settled into the nests of their office cubicles and were busy bothering the world with their phone calls and wondering what excuse they’d use for working late so they could shag their secretaries. The rest of us were enjoying the weather. I was absently ticking over my options for lunch while gazing up at the strip of sky framed by the concrete towers lining the street. Emily was just suggesting we grab some sandwiches from the deli and head to the park as we turned a corner. They seemed to be moving so slow, and silently. A cluster of about half a dozen boulders, the largest the size of a half-ton truck, passed through the air just past the tip of the building on our left. At first I said nothing. It just didn’t click. I thought it through a bit to be sure of myself and then asked the age old question,
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“Then I’m pretty sure you didn’t see it,” I said.
Then a cluster of shadows slipped silkily across the street, over the cars and right over the pavement in front of our feet. I snapped my head up just in time to see the last of another cluster of gigantic rocks sneak over the top of the building, this time even closer.
“There!” I pointed up.
She craned her head to gaze up, and right on cue another stone came sailing into view over the crest of the building on the far side of the street. Silently and oh, so gracefully it passed over head. Silent, until it struck the 22nd floor of the office building, bounced off, and came hurtling towards the street.
Not everyone can be as observant sadly, and despite the sound of the first crash, and the second as it ricocheted off the building on the other side of street, the three ladies it hit hadn’t even looked up. Pavement, dust and a fine crimson mist exploded up from the sidewalk. The sound of twisting steel as the giant rock came to rest half rolled through the side of a mail truck pierced through my skull. I inhaled deeply to fuel a string of profanity when I looked up to see two more boulders slamming into the building and coming crashing down, closely followed by a rain of concrete debris dislodged from the tower.
“Run!” I screamed, as obvious as it sounded.
We raced back around the corner only to see the silent floating stones crashing into buildings all down the street. Bang! Out of nowhere, one landed in the middle of the street just to our left, and bounced in the air. I dragged Emily up the stairs of the nearest building to shelter us under the giant marble arches above its entrance. The air was filled with the rumbling bass of granite stone missiles raining down upon the street and the protesting shrieks of twisting metal. It was deafening. They struck, they bounced. Strangers running down the street would dodge the first hit, only to have it bounce up spinning and land on them as they fled, grinding them into a shredded mess as it hopped along like a pebble. They would come to rest looking like what they were, giant boulders out of place, as if they’d fallen off the back of a truck. Only the red smudges gave testament to the reality of their recent history. One after another they fell. Two or three landed close to where we sheltered, one of which struck a man in a suit from behind. It was like something out of a cartoon, with his torso clothed in perfectly pressed Italian suit, with nothing but tomato soup below the belt. Then there was a different sound.
“Clang!”.
It clattered down to the street and landed on the street corner next to us. A tube, with fins rattled about and came to rest. It looked like a bomb, with a bulbous head at one end and sharp looking stabilizer fins at the other. Only the colour would set the mind to question its nature. It was bright royal blue, with a chequered pattern just bellow the tip. It looked like a paint job you’d see on a race track. It lay there noiselessly. Further down the street you could hear the same clanging as similar missile dropped to the asphalt. The boulders stopped. The rumbling stopped. The screaming quietened and the whimpering and moaning did its best fill the gap, but could barely be heard over the sound of my pulse keeping cadence in my ears. The air was punctuated by a few more clanging crashes further away and then quiet. We stared at the bomb like tube with its snazzy blue paint job and did our best to remember to breathe. It began to hum, then whirr. Then, like a claymation creation, arms sprouted from its sides. They pawed gingerly at the ground around itself, as if looking for a dropped pair of glasses, then, seemingly satisfied with its exploration, firmly planted its hands and lifted itself up off the ground. From the top popped up a torso and what one would assume was a head, though it showed no features save a perfectly triangular nose. Out of its shoulder it extended a pole which bloomed into a propeller. It stood there on its hands, as the propeller began to spin, within seconds it was faster than the eye and could be seen only as a blurry halo above the things perfectly spherical head. It shot up twenty feet in the air, a large gun appearing seemingly from nowhere in its hands, and hovered momentarily in the air.
“Destroy” was the only thing it said, before opening fire on a herd of senior citizens cowering next to a school bus. They evaporated in a hail of shrapnel, the bus blew up...and the world began to end. They had arrived. And we’d never know who or what they were.