Skeleton Wars (8 page)

The area where the warriors were standing was
covered by total darkness and the planet started shaking. At first,
the tremors were very faint, but they kept on intensifying up to an
extent that caused some weak structures in the residential areas of
the ordinary ghosts to collapse. A strong flash of lightning which
was accompanied by a very violent thunder struck into the dark
cloud and by the time it disappeared, all the skeleton warriors had
vanished mysteriously.

At 15:00 hours GMT, it was night time in all
US States, when a strong thunderstorm developed throughout the
whole country. Surprisingly, the lightning and the loud sound of
the preceding thunder could only be seen and heard by those in USA
but not in the neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico. When the
thunderstorm ceased, the sky was seen splitting apart. In only ten
seconds the split elongated and cut across the skies. Out of the
split came out a large bolide which traveled towards the ground at
a speed of 25Km/h. At an apparent magnitude of -15, this mysterious
fireball was brighter than a full moon and could be seen from
everywhere in the contiguous USA.

This burning meteor was extremely bright and
the light from it was mistaken by many as daylight which had broken
out in the middle of the night. Many of those that were asleep were
awoken by the light. They rushed to the windows and joined the
others who were gazing at the specter of the bolide. Those who were
found walking were stricken with panic and took to different street
corners to hide. When the fireball touched the ground, it exploded
like fireworks and gave out yellow beams of light and clouds of
fire. These clouds of fire raced to the buildings but they did not
set any house ablaze. In fact, temperatures remained unchanged
everywhere. In spite of the fact that every citizen in the
contiguous USA had managed to see the bolide with their eyes,
satellites and telescopes at all US observatory centers still
failed to track it completely.

There was total silence all over the country
for the five minutes that followed. The silence was only
interrupted by tremors which quickly developed in all major US
cities and towns. The shaking of the ground lasted for over thirty
minutes. It was initially weak but intensified with time and turned
into a real earthquake of magnitude of 2.5 on the Richter scale.
There was however no major structural damage that occurred except
for the windows of some buildings that shattered in some areas. The
earthquake was replaced with weak windstorms which blew
continuously throughout the whole night.

By the morning, the winds had intensified
into strong dust devils in all major US cemeteries. Gravestones
from most of the graves were blown off, leaving the graves open.
Skeletons of the dead who had been buried there arose and jumped
out of the open graves. They started running in different
directions following the winds which were blowing towards all urban
centers.

The whirlwinds were blowing strongly over the
houses that had been unknowingly built over old graves. Deep cracks
developed in the floors of such buildings and skeletons of the dead
rose out of them. Occupants in these houses were shocked by the
sight of human skeletons cropping out of the floors of their
bedrooms or living rooms. Such skeletons would run out of the
buildings to join the others that had started occupying the
streets.

A tragedy had befallen the nation! Sudden,
panicked predawn order to evacuate from all streets was given to
the civilians by the authorities. Sirens from speeding police cars
could be heard in the vicinity. Numerous police helicopters were
also roaming above the buildings in all major US towns. They were
dropping papers with worded warnings to the civilians, urging them
to stay indoors. Local televisions and radio stations stopped their
normal programs to broadcast guidelines which the citizens could
follow to escape the danger.

The military was quick to console the
civilians with a promise to contain the situation. Foot soldiers
from all US Army divisions were deployed on the streets to fight
the invading skeletons and to provide rescue and first aid to all
those that been injured in the attack.

The soldiers started shooting at the
skeletons but at first, the skeletons were not shooting back.
Instead, they were just running aimlessly in all directions and
causing chaos wherever they reached. But with time, the skeletons
started attacking nearby gun stores and police stations from which
they obtained different firearms and started shooting back at the
human troops.

Taking a precedent from the first two raids
which the skeletons had performed on earth, all US Tactical Forces
had been given orders to concentrate firepower on the skeletons’
joints especially the knees and ankles. It was the only assumed way
of causing casualties to the skeleton ranks.

Though the soldiers were trying hard to put
the above order into effect, the skeletons were hard to hit because
they were not standing in fixed positions. After firing stray
bullets to disperse the human soldiers they would run away before
the latter could respond appropriately.Unlike the US soldiers, the
skeletons were not fighting to win but to confuse and disrupt the
US Army, a mission which they had achieved. However, very few human
soldiers were being injured because many of them were moving
through armored vehicles. Others were snipers who were shooting
from a distance, especially from the top of tall buildings where
the skeletons could hardly locate them.

As soon as the shooting began on the streets,
the US Federal Aviation Administration issued an order to all
civilian planes that had taken to the air that morning to take
emergency landing on nearby airports. The airspace was cleared for
the military planes which were planning to rise into the skies.
NORAD issued standing orders to all USAF airfields to have ready
squadrons of military planes, armed and prepared to take to the air
to the defend the skies in a moment’s notice.

The US President decided to drop the
Continuation of Government Readiness Conditions from level four to
zero and all US armed forces were ordered to DEFCON 3. The
president was evacuated via the White House Tunnel System to the
underground bunker at Camp David. The Secret Service took the US
Vice President and other top ranking White House officials down
into the White House bunker.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency
issued an order directing the 1
^st
Helicopter Squadron
from Andrews Air Force Base to the Capitol to evacuate the top
Congressional leaders to the Mount Weather Emergency Facility. Army
Helicopters from Davison Army Airfield evacuated all senior Defense
Officials to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, the alternate
Pentagon where they to command the battle from.

The attack had started at a time when Foreign
Ministers from the world’s most powerful countries had gathered in
Moscow. Following the second raid which had occurred on almost all
continents, the world had realized that everyone was a potential
target for the skeletons, but not only the US. Nations had decided
to put their political differences aside and their foreign
ministers had convened at the Russian Foreign Ministry Building on
Smolenskaya Square at the center of Moscow, to discuss the future
of mother earth. They had plans of forging a supranational force
which was to be ready to defend the world in case such an attack
occurred. The force would also aid civil authorities in maintaining
law and order and maintaining a supply of basic services to the
populace, during and after the skeleton invasion.

However, in the course of the meeting, a
secret service agent approached the US Secretary of State. He
leaned over him and whispered into his ears, “Sir, the US is under
attack! Countless human skeletons have already occupied the streets
of all our major towns and cities!” All delegates turned their
attention to the US secretary of state as he stood up with a frowny
face. He picked up one the microphones and shouted, “The world is
already under attack! They have started with us……”

He had not yet finished speaking when
soldiers from the Russian Army stormed the building and called off
the meeting. They were working on orders from the Russian
President, who had also received the information about the attack
on USA from their classified sources.

The Russian Army offered to disperse all
these foreign delegates to different army controlled underground
bunkers to guarantee their security. Many of them were rushed to
Ramenki Emergency Bunker, six miles away from Moscow. The Russian
President had also evacuated to this underground town that was
designed to shelter him and his family and many other VIPs in such
periods of war.

The US secretary of State and his Russian
counterpart were flown by helicopter to the Russian National
Defense Center, a top security fortified facility near Moscow
River. For the first time in history, this Russian wartime complex
was linked to the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, its
US equivalent. With request from the US Secretary of State, it was
also receiving updates from NASA’s Headquarters in Washington D.C.
Agents at the three facilities were tasked with round-the-clock
monitoring of the world’s military situation. Russia and other
countries were willing to provide any assistance to the US
government mainly in terms of military support in case they needed
it.

A few hours later, their Satellite Early
Warning Systems presented images of over twenty triangular aircraft
on their computer screens. The aircraft seemed to be moving at a
slow pace and were about to enter the US airspace. These UFOs had
managed to evade all the countries’ space surveillance systems,
despite the great effort each nation had put in to detect them in
space.

However, it was not too late for the US
Military to intercept them. The US Army air defense fired their
newly modified MIM-107A Patriot Guided Missiles to hit the UFOs
before they could descend to the ground. traveling hypersonically
at Mach 4, these surface-to-air missiles reached their targets and
were seen hitting all the twenty aircraft with at most precision.
Military officers, whose eyes were glued on the screens by then,
cheered as they saw the last UFO exploding into fragments.

Immediately NORAD ordered for the scrambling
of more than fifty Lockheed Martin multirole tactical fighters from
various US Air Force Airfields to the air. The squadron was
consisting of more than ten F-22 Raptors while the rest were a
mixture of F-15s and F-16s. Their mission was to spot any remnants
of the UFOs which might have evaded detection and give them a
deserving welcome before they could land on earth. Flying
supersonically at Mach 2, the F-22 Raptors entered the skies first.
However, just a few second later, pilots of the other fighters were
shocked when they saw all the Raptors exploding at once. With a
closer observation, the pilots saw a fleet of hundreds of
triangular aircraft that were coming from space.

Laser guided missiles fired by these
triangular aircraft were the ones that had hit the Raptors and many
more were homing against the remaining fighters. The pilots had no
option but to eject their seats from the fighters. Many of such
abandoned jets were hit by the missiles while others were seen in a
circling descent before they crash landed on the ground.

Actually, military officials had cheered for
nothing because the Patriot Missiles had not hit any of the
aircraft but they had been jammed into self-destruction by the
arriving UFOs. The explosion of the twenty aircraft the Military
officers had seen on their computer screens had been a computer
simulation which the ghosts’ computer specialists had intentionally
fed into their computer systems.

After shooting down the fighters, the UFOs
switched off their stealth and radar jamming systems. They did it
intentionally such that they could reveal their arrival to the
whole world. Radar screens at all military control centers in the
world were crowded with a fleet of triangular aircraft which were
flying in right echelon formation towards the earth.

When the UFOs reached near low earth orbit,
three small aircraft from the middle row echeloned through and
moved straight to the International Space Station. All the three
docked on the station and a group of twenty skeletons jumped out of
them and entered into the station. They killed all human crew that
was on board and took full control over the station. These twenty
skeletons were the finest of all computer specialists the ghosts
had trained. They were tasked with turning the station into the
main computer hacking and jamming center for their operations.

They installed the station with high-end
computer systems, which had state-of-the-art data encryption
programs and advanced means of automation, all of which had been
made by the ghosts. They started with hacking into the altitude and
orbit control systems of all manmade satellites in space. They
orientated all the satellites that were to be of use to them
towards their desired positions. Those that they were not to use
were driven away from their set orbital positions while others had
their antennas positioned in wrong directions. This resulted into
disruption of their signal transition and reception from earth.

All computer and telephone networks on earth
were switched off at once. The ghosts also took over T.V, Radio and
Military Communication Systems, causing a massive communication
failure all over the world. Military officers at Pentagon were
uncertain of what to do because they had lost control of the US
Global Command and Control System to the arriving ghosts. They had
no means of coordinating their soldiers on the battlefields to
launch joint military offences against the aliens. But the last
blow to their attempts came when the hackers switched off the US
power grid which nullified most of their operations.