Freda grabbed Lottie's hand and pulled her out from under the table. She’d thrown together some necessities in a duffel bag and had double checked the inventory before focusing on her whimpering sibling.

“Come on now, Lottie. It's time to go,” she said for the third time. Freda was beginning to get frustrated with Lottie, but she knew the poor thing was terrified.

“Just leave me here,” Lottie moaned. “You'll be better off on your own.”

“Not in a million years,” Freda said, grabbing her sister again.

Finally, Lottie relented and stood up rather than remaining as useless as a sack of wet flour on the floor.

“Where are we going?” Lottie moaned as Freda pulled her toward the door.

“Remember where we vacationed the last summer I lived at home?”

“That's over a hundred miles away,” Lottie whined.

“I told you, outside the city is going to be the safest place for us until our military figures out what to do.”

Freda was saddened that she had to leave in the middle of her most promising dissertation experiment, but the end of the world didn't wait for anyone. Not even PhD students. She pulled her sister out of her apartment and down the stairs to the main floor where she threw her duffel bag into the back seat of her old car, and pushed Lottie into the passenger seat. Once Lottie was securely belted in, Freda took the driver’s seat and pulled out of the parking lot like a mad woman.

She pressed on the throttle and zoomed into the street. The roads were crowded with cars, and it took almost an hour just to get out of downtown Boston. She breathed a sigh of relief when she finally made it out of the city, thankful, she still had three quarters of a tank of gas.

Outside of the city, the roads were fairly clear. There were van loads and buses of people making their escape to the wilderness just like her, but there were still just as many who were traveling in the opposite direction. Everyone was trying to escape. She turned on the radio and listened for emergency broadcasts. The government announced that there would be a meeting among the nations about the possibility of offensive action versus the possibility of surrender.

When Freda heard the word surrender, her heart gripped in her chest. How could they even consider it? She drove all through the afternoon and into the evening to the cabin her parents had rented six years ago when she had still been living at home.

On the way there, she passed stores that were already being stripped; electronic stores and shoe stores being looted. She shook her head in disgust, wondering how people could even think about things like big-screen TVs when we were facing an alien invasion. By the time they made it to the lake, Lottie was asleep in the passenger seat. It was dark with only a few lights glowing on the rural street, deep in the forest around the small lake.

When she’d called from the road to rent the cabin, no one had answered. After a dozen attempts, she’d given up trying. She made it to the cabin with her gas tank nearly on empty and having to pee like crazy, but at least her wits were still about her. She parked the car in front of the dark cabin, turned on her cell phone’s flashlight, and walked up the rickety stairs to the front porch.

Bouncing like a fidgety preschooler, she tried the doorknob and front windows. All locked. But when she walked around the back, she found an unlocked window. She pushed it open and removed the screen. Holding her bladder, she climbed inside. Once inside the small three-room cabin, she hurried to the front door and unlocked it, turning the lights on as she went. When she opened the door, she found Lottie standing on the other side with the duffel bag in her hands.

Lottie walked through the door, blurry-eyed and frowning. Freda suggested Lottie sit down on the couch and see if there was anything on the television while Freda used the bathroom.

When she was done, she checked the plumbing to make sure water was coming through the tap. When the water sputtered out clean, she let out a long, grateful sigh and washed her hands. In the living room, she grabbed the duffle bag off the floor, went into the kitchen and began unpacking her supplies: a small first-aid kit, cans of food and non-perishables from her pantry, a bag of rice, a carton of oatmeal, and a jar of coconut oil. She had a large bag of beef jerky from the last time she'd gone to the gourmet grocery store and a pound of ground coffee. She looked around the cabin and found the rudimentary provisions the park had supplied. Coffee filters, salt and pepper shakers, plates, a toaster. She looked in the freezer and found ice already made and a box of baking soda in the fridge.

“Did you find anything good on TV?” Freda asked her sister, turning into the living room.

“Only emergency broadcasts about the international discussions.”

“How many cities were lost?” Freda asked.

“So far, the reports are New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Beijing. It’s estimated there are half a billion dead.”

Freda sank down in the arm chair across the room from Lottie, the severity of the attack finally sinking in. She had switched into emergency mode the moment she'd heard the hologram in the sky, but it wasn't until this very moment that she'd had a chance to reflect on the atrocities. A tear slid from her cheek and she wiped it away, getting to her feet.

“How about rice and beef jerky for dinner?” she asked her sister. “I even have a can of corn.”

“That sounds great,” Lottie said weakly.

Freda went to the kitchen and began to prepare the rice in one of the pots provided by the park. She set it on the stove and lingered in the kitchen, not wanting to let her sister see her cry. She had to be the strong one. She couldn't let the death toll tear her apart. She knew that her parents were in New York City today, having planned their weekend getaway while Lottie visited Boston. She had tried to call them several dozen times on the road to the cabin, but neither of them had answered their phones. There was an obvious reason for that. And Freda didn't want to let herself think it, let alone believe it. But there was no way around it, her parents were probably dead. And she would have to bring it up with her sister eventually.