The World of Willow

 

My book The Willow and the Stone and its sequel Willow in the Desert (releasing in the new year), are set in the not too distant future in which Earth has been invaded by insectoid aliens.  Mankind has been all but obliterated.  From Willow in the Desert, this is how that happened:

            Attack.  The word brought visions of spaceships firing lasers upon screaming humans, something akin to movies like Independence Day or War of the Worlds.  Instead, the Old Ones had opened their offensive by somehow shutting down the computers that ran everything, bringing life as man knew it to a shuddering halt.  Entire power grids had gone down all at once, taking out much of transportation and communication.  Then the aliens waited as emergency services failed, panicked rioters took to the streets, and chaos ensued.  Things became so crazed that when the aliens swept through the black, unlit nights and began their terrible harvest, the majority of humans didn’t even notice at first.  And when they finally did, when people at last realized they needed to band together to fight this common enemy, it was too late. 

            Armies marched on the Pyramids.  Bullets and explosives were effective on the aliens, but not on the goliath structures they’d landed and made their homes in.  At first when the Pyramids had been surrounded, the Old Ones had simply hunkered down and waited.  The ones at San Francisco and Beijing mounted no defense when nuclear warheads were set up around their perimeters.  Because there were no computers capable of arming and detonating the explosives, crude remote control frequencies did the job.  The landscape surrounding the targets had been made unlivable, but the two Pyramids remained unblemished. 
             The nuclear blasts had been mankind’s last hurrah.  When the strikes against San Francisco and Beijing failed, when the jets wouldn’t fly, when the armies so dependent on their technology were wiped out en masse by shockwaves emitting from the Pyramids they’d surrounded, it became every man for himself.  That just made picking them off even easier for the invaders, which they’d done with alarming alacrity.
            The world had ended with a bang after all.

The Willow and the Stone is currently available at Amazon and Smashwords