Don't worry this isn't normal

Normally I'm really lighthearted and funny, but... I don't know... something came over me...

"Here we are" I say as my team rounded the corner of a building and came in view of the fort. That is if "fort" is the right word. Its been almost a year sense the thing fell out of the sky, and with it came the worst alien attack the earth had ever seen. Before that day I had never believed in extraterrestrial life, but as it turns out the government has been in contact with different alien races for the last fifty years. But about a year and a half ago they started losing contact with different planets. Nobody knew what was going on, and nobody imagined that this would.

Almost a year ago this huge "spaceship" flew down from space and landed here in Washington D.C. I wasn't there. Unfortunately I was home in California, so I had no warning when the monsters invaded. I remember it was a Friday and I was at work, my Dad was in the bay area working, my Mom was driving my sisters to music class and my brothers were at home. I was folding rags at the shop and stacking them in the cleaning cabinet when I heard distant thunder then I felt the ground shake. I had been in the shop a while now, but it had been fairly sunny last time I was outside. Then I got a phone call. It was my Dad. I remember wondering why he would call me when he's supposed to be at work. His voice was shaky, and I was immediately frightened. My Dads voice was never shaky. "Ben" he said quickly, "how's everyone?"

"I'm fine, but I'm at work." I said confused, "everyone who?" 

"Just get home and check on my family. Mom won't answer her phone an-" He was cut of and all I could hear was static. I was so scared, I didn't even think that my Dad was joking. I ran to my boss' office, told him I had to go, and grabbed his truck's keys. 

As soon I went outside I saw smoke rising in the north.  the smoke wasn't just rising from one spot. It seemed to be coming from the whole area. As soon as I was a mile away from the shop I hard more thunder. I just had time to look back behind me as I saw the little town become completely enveloped in flames. That's when the truck was thrown off the road and I was knocked unconscious. 

When I woke up there was smoke everywhere so you couldn't see more than a mile in any direction. I was still just outside the little town I used to work at. But there was no town everything was burnt to the ground and perfectly level. Every hundred feet there was a sort of post with a red light at the top. I tried to find a trace of the shop or my boss and co-workers, but there was nothing but ash. Just then I turned and ran. I ran as fast as I could toward home. Six miles later and out of breath I found the same thing as the last town. everything had been destroyed. Everything was replaced with lit up posts, and I was too devastated to move. I couldn't wonder what the post were. I couldn't even cry. I just stood there looking at the destruction of everything I loved. 

It must have been hours before I decided to go. I didn't know where but I went. I kept walking until my sorrow had turned to anger. I walked from town to town looking at the destruction. The giant round patches of ash weren't only in place of towns some where just in the middle of nowhere. That night I walked until my legs gave out and I fell. There I slept.

The next morning I felt someone shaking me awake. Before I even opened my eyes I knew I was back home and one of my brothers was waking me to show me something he had drawn, or maybe my Dad about to give me a lecture on laziness. But when I opened my eyes I saw that I wasn't in my room. I was laying in the ruble of a once rather large town that was now empty save for me and the person shaking me. I turned over to see who it was and looked into an old wrinkled face with eyes brightened by tears he was holding back. The man was covered in ash and babbling about... well... it's kind of obvious. It seemed that he had gone quite mad but I tried to listen to him. The things he said didn't make any sense, and I didn't say anything while he led me to a spot right at the edge of the town. He brought me to the the very edge of the explosion where apparently his house once stood. The explosion had only flattened and burned part of the house. The rest had been knocked over by the force of the explosion. It seemed that the bombs were very precise in how much ground they covered. As I looked back on all the towns I had walked through I remembered that they were all destroyed in perfectly round circles of about the same size. The old man started digging through the wreckage until he found a small picture frame. He looked at it for a moment then handed it to me as a tear rolled down his wrinkled cheek. I already knew what I was going to see but I looked at the picture anyway. It was an old picture all black and white. "She's beautiful" It was the first time I had spoken sense I grabbed my boss's keys and my voice was extremely crackly. The old man stopped mumbling and became very quiet.
The next few weeks I spent taking care of the old man who's name he never told me, so I just called him Gramps. Eventually he started making sense with his words and I got to hear his story. He had been driving through the country from work, like me when the bombs hit, and when he came home he found his home destroyed and nobody there.
About a week after I met Gramps I found another survivor. Sam had been on a trip to the grocery store for his Mom right before the invasion. It didn't take much deciding to call it an invasion. It seemed that the towns were all targeted, and all communication was down. In other words we couldn't use our cellphones.
Throughout the next month we found many survivors. Gramps and I tried to take care of all of them but it wasn't easy. Food was scarce, medicine was impossible to get, and winter was coming. We didn't stay at the  old mans burnt house though. We found a nice big house that was still intact out in the country, and that served as our base. Pretty soon we had a little community going. People from miles around came with nothing but horror stories about extreme loss. For some reason I made a point to listen to whatever I could. It was torture but I made myself listen.

This is way longer than I thought it would be. I'll finish it in another post. Sorry to make it sound so sad, and now that I've re-read it it looks pretty stupid, but I thought I should post anyway...ish