This is written to a prompt I encountered on Pinterest from here.

🛸

We had never come up with a cure.

Instead, we had come up with ways to deal with it.  I say we, but it was my grandparents and their parents who did most of that work.

The rest of us just learned what we had to do and got on with the work of rebuilding the world.  By the time I was an adult, you could barely tell that there had been a world-scarring, population-destroying mega war in my grandparents’ time.

And then, of course, the fucking aliens showed up.

They had spacefaring tech that we were only beginning to develop.  They had weapons that were, frankly, amazing, and, from a biologist’s point of view, also horrifying.  They had ships parked in our atmosphere.

We had zombies. 

We had the Shield, which meant that they had to land to truly fight us.  *Nothing* could get in or out of the Shield when it was up.  We’d – those grandparents – had built it to quarantine Earth.  We might have been able to hold the aliens at bay indefinitely.

The problem was, if we were wrong, they’d smash the Shield and then we’d be at the mercy of whatever came next.

So we let their ships in, in targeted areas, areas populated with volunteers and with, ah, with the recently dead, who had also volunteered, in a manner of speaking.  We cordoned off whole countries – again, much as my grandparents had done.  We used our own fighter planes to steer the aliens where we wanted them to land.

They shot us.  They killed – I would say countless, but we were keeping close count – they killed an unbearable number of humans.  Their demands were clear.  Their aim was scary.

Their response when we got back up, when every single dead human stood up and picked their guns back up and started walking towards them – that was priceless.

Every living human carried the virus within them.

We made sure, once again, that the virus did not leave the planet.