“I don’t know yet. Let me think.” There were plenty of military veterans around my hometown, I had one of them with me, but Tom had been a Navy supply clerk twenty years ago, and I was Army infantry with recent combat experience, and on active duty. I guess it made sense the others were looking at me for ideas. They knew I’d been in combat in Nigeria, but fighting disorganized home-grown militia fanatics in the bush was totally different from tangling with giant space hamsters in my hometown in northern Maine.

“Goddamn, where are all the gun nuts when you actually need them? Is this all we got?” I looked in dismay at the collection of hunting rifles, shotguns and the odd 9MM handgun. Everybody in Thomson Corners had a gun, because everybody hunted, or at least needed to keep bears away from their backyard bird feeders. “Come on, nobody has an old M-60 in the attic? Maybe an AK?”

“Hell, Bish, I want to kill a moose so I can eat it, not vaporize the damned thing." Tom said. "Hunting licenses ain’t cheap.”

“All right, all right, me too.” I looked through the binos again, at the hamsters patrolling the streets of my hometown. At the dark smoke coming from the potato warehouse, across town by the railroad tracks, which was still burning. At the hamster’s shuttle, or landing craft, or infantry assault ship, or whatever they called it; squat and ugly and powerful looking, with a banged-up nose and a bent wing, and a thin stream of white smoke coming from the belly, as it sat on the front lawn of the elementary school.

Hamsters. We have other names for them; rats, weasels, rodents, but with their fine, golden fur, round faces and whiskers, what they most look like are hamsters. Except hamsters aren't six feet tall, wearing body armor, helmets and goggles, carrying evil looking rifles, and coming down from orbit in an assault ship. That I know of, I mean, I never owned a hamster, so what do I know? We didn't know they were hamsters, until one of them in the doorway of their ship, maybe the pilot because he didn't have a rifle, took his helmet off, got something from his pocket, and started eating it. He got yelled at, and put his helmet back on, but not before we saw his furry head and hamster ears. They weren't exactly hamsters, but close enough.

Susie Tobin lifted her eye from the scope of her .30-06 hunting rifle. “What about the quarry? They have dynamite, right?” Susie was about five feet nothing, her day job was a teacher at the regional middle school, and looking at her, you wouldn't think she could even lift her old Army surplus rifle. But I'd seen the racks of deer antlers, tacked up on the south side of her barn, so she sure knew how to use it.