“It’s them,” the girl says.

“Shut up,” the man replies. He turns down the TV again. “I mean, keep quiet. Damn.”

They hear heavy footfalls coming up the stairs. The girl backs away from the peephole when she hears another door get kicked in. Their downstairs neighbors start to scream.

“Go hide,” the man says to the girl. “Go on.”

The man’s grip tightens on the baseball bat that he retrieved from the hall closet when the alien mother ship first appeared in the sky. He inches closer to the shaking door, positions himself to one side of it, his back to the wall. They can hear noise from the hallway. A loud crash, their neighbor’s apartment door being knocked off its hinges, harsh words in guttural English, screaming, and finally a sound like compressed lightning being uncorked. They’ve seen the aliens’ guns on television, stared in awe at the sizzling bolts of blue energy they fire.

The footsteps resume, stopping outside their shaky door. The man’s eyes are wide, his hands tight on the bat. He realizes that the girl hasn’t moved. She’s frozen.

“Wake up, stupid,” he snaps. “Go.”

He nods toward the living room window. It’s open, the fire escape waiting outside.

The girl hates when the man calls her stupid. Even so, for the first time she can remember, the girl does what her stepfather tells her. She climbs through the window the same way she’s snuck out of this apartment so many times before. The girl knows she shouldn’t go alone. Her stepfather should flee, too. She turns around on the fire escape to call to him, and so she’s looking into the apartment when their front door is hammered down.

The aliens are much uglier in person than on television. Their otherness freezes the girl in her tracks. She stares at the deathly pale skin of the first one through the door, at his unblinking black eyes and bizarre tattoos. There are four aliens altogether, each of them armed. It’s the first one that spots the girl on the fire escape. He stops in the doorway, his strange gun leveled in her direction.

“Surrender or die,” the alien says.

A second later, the girl’s stepfather hits the alien in the face with his bat. It’s a powerful swing—the old man made his living as a mechanic, his forearms thick from twelve-hour days. It caves in the alien’s head, the creature immediately disintegrating into ash.

Before her stepfather can get his bat back over his shoulder, the nearest alien shoots him in the chest.

The man is thrown backwards into the apartment, muscles seizing, his shirt burning. He crashes through the glass coffee table and rolls, ends up facing the window, where he locks eyes with the girl.

“Run!” her stepfather somehow finds the strength to shout. “Run, damn it!”