Operation Fluid.

Brendan sighed loudly. This was anything but fluid. More like stuck. Nothing was moving. Even the grass on the side of the road wasn't fluttering. This was Drumcondra on the Saturday before Christmas. This was the last trip into town to get the last few items.

Obviously, there were others thinking along the same lines. Plenty of others. The smell of car fumes and frustration filled the chilly December air. The only thing that moved faster than those on the pavement were bicycles and motorbikes. Brendan scratched at a jelly stain on his jeans.

Everything moved in slow motion today. Queues were everywhere, everyone seemed to be in a rush somewhere and children cried and laughed in equal measure. You'd know it was Christmas week - the sense of panic among parents was almost palpable.

Temperatures in cars were rising around him, even though the weather outside was heading in the opposite direction. The news report on the radio stated that accidents were happening all over the city, due to black ice. The Garda name for good traffic flow during the Christmas period was now becoming laughable.

Brendan was effectively parked for the past twenty minutes. He shut off the engine. He chewed on his nails. He flicked through the messages on his phone. He called home, but his wife couldn't talk because the kids had her busy.

Nothing was moving on the outside lane. The bus lane on his left wasn't much better. Brendan wiped the condensation from his car windows. He liked people watching - it was a past time that he sometimes enjoyed. He was a patient man. He used to try and attach a name to the characters he watched.

The first car he looked at with interest was on his right and slightly forward of his location. It held a solitary man. He stared forward with a sad face. He looked drained. He wore a beige raincoat and tan driving gloves.  Brendan guessed this man's name might be something like Timothy.

Moving on from Timothy, he looked directly in front. A mother and her two kids - one boy about nine or ten and a younger girl of about three. She sat in a car seat while he played games on a phone or something. The Mum, who Brendan christened Martha, was on her phone constantly. She seemed like she was arguing with someone. Her window was cracked open a touch and Brendan heard the words "turkey for fourteen." She was going to be busy this holiday season.

He looked left. He had a double decker bus parked within five feet of his passenger door. The bus was packed and toxic fumes plumed from it's exhaust. Their windows were well fogged up, unless one passenger wiped it, to see out. A young lady peered out of her wiped circle on the bottom deck.

She was pretty, and probably was called something like Elaine. She wore a warm red buttoned jacket with shoulder length brown curly hair. Her head bounced along to the music pumping in her ears. She was entertained, despite the humdrum of the situation. She looked happy.

Looking upstairs, a small window open let in some cold air. Brendan could see multiple passengers. A young man in an ill fitting suit, sat with his head against the glass. He was sound asleep. Drool oozed from his mouth and it seemed to creep out the lady with the black bobbled hat beside him.

Moving further along the window toward the front of the bus, he spotted a young couple cleaning each others teeth. With their pierced tongues. Like a washing machine on rinse. They seemed oblivious to everyone around them. They were no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, with their entire lives ahead of them.

At the front of the bus, Brendan could barely make out the side of a man's face. He had thick black hair and was chatting constantly on his phone. He wore too much gel in his hair and some of it stuck to the glass when his hair rubbed off it. He laughed and gesticulated a lot with his hands. Was he Italian, perhaps? A name like Roberto. A scream interrupted his daydream.

Then a horn blared behind him. The traffic was inching forward. Then another blast of multiple horns, these far more impatient. The man on his right wasn't moving. The impatient git behind Timothy was waving his hands like a madman.

Except Timothy wasn't moving. His head slumped forward against the steering wheel, sending out a constant blast of noise.

Brendan inched his car forward and then pulled his handbrake up. Racing out of his car he reached Timothy's driver door in seconds. Yanking open the door, Timothy's right arm slumped out into the cold air. Brendan checked for a pulse while other motorists blared their horns, not realising what was going on.

Brendan pulled his mobile from his pants pocket and dialled 999. No emergency service was going to reach this man quickly. Beaumont Hospital was nearby, as was the Mater Hospital. His pulse was weak but thready. He had a chance. But he needed immediate medical attention.

Like a knight in shining armour, a single light came moving toward him. Brendan risked his own life standing in front of the moving object. The high visibility jacket gave away the incoming Garda. A motorbike could get through this madness.

Stopping the Garda, he ran through a quick plan. Taking Timothy on the back of the bike wasn't an option. The Garda had to clear a path. Brendan parked his own car on the path, off the road.

Moving Timothy with the assistance of other motorists, who now had stopped bleating their horns into the backseat, was difficult. But they managed it. And then they turned back toward the city, away from the flow of stranded cars and buses.

Timothy received his Christmas miracle - from a stranger called Brendan and because of an Operation that was anything but Fluid.       

Clean Strike.

Amy woke when she heard the unmistakable sound of the clacking. The same clacking sound of their voice box and their tongue snapping against each other. They made this sound when eagerly searching for food. Their sticky tongues slithered in and out of their mouths sniffing the air. They had to move.
.
Stealthily moving out of her bunk, she grasped their weapons. Tapping Thomas on the shoulder and holding her cupped hand over his mouth, she held her index finger over her own mouth. Any sound above a grunt might give their location away, cowering in the boughs of the large oak tree. It slowly began to rain a light mist, as thunder clouds gathered.

Their weapons were their potential lifelines. They were the food. No weapon equalled no chance.

The visitors were becoming ever more frequent to the woods. They were ugly frightening beings, but not quite the greatest warriors.

The humans were becoming more troublesome as they fought back with more ferocity than the visitors first expected. Loud music from twenty odd years ago, strangely filled the void of cramped spaces and tight, tired limbs.

But with the visitors running out of food in the cities, they had to branch out into the countryside. They were becoming desperate.

Amy poked her head out slowly from the canopy. She saw four of them. Their brown scaly skin left a lingering smell of musk and sweat in the air. Sickly sweet. It reminded her of when she had her first encounter with them, six days ago. Amy placed a wet rag over her mouth to prevent her from gagging.

They were communicating through their clacking and demonstrative waving of gestures - it seemed like they were arguing amongst each other. Thomas checked the charge on his stun gun - it was working, but wouldn't be wholly effective. It might knock one of them off their feet, but wouldn't be enough to kill them.

The visitors arrived six days ago when everyone thought that meteor shower that the entire earth suffered was just a freak of nature. No one realised that inside the meteors were spacecraft. Under cover of darkness and with the benefit of surprise, they appeared firing their weapons. They killed thousands in the first hour. Within twenty four hours, they had taken over the major cities with their superior firepower. They then polluted the water supply, forcing the human race into the countryside.

Then the Queens, like bees, of their race began sproulting. They gave birth to an entire race of soldiers, far superior in height and build to the human race. They also had weaponry way beyond what Amy and Thomas now possessed. Their weapon was little more than a pea shooter against a tank cannon.

But the visitors didn't factor in battling the indomitable human spirit. The ability to morph and change as circumstances arose. To learn from mistakes and develop their experience. Amy heard that the smaller towns were becoming harder for the visitors to dominate as groups of resistance used guerrilla tactics to survive. She had also heard that the resistance were winning battles with the visitors own weapons. Adapt and survive.

Her senses twitched as one of the four stopped dead in his tracks, directly under the tree they were now encamped in. He issued orders for the other three to fan out. He sensed something. Amy turned to Thomas and indicated to be quiet. Thunder roared overhead like barrels being rolled on concrete. About the right time to hide any noise they made.

The leader of the quartet was following his gut though. He knew there were humans here, but none of them thought of looking up. Amy and Thomas stayed hunched and folded over, with ample foliage covering them. The rain started to get heavier, coming down in sheets of warm tropical gush.

As the rain became heavier, so did the deluge coming through their camouflage. She pulled back on the slide of her Glock 45 handgun, knowing that their hideaway would become exposed. Bullets slowed them down, but didn't kill them immediately. She didn't think she had enough bullets to kill all four. She only had one more full clip - twenty-one bullets in total.

Thomas only had a stun gun, batons, one spear and a bow and arrows. She had her gun, baseball bat and a lightweight graphite snooker cue with the tip filed down to make a deadly spear. That was the last resort. The final stand.

The visitor's weapons were like an elongated devil's spiked fork, that fired an electrical charge. Amy had seen it's devastation at work. They seemed to use their weapons with various charges. On humans, they seemed to use a lower charge to bring people down and knock them unconscious. One benefit of these weapons was that they seemed to take forever to recharge.

They would then cart you away and eat you at their pleasure. If immediately hungry enough, they would feed on any human with the same savagery as a starving pack of lions.

As more leaves and branches fell from their tree rather than others, the leader eventually looked up.

He saw the underside of Thomas' white trainer. Amy knew now it was time to fight or flight.

One of the visitors fired his weapon. It shattered the bough ten feet above them, to absolute smithereens.

Another shot soon fired high and wide into the clouds. A shaft of lightening smashed to the earth, about one hundred metres away from the visitors location to the north. It scared them enough to reconsider their current mission. The leader shouted an order to continue firing at the twosome in the tree.

Amy took the opportunity to fire back. Thomas primed his bow and first few arrows. Amy nodded, indicating her assertion to fire. They both stuck their heads out and both fired in a staccato grouping.

One bullet seared through the shoulder of one of the visitors. An arrow lodged in the foot of another. A screech filled the air as another lightening bolt lit up the evening. The thunderstorm neared their location.

The visitors shot back with two quickfire rounds of charge. It shone a hue of light blue as it passed them into the sky. Their aim was being affected by the noise and distraction all around them. They weren't used to this weather.

Within minutes, Amy was out of bullets and Thomas out of arrows as the foes traded blows. Amy considered swinging and leaping from tree to tree, but the nearest bough wasn't within easy reach.

The visitors didn't seem to eager to climb the tree either. They wanted to shoot Amy and Thomas down. Another huge bolt flashed within ten metres of the visitors.

Amy prepared to use her last stand. She raised the graphite cue aloft and threw it directly at the leader.

The next bolt jolted through the flying implement and directed the ten thousand volt charge of electricity through the graphite stick.

It sliced right through the leader's skin, bone, sinew and cartilage. The other three glanced quickly at each other as Thomas raised his sharpened spear.
In the dark of the evening, it looked like another graphite cue.

They dropped their weapons and fled back toward the city. Amy and Thomas cheered loudly against the cacophony of the maelstrom above, happy that they had struck a blow for mankind.