Found

Part One

From the Secret Files of Derrick Jackson

Editor in Chief: Skywatch Monthly

You shouldn't be reading this. This document shouldn't even exist. The information that follows is top secret, classified, the kind of thing that would get you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay or some off-the-books Super-Max if they so much as suspected that you were privy to the things I'm about to tell you. I'm taking a huge risk in writing this. But I don't care. This story needs to be told. So here it goes.

You've probably never heard of Neile Adam. They don't want you to know her. But I can assure you; she saved your life.

I'll assume that you remember what you were doing on the night the Kress invaded. Everybody remembers, the same way past generations remembered Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. The Kress invasion had all of those beat by a country mile. I'll never forget where I was, standing on the roof of my apartment building, staring up in sky in abject horror as that one, massive mother ship broke through the atmosphere. I can still see it when I close my eyes at night, how those countless hordes of drones descended from the main ship, sending down wave after wave of foot soldiers bent on scooping up as many of us as they could to take back to their interstellar meat farm.

Luckily for me, the building I was living in just happened to have an old abandoned fallout shelter from the 1950's in the basement. That's how I survived that night, cowering in that dank hole with twenty of my neighbors while those lizard-skinned, bug-eyed monsters roamed the streets above, snaring as many terrified people as they could in their alien fish nets. God help me.

It was a night of horror unlike anything this country - this planet - has ever seen before or since.

But have you ever wondered why it only lasted for one night?

What caused the Kress to suddenly stop their attack and high-tail it back to wherever they came from, never to return...at least not yet?

The official story is that our military forces were able to rally a swift response and push them out. Malarkey. Sure, there's every indication that our men and women in uniform did an admirable job fighting the good fight – four in particular, who served this country about as well as anyone in their position possibly could. But the truth is far stranger than that. At the end of the day, it wasn't the combined efforts of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines that sent the razor-teeth packing. It was a sixteen year old girl armed only with a GoPro camera and an unnatural, almost mythically courageous spirit. Oh, and two hand grenades. But we'll get into that soon enough.

I know all this because I've seen the evidence with my own eyes.

In the ten years since that horrible night, I've made it my life's mission to gather, disseminate, and report on any and all information related to the Kress. I tell you, the public has a huge appetite for it! Skywatch Monthly has over fifty million subscribers worldwide. I get emails and calls from thousands of people every day, mostly hoping that I can help them understand what the Kress really were and why they chose our tiny little corner of the galaxy to invade. I don't know if I can help them understand. I've been spending the better part of a decade trying to do that myself.

But I can tell you that the powers that be don't like me much. They want to control the narrative. They want to perpetuate the notion that the Kress are gone for good, that they've run for the hills and will never return. It's better for the bottom line if that's what people believe. It gets us working again, paying our bills, and falling in line like good little citizens. But I can't do that. I care too much about the truth, and I've been scratching, digging, and chipping away at it ever since. There are many in power who'd like to see me shut down. But there are others who believe in what I do, a small minority who – though they move in high circles – believe in the cause of free information, even if that information and the truth it champions is not what the masses want to hear.