They came during the night with no warning. Unlike what Tennessee and others had believed throughout the years, there were no televised speeches of welcome by political leaders. No large space craft hovering over the nations’ capitals, no welcome from the scientific communities, and no time for alerting our military. No one knew how the Demonbruens arrived. It was as if they'd appeared through some kind of invisible portal.

The morning of their first arrival, many of the world’s leaders awoke to find one or more of these beings in their homes or offices. The strange weapons were so advanced our military were helpless against this threat. The Aliens wasted no time imprisoning every world leader and rounding up all scientists.

The Demonbruens—Demons as Earth’s inhabitants called them—called themselves Bruens. Many of the Demons had similar features, square jaws, black-onyx skin, and unusually dark eyes with swirling teal centers. Ranging in height from six and a half to seven feet tall, the warriors were solid muscle, covered with metal armor that could only be thought of as primitive. The headgear sported long curved horns on both sides. Other Demons appeared to be a blending of part machine and man, but their faces were the same, with very minute differences in colors of their eyes.

What the world soon found was that being a copy of each other was not the only thing that distinguished the Demons. They worked and killed as a unit. It had taken only a week for them to conquer the world as Tennessee Creswell knew it. A week, ironically the same length of time it took for creation. The military and civilians had fought them...and lost.

The Demons were faster, stronger, and seemed virtually indestructible, with weapons resembling bow and arrows but unlike any bow and arrow ever seen on earth. The bows were long, almost the length of the Demon, with the tips of the arrows surrounded by blue flames. When the arrow struck, the tip did not penetrate the skin. Instead it paralyzed its victims instantly, rendering them helpless for more than a couple of hours—plenty of time for the beasts to capture or kill their victims.

The worst of the Demons was High Bruen Traag and his second in command, Kur Suun El, the superior and commander of the Warlords. Under their command, the Demons swept through many of the larger cities, wiping out human resistance movements around the world. Those who could do so escaped, and those who could not were captured, mostly women and children. The males went into hiding. At night, squads of Demons roamed the streets destroying those elusive males who dared to venture out for food, provisions, or to fight.

In the end, the resistance made little difference. They claimed the Earth and its inhabitants as the property of the planet Demonbruen. The captured women and children were especially important to the Demons. It was rumored that the females of their planet had all but disappeared, and these warriors were looking for planets with women who were considered reproductively compatible with their species.

At twenty-five years of age, Tennessee—Tenn, for short—was considered prime reproductive age for mating. That was the deciding factor that had sent her family on the run. Although previously captured, Evan Creswell was the first scientist who had actually managed to escape imprisonment from the containment area. It was during this first confinement that her father, a well known scientist and professor of electrical engineering at MIT, had found a weakness in the Demonbruens.

After discovering the Demons’ plans, her father had rushed home, avoiding all of their checkpoints set up throughout the city. He’d burst through the door and torn through the house yelling that the family needed to vacate their area while collecting essential bits and pieces and shoving the items into backpacks. Tenn and the rest of the family had wasted no time in helping, grabbing what they could. In the end they had filled three backpacks and escaped through the back alleys that ran through their neighborhood.

Tenn’s sister, Alize, home with the flu, had been carried out on her father’s back. The group had managed to avoid many of the Demons patrolling the area until they had been tracked down by a night patrol led by Kur Suun El.

Tenn and her father had left their hideout to find a pharmacy and medicine for Alize’s infection and had unknowingly led hunters back to their hiding place. The family were eventually captured and separated. The women moved to a compound several miles away. Two weeks later her father had escaped and searched until he had found his family at the departure compound and portal to the Demonbruens planet.

The Demons wanted to know how the family had succeeded in escaping a compound considered impenetrable and what they knew about how to destroy Demons. It was difficult being hunted by the Demons, which resulted in them never staying in one place long enough to be discovered. Wandering from town to town, constantly on the move, they had hidden among the debris of fallen lives and scraped together what supplies they could, ever watchful for the patrols. They’d eventually found an old fall-out shelter in the basement of an abandoned hospital in the small town of Kenner, a great blessing. It allowed enough time for Alize to recover while Tenn and her father formulated and planned their survival.