Beautiful beaches, beautiful women... Ahh, this is the life. He has to have died and gone to heaven, sitting on a towel in the sand, the cloth vibrant red-orange like fire, feeling the sun warm his skin.... He sees the beach beauty approach, blonde and busty, and he can't help but grin sheepishly as she smiles at him...

The klaxons kick him awake faster than his superior's shouting.

"WHAT THE HELL?! Lieutenant, confirm this! LIEUTENANT!" Major Braden's harsh shout had an edge to it 1st Lieutenant Scott Reeves did not feel comfortable hearing; panic.

"Sir!" Reeves says in clear disorientation, quickly blinking the sleep from his eyes, trying to clear his visions as he focuses on the screen... Spots, what's with all the spots? Must be something in his eyes...

"Over three hundred contac-no, double now! Major! What's going on?!" A female voice... Lieutenant Wilkins, fear more obvious in her own voice. "Some kind of computer virus?"

Despite fear and confusion kicking at his tiredness, Reeves is trying hard to stifle a yawn, suddenly teary eyes looking at the screen with disbelief... Had they really done it? They'd had problems with bugs in the software before, when RobCo first put the new servers in, but not of this magnitude... Moving his hands quickly over the keyboard at his work terminal, he tries to connect to the East Coast and West Coast servers to confirm this data. In seconds, warning and panic reports flood into his terminal's memory, with matching data. "Sir! I..." he can't suppress the shiver that suddenly goes down his spine. "Sir, I don't think this is a drill!" he forces himself to finish, the pitch in his voice rising with his own growing panic.

"Confirm it, confirm it NOW!" Major Braden shouts, but confirmation comes in less than a minute; on the map of the states, a greenfield readout taking up most of the far wall of the room, contacts all over the west coast suddenly disappear. For a second, there's only the stunned disbelief. It can't be happening. It can't be really real. But a message suddenly flashes across the Lieutenant's screen, flat and final.

USAF Server (West Coast) contact lost; please check connection and try again.

"Major! Multiple west coast signals have just gone silent!" Lieutentnat Wilkins pops up, one hand clenching her headset tightly, on the verge of screaming.

"We've just picked up multiple launches across the country... they're launching the counterattack, Sir!" Lieutenant Prestons adds, the room quickly starting to break down in a mixture of solemn silence and panicked shouting.

Major Braden's obviously not taking it well either, sweat soaking into his uniform shirt already, teeth clenched and bared. "Sound the alert sirens, damnit. Sound them now." his words come out in a low, frightened hiss, but they're easily heard despite the panic. "God help us all."

There's little left to do now, Lieutenant Reeves thought with frightened, sad surrender as he watched the blips on the radar slowly grow less and less, impacts on the map starting to swallow up spots of the Midwest, closer and closer to the base...

It's too bad, he thought solemnly... He had always wanted to see the beach.

Enclosed in a windowless room, he never saw the flash, only felt the earth suddenly jump under him, the lights going out. A half-second later, there was the heat of the sun, and then the rumble of the ocean. Then nothing.

I thought it was good, I enjoyed it alot. Keep doing what your doing.