The news desk was a maelstrom of controlled chaos. Every screen glowed with breaking reports, each more alarming than the last. The scrolling ticker at the bottom of the main monitor flashed “IMMINENT THREAT – EAST COAST DEFCON 3.” Sarah, the senior producer, barked orders into her headset, her eyes darting between the live feeds. “Get me a general on the line, now! We need specifics. Where exactly is the first wave expected to hit?”
The whispers had been building for days, then weeks, fueled by increasingly aggressive rhetoric and a series of cyberattacks that had crippled vital infrastructure across the globe. But no one truly believed it would come to this. Not a direct, kinetic attack on American soil. Not tonight.
Then the first reports started trickling in. Not from official channels, not yet, but from panicked social media posts and amateur radio operators. A flickering image from a grainy phone camera, posted seconds before the signal died, showed what looked like a dark, fast-moving shape against the twilight sky, far off the coast of a major eastern seaboard city. Another, equally shaky, captured a distant, rising plume of smoke, too large, too sudden, to be anything but catastrophic.
“Multiple unidentified projectiles detected, inbound to the Northeast,” a calm, synthesized voice announced over the newsroom’s internal comms, cutting through the frantic chatter. “Initial trajectory indicates a concentration on [REDACTED STATE]. All personnel are advised to shelter in place and await further instructions.”
A stunned silence fell over the newsroom, broken only by the rapid-fire clicking of keyboards as reporters furiously typed out their initial dispatches. Sarah stared at the main screen, where a satellite image of the East Coast now displayed multiple red blips, accelerating with terrifying speed. The orange glow of the sunset was rapidly fading, replaced by the deep, ominous black of night, a canvas upon which a new, horrifying chapter was about to be painted. The attack wasn’t a threat anymore; it was here. And it was starting, as predicted, with the state. The specific state remained a closely guarded secret on official channels, but the dread was palpable, a chilling certainty that reverberated through every fiber of the nation.
