Title: Aidan and the Alien Invasion
Series: Arrival, Book One
Author: Damian Serbu
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 07/28/2026
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 286
Genre: Sci Fi, Sci-Fi, futuristic, new adult, aliens, college, coming of age, geeks, nerds, interspecies, slow burn/UST
Description
Aliens seize control of Earth, descending without warning, cutting off communication systems and crushing military resistance. Aidan and his friends flee home from Chicago to rural Michigan, but learn the aliens control the entire planet.
Their leaders have dark intentions that Aidan and his friends uncover when they fall in with a revolutionary faction of aliens who desperately seek to save humanity. Human aid to the revolutionaries’ cause is essential but dangerous. As secrets and surprising histories are revealed, Aidan adds to his own chaos when he drifts into an unlikely romance.
As if ADHD and dealing with young adulthood weren’t enough stress, Aidan has to navigate his role in the conflict, as well as embrace his heart’s desire with an unexpected ally.
Excerpt
Aidan and the Alien Invasion
Damian Serbu © 2026
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
Visitors
“What the heck!” Jarvis exclaimed as he stared at the television when Aidan walked into the common area. “Have you seen this?”
Aidan glanced at the TV, wondering why his quad mate called his attention to some disaster movie he decided to watch in the middle of the day. Aidan ignored him and went to the fridge to grab an energy drink. He glanced out the window at the Chicago skyline, glistening in the afternoon sun.
Aidan squinted into the bright light, confused to see a Star Destroyer instead of an airplane heading for downtown. Maybe Ellie had a point last night when she told him to stop watching so much Star Wars.
“Dude!” Jarvis shouted, startling Aidan and turning his attention away from the window and back to the TV. Aidan grew alarmed at Jarvis yelling at him, for the first time he could ever remember. “Look!” Jarvis jabbed his finger toward the screen over and over.
Aidan walked over and stood behind Jarvis, who let his arm fall to his side as he sat on the couch, mesmerized.
Okay, so the movie impressed Aidan with its realistic scene. Everything appeared as if they watched one of the major news networks reporting on an alien invasion of Washington, DC. The news logo was prominently displayed in one corner with the time of day, the scroll across the bottom ran with the latest news, and in a tiny inset box, the anchor talked in a somber tone about the main event on the screen.
Speaking of Star Wars, most of the TV screen showed a lame rip-off of a Star Destroyer hovering over the US Capitol and stretching all the way to the White House. Shaped in the same triangular fashion, the movie Jarvis watched only bothered to change the appearance with a smooth, shiny gold surface and no other extended pieces of ship, guns, or protrusions. So they went with a golden Star Destroyer phallic kind of shape.
But the newswoman looked scared shitless. Seemed realistic. Aidan was impressed the movie producers got an actual anchor to appear in the film, and she could act well enough to sound believable.
“What are we gonna do?” Jarvis asked Aidan, his usual authoritative voice quivering.
“Huh?”
Jarvis pointed to the TV again. “We need to get out of here. But where can anyone be safe? They’ll come here too. They could go anywhere.”
“Have you been drinking?” Aidan asked. “What movie are you watching, anyway?”
“Dude!” Jarvis screamed even louder. “That’s not a darn movie! Real, dude. Real. Happening now.”
Aidan scrutinized the television more closely, and his heart raced. He grabbed the remote and hit the guide button to verify his fear. Jarvis was watching the actual news, not a movie.
“Holy fuck! They really invaded Earth? Are you sure? What are we going to do?” Aidan took his turn to shout in alarm as he dropped the energy drink.
“I asked you those questions already!” Jarvis launched off the couch. “Okay. Stay calm.” He pointed toward the spilled drink on the carpet. “Clean up, dude. No. Scratch that. We gotta go. Now.” He returned to his more staid and thoughtful self, but his body language gave off a sense of urgency.
Which was good, because Aidan prepared to lose his shizzle. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Two major problems.” Aidan and Jarvis stared at each other across the couch as Aidan spoke in an increasingly high-pitched whine. “We don’t have a car. And they’re almost here.” Aidan pointed toward the window.
Jarvis and he turned their attention to the skyline, where the supposed airplane of earlier flew at a slow rate toward downtown Chicago, coming close enough to show them the truth. An enormous gold triangular-shaped craft loomed on the horizon. It matched the spaceship taking over Washington, DC.
Jarvis clutched Aidan by the shoulders. “Pack a bag. Fast. Take whatever you need. Like we got two minutes to get out of here.”
Aidan loved a man in charge, even if the particular man commanding him was straight, so he launched into motion without thinking. He hurried to his room, grabbed his backpack, and threw in his computer, a couple of sentimental items from the top of his desk, and his favorite clothes from a drawer. The flurry of activity helped alleviate a little of his ADHD reaction to a major stress event. His mom’s voice in his noggin also reminded him to take deep breaths. He’d crammed in as much as possible and scanned his belongings when Jarvis yelled from the living room.
“Now, dude! Aidan?” Jarvis ran into Aidan’s room and pulled on his arm. “We gotta go.”
Aidan followed Jarvis into the common area as they sprinted toward the door, but Jarvis lurched to a stop.
“Wait.” Jarvis stared down at Aidan. “Where are we going?”
“Shit!” Aidan screamed. “I was following you. I assumed you had the next move figured out! You plan months in advance. You have your life all dialed in for, like, the next thirty years!” He knew he sputtered along like an unhinged lunatic, but rising to an emergency never was one of his strengths. He pointed at Jarvis. “You sounded like you had a plan. I thought you had a plan!”
Jarvis jabbed a finger toward the window. “Well, I forgot to factor major alien invasion into my future. I’ll recalibrate for these visitors, but for now, I doubt we have time to do much more than get out.”
Aidan nodded as they stared with vacant, fearful expressions at each other.
“We don’t have a car.” Aidan shrugged. “I doubt the El will get us far enough away. Uber. Taxis.” Aidan shook his head. “Not gonna work. I mean, I assume they all roared out of town or got riders already. I got nothing.”
Jarvis nodded agreement. “Yeah. Me neither. But staying here seems like a super bad idea.”
“Why?” Aidan asked. The safety of the residential hall and ignoring the crisis had a certain allure suddenly.
“Why?” Jarvis shot back. “Why? Aliens!”
“I know. I know. But are we fleeing because of danger or because we think we should flee?”
Jarvis squinted at Aidan. “You gotta make sense if you want an answer.”
“I mean, are they Sigourney Weaver nasty aliens or E.T. coming for a visit and some tea? How do we know if we should panic?”
“How would I know?” Jarvis’s eyes grew enormous.
Aidan pointed to the TV. “What’d the news say?”
“Oh. They said the spaceship appeared over Washington without communicating to the people below. There are no signs of massive explosions or blowing the crap out of the Capitol, like in a disaster movie. But the spaceship is hovering over everything, and all electronics have fizzled out. None of them work: no cell phones, no satellite communication, no computers, like, nothing but a few people calling from old-school landlines.”
“Landlines?” Aidan scrunched his brow.
“Phones. Don’t you ever watch old movies?”
As if on cue, Aidan’s phone rang with the “Imperial March” from Star Wars as his ringtone.
“Well, that’s fitting,” Jarvis muttered as Aidan grabbed his phone.
“Yes!” Aidan yelled as he looked down at Ellie’s smiling face. “She always knows what to do. Always.” He held up the phone and showed Ellie’s picture to Jarvis.
“Answer!” Jarvis ordered him.
Aidan tapped the screen and held the phone to his ear. “Ellie! What the fuck? Have you seen?”
Her calm voice on the other end immediately took Aidan’s blood pressure down several points. “Yes, I saw. I can’t imagine many who haven’t. I need you to listen to me and get control of yourself.”
Aidan took a deep breath. “I’m in control.” Shit, his voice quivered.
“You sound about ready for a major panic attack. Don’t lie. Is someone with you, in case you freak?”
Aidan nodded his answer.
“She can’t see you,” Jarvis said aloud.
“Right.” Ellie chimed in from the phone. “Aidan, who’s with you? Can he help?”
“Oh, yeah. Jarvis. You know, my roommate.”
“Let me speak with him.”
“You already are. I put you on speaker.”
“Jarvis, you can hear me?”
“Yep. Shoot.” Jarvis grabbed the phone from Aidan’s shaking hand before he dropped it.
“You two need to haul ass downstairs, fast. Don’t take the elevator because electrical systems are starting to fail like in Washington. Did you see the news? I assume the same will happen in Chicago and anywhere else these assholes go.”
“Yes, we know.” Jarvis answered again. Aidan decided to stay quiet and concentrate on remembering to breathe.
“So,” Ellie continued, “hit the stairs like you’re running a race, and I’ll pick you up in the alley. The alley out back, near the kitchen. Guys, roads are packed. People are fleeing. We have like two seconds to get out of downtown before this place goes to shit.”
“Gotcha.” Jarvis hung up and handed Aidan his phone. “Follow me.”
Jarvis opened the door and hurried into the hallway, where they saw a group of people waiting for the elevator. Aidan started to move, but Jarvis grabbed his arm.
“Don’t forget your bag.” Jarvis pointed to Aidan’s backpack, sitting inside their doorway.
“Yeah, yeah.” Aidan slung the backpack over both his arms and adjusted the straps to fit on his back as Jarvis hurried down the hall.
“Where are we going?” Aidan asked Jarvis because they moved away from the growing throng at the elevator.
“You want to be in the elevator when all the power goes out?” Jarvis asked him as he pulled on his arm to hurry Aidan along. “Did you hear a thing Ellie said?”
“I listened but can’t process very well. But no, I don’t fancy getting stuck in an elevator though.”
A few other students pushed past them in the opposite direction, but one looked at them for a second, then spun to follow after they passed him.
Jarvis slammed open the emergency staircase door and rushed into the stairwell, Aidan following close behind. Far below, they heard an emergency alarm sounding because someone had opened the exterior fire exit. Others ran down the stairs with them, a group of jocks pushing past as they leapt two stairs at a time without concern for shoving into people.
“Fuckers,” Aidan muttered under his breath as he concentrated on going fast without falling. His backpack must weigh ten thousand pounds, and he already had started to sweat.
Jarvis, taller and speedier, stopped at every landing to make sure Aidan was following. He carried his larger bag in one hand and did not seem to exert any effort whatsoever to move fast. At each floor, additional students packed onto the landing, pushing bodies more and more tightly into the stairway. Aidan stuck to the edge to lessen the feeling of claustrophobia beginning to set in. The white wall’s brightness felt more open visually than getting stuck in the middle of a crowd of panicked people, even though he knew they could just as easily smash him into the drywall as much as a body.
On the third floor, with Aidan feeling the breeze from outside rushing into the building, a woman moved slower with her foot in a cast. With one hand, she gripped the stair railing as she hopped down one step at a time, while the other hand held tight to two crutches.
Jarvis hurried down to her. “You need help?”
“I’m good,” she answered. “Protect yourselves.”
Unconvinced, Jarvis stayed beside her to block people from blasting into her, so Aidan took the cue and remained two steps behind him to create more space and make sure no one fell into either one of them. A few people bumped into his backpack before swerving around him and then Jarvis. Jarvis took the crutches from her, handing one to Aidan. Aidan’s heart thundered in his chest with fear, wanting to get out of the building faster but knowing he, and Jarvis more so, could never live with themselves if they abandoned her.
The last two flights felt as if they took an hour to traverse, but their efforts paid off with people slowing and going around them with more care.
Aidan noticed his armpits sweating as if he’d run a marathon and hoped he had remembered to wear deodorant today. How weird, he thought, to worry about body odor when he needed to concern himself with trying to survive.
At the bottom on the first floor, Jarvis held the door open for the crutches woman as she and Aidan got to the bottom. They emptied onto a side street to find the sidewalks bustling with people and the roads full of honking cars because traffic moved at too slow a pace.
“Thanks.” Tears welled in her eyes.
“You got someplace to go?” Jarvis asked.
Before she could answer, a group of girls raced over. “Penny!” two of them shouted in unison. Another grabbed her arm to lead her away with the group.
“Wait!” Aidan shouted after them. “Don’t forget these.” He held up one crutch as he took the other from Jarvis and handed them to one of the other women.
“Oh, yeah!” Penny smiled wearily. “Thanks again.”
Two of the women pulled Penny along, one explaining as they walked away, “We tried getting in, but too many people were streaming out.”
Jarvis tugged Aidan’s arm. “She said the alley, remember?”
“Penny?”
“No. Ellie. Focus.”
“Right. Alley. Fast.” A drip of sweat trickled down his side from his armpit.
Aidan stayed close behind Jarvis as they went as fast as possible through the people toward the corner. As with the staircase, people bunched onto the sidewalks going in every direction, most seeming to follow some decorum of not shoving into people or trying to harm their fellow humans, though Aidan spotted a few who pushed into folks and shoved through the crowd. Aidan had expected chaos and found, to his surprise, a more respectful atmosphere, unlike movie versions of panic where everyone trampled each other in a mad dash to save themselves. A few selfish jerks cared for no one else, but the majority attempted to survive with a certain amount of dignity.
Jarvis and Aidan rounded the street corner, a car horn blaring so loud Aidan’s ears hurt. Fewer people rushed along the side street, Aidan assumed because these roads did not lead to paths out of the city. A couple of yards ahead Aidan could see their next turn, free of cars, yet darker and narrower.
Proving, as always, how one must always listen to Ellie, Jarvis and Aidan sped into the alley to find a row of parked cars but a lane otherwise free of traffic. Up ahead, Aidan breathed a sigh of relief to see the red brake lights on an old black SUV.
“There!” Aidan pointed to the two-door SUV and ran forward, taking his turn to tug Jarvis along. Aidan yanked open the passenger door and threw in his backpack before jumping into the vehicle. After an awkward shove with his left foot against the door frame and hanging onto a seat belt with his right hand, he landed face-first in the back seat with his limbs flailing everywhere. By the time he faced forward, Jarvis sat in the passenger seat with his bag in his lap.
The minute Jarvis slammed the door shut Ellie revved the engine. “Fasten your seat belts,” she said, as if she were a flight attendant preparing for takeoff.
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Meet the Author
Damian Serbu is an author of gay horror/speculative fiction. After over twenty years of teaching history at the collegiate level, he now writes full time. He lives in the Chicagoland area with his husband and two dogs.
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