[ WP ] Aliens came and declared war on Earth , but humanity defeated them . Twenty years later , we discover that our victory might not have been as complete as we thought .

The war had left his city in a new shape. The roads used to wrap around in a perfect circle and now they were a mess of Frankenstein spaghetti pieces. An entire section had been burned by those alien bastards. One shot from their ship and it just rubble. The military had built a similar instrument and miniaturized it, eventually driving the beasts back into space. Their corpses and weaponry sped the human race up technologically by decades. We earned a mass communication array across galaxies and could eliminate any other form of transit with thier teleportation tools. But cities still felt the same, they felt like home- just a bit more wartorn than one would like. 
 
 Lonnie was one of the few veterans of the war from beginning to end. He had enrolled at his first opportunity and never left in the three years of battle. They armed him with a laser musket and let him defend any point on the grid. He'd picked home; now he had a house built only a few feet from where he spent his longest night of defending this fair planet. But lately something had n't felt right. 
 
 Lonnie had been noticing less and less activity in the streets and everyone had miniaturized laser pistols on their hips except two people down the street. They laughed at shootings and giggled at disease. It was infectious apparently; weeks later the neighborhood was doing the same. 
 
 He pieced it together over a microwaved steak one night. The laughter was the disease; no one would laugh at human life being lost if they were truly human- but if they were infected? The aliens had n't been known to produce through viruses but the attack started only hours after the ship had been spotted. There was no time for the little details of how the aliens reproduced or how many were on board. No the humans had rushed to defend what was theirs but in three years they had discovered nothing about the biology of the creatures. In thirty years they'd all but forgotten about it. Lonnie rummaged through his old war chest and found the scanner he used when scouting places to secure for the military. 
 
 He set the scanner down next to his lunch. He did n't want to know anymore if he had to fight again, at his age, he would n't be much help. The invasion had been a failure right? Surely no more than a few of the aliens survived and they must have been running scarred. He flipped the scanner on. The screen was full of blinking dots and the speakers bleeped so frequently it was a continual hum. He was the only space on the radar not blinking- but how? They'd been shot down and crunched into submission. 
 
 Lonnie did n't hear the knock over the blaring speakers of the scanner. A young man with a laser musket on his hip walked up the porch and through the door. He gripped the pistol tightly, a scanner was silently blinking on his wrist, the last one was here, the last alien. He was a hunter. The aliens had corrupted a few humans and his scanner reported them far more accurately than the old ones they had stolen and rewired from the aliens. Those had gone to the foot soldiers, real trackers were designed for hunters and sargeants to properly command their squadrons. 
 
 The hunter saw Lonnie looking deep into an old scanner; he was one of the possessed it seemed. The eye twitch and the plate of pure meat would easily sustain the virus. The hunter doubted he even knew he was different. `` Good riddance!'' The hunter screamed as he opened fire on the alien. He had to collect a sample of the ashes just to be sure, but the green smoking remnants were a definite sign of something other than carbon keeping this being alive. Too bad, he had many medals of valor from the humans side, it could have been a good takeover for the aliens if it had fully matured. The hunter smashed the old scanner, scooped up a sample of the ashes and left.
