[ FF ] `` The weapon that won the war '' ( Feedback for every response . ) 400 words or less .

My take. 400 words. 
 
 *** 
 
 They called them demons, though the name was a misnomer dredged up by some religious muckymuck talking up the End of Days or some such. I was there when they broke through and can say that what lay beyond the portal was no Hell. It was far worse. 
 
 Chicago was the first to fall, to a firestorm of all things, as blue fire burned hot enough to light up steel. The portal was there, you see. 
 
 No, we never did find out who did it—physics experiment gone wrong, a black DARPA project maybe—it doesn ’ t matter in the end. The dead don ’ t care. 
 
 Not many survived the flames, though those who did came to envy those who did n't, ‘ cause afterward came the demons. Mercy was as alien as their glowing eyes, chitinous bodies, and mandibles. 
 
 I was coordinating the evac from helicopter, what good it did, until the military came in and we wrote off anyone left behind. Fought ‘ em as best as we could, set up a perimeter outside the city, called in air strikes, even wiped out some high-rises, just like 9/11 all over again. 
 
 That? It was a terrorist attack before your time. 
 
 Ah, we used to build our buildings up back then, not into the ground. 
 
 Yes, I suppose it does seem peculiar. 
 
 We hit ‘ em with what we could, though their damned exoskeletons were impermeable to anything short of a howitzer round. We tried gassing'em, but none of our chemicals did much—sarin, phosgene, mustard, all useless. Phosphorous rounds worked for awhile, burning ‘ em from inside, though they learned to adapt. 
 
 We lost the Midwest in a week, North America the week following. Nukes held ‘ em back for a bit, but then they started to mutate. 
 
 The writing was on the wall, though we did have one last hope: unmanned drones with directed energy weapons I never did learn much about, some sort of radioactive something or other, but work they did. Problem was that they had to be operated unmanned and blind, as they ’ d toast anyone nearby, killing ‘ em with radiation sure as sunshine. One of the governments had made a breakthrough with AI though, and we gave it the job of running the drones. 
 
 It brought the bugs to their knees and it looked like humanity just might survive. 
 
 None of us thought the machines would turn on us.
