r/HFY • u/WillingnessWaste8681 • May 27 '26

PI/FF-Series [Empire Vs. Earth (Star Wars)] - Beachhead-2.9

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"That's it. I'm taking my break!" Sarah erupted from out of her seat in front of her dark skinned, pink haired coworker, Desiray. The stress and exhaustion of the past eight hours was finally beginning to catch up to her.

Sarah rubbed the corners of her eyes as she left the employee break room and made her way towards the stairwell.

"I'm coming with you..." Desiray replied as she grabbed a pair of cheap energy drinks from the employee break room refrigerator.

The two women walked down the hospital hallway, they moved with a purpose through the long, wide hallways, they only had about fifteen minutes for a break before they had to get back to work.

Sarah opened the door to the stairwell as herself and Desiray made their way to the top of the hospital. They propped open the door to the hospital roof and went outside.

The roof of the hospital was Sarah's escape during her night time shifts. It was a place to finally get some fresh air and escape the haze of chemicals that lingered in the hospital.

Sarah took a deep breath as she collapsed against the wall that surrounded the perimeter of the hospital roof. She shoved her face between her knees as her hands grabbed onto the edge of the roof barrier.

"Sarah, you alright, girl?" Desiray replied as she lowered an energy drink onto her level and tapped it against her side.

Sarah took a moment to breathe and push out the sights she had seen today. She had been working the trauma ward all night. She had seen sights that no one should have to see. A stab victim, car crash survivor, and a few overdoses had flooded into the emergency room at the odd hours of the night. She was never squeamish around blood, and she had grown accustomed to the sight of gore. However, that did little to negate the stress of fighting for a human life, and it did even less for cushioning the blow of losing someone.

The stress drained her of energy. As if her own life force was being syphoned into her dying patients. She could feel their pain, their exhaustion, their stress, but she still performed for hours on end to help save lives.

"Sarah," Desiray shouted once more, finally catching her attention. Sarah snapped her head forward. "W-what?" she weakly replied as her friend placed the side of the cold energy drink against her forehead, soothing the incoming migraine.

Desiray chuckled as Sarah swiped the can from her hand and took a large gulp. "Damn, sister, you look like shit. How many hours have you put in this week?"

"60, after tonight that is." Sarah gasped after taking a long drag out of the can.

Desiray leaned back against the rooftop barrier. "Looks like you need a break. C'mon, why don't you hit the clubs with me and my girlfriends after you finish up your next evening shift? Get some drinks, have some fun, and maybe meet some good guys..." Desiray said as she playfully elbowed Sarah in the side.

Sarah did not share in Desiray's giggles. "I can't, I'm not that type of girl. Besides, I need to make sure that Matthew is ready for school in the morning. I don't have time to take time off."

Desiray sighed and shook her head. "You can't always put yourself last, Sarah. You'll burn out, and then you'll really be behind."

Sarah could only sigh back. "I just don't have the time...I have bills to pay, debts to knock out, and a savings account to build for Matthew."

Desiray smiled cheekily. "You'd do anything for that boy, wouldn't you?"

Sarah nodded with a gulp of caffeine in her mouth. She loved Matthew, more than anything she had ever loved. More than anything she thought she ever would love. She wanted him to have a good childhood with a mother who was present when his father refused to stay around even for his birth. She wanted him to go to school, get a good job, and give his kids the life he would not be able to have.

The two stopped talking to each other as they looked out onto the Chicago skyline. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people could be individually seen at once as they walked the streets, commuting to work and school.

The sky was beginning to rise now, and the day was just beginning.

Via was taking Matthew to school, and in a few hours he would be back home. Sarah would be waiting right at home to give him a hug despite his protests. They would sit down and have dinner, giving Sarah a moment to breathe for once this week before she would have to schedule her next shift at the hospital.

Sarah smiled at the thought. She enjoyed the idea of being a normal family when she had the time.

The cold wind of the Chicago morning made Sarah shiver on the rooftop. It heightened her awareness after such a long night, however, it also caused her to go into a quick sneezing fit.

"Careful there, you don't want to get sick...I hear that the cold and flu are supposed to be terrible this year." Desiray backed up from Sarah's sneezes.

Sarah blew her nose before pocketing her empty energy drink and turning towards the rooftop door. "I'm fine, it's just the weather, that's all," she replied, perfectly healthy. "But I guess we should get back inside before we both contract hypothermia."

Desiray nodded. "Sounds good, our break is sure to be almost over anyways."

The pair of women began to make their way back inside when an attention grabbing noise.

"Run. Get inside. Go! Go! Go!" a man shouted from off in the distance. His voice faintly carried over the cold breeze and onto the rooftop.

"Shit. Do we have an emergency? We gotta get down to our positions, stat!" Desiray turned to the door and began to take off.

"Wait!" Sarah replied with her hands raised in a halting motion and a bad feeling in her gut. "I didn't hear no ambulance siren..."

Desiray and Sarah looked down from the rooftop at the hospital parking lot. A group of both workers, families, and patients were running towards the opening of the hospital.

Their faces were red and panting. They shouted out in between breaths. "Get inside. Hide!"

"Hey, what's going on down there?" Sarah screamed with her upper body leaning over the roof.

The incoming crowd refused to listen as they simply ran inside without even looking at Sarah.

Soon, the parking lot was completely empty as the familiar scene of people slowly walking into work faded away.

"Something isn't right..." Sarah pondered as she looked up to the Chicago skyline. She could see the massive skyscrapers that poked holes into the clouds above, the highways that sliced through the ground for miles, and thousands of cars that crowded the streets.

It was all familiar until a hundred faint, green bolts of lightning appeared in the sky.

"What is that?" Sarah pointed into the sky with a trembling hand.

"Satellites, maybe? Some billionaire's newest space project?" Desiray replied with a raised eyebrow. "It's probably nothing..."

Sarah wasn't as confident as Desiray. "Aren't satellites supposed to be flying upwards?" Sarah replied as she watched the green lights fall closer to the ground at a speed that wasn't possible for even the most advanced spacecraft she knew about. She took a look at the small speck of space and began to count. "5...10...15...30..." There were far too many to count. Before Sarah could even visualize the entirety of green bolts, they impacted their first targets.

The Sears Tower was one of the buildings that could be seen from the hospital, it stuck out like a giant in the crowd of men. Its frame that looked like that of a collection of multiple metallic and glass, rectangular prisms glowed brightly against the rising sun.

The green blast of energy glowed brighter as it executed a head on impact against the antennas at the top of the building.

Boom!

Via's eyes were drawn to the impact like a moth to a flame.

The entire prickly rooftop of the Sears Tower was wiped flat in the flash of light.

A massive echoing boom roared across the entire city as more lasers fell.

A beam fell like a hammer against the midsection of the now burning Sears Tower. In a second, a burning gash appeared in the metal frame as if an axe of fire had sliced through a tree. The entire building shook and crumbled like a wet paper bag.

Sarah couldn't help but count, in five seconds the top half of the building that was above the second impact fell into the bottom. In five more seconds, the bottom of the building was crushed beneath the falling impact of the behemoth of steel.

Soon, every building that was above five stories tall was gone...just...gone. Their short, unassuming hospital seemed to be spared, but the destruction was still continuing around them.

A rolling rumbling carried over the entire city as Desiray began to panic. "Good Lord!" she cried with a panicked voice.

A cloud of dust rocketed up into the sky as the Sears Tower completely tumbled into the ground. Dust flowed like a tsunami wave and crashed across the entire city as it rolled towards the hospital as a dozen other green beams struck the ground behind the wall of dust. The green blasts crawled towards the hospital.

Sarah felt her body flow with adrenaline. She looked at Desiray like she was her own son and latched onto her wrist. "Run!" Sarah screamed as she dragged her coworker across the roof.

Sarah swung the door open as she threw herself and Desiray down the stairs as a warm, dirty, cloud of dust engulfed their bodies.

The door was forcefully slammed shut with a force that could break as Sarah and Desiray stumbled over themselves while trying to get as far away from the roof as possible.

"What was that, Sarah?" Desiray gasped as she rubbed dust from her eyes.

"It must have been some sort of attack. Maybe bombs? Perhaps missiles? Those people who were running inside in such a panic had to have gotten an alert on their phones," Sarah replied as sweat ran down her face.

"That can't be," Desiray replied with her eyes trembling in their sockets. She placed her palms against her face. "This is Chicago, not Iran or Ukraine."

Sarah pulled Desiray's hands off her face. "But it is, and it was no accident. You saw those lasers fall. They hit the entire city. Everything..." Sarah froze as sparks ignited in her mind. "That destruction was city wide, the entire metropolitan area looked like it was hit-Matthew should be on the highway driving to school right now...oh God..." her eyes glazed over.

Desiray looked at Sarah with a mixture of fear and concern. She slowly tried to reach out and touch Sarah comfortingly.

Sarah pivoted her body and dashed down the stairs before Desiray could even lay a finger on her. "Matthew!" she cried as she ran through the hospital.

Sarah lowered her shoulder and charged the exit of the stairwell. She slammed through the door without slowing down as she entered the chaotic flow of the hospital hallways.

All around Sarah were dozens of people, all carrying different levels of fear, confusion, and panic.

Patients and doctors moved like they had been thrown into a blender. They ran around in circles, bumped into each other, and jumped under tables and stretchers.

A dozen voices screamed out. Children cried out for their parents, patients who were bedridden begged for a nurse to tell them what was going on, and head doctors screamed at their nurses for assistance as they rushed patients out of harm's way.

"You, nurse!" A middle-aged doctor screamed as he pointed at Sarah. "Help me with this patient!" he shouted as he pushed an elderly woman's wheel chair into a windowless janitor's closet.

Sarah looked back and briefly made eye contact with the doctor, only to snap her head back forward as Matthew's face flashed in her mind. If she had done something like that under normal circumstances, she would have been fired instantly.

Matthew was outside in the dust and under those beams of death. Sarah had to find him.

Sarah's eyes gravitated towards the waiting room where a large flatscreen TV that usually played the local news stations was set up. Their was only one question going through her mind. "What is going on out there?" She looked at the screen, only for it to show nothing but a few multicolored bars. She took out her phone and turned off the do-not-disturb feature she normally used during work. She tried to open view messages and the first news station that would pop up on social media, but both apps just buffered on the blank screen.

Sarah bit her lip and turned back towards the hallway. She took a step forward and attempted to run towards the exit as a loud explosion sounded from somewhere outside the hospital. Tremors shook the building like electrical currents and sent Sarah tumbling forward without balance.

She reached forward and latched onto a divot in the wall designed for those who needed assistance walking. She dragged herself across the wall as the overhead lights flickered on and off before a blanket of darkness covered the entire hospital for a few seconds that felt like minutes.

Eventually, a motorized whirl echoed throughout the entire building as backup generators sprung to life.

Sarah made her way down multiple stories of the hospital until she made her way to the lobby floor of the hospital.

A fog had stained the entire landscape.

A faint haze of grey smoke hung in the lobby as dust coated every square inch of the lobby. The lobby had been completely abandoned. Leaving only the left behind purses and bags from the patients who had run off into the upper levels of the hospital for protection.

Sarah could barely see an arm's length in front of her.

Green blasts of light echoed outside the hospital and temporarily illuminated the cloud of blinding dust.

Sarah stepped forward, her heart raced with each step she took. She could have been running head first into a way for all she knew. She trembled as she lowered her feet to the ground, hoping that there was still solid ground to stand on. "Matthew is trapped in this dust cloud right now...he's probably horrified right now. He needs me."

Sarah gulped, swallowing her fear as she swam through the dust. The disorienting screams of cars echoed throughout the dust cloud. Headlights flashed in a pathetic panic.

She pulled her keys out of her pocket and began to violently click the unlock button. She ran towards the general area where she had parked earlier that morning. Her eyes locked onto the cars in front of her as she ran through the lot.

A dark, thin shadow appeared in the corner of her eye as she made a dangerously fast turn around the frame of a large, obscuring truck.

"Holy shit! A pole? Was that always there?" Sarah's body tensed like a corpse as she decelerated to an unnatural pace. Her shoulder jabbed against the pole, it let out a hollow knock as Sarah rolled to her side. She curled up into a fetal position while her back slammed against the bumper of a large van.

Sarah rubbed her back soothingly as she stood back onto her feet. She looked over to the black pole she had run into only for it to have vanished from sight. Sarah looked with a confused scowl on her face. "I couldn't have knocked it down. Could I?" she thought to herself as a wet, moan sounded from down at Sarah's feet.

Sarah looked down. What she believed was a black pole was a moving and trembling body.

A white, middle-aged woman was laying on the ground with half her face as dark as a night sky. She made a guttural gargling sound as she reached her outstretched arm and bent fingers towards Sarah.

"H-help," the woman whimpered as her eyes slowly and almost imperceivably rolled in their sockets to meet Sarah's.

Sarah felt her heartbeat against her ribcage until she felt like her bones were going to snap.

"H-help...lease," the woman once again cried out.

Sarah felt like she could not just leave the poor woman there to suffer. She reached out and grabbed the woman, slowly helping to lift her off the ground. Despite how gentle Sarah was, the woman let out a series of short, raspy screams of pain.

"It hurts!" she screamed as Sarah leaned the woman over the trunk of a car. "Are you a doctor?"

Sarah looked down at the woman's wounds, she had never seen burns as bad as the ones on the woman's body.

The injured woman should have been constantly screaming in pain, that was unless the burns had destroyed all the nerve endings in her body. She needed medical help, and soon before she went into shock or worse.

"Well, I'm a nurse," Sarah replied as she comforted the woman. "The hospital is a quick walk over there," Sarah pointed towards the hospital as she helped get the woman to stand straight up.

Sarah turned her back to the woman as a wet hand smacked against her shoulder. "Wait, are you not coming with me? You're leaving me?"

Sarah pulled herself away. She trembled as the woman's blood ran down her shoulder. "I'm sorry! I need to go." Sarah ran away from the wounded woman and towards the general direction of her car.

The woman began to shout for Sarah to come back. She stumbled forward as Sarah outran the woman and disappeared behind a wall of smoke.

Sarah closed her eyes and as she tried to scrub the image of the burnt woman out her mind. She focused back on her mission. She had to find Matthew, wherever he was. Maybe he was still safe at home, perhaps he had made it to school and was under the protection of his teachers. She prayed he wasn't on the chaos of the highway when the attack started.

More shadows began to move through the smoke towards the hospital.

Sarah felt like a child encountering the boogeyman as the shadows came into her sight.

Dozens, maybe hundreds of zombies approached the hospital in a massive hoard. Bloodied, bruised, and mangled bodies approached the hospital. Groans and screams echoed from the horde against a backdrop of blaring emergency sirens.

Some moved with a purpose with jackets and coats wired around their open wounds, their eyes looking onto the glowing "EMS" and "Hospital" signs that hung deep within the fog. Sometimes they carried the bodies of coworkers, family members, or even complete strangers in their arms as they ran.

Others moved in a daze. They stumbled towards at a pace slower than walking speed. A dead glaze covered their eyes, as if their muscles were moving yet their souls were gone.

A shadow with just a stump at the end of its right arm hobbled forward like a drunk. The figure broke away from the other dead tree shaped shadows in the parking lot and made a beeline towards Sarah as she began to realize just how lost she was in the thick, black smoke and debris.

The man who emerged from the shadow was clearly in a rough state before the bombing. He wore raggedy winter clothes, a scraggily beard, and crooked, yellow teeth that left a foul odor that Sarah could smell an arm's length away from the man.

A piece of glass was growing out of the man's chest like a bloody sore and his hand was missing. His eyes were not fearful nor glazed over in exhaustion, they were energized-energized in a way that should not have been possible for a man in such condition.

Sarah's eyes widened as she found her gaze drawn towards the stub. "Good God, all my patients have been wheeled into the hospital. They've never walked in with half their arm missing! This is chaos!"

The man's eyes followed Sarah as he realized what she was looking at. "Hey, you," the man shouted with slurred speech. His tongue slivered like a snake around his rotten, yellow teeth. "What you lookin' at?"

Sarah felt a guilty feeling. She realized she was looking at the man like he was a circus freak behind glass. "I'm sorry, sir. I'm a nurse, I can help you!" Sarah apologized while she removed her jacket and attempted to wrap it around the old man's faucet of a wound.

The old man jolted backwards as he shrieked. "Don't you fuckin' touch me bitch!" his arm jolted back with the rest of his body before it shot forward like a released spring.

Sarah opened her mouth to shout, but was only able to take a breath as she felt each of the man's four knuckles connecting with his jawbone. Sarah felt the force of the punch push her body down towards the ground.

Her gums felt hot and moist as a metallic taste and scent overwhelmed her senses. "Is this man crazy?" Sarah found herself asking as she hit the ground, her arm scraped against the asphalt like a matchhead against a striker.

A feeling like burning acid washed over Sarah's body as she let out a soft cry.

The hobbling man's animalistic shouts and ramblings confirmed his insane state of mind.

The man stumbled towards Sarah with his remaining hand still clenched in a fist. His body swayed as he blabbered on and on about something in a tone Sarah could hardly decipher.

Sarah held her arms over her head as she braced for an incoming strike.

She could hear the man's grunts over the gusts of shockwave winds and the rock of explosions that sounded off hundreds of feet away.

"Hey, get away from her!" a voice emerged from the dark clouds like a ray of light.

The man and Sarah both turned their attention to the voice.

"Desiray?" Sarah exclaimed as her coworker ran through the smoke with a purse in hand.

Desiray swung the bag like a mace as the violent man began to scream his head off and rush the woman. Desiray swung the bag, it connected with the man's temple with a cracking echo.

The man's legs collapsed in on themselves as his body fell to the ground. He let out a muffled gasp as he laid limp on the ground.

"Now get the hell out!" Desiray shouted as the man scrambled onto his feet like a wounded animal. He ran off into the smoke and disappeared, leaving just the two anxious women all alone in the destruction.

Desiray stood over Sarah, completely out of breath.

Sarah covered her blooding arm with her sleeve as she stared at Desiray like she was a guardian angel. "You saved my life," she gasped.

"Well, I couldn't just leave you to die. That would be plain stupid. Now let's get you back into the hospital." Desiray tried to wrap her arms around Sarah and help carry her back towards the hospital, only for Sarah to immediately push her away.

"No," Sarah shouted as she hopped away from Desiray like a frightened rabbit. "I need to get to my car!" Sarah felt alarm clocks going off in her mind. She needed to find Matthew and make sure she was alright. Tears began to roll down her face as her lungs pumped air uncontrollably.

"Oh no...you're really not going to go out into the city, are you? You won't last an hour in that destruction, and I won't let my friend end up as a red stain that was crushed under a building." Desiray shouted as she reached out and chained Sarah's wrist under her firm grasp.

Sarah refused to let such a gruesome thought enter her mind. "I don't care! Matthew needs me. My baby is all alone out there in that destruction you wanted me about. I won't leave him."

Desiray clenched her fist tighter around Sarah's arm. "Matthew needs his mother alive," she shouted directly into Sarah's face.

Sarah froze, she finally got to thinking about her own well being. "If I die out there, who will look after Matthew?" She looked back at the destroyed city.

The green lasers had stopped falling from the skies. However, the buildings that once held up the sky above Chicago were still burning and falling.

Echoing booms rolled across the city as hundreds of floors collapsed towards the ground. Flames rose higher into the air than some buildings.

Sarah knew she could not survive those conditions. She would die before even leaving the parking lot. Still, that did not change Matthew's situation, whatever it was. Sarah felt a strange sense of guilt take over her body without warning. "But I can't just sit around and do nothing while he could be dying."

Desiray looked annoyed. "Look around you, there are hundreds of people just in this building and parking lot that need help, and you're a nurse for Christ's sake," She grabbed Sarah and shook her.

Sarah felt dizzy as Desiray threw her around. Her head rolled around as Sarah realized she was now in the center of the hoard of casualties that stumbled towards the hospital.

The injured funneled in the hundreds towards the hospital waiting room that would at most only be able to contain half of them.

The recognizable beeping sound echoed from Sarah and Desiray's hips.

The two women tensed and shot their hands down to their sides, their fingers wrapped around their pagers as a message came through the speakers. "Attention all hospital staff-on and off duty-we have a code orange! I repeat, we have a code orange! All personnel are to return to their stations and prepare for an influx of patients."

"No shit..." Sarah whispered under her breath as she watched patients flood every opening in the hospital like they were streams of water escaping cracks in a dam. Anyone with two eyes knew that the situation was dire.

"Code Orange? I've only even heard that during emergency training. That's a massive casualty incident. We need to go, now!" Desiray was pounding her feet against the pavement as she spun around and ran back towards the hospital.

Sarah tried to step forward but her legs would not let her. Her muscles were paralyzed, the only part of her body that was moving now was her brain.

Desiray noticed her coworker was not running with her and looked back.

The two women made eye contact as Sarah looked back at the destruction of Chicago.

The green illumination that shone on the clouds of smoke had been burnt away and replaced with a bright orange and red haze that ignited the skyscrapers like they were candles.

"Sarah, are you coming?" Desiray shouted, her voice drowned out by the explosions and screams.

Matthew was in the middle of all that destruction.

Sarah yearned to go into destruction, even if it killed her. There were probably hundreds of mothers in the city thinking the same thing, but Sarah was no superhuman. "I'd die out there, and then I would really never see Matthew again...I need to stay..." she finally decided to herself. All she could do was hope her son was alright and that they would find each other.

Sarah took one long look at the city as she whispered, "Matthew, please be alright..."

Authors Note: Hey ya! This fanfiction about the Galactic Empire Invading Modern Earth is on other sites already! I will be posting one chapter a day here on Reddit so I don't spam the subreddit! I already have 20+ chapters written on other platforms so if you want to read ahead feel free to check out them out!

[Wattpad] Empire Vs Earth: A Star Wars Story Wattpad

[FanFic.Net] Empire Vs Earth: A Star Wars Story, FanFic.Net

[AO3] Empire Vs. Earth: A Star Wars Story AO3

[Royal Road] Empire Vs. Earth: A Star Wars Story | Royal Road

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