The people I care about are what brought me here –- to this place -– Rose Hall, the dormitory-come-fortress I called home for four years.  The place where the impurities of my character were burned away in the fires of emotional strife brought on by hard work and failed relationships.  The place where I met, lived with, a learned about life from Stephanie, Caitlin, and Kristine. The lessons taught to me by these three have shaped me into what I am now, and I wish to repay their kind actions, which is what brought me here.  My friend Kristine was turning twenty-one, and I wanted to surprise her.

            I was hesitant at first to enter, because I am what people refer to as “creepy,” due to my odd appearance, the combination of black trenchcoats, silly yellow fishing hats, glasses and goatee.  But that never stopped me in the past, and I walk straight into the building and onto the girl’s floor.  Building security was just as lax as it was when I was a staff member here.  It’s nice to see that some things never change.

            It had been a while since I had seen her, and I don’t know how she would react to seeing me.  What if she isn’t pleased to see me? What if she’s not home?  Why the hell didn’t I think of this stuff earlier, so that I could create a contingency plan? But you can’t plan for everything, I drove too far to turn back now.  I knock, and lower my head.  All I can do to curb my anxiety in these situations is to try my best not to think of anything.

            Aww hell, worst even if everything falls apart I can always go visit Caitlin.

Kris opens her door, and she was just as I remembered her, as though I never moved away -– slender, shy, bespectacled, and bright.  Her long, dark hair bunched into a ponytail and hidden beneath her bandana.  She wore a baggy purple tie-dyed shirt with tight blue jeans, balancing yin with yang by making her look both wholesome and sultry.  She looks at me wide-eyed with joy and confusion.

            “Hat Guy!”  We hug, not knowing what else to do in this situation.

            “Happy Birthday Kris.”

            “Thank you.  Up visiting your family?”  she asks.

            “No, visiting you.”  I tell her.

            “What?”  she asks with a perplexed pseudo-anger.

            “I drove all day to come here to see you.”

            I put her in an awkward position again.  Kris never really held any affection for me, but she was still glad to see me because of our friendship.  I sit down on her bed, and she does too, about an arm’s length away, where she hangs her head.

            “No one’s ever done anything like this for me,” she meekly informs.

            “I know, that kind of why I did it.”  I tell her, lowering my head in meekness as well.  “I figured you deserved it, you’ve really helped me grow as a person.  I remember you toiling for hours on your art projects, and I thought maybe you’d need a break.”

            “What did you have in mind?” s he asks, with a hint of fear and uncertainty.

“The bar,” I tell her with a half-smile.

Kris just cocks her head and puts her index finger to her mouth.  Appalled, yet intrigued.  Trapped in a campus where stomach pumps are as common as fire extinguishers, she had never gone drinking before, for she was probably the most timid and virtuous young woman I had ever met.

            “A little vice is nice,” I tell her with an evil grin. “Besides, it’s something out of the ordinary, something different.”  After a moment of hesitation and inquiry, Kristine put on her coat and we began to traverse the well-beaten path leading to the Edinboro Hotel Bar.

The Edinboro Hotel Bar was place that my mom told me to stay away from as a kid.  It was a popular bar in this small college town, and it showed.  It was a place almost as trashy as its regular clientele, sorostitutes, self-proclaimed pimps (none of which are involved in the pimping industry), and other forms of human garbage.  It was dark as a cave, as to distract you from the unplaned wood furnishings and the eighth-of-an-inch layer of viscous sludge that coated the floor, along with other forms of miscellaneous grime covering everything else.

            We do not speak of the restrooms.

It was a Monday night and the place was near-empty, much like it was on Stephanie’s twenty-first birthday, which seemed a lifetime ago.

 “What do you want?”  I ask.

“I don’t know, this is new to me...”  tells Kristine while shrugging her shoulders.

“I’ll get you something that tastes good.”

            “Alright.”

            I walk up to the nonchalant, red-shirted barman.

“What’ll it be?”  he asks.

“I need a strawberry daiquiri and a...”  I look back at Kris.  Hmm, what’d be a good first drink? Didn’t put too much thought into this.  “Eh, make it two,” I tell the barman.  Once he pours them I walk over to the booth that Kris made her at home in.

“Ooh, what are those?”

“Strawberry daiquiris, they’re like smoothies, but hotter,” I tell her as I situate myself in our booth.

“Mmm, its good.”  She tells me as she begins to slurp down her drink.

“Whoa!  Slow down chief!  We don’t know how much you can handle!”  I jokingly tell her.  I turn my head to crack my neck, when I see what at first appeared to be a trashcan gliding around the streets.  I realized its true nature when it smashed the street-side picture window with his worthless, toilet plunger arm.  It spoke to us, in a shrill, mechanical monotone: “Sub-mit to the Da-leks or be... ex-term-min-ate-ed!”  For a moment I gaze into his lone eye-stick, stunned at what I have just seen.  The Daleks.  Few words have inspired so much fear to so many.  The bartender told him that he’d have to pay for the window, but the Dalek shrieks on.

“Ex-ter-min-ate!  Ex-ter-min-ate!”

I snapped my head over to Kristine.  “Get down!”  I shouted, before grabbing her head and pushing her under the table.

“Ex-ter-min-ate!  Ex-ter-min-ate!”  shrieked the Dalek as he laid down blue laser from his gun-arm.  The bartender screamed as loud as he could while wildly waving his arms over his head.  My field of vision swapped between real and photonegative many times before the bartender lunges to the ground, dead, while the Dalek gracefully rolled away.

The Dalek rolls into the bar, and looks around for any signs of life as his kinsmen roll down the streets, killing all they encounter.  We were trapped, and this tapped into my greatest fear –- powerlessness.  Kris dared not make a sound.  I watch her eyes water as we lay on the floor, curled in balls.  We knew that if we stayed there any longer, we wouldn’t make it, and that we were to try something, we’d just get myself killed. The Dalek is literally by design, a murdering machine.  He existed to kill, and served no other purpose.

Kris and I weren’t going to make it.  No one in Edinboro feared random invasion since in my fifth and final year at Edinboro, when we finally vanquished the Demon Mafia, and re-imprisoned Cthulhu.  No one was ready.  I was ill-equipped and rusty, having spent the last year working hard pursuing my advanced degree.  We were going to die, right here, on this scummy barroom floor. But even though we wouldn’t make it, maybe I could stop this creature from killing others.  I grin a sly grin as I wipe Kris’ tear away.

I crawl my way to the edge of the table, a where take off my trademark hat and run my fingers through my thinning hair. There I squat at the end of the table, holding my hat, waiting for an opportunity.  Eventually one presented itself, and with a snap of the wrist, my hat flew in a gradual arc across the barroom, and right onto the Dalek’s eye-stick.  The blinded Dalek spun itself in circles and wailed.

“Mal-funct-ion!  Mal-funct-ion!  Op-ti-cal sen-sor off-line!  Mal-funct-ion!”

Now! When he was distracted! I bolted across the room over to the bar, and in one graceful motion, I jumped up, set my hand on the bar and kicked my legs over, my black trenchcoat flowing all the while.  I land on my feet and immediately squat down, looking for something to use as a weapon.  There, on the bottom shelf, was a sawed-off shotgun.  The mainstay of the action movie arsenal; proven time and time again to have what it takes to kill aliens, demons, and robots –- with style no less.

“Not very creative, but that’s ok,” I say to myself.

The blinded Dalek bumbles his way through the bar, banging into tables and what not, shrieking about his malfunctioning optical sensors all the while.  I arise from behind the bar, holding the shotgun across my chest, sneering as I pump a shell into the chamber.

“Re-tal-i-ate,” I say to the Dalek in a mocking monotone.

I fire off a round from the hip, and the Dalek continued to spin itself around.  It was not dead, though I managed to make a half-dollar sized hole in its metal shell, next to its gun-arm. I must’ve pissed it off, too.  It spun randomly shooting lasers all the while.  I duck behind the bar and look for a new weapon. Sure it’s easy to improvise a weapon, but not an anti-tank weapon!  I rummaged for a few seconds before I found a little toolbox.  It was a junky little thing filled with well-worn, random tools –- these things are common to places like this.  I filled my pockets because I hadn’t a clue where my adventures would take me.  I paid particular attention to the claw hammer, which caught my eye.

I crawled along the floor over to the Dalek.  The gun arm didn’t have a great range of motion as it was, but I must have damaged the servos that control its motion, because it was only firing at chest-level.  I bury the claw into hole I had blasted, and pull back on the handle.  The Dalek continues to rotate, taking me with him, until I put enough pressure on his gun arm to pop it out.

“It’s ok Kris.  I’ve disarmed him,” I assure as I pick the broken laser off the ground.  “Quite literally,” I add.

            I stand up and dust myself off.  I stand right in front of the Dalek and take my hat off his eye stick, and put it back on. Waving his gun-arm in front of him, I lead him to the door, open it up, and toss it into the street.

            “Fetch,” I tell him.

            Peeping from one of the windows, I see seven or eight of the Daleks harassing the other local small businesses abandon their posts and rush to their injured comrade.  I pump another shell into the chamber, before coming to my senses.

            “No, need more firepower.”  I say to myself, as I turn to peruse to the shelves of liquor, though most were broken by the random shots of the blind, spinning Dalek, yet I grin as I shove a clean bar rag down the mouth of the Bicardi 151 bottle.  The Daleks form a circle around the gun-arm in the street, as soon as it’s owner raced to it.  One of the Daleks spoke

            “You are un-armed and there-fore in-e-fect-ive in com-bat! You are in-fer-i-or to a ful-ly funct-ion-al Da-lek!  You are in-fer-i-or, and be-cause of this you shall be... ex-term-in-at-ed!”

            The Daleks close in, tightening their circle and open fire upon their comrade, who flashed between real and photonegative several times before exploding, and bursting into flame.  Now, when they were distracted, I lit the rag with a book of matches from the bar.  Pivoting out from behind the corner, I lob the Molotov cocktail to the center of their ring, and throw myself to the sidewalk behind the corner to shield myself from the blast.

            When I get back up to peek around the corner, I see the Daleks screeching, their casings aflame.  Unable to stop, drop, and roll, these Daleks spin themselves in circles, only fanning the flames.  Eventually it proves to be too much, even for them and they explode in small bursts.

            The sound of explosions drew the attention of my portly mathematician friend, Bill Purcell, out on an evening stroll. The sight of the emotionless, pepper-pot like invaders stops him in his tracks.  He looks on, smiles, and sighs with relief. “Finally,” he says to himself.  Lifting up his plaid Oxford shirt, he withdraws his Smith & Wesson 500 Magnum, which he carries for such occasions.  He clicks on the red-dot laser sight mounted to the top of the revolver, pulling the hammer back, and watches the cylinder spin, and letting loose a gleeful, yet mischievous “Hee Hee!”  The rounds from his hand cannon pierce through the Dalek’s metal casings and maiming their gelatinous bodes within, knocking them over like bowling pins.

            Upon seeing the approaching Daleks fall where they stood, I turned back to Kristine, and shout across the bar to her:

             “Come with me if you want to live!” and so she did. Bill’s hand cannon soon went empty and while he was reloading a particularly crafty Dalek aimed to take advantage of this by sneaking up behind him.  Fractions of a second before this Dalek had a chance to exterminate Bill; he shifted his waist to the right, and grabbed the Dalek’s gun-arm with his right hand. Bill wrapped his left arm around the Dalek casing, and threw him to the ground with a shaky judo hip toss.  I see him do this and still holding onto the gun arm Bill hits the Dalek’s shell with a stomping kick, pulling the gun-arm from its socket.

“Center down!”  I scream.

Bill looks up from his reloading and waves at me, and I jog over to him.

“Oh, hey Coons.”

            “You got to make sure your center of mass is below your opponents before you can execute O-goshi.”

            “Ah,” he replies.  I don’t think Bill has ever met Kris, so I introduce the two.

            “Kris this is Bill, we used to do karate together in the basement of Dearborn.”

Wait a minute, something isn’t right!  I Look at Bill with a puzzled squint.

“Didn’t you graduate yet?”

“Changed my major.”

“Again? Jesus Bill!”  I scold.  Bill just closes his eyes and sighs.

“Yeah... I know...”

            Kris looked a little puzzled by him.

“Aren’t six-shooters a little outdated?”  she asks.

“This isn’t a six-shooter, it only holds five,” informs Bill, before pausing, sighing, then smiling with pride.  “The bullets are so big, there just isn’t enough room for six.”

            More Daleks roll onto the streets and head towards our general direction.  Bill remains oblivious to this as his eyes glaze over with infatuation for his weapon.

“This is the Smith & Wesson 500 Magnum.  This is the most powerful production handgun in the world, in fact it’s more powerful that a lot of custom models that were made to be more powerful than any production model before this...”

“Hey Bill...” I say, failing to draw his attention.

“Ex-ter-min-ate!  Ex-ter-min-ate!”  shrieks the Daleks, as they draw ever closer.

“It fires a 440 grain .50 caliber bullet –- that’s a half-inch of lead –- at 1,625 feet per second and exerts 2,580 foot-pounds of energy...”

“Um... Bill...”

“Ex-ter-min-ate!  Ex-ter-min-ate!”  shrieks the Dalek horde, as they close in on us.

“Bill...”

Bill finally realizes that the Daleks have completely surrounded and encircled us.  He closed is eyes and sighs.

“Yeah.  Um, this shouldn’t be happening.”  He informs.

“Ex-ter-min-ate!  Ex-ter-min-ate!”  shrieks the Dalek horde.

A group of cars suddenly drove up and encircled the Daleks, and then with an “OOOMP-URRRT-OOOOHT-AHHHT-EEET!” noise the cars and trucks transformed into giant robots, and fired upon the Daleks with their laser rifles.  Though I minored in political science as an undergraduate, my emphasis was in political theory and not US/Cybertron relations, so I didn’t know what to make of them.  I walk up to a blue pickup truck android and ask him:

            “Who’s in charge around here!”  He points to a yellow humanoid-Volkswagen.

“Bumblebee is!”  he screams.

            “Thanks!”  I tell him as I jog over to the walking, talking VW Beetle.  “Hey!”  I shout.

“I’m kinda busy.”  He replies, without so much as looking down at me.

“I wanna thank you for saving me back there.  The Daleks are going to make there way to the university because it’s a population center.”  Bumblebee pays closer attention.  “It’s not very far from here, we had a lot of paranormal trouble in the past and a lot of the students there have seen some combat experience, they may be helpful.”

“Do you think we could be able to establish fortifications there?”  says Bumblebee as we watch the Daleks roll down the streets.

“I don’t think these guys were designed with stairs in mind, it’ll be fortified enough.”  We both grin.

I run back over to my friends, and look at the carnage.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I tell them.

Without looking up or saying a word, Bill pulls his lock picks from his pockets, and unlocks the nearest car, which he proceeds to hotwire.

“That’s our Bill!”  shouts Kris, the Transformers, and myself as we smile, snap our fingers, and point, complemented with the non-digetic “da-deet-deet” noise to complete the campy sitcom feeling.

“Shotgun!”  I call, while holding the shotgun, because it seemed logical.

We all pile in to the car, with Bill driving, myself riding shotgun, and Kristine in the back.  Bill flies off with his conservative madman driving style, which is fifty miles an hour at all times, whether it be the interstate, a school zone, or weaving through a funeral procession.

 “OK, here’s what’s happening,” mandates Bill.  “We’re going to my house. We’ll be safe there.  Because we have guns. Lots of guns.  Enough guns to keep us safe until this whole thing blows over.”

“That’ll only endanger your family Bill,” I tell him.  “The Daleks will come after us soon as they find out who we are and what we’ve done.”

“Oh yeah, Cthulhu...” reminisces Bill.  “That was a fun day. W asn’t fun at the time though... so where are we going?”  he asks.

“Every week my mom visits this lady from our church who we met when we first came to town.  She lives down by Lakeside, pretty sure no one will look for us there.”  I tell him.

“What’s the address?”  asks Bill.

“Um... um... well, she really doesn’t have one... just park by the park an’ I can take us from there.”  I say.  Bill stops the car in the middle of the road.  There’s no need to park, because at this point it just doesn’t matter anymore.  We hustle across the field, over to the woods.  As I fled my life, I couldn’t help but to look back, at the massive wooden play structure at Billings Park, and once again, I am flooded with memories, like the incessant game of tag.  People came, people left, but the game continued, sometimes for months.  I look at the towers, bridges, and ramparts, and I remember jumping from all of them with my friend Steve, because we wanted to see how high we could jump from without breaking our legs.  It made sense at the time.

“Do you think she’ll mind us?  I don’t want to impose...” inquires a winded Bill.

            “Nah, she won’t mind at all,” I reassure.  “She’s really sweet.  I remember when I was little, she’d make me wooden kites and give me candy and stuff.”

“How does a wooden kite fly?”  asks a puzzled Kristine.

“They don’t, damn thing gave me a concussion.”  I tell her, to which she cackles maniacally.  “It’s the though that counts though.”

            We jog on to the middle of a wooded patch, until I stop at a majestic oak tree.

            “Well, here we are.”

            Spiral stairs wrap around the majestic oak, climbing helically to the massive tree house in its branches.  This house has gone unnoticed by for many years, partially due to the fact that no one would think to look for a tree cottage.  Mrs. Harmon had lived there for over thirty-five years, and it looked as new as the day it was built, thanks to Thompson’s Water Seal.  The three of us ascended the stairs, and upon rapping the knocker, we heard an unintelligible moan, welcoming us in.

            Mrs. Harmon was just as she always was before, laying on the couch in front of the TV, drinking wine straight from the cask.  All of the local channels, along with CNN and its innumerable knockoffs give reports of the invasion.

            “...The Daleks have suffered heavy casualties at Edinboro University from the hands of its residents and the Transformers. They seem to be retreating, falling back to a point six miles outside of Edinboro, where...”

            The grandfather clock began to ring.  I look at its face; it read 10:18 PM.

            “Cloister bells!  Cloister bells!  To the TARDIS children, the TARDIS!  There’s no time!  For once, it’s the one thing I haven’t any of!”  she mumbled from her couch.
            There was a large clump of stars in the night sky, moving along in unison -– the Dalek Battle Group in orbit of the Earth, and from this lofty position, I saw a bright orange shooting star streak through the sky, landing off on the horizon.  I don’t know why, but I felt strangely compelled to turn around and snap open my trenchcoat to shade the eyes of Bill and Kris.

            There was a flash greater than a thousand stadium lights, and once it had faded, the room was aglow from the sickening orange of a massive fireball that shaped itself into the trademark mushroom cloud.

            “Inside the clock, go now. There’s no time...”

            Confused, but with no options at this point, we open the clock’s door, revealing a passage into an unknown abyss.  The pendulum and the weights were held to a shadow-box within the door itself.  I’m almost certain that there was a light switch in that massive room, but I couldn’t find it, so we dare not move far from the door.

            A rhythmic mechanical pulsing noise permeated the clock’s interior.  When the noises ceased, the door opened, revealing spacious and dimly lit room.  A black equilateral triangle juts up from the floor seven feet, balancing on a single point. Seated is at this triangle is an older man, using it is as a desk.  He was dressed in a red a white gown, with a color-complementing hat that looked as though it were a cross between a mortar board and that thing the Flying Nun wore.

“Oh, Hello,” he says apathetically, without looking up from his keyboard.

“Who are you?”  I demand.

 “My name is the Strategist.  I speak on behalf of the Celestial Intervention Agency under the command of the Time Lord High Council.”

            Kristine was confused by all that had happened today.  She was severely emotionally distraught by the death of all her friends, the leveling of her home and the destruction of the big art project due at the end of the week that she’d been working on, though she cared about this exponentially less than she did the other two.

            “What have you done!”  she screams.

            “I have done nothing, yet.  There has been a corruption of the timeline.”

            The three of us look on in intrigue as we listen to this mysterious figure.

 “There is much that we have seen that you have not,” informs the Strategist with an arrogant voice.

“Oh? Like what?”  snaps Kristine.  She seemed pissed; glad I wasn’t the Strategist.

“A few years earlier the Daleks fought another prolonged and needless engagement.  Though they proved to be the victors, they suffered billions of casualties, severely depopulating their race.  The Dalek Battle Fleet which attacked Earth comprised a large percentage of their population for the time. When they were destroyed, the Daleks made a much welcome addition to the Galactic Endangered Species List.  It took centuries for them to recuperate.”

            The Strategist momentarily stops for a sip of ice water before resuming.

            “But the timeline has diverged, for reasons I do not understand.  Searching for another world to invade, the Daleks found one with the infrastructure to rebuild their armies.”

            “Cybertron,” I say under my breath.

            “Precisely.  From orbit, the Daleks hacked the planet’s central computer, turning the Transformer’s defenses against them.  The Transformer race was forced to flee Cybertron.  The Autobots and the Decepticons ended their millennia of war to unite and stop the Daleks,” he sighs, then continues.  “They fight a loosing battle.”

“But maybe they’ll pull through,” hopes Kristine. The Strategist chuckles.

“I am a Time Lord, and I have traveled to the future to see the consequences of their actions.  With the manufacturing capabilities of Cybertron, the Daleks will overrun anyone in their path.  All efforts to stop them fail, and if the present timeline is allowed to continue, then the Daleks will be only form of life left in the universe.”

            “And there is nothing that can be done to stop them?”  asks Kris.

 “I have spent twenty-one of your years sitting here, searching for a way to restore the proper timeline.  The Transformer leader could use the Autobot Matrix of Leadership to ‘light their darkest hour,’ and destroy all Daleks in all points of the galaxy.  But the Daleks ensured that he was the first to fall, so they could seize the Matrix. Though it could solve our dilemma, we cannot retrieve this artifact.  It never left Cybertron and lies at the heart of the planet.”

“Why don’t you use your time machines to stop the Daleks from stopping the time line from changing?”  inquires Bill.

            “We have no way of knowing when the timeline originally diverged, no way of telling when the Daleks first leaned of their mistakes,” states the Strategist before pausing for a sip of ice water.  “Besides, that would only be a temporary solution. There is nothing that would stop someone else from informing the Daleks about Cybertron.  I have tried to find a way that keeps the Daleks from ever learning of the planet’s existence.”

            “And how do we do that?”  asks Bill.

“I’ve spent twenty years asking myself that question.  No matter what I do, the Dalek Battle Computers think of a way to counter it.  I’ve gone through every permutation, but I think I’ve discovered a weakness.  Looking past their irrational hatred, the Daleks are beings of pure logic.  All we need to do is find throw a wrench into the works... but how do we go about doing that?”

            The three of us look on at the Strategist, waiting for him to give us the answer to his own rhetorical question.

“Magic,” says the Strategist with a grin.

“What?”  Kris snaps.

“That has to be the stupidest thing I heard today... and this has been a weird fuckin’ day,” adds Bill.

“The Great Old Ones chose not to intervene.  Our knowledge of magical artifacts is limited at best, but we may have found a solution,” states the Strategist, clacking away at his keyboard.

 “Another Time Lord, the Philosopher, came across a peculiar artifact called the Seven-Star Coin during an adventure.  Sadly, we have no record of this person, but though I have been given access to some archived memories...”

            A three-dimensional holographic image shines down from the Strategist’s exalted podium, to create a bright red disc about two inches in diameter and an eighth inch thick, with seven stars carved into the middle.  After a narrow lip running around the perimeter, the sides were recessed into a something close to a regular heptagon, for the laws of mathematics forbid this shape from having a perfect geometry.  All in all, it was a poorly named artifact.  I was more of a medallion or a tacky drink coaster than a coin.  I don’t know about Bill or Kris, but I was sold on the idea.

“Alright, where do we find this... Seven-Star Coin?”  I ask.

 “That is the difficult part,” says the Strategist, chuckling to himself.  “If we knew that we would have solved this dilemma long ago!”

 “You don’t know where it is, you don’t have a plan,” scolds Bill.  “Even if you did change the timeline to the way it was, how do I know that I would be a part of it?  What if obtaining the Seven-Star Coin somehow prevents my existence...”

“You’re right Bill.  We can probably think up a better plan.”  I state.

 “Very well then.  I’m sure we can find another band of people to hunt for the Seven-Star Coin.  You are free to go.” informs the Strategist as he presses buttons on his desk-console.

            We walk back to the clock.  I stop for a second and turn around, but the Strategist answers my question before I can even ask.

“I have all ready programmed your TARDIS to return you to approximate space-time coordinates.  Good day.”

We walk inside the grandfather clock, and it fades from existence again.  After transcending time and space, we appear in front of what was the lake, now a basin of charred roots, the water having been evaporated in a great firestorm.  I look behind me to see a great mass of burned-though logs amidst a great pile of cinder and ash.

 “Billings Park.”  I say under my breath.

            Skeletons lay where they fell.  A few Dalek casings lie with them, but for every one that has fallen, ten-thousand will soon replace it, for these beasts were literally pouring off the assembly line of a factory the size of Mars.  Shadows of Daleks rolling by in the horizon can be seen in the amber glow of the blood moon.  The Terminator theme plays non-digeticaly in the background, emanating from sources unknown.

            “What are we gonna do?”  asks Kris.

            I just stood there for a moment, with a lump in my throat. Everything I knew was destroyed.  Everyone I knew save Bill and Kris was dead.

            “There... is nothing that we can do here.”  I try my best to keep my vestigial emotions from getting the best of me.  “This town is no more, and the rest of the Earth will soon follow suit. Something’s happened, something that has never happened before -- the future has been re-written.  Now it includes us... and our search for the Seven-Star Coin.”

There is a screeching chord, and the closing credits roll.