There’s no dogs in the story. Wait, that’s not true. There’s no dog in this part of the story. One of the viewpoint characters has a dog, but said canine is, like, eleventy bajillion miles away and thus not likely to be in any sort of danger.
What strikes me as off is the time frame. The invasion begins sometime during the picnic? This squad is going to be in a hurry, moving fast to achieve their attack goals. On day one, there is no way they’re going to screw around with a family picnic. They would either ignore them or just spray them with machinegun fire and move on. The rape/murder pillage time is later, when the invaders are settling in and collecting their “rewards”.
IMO, you could make a more interestring story if the picnic is sometime later. Like, the first time the families felt safe enough to venture out of their homes, after they’ve been bombarded with propaganda from the invaders claiming all the violence is over and it is safe to return to a normal life…
Sexist? Nah, women are wimps! 
That’s not sexist.
My mother dies saving me from rape and I’m so traumatized by the day’s events that I go catatonic? My mother would kick my ass! ( If she weren’t already dead )
“Aiie, Dios Mio!! You don’t see anybody else getting all catonic or whatever you call that! Stop your lying around and get moving, girl!”
I can just hear her…
Seriously, I just can’t feel it. The women in my family have experienced some heavy trauma and so far, no catatonia, although some really good pissed off, insane, went to jail and got bailed out later activity…
Slightly off topic, but what woman in her right mind would have children ages 25, 6 and suckling? And who defines a child as suckling in this day and age? Just askin’.
It’s probably not sexist for the women to have more extreme responses to more extreme events, but why did you pick two women to be the main victims? Maybe that’s not sexist either, in your particular case, but when writers want a victim (rather than a body count) they often use women, for what I think are sexist reasons.
Wouldn’t the main victims be the several dead people?
Anyway, it sort of came out that way because of the dynamics of the evac group and specifically Greer’s family (which Susan is, or was, about to marry into). Greer’s husband is the first to die; he does so while (successfully) protecting his child during the evacuation. I think his young adult son, seeing his middle-aged father die in such a fashion, would definitely feel an obligation to step up; he’s going to feel it’s now his responsibility to look after his mother and sisters as well as his fiancée. (And, yes, I am saying he would feel it’s his responsibility to look after her rather than the reverse, not because of his culture but because he’s a lot bigger and stronger than she is.) He too dies while trying to protect a family member, though he does not succeed, as his sister dies as well. The other characters who die are soldiers whose very job it is to protect the other people in the evac group; they’re clearly doing their job. And soldiers tend to be male, though I do have female soldiers in this universe.
Oh, it’s not hard to do. Greer’s probably in her mid-forties. One of my sisters is only slightly older has a twenty-four-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, and the son’s conception was deliberate; I also used to date a woman who was 18 years younger than her nearest sibling in age.
Greer’s a minor character, so I didn’t write an extensive backstory for her, but I’m thinking the eldest child’s birth was inadvertent. She and her hubby have a baby young, she puts off having more while she and her husband get their lives in order, and then, in her late thirties, she realizes time’s-a-wasting.
As for the word “suckling,” I wrote that because the first time she appears, the fourteen-year-old male VC notices her breast-feeding the kid. Also I like archaic words. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use springald for weeks.
It’s moot because I have deleted the catatonia anyway, but you have a point. My mother would have had the same reaction. She’d have expected my sisters to thank God for being saved, then to murder whomever had murdered her, then to have seen to the care of the men in the family as she would think we were weaker, and then, in private, to release a maximum of one grudging tear. And no tears at the funeral.
Things go really, really badly for the defenders, as the bad guys have them enormously outmatched in the super-hero’s absence. And, anyway, the characters aren’t attacked during the picnic. They’re part of a group that tries to evacuate, only to find that’s impossible,and spend some time hiding. They don’t encounter the enemy solders until they latter are in the ‘capture slaves’ portion of the exercise.