Them #4
The man stirred as the sun began to set.
His circadian rhythm was the first of his bodily functions to adapt to the new world order.
Most days, he slept from just after dawn until just before dusk, waking every few hours to peek out the window and check that his temporary shelter remained undiscovered.
Some days he rose a little earlier, or retired a bit later, and spent the spare daylight preparing a meal or reorganizing his pack.
The second of his bodily functions to adapt was shitting: once every night or so, before sleep.
He still pissed often enough, but that would slow down if bottled water proved scarce in the suburbs.
He would not, could not, retrieve any from streams or ponds or rivers or such.
In the water waited those dark silhouettes, triads of sharp pillars.
The third was his balls. He could not recall the last time he’d touched himself.
Dreams had tapered off. Four or seven or however many years ago, at the start of everything, inside the bunker, they were frequent.
Horrible. Back when nights were still nights, thick looming limbs coated in living rock would rise up all around him.
Visions of exoskeletons that stretched up into the clouds and moved with the certainty of a dinosaur that knew it would never go extinct.
Bigger than they should’ve been, than they’d ever appeared on the news.
Bigger than anything could’ve ever been.
Sometimes, in the dreams, his neck would whisper tick-tick-tick as the slow, agonized crick of each vertebra reeled back and forced him to bear witness to scores of three-pronged mandibles snapping at the clouds, biting chunks out of them.
Sometimes, now, he actually missed those dreams, missed standing beneath the whites of the cumulus and the bright blue sky…
Then the behemoths would step into frame, blood began to rain, and there was nothing left to long for.
After he saw one of those giants for the first time—a real one, not made of pixels and bandwidth, but built of maybe flesh and maybe bone—the dreams stopped. That was during his first week outside the bunker, near the Florida-Georgia line. A day or two after the 7-Eleven. Dusk.
He’d left temporary shelter too early. Hadn’t learned yet.
Besides, after those obfuscated years cooped up underground—without daylight or even a clock once the power grid shut down—nothing seemed real.
He’d heard the titanic footfalls above his head, but they never dug him up.
Nobody, human or otherwise, ever knocked on the door.
He went into the bunker after New York fell, before the demons drove south in large numbers.
Too tired to run. Too afraid to fight. He still hadn’t seen one then.
Not really. But he didn’t need to know the monsters to fear them.
By the time the man emerged, everyone was dead, and they were all that remained.
He’d heard the nightmare before he saw it, mere days since crawling out from his hiding place. A coarse wail echoed over the swampy countryside like a broken raid siren: the clink-clink-gash of the chain mail tail as it dredged furrows in the gravel road beyond.
He was moving through the slash pines, away from the open earth, but needed to see it, needed to see like a child must, after a weary battle with their greatest reptilian instincts, check under the bed for the boogeyman.
Yes, that was right, because once you focused on Freddy Krueger’s ridiculous sweater, once you glimpsed the Grinch’s growing heart, once you got a good look at the monsters and all their parts, they weren’t so scary anymore, right?
So he’d ducked into the tree line where woods met field and then field met tractor-trodden road, and he’d pressed his body into the back of a thick oak. The man had arched his shoulders around the curve of the trunk, gripping the bark between them, and begged his breath to slow, to stop, to wait.
The dredging grew louder in volume, climaxed, and then began to fade away.
Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash.
It was only then that he’d mustered the courage to steal a glimpse.
Only when he could be sure the hunter’s back was to him did the man have the guts to peek out from behind the tree.
The creature’s three legs, like curved javelins, were naturally an obsidian black, yet gleamed pink with the reflection of the falling sun.
Each was at least six feet high, decorated with an inner bladed edge.
The trio of legs poked cone-shaped holes into the bed of gravel as they walked their strange, rotating gait.
It moved in a tight circle, constantly spinning itself as it lurched down the road.
Each leg took care to step over the ten-foot-long tentacle that dragged out behind it.
Why do they walk like that? Like a living, spinning top in foul slow motion?
The three perfect legs curved and met one another at a singular, node-like torso, which was covered with a trembling chain mail of scales that seemed to breathe.
From beneath, the long anchor of the tail protruded.
It dragged on the road behind, clink-clink-gash, and tore at the asphalt with its serrated stinger tip. Clink-clink-gash. Clink-clink-gash.
From the top of its torso rose a solitary, flexible obelisk of tower-stacked stone. A neck topped by a sleepy head that looked more like a mountain than a skull.
Its six eyes, three along each side, were sky blue, each a glimmering lantern in the dying daylight.
Its three-pronged mandible maw was slack and panting, as if the repulsive heap of rocks and bone could somehow be tired.
The man’s shoulders relaxed. He hated it, yes, but not because it looked like a monster.
Not because it looked like a giant meteor or a thinning ozone layer or a nuclear bomb or any other apocalypse he’d imagined.
Not because it wasn’t supposed to be or because it was other.
Even the dozens, hundreds, of human lives it alone had devoured all fell away and were forgotten.
The man, no longer hidden by the trees, standing exposed in the too-open breaks between them with head held high and eyes thin, hated that it looked at peace.
Happy. Content. Like someone returning to their front-porch family after a day of exhausting success.
He hated it because he could see that it would not notice him, because it was so obviously distracted, lost in thought.
Hated it because the creature’s emotion could be so easily deciphered despite its disgusting difference.
He saw this in its eyes: six sky blue eyes that might have been beautiful.
The Scorpion, as the invaders had been branded before the end, was something of a gigantic steel snake.
A towering, crouching spider with the plating of a lobster.
A three-legged titanium lion with a javelin tentacle for a tail.
The result of a praying mantis’s intercourse with a skyscraping crane. A scorpion from the stars.
That night, after he saw one for the very first time, the man climbed high into the branches of an old Southern oak and waited until it lumbered out of range.
Not just out of sight, but until its bone-chilling, earth-tearing wake could no longer be heard or felt.
Then he ran back through the forest, to the house he’d stayed in two days prior, and remained there for two more weeks.
The next time he dared to leave, he’d left at midnight.
But that was a long time ago now, a year and a half about.
Winter or spring. It was late summer now.
He’d grown, right? Or had he only grown more familiar?
When he wasn’t near them, when they seemed more like bad dreams than reality, the fiends reminded the man of something from Starship Troopers.
But he knew that was a flimsy comparison.
These things had a life to them. They weren’t like bugs because all ants acted and looked the same.
In that sense, the Scorpions were unlike anything. Unlike everything.
Since then, he never again dreamed of monsters gnashing at the clouds.
Just of, on occasion, Her. Sometimes they were a release, dreams of staring up at Her too-high ceiling with the wooden beams She’d once dared him to climb, staring at the wooden beams as She rode him and nibbled secrets of love and promises of eternity in a house on the Chesapeake into his ear, dreams that ended with waking in the dust of dusk and scavenging a clean pair of underwear.
But mostly, when he dreamed, he dreamed of Her walking on train tracks beneath an innocent sun.
In this dilapidated farmhouse, the man had no dreams. Not any he could remember. He eased out of bed on tired legs, brushed his teeth, and returned to the master bedroom, moonlight shining through the exposed gash in the ceiling.
Inside a tilting wardrobe tucked against the far wall, he found clean socks, underwear, a plain white undershirt, and a pair of jeans that were several inches too large at the waist. He thought they would be fine with a belt and a few rolls at the ankle, and began to change, but as he did, his eyes wandered to a nearby dresser.
A framed photograph, not of husband and wife, but of two middle-aged men. One was bald, the other with a full head of long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Smiling and holding each other close atop a pyramid of hay bales. The sides of their heads touching.
The man felt a pang of guilt for having assumed yesterday. It was Mr. and Mr. North Carolina-or-Virginia Farmhouse. Sorry, fellas, he thought. My fault.
The bald man on the left in the photo was tall and full with a thick neck and barrel chest. His partner, dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt, appeared much closer to the man’s own lean build.