Them #5
He crossed the room and opened the top drawer of the dresser, searching for the thinner of the generous couple’s wardrobe. Before long, he was dressed in a clean pair of well-fitting jeans and the same black-and-red flannel shirt that appeared in the photograph. A perfect fit.
The man cooked his turkey breakfast, threw on his coat and backpack, checked inside the standalone stone garage—still North Carolina plates—and began to walk under the crooked smile of the moon. North.
My administrative career was divided between Washington and New Mexico.
The former was more permanent, an office with five walls that was undeniably my own.
The latter I was called upon to visit so frequently that it just as well could’ve been, but people love centrality.
All their eggs in one closely clutched basket, bunkered together.
I traveled often to check on the progress of the various projects I’d approved.
As hard as the president and his men made it for me to deny proposals, regardless of party or generation, they trusted me a great deal with their cancellation.
Trees that bore no fruit were mulched to fertilize the hypotheses that did.
I spent most of my time in desert hangars, where the majority of the “practical” technology was stored.
Advancements in radar and the evasion of it were at the forefront of the 2010s.
I avoided the basement. The hollowed core of the desert was filled with men who didn’t know how to stop.
The smartest looney bin you’d ever seen.
Mind control, cloning, mutation. Bullshit straight out of a comic book.
It was a depressing waste; I took particular joy in scrapping those sorts of projects.
In the half decade that Dr. Andrew Brown spent building Project Artemis, I must’ve erased a dozen crackpot ventures into resurrection, telekinesis, and the like.
I appreciated Brown; he’d played a large role in my favorite of the base’s aircraft: the Celestial, a terrestrial jet capable of extended space flight and orbit.
The sort of machine that could’ve dished out an atomic surprise if push came to shove, even targeted strikes against enemy satellites. Possibilities beyond our atmosphere.
Brown’s Celestial received most of the basement mulch, so his eccentric pet projects were often allowed an extended lifespan. I considered it a favor, but either way, as the lab’s chief scientist, he had significant free rein.
While I knew that Artemis’s eventual cancellation would be a bureaucratic headache, I also believed such a thing to be inevitable. The science-fiction fairy tales inevitably got canned, not that it stopped us from trying.
The first five or six years Brown and Weisbrot spent in the basement were uneventful, the master preoccupied with his teleportation cannon and the apprentice without any fresh extraterrestrial material to experiment with.
I frequently forgot about them. I went about my business, which was minimal in all aspects but paperwork and travel.
I never had any immediate family to keep up with, so I picked up books.
I wasn’t much of a reader growing up; my youth was composed of weight room sweat and barracks poker.
When my friends got out and got married, I got a desk job and never left.
I stayed in the dirt and played around for a while.
Do that long enough and you get muddy. That’s why they stuck me with the basement creatures; I didn’t have anyone back at home to lie with.
So instead, I read, which I suspect is the reason I’m still alive and writing all this down.
Only now, after rereading the same thirty or so beat-up paperbacks over and over—what few I could carry into this hole in the wall while I waited for the world to end—do I realize how much I miss it. How much I need the stories. The words.
If I had any guts, I’d get up and walk to the closest library, let myself in, and peruse awhile.
The trek might take a few nights, but it would be worth it.
I’d bring a whole suitcase of books back with me, or maybe just set up shop and live there, among the moldy rows and unlooted stacks.
I could sleep in the bathroom. Only come out in the dark and study my scrolls beneath candlelight.
Am I a coward? Or am I simply not ready yet? Once I walk up those stairs, I’m never coming back here. But what if I never scale them? I think I want to die. But then why am I so afraid?
The first book I read, not in school but with my own eyes, was an impulse buy in an airport convenience store on my way to my brother’s wedding.
After that, I only ever communicated with him through Christmas card courtesies.
My cards always had the same picture, Montana horizons.
I wonder if Montana is still whole. Are the horses safe?
The mountains? Or have they crumbled? Could mountains, too, go extinct?
Have they crushed Granite Peak under their immense weight?
Maybe they think it’s as beautiful as I once did. Is that even possible?
The book was The Mist, by that famous Maine Democrat who my same brother always disparaged on his Facebook posts. I picked it up because it was thin and green. I read in slow pauses on the flights to and from the wedding. Have you ever read The Mist, pal? Would you like to know something?
In the book, we lose. Can you reckon that?
Humanity loses. There’s a static cough of hope, a whisper that the struggle may continue, all hope may not be lost, and then?
The end. The Mist might’ve never made it to Boston.
The Mist might’ve swollen to cover the world.
You never learn. You aren’t allowed to know.
In the movie—I had the good habit of only watching the adaptations after I’d finished the book—we win.
Sure, there’s that downer of an ending, but the military comes in and torches the mist-borne freaks.
We incinerate them. Game over. Good guys win.
Maybe I should’ve felt proud of that, what with my career path and all, but I didn’t.
I watched The Mist on a fingerprint-smudged New Mexico–hotel flat-screen hours after witnessing unextinguishable basement napalm ignite a death row prisoner into a dancing sun.
But in the book, we lose, and the monsters dance on.
The man walked in slow silence. He knew that his pace could be quickened, but it seemed tiring to do so.
At night, nothing chased him but time, and even then, the man liked it best when time hurtled forward and lapped him.
He was in no rush to get to the Chesapeake, nor to discover what might be waiting there.
Or what might not be. What probably disappeared long ago.
He had no plan for his arrival. There would be ample hours to craft one, though he doubted he would even bother.
A plan would be company, a new stranger with distracting concerns in his ear, shielding his senses from what his eyes should be seeking in the darkness.
Drag marks. Corpses. Purple snakes of dung.
Or sounds to his ears; they were louder in the dark. Running water. Clink-clink-gash. Voices strained through heavy metallic cords.
A plan would poke at his moon shadow and make the man dumb. So he just walked.
Sometimes he made lists. Lists were quiet.
Backpack: canned food, water, lighters, ammunition, WD-40, AA batteries, multi-tool, frayed toothbrush and expired toothpaste, a battery-operated voice recorder with playback function.
Jacket pockets: compass, one canteen, leftover dried turkey, a Ziploc bag of deer shit, flashlight, pocket knife.
Wrist: watch. Waistband: pistol. Head: his hat.
Florida had signs of life, stockpiled food present but not plentiful, as if the titanium locust plague had swept through within the past two years or so. That was two winters ago now.
Then he walked to Georgia and South Carolina, where people had been dead for a little longer. Less time to consume. North Carolina was a quiet place. The man would not predict Virginia. Predictions were as loud and wrong as the people who made them.
Scorpions: bigger, faster, replicating, armored, packs, cannibals, predators, water, rocks, daylight, death.
The man: small, slow, alone, fleshy, scavenger, prey, water, nocturnal, maybe lonely, alive. Alive. Yes, the man thought, alive. When everyone else was not. What’s the difference?
The bunker, the man considered, but he knew that was an easy answer.
Plenty of people in plenty of places had bunkers, but plenty of folks had been dug from the ground like night crawlers, their shelters pried open like cans of the Jolly Green Giant’s corn by jolly black beasts.
He’d seen the metal and concrete frames torn out of the ground. Eviscerated like dog toys.
Add to the list: can dig, can penetrate, can smell.
Can smell, with something. The man didn’t know where their olfactory glands were.
He didn’t know about their ears, either, but they could definitely hear.
Why else would they sing those horrible sunrise songs that somehow harmonized with the birds, stupid birds who seemed to have no idea that the world was dead?
No, not dead, just… different. Theirs now. We had our slice of millennia. Never learned to share.
The gaping brilliance of their eyes, each like a thrusting whirlpool, told the man that the Scorpions preferred one sense above all else: sight.
So the bunker was not the difference, but it helped.
Perhaps it was because he’d sought shelter the day after New York burned, when the southernmost monster sightings were in Kentucky.
Did they smell his cowardice and leave him be?
Or maybe it was because he had stolen his safety, left the bunker’s owner to rot into a distraction.
A decaying decoy to keep them busy. But the man had long decided that the only difference was he came out alive and everyone else was dead.