Them #9
The man crept upward, his teeth fragile beneath the strain of his jaw.
A memory of an ancient locker room rushed in.
A vision of a past life, a scene from a black-and-white film in which all the actors are dead.
Older teammates stood above him and his friends, putrid pouches of tobacco festering inside their gums. Hold it in tight, they said, the nausea will pass soon, but the sensation only inflated itself inside his intestines, creeping up through his throat like a balloon of rising hot bile. And now, he felt it again.
He crawled higher with the intention of a hunted goat, taking note of noisy twigs and loose rocks as they appeared from within the darkness. One slip could send a dirt slide all the way to the bottom. A late-night dinner bell.
His arms, underused in his travels, grew heavy and weak as they hoisted him over the deeper ledges. The man was grateful that he’d lost weight, even if the biceps that had once strained his sleeves now hung loose in the dirty fabric. The less meat he had, the less they could enjoy him.
He scrambled up the final ledge with a heave and a gasp. He drew in repressed breaths, steadied his mind, then listened, his near-blind gaze trailing toward the pool below.
Beneath the roar of the waterfall, the dark stalks did not stir.
He’d made it. He was safe.
The man wanted to laugh, to burst out in something that might’ve once been jolly but would now sound merely human.
He felt a wave of sudden energy, an urge to flee to somewhere far away.
Somewhere where he could laugh and grin and grunt the sounds of victory.
One hand readied the lighter, while the other drew his jacket closed, concealing the spark.
Thin rays of candlelight poked out from his collar and puddled near his feet.
He looked around, eager to make his escape, yet still wary of his surroundings.
A wrong step could send him shooting over the falls, or expose his light.
Failure dominated the possibilities. Even if everything went right, what if one of them simply woke up?
There was a retention pool at the top of the waterfall, but it was small, speckled with semi-submerged rocks that formed a stepstone bridge. The other side was barely visible in the muted flame’s glow.
Feeling as if his legs were infallibly silent stilts, the man began to walk across.
The creek wasn’t so wide here at the head of the falls.
The scattering of rocks measured a dozen and a half feet across, each stone slick and slippery.
No matter. He tiptoed as stealthily as a midnight shadow.
The only sound was the howl of the water below him, and he was sure that it would mask any noise he ma—
Suddenly, his confidence waned to nothing, as the moon had done. That tremoring quake in his gait returned, and the man was sure that he would slip. That he would fall. But why?
Something in the air. Something in the air.
He closed his ego and opened his senses.
Something was in the air. A scent. It smelled like old, sweet metal. Blood set out to rust. It smelled like gore.
There, in the pool above the waterfall a few yards upstream, the man saw a flat, imperfect lump in the current. A shape barely visible in the lighter’s weak shine. It was a body, lying on its back. One that, the longer the man looked, seemed to shake and tremble with some unseen force.
The man leaned over the running water. Was it an illusion? The current producing postmortem shuffles? Was this person alive or soggy leftovers?
Are they breathing? Head above water? Hiding? Just need a look. Just need a look because because because I just need a look just need to know just need to see just want t—
The night suddenly shimmered with an aurora of alien blue as the person supine in the water began to glow like a jack-o’-lantern. The man gaped at the corpse’s rotting chest cavity, hollowed out and aflame with turquoise tremors.
A small dark helmet rose up from the viscera crib. Six startled eyes, each no larger than a golf ball, fixed themselves on the man—and the monstrous infant began to wail.
The planet was Gliese 667Cc.
One hundred and twenty-nine trillion miles away.
I was there that day. The machine blasted its lights, and then silence. Stillness among the basement dome and galactic cannon, the stale air and bunker walls. And then a scream shattered it all. A single earsplitting scream.
Paralysis was replaced by panic. Pandemonium spreading like a wave across the test chamber.
We thought someone was injured, that the machine had blown a fuse and blasted the shins off some poor engineer.
I’d heard that sound before. Unearthly pain.
A fellow I never got the chance to know had made it through a shrapnel-mangled mouth. A dog tag lost to the jungle.
The radios went ablaze, and it wasn’t until everyone was accounted for that the scream weakened to a guttural inhuman moan, and that was when we opened our ears and really heard it. Coming from inside the chamber.
Then the radios went dead, and the stillness returned.
They opened the doors remotely, from the safety of the observation room.
A gush of dark, odorous water poured out.
There were plants unlike anything I had ever seen.
Odd-looking weeds and flowers that immediately shriveled and wasted away when they washed upon the cold laboratory floor.
And there were the usual rocks. And mud.
And there was a monster.
Its body had been severed by the teleporter.
A single stalk, four feet in length, writhed in fluid pain on the laboratory floor.
Angry ocean eyes studied us through the blast windows.
Its mandible chomped at us, foaming. The legs and stinger didn’t make it.
I wish they had. Then it could’ve properly scared us. We might’ve been afraid to press on.
When it died, there was applause. Everyone on-site, from the scientists to the generals, thought it was going to be our very own Manhattan Project.
The hazmat unit worked all night to clean up, contain, and catalog the score.
There was much to be excited about. Gliese 667Cc had water.
And there was flora. Fauna. They had a field day collecting microbiological samples.
But there was nothing they were as excited about as that stalk.
It was a snakish thing. A piece of chimera from the stars.
That’s what they wheeled to Weisbrot’s lab.
The rest of the teleported material went elsewhere.
Shipped across the country on the same highways folks used to take to work every day.
But the beast from beyond? The beast stayed in the desert, while Weisbrot made it his mission to understand it. And Artemis fired again. And again. And again. At the same planet, at the same creatures, over and over and over.
Weisbrot’s gone now. Been gone. Everyone’s gone.
But perhaps I can enlighten you further about the denizens of Gliese 667Cc.
They hate the dark because they lived in tidal-lock sunshine.
They love the water because they were born in a single terminator-line river that spanned their entire world, a planet four times as massive as our own.
They walk on organic metal stilts because they waded unchallenged through their domain.
They eat each other because there was nothing else big enough to satiate them, and they implant fetuses in each other because they don’t have wombs or cocks or cunts.
They eat us because we told them to. They move in packs because they love.
Their eyes glow so they can see in dark waters, and they spin when they walk because they’re a paranoid species.
They scream because they feel and they feel because they’re real and they hate us more than anything for bringing them here.
Most of all, I think, they remember their home and are disappointed with ours.
The man fled a chorus of gravelly wails. More than just the child now. They were all sounding the alarms. They were coming. Right now.
He dodged and ducked through the trees, pistol in one hand, flashlight now in the other, its frail yellow beam bobbing with every stride. He sprinted for twenty seconds before he heard them following, their metal hides scraping their surroundings. Living, breathing missiles. Heat-seeking.
He wanted to look back to see how much ground the blue eyes were gaining, but his reptilian instincts terminated all curiosity and fear. Cortisol numbed everything but a blunt logic that grabbed the man by the collar and surged him forward. Throttled him.
Without breaking stride, the man holstered the pistol and swooped down with his other arm, setting the flashlight on the ground, pointed ahead. He hoped the beam would distract them for a moment and illuminate enough forest to find freedom.
Running alongside the dagger of light, his hands free, the man seized the bag of deer shit from his pocket.
He tore the Ziploc open and began smearing it all over.
Wrists. Neck. Face. Hair. The stench made him gag and stagger as the yellow flashlight behind him was overpowered by fierce cerulean. Hide now hide now hidenowhidenowhideno—
brOOUHM!
The man collided with the trunk of a pine and sprawled to the ground, arms pinwheeling.
The baggie of deer shit, his fatal distraction, fell away.
His vision dwindled and his head throbbed and the whole of his skin seemed to swell with tears as the man groped the ground and found the feces, and suddenly he could not remember where he was other than a place of grave danger as he tried to scramble to his feet and once again stumbled.
He crawled away from the encroaching thunder, the dreadful roar of fury, and the man could only be certain that they were coming.
They were coming.
He scuttled like a molting crab, hands plunging into dirt and rocks, splintering fingernails, as he dragged his limp legs forward.