Them #10
WhooshwhooshWHOOSH! as the monsters rushed toward him, their metal hides whistling in the witching hour’s breeze. Closer.
And then another sound: running water. The man remembered the waterfall and worried that he’d scrambled the wrong way, but no. This water was nearby, yet barely audible over the ringing inside his skull. Quiet. Calm.
He crawled faster, repressing the urge to puke all over the forest floor, now clutching the open Ziploc in his teeth so that all ten fingers could claw their way toward the water, and finally his filthy hands reached and found open air and he hurled his body over the edge.
The ground gave way to a meandering creek, bordered by an overhang of roots and dirt that had been hollowed out by decades of seasonal floods. But now the water ran low, and the man thrust himself inside the damp cove.
Hidden from sight, he finished slathering himself with deer feces, doing his best to conceal his scent, and prayed to an indifferent God that the creek was too shallow and narrow to draw his assailants’ interest. Vomit swelled from the sickness inside his skull and the shit upon his skin.
Where am I?
The forsaken flashlight, sixty yards back, was suddenly crushed—crkt!
—its trailing light snuffed out. But the man remembered his other tool: the recorder, the digital recorder!
Hands jabbed at jacket pockets until they found the plastic case.
He seized the device and threw it over the edge of the embankment, pressing the play button as he released it, like pulling the pin on a grenade.
The recorder sailed, tossed with the last of the man’s dwindling strength. He curled back under the creek bank and waited for the screams.
Oh, my fucking head. Hurts.
One night, many moons ago, he’d fed the digital recorder with his best bloodcurdling cries. He’d once believed that the clever trick would someday give him a chance to run, but now it only allowed him to hide in a broken ball. A mouse frozen behind a splinter in the wall.
His screams erupted in the forest air, but after striking an unseen branch, the recorder tumbled to the ground, hardly twenty yards away by the sound of it.
The throw hadn’t covered nearly the distance he’d hoped for!
He pressed his back against the rough earth, trying to disappear into the roots of the overhanging tree.
The slashing rumble of approaching Scorpions grew louder—WHOOSHWHOOSHWHOOSH—until they came upon the recorder and stopped.
The man listened closely from his hiding spot as, one by one, the beasts could be heard circling the electronic contraption.
They went quiet for a moment, as if investigating their discovery.
The man wasn’t sure how many were out there.
All he knew for certain was that his head was pounding.
Contused. As he listened to them grunt and poke at the recorder with the tips of their stingers, the man began to cry, and he couldn’t tell if it was because he was afraid or because he could no longer control his brain.
Loose loose I’m loose as a goose. Cry cry I cry your pardon.
Pardon me. Me. Fox and the geese, is it?
No. I’m all alone. World’s gone to the foxes.
Surrender to concussions and creatures? Let his body slip slip slip into deathly, blissful unconscious?
Or try to hold it together?
The man opened his eyes as wide as he could manage. His right arm was tucked beneath him, and his left grasped a hanging vine of root. The rhythm of his lungs was tight and shallow in his ears.
Click-click echoed above him, their footsteps. Their prodding at the digital recorder. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click-CRUNCH and the sound of pixelated screams disappeared at once. Broken.
One of them uttered a grunt of annoyance and began to move again. Clink-clink-brip, clink-clink-brip. Was it going back? Was it satisfied? Clink-clink-brip, but more distant now; they were leaving. Going home.
The man’s fogged mind processed as well as it could, desperate to determine if he should flee or remain hidden. Hush, he told himself. Listen.
Clink-clink-brip… clink-clink-brip… clink-clink-brip…
Yes, they were leaving. Just one of them. Fading. But there had been others, hadn’t there? How could he be sure they’d all left? That none would remain to stand guar—
As if in answer to the man’s questions, three or four more distinct clusters of sounds followed the first one away from the creek. Clink-clink-brip, clink-clink-brip, clink-clink—
Wait. No. One was coming closer. Clink-clink-brip.
Louder.
CLINK-clink-brip. CLINK-CLINK-brip. CLINK-CLINK-brIP.
The man wrapped his arm around the slimy roots and sucked his chest in so tight that his skin seemed to rub up against his bladder and lungs and intestines. Ribs mingling with soft tissue.
CLINK-CLINK-CLINK. So close now, above him.
His esophagus began to clog with half-digested canned food.
He arched his back into the overhanging dirt and felt the soil pulsate with every scythe-step.
Crumbs of earth showered his face. An animal so powerful its mere footsteps birthed shock waves. Evil angry elephants.
The man curled his hand around the butt of the pistol and thumbed the safety with a silent click.
The world began to shine with a horrible alien sun; the violent bright blue light pressed into the man’s skull.
He raised the pistol.
The light grew stronger, illuminating the creek into clean baby-blue ripples—
—and into the ripples stepped a lone pillar of slick, curved steel.
Then another.
Both unequivocally wrong.
Out of place the same way the first blimp must’ve looked floating in the sky to those ancient, forgotten people.
Unnatural. Impossible. Alien.
His fingers tightened around the weapon. The light squeezed further into his mind as the photons crawled and wriggled through his nervous system. The brightness pressed his senses—shattered inside his skull like cyan stained glass—and his brain begged him to find the trigger.
The light drew ever closer, and lower, now divided into six distinct searchlights that swept over the trickling pools. The man saw three hungry jaws dip below the dirt shelf, each unhinging as the mandible mouth approached the water.
Behind them followed the eyes, then the endless spire of a null-colored neck, and how it reached down, down, down.
The man apologized to himself, squeezed his eyelids shut, teased the trigger, and waited for whatever followed.
But nothing came.
The man opened his eyes. Blinked three times.
Shlip, shlip.
The entire creek had lit up into a single bioluminescent lava lamp. The mountainous head was submerged, the water covering its eyes, their fawning light spread throughout the shallows.
Shlip, shlip.
It was drinking. He could hear it slurping underwater. Like a dog.
Shlip, shlip.
Like a goddamn dog and suddenly it didn’t look like a blimp in the sky or a killer from another world, but just another animal.
A voice rang through the distance in a language the man could not understand. “Krrrak Rkrank?” it asked. “Krrrak Rkrank?”
It’s a question, the man thought. Ends with question mark, but how can I tell?
The drinking thing lifted its head from the water, dripping, and responded “Ekkkrat! Ekkkrat!”
The Scorpion plunged its head back into the water, took one final shlip, and rushed away like a metal ghost. It never once glanced at the root-choked cave.
Clink-clink-brip. Clink-clink-brip. The footsteps grew soft and sleepy as they disappeared into the come-home call of the waterfall. Clink-clink-brip. Clink-clink-brip.
With the beast gone, his adrenaline fading, and a swelling concussion, the man’s bark-beaten mind forced his eyes closed.
Sleep came like a gentle flood.
It took another year to get the full picture.
Daily teleportation surveys. At first, we could only catch pieces of them.
Biometal scales that curled around amputated segments.
We started to develop bulletproof plating out of it within a few months.
I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t excited about that.
I felt it, the energy surging through our windowless tunnels.
Now, I could look back and tell you we were utter fools, and that I was terrified and knew it was doom prophesized all along…
but that would also be a lie. I was scared, yes, but I didn’t know it.
The dread that shadowed me and held my hand whispered things, but they weren’t all bad.
Sometimes they were exciting. Because something in the basement had worked.
Our victory over fundamental laws of space and time had promised us more.
I mean, the stuff we hauled back was nearly indestructible!
Bullets bounced off their exoskeletons and fire had nothing to grab hold of or eat away.
Those monsters, even the fragmented bits that Artemis caught, were invincible to all but sheer explosive force.
Pieces. It was like Frankenstein’s lab in that way.
Artemis could reel back only a small area of space.
Everything else was left behind with biblical precision.
The aliens had legs and heads and tails, but the white coats didn’t know how they all fit together.
The way the muscles were constructed made the researchers believe they were built like elongated spiders.
They thought the Scorpions were low, long things.
If we knew the truth back then, that they were taller, towered over us, maybe we would’ve been more careful. More afraid.
But, like I said, we had trumped reality and were promised more. I don’t know who we thought promised that to us. Other than ourselves.
The man slept until sunrise.
When they finally brought back a complete specimen, it murdered two of us within minutes. It was just like any other trial at first. We’d wanted to bring back a fully intact one for the past year but had no way of aiming for it. It was blind luck; who would wander into our trap?