Them #11
We heard the screams and assumed it was split in pieces. Dying, like the rest. The procedure began: wait until it expired, clean it all up, then haul it deeper into the basement.
Fifteen minutes passed. Ten had always been enough. The screaming stopped, but the creature was not silent. We all heard it, the curious tap-tap-clicks against the sterilized teleporter chamber, but we didn’t listen. Not really.
The first operative walked right up to the teleporter window, when suddenly a thick stinger pierced the blast-proof glass and drove directly into his face. The tail slurped back into the machine like the tongue of a frog, leaving a crumpled corpse behind.
The second technician rushed to his side. A neat circle straight through eyes and nose and cheeks. A gory hole where a face used to be. She was the only one who avoided the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis that plagued the lab, but her panic was futile. The man was dead. Obliterated.
She wailed, first because she was in shock.
Then because the thing’s skull, that maddening head of sharp turns and evil angles, shot through the shattered glass and snapped at her left arm with three massive mandibles.
Blood sprayed, pooling on the floor, working its way into the gaps between the tiles, filling them up like crimson canals.
My God, it moved so fast. I thought I was dreaming, entrenched in the moonwalk limbo of nightmares where everything travels in slow motion except the Beast.
With one thud, it ripped the chamber door off its steel hinges and spat out what was left of the technician’s arm. It stood to its full height, perhaps fifteen feet. The neck was still sticking through the porthole, and the chamber door sat around it like an alien necklace.
It moved forward. Slowly now. Blinking. The room strobed with flashes of that furious blue. One of its long spears stepped right through the second technician’s stomach and dragged her along for a few steps, a puddling trail in their wake.
Never knew either of their names.
Those of us who weren’t in imminent danger rushed to the observation windows to watch. We needed to see it, to feel it. To feed off it. Another victory.
We needed to make sure we weren’t dreaming.
The specimen towered above its second victim, folded itself inward into a shape that was almost like a human being bent over, and coughed. Its triple jaws opened wide, and its bone-mouth hacked with a deep echo. Blue pus was spat out onto the blood-slicked floor.
Then it fell over and died.
It couldn’t live in our world, you see? It came from another place. Breathed another atmosphere. But never fear, that’s where Weisbrot came in. Yes, that was our plan all along, whether I want to admit it to myself or not. Whether I listened to him or not.
We were going to take whatever we reeled back… and make it our own.
The man awoke to a voice he nearly couldn’t place.
A woman’s, older and jovial. Low valleys and high peaks, windpipes fit for hymns and gospel.
A powerful volume that commanded attention.
It was… his mother’s. Her face appeared in his mind’s eye for the first time in years, framed by her flourishing curls.
Her eyes glistened with golden-brown love.
Warm, mahogany cheeks rippled with dimples.
C’mon, Timmy! her voice echoed in his head.
She was… yelling. Smiling, but yelling. The pulsating pain of sunrise beat against his eyelids, and he wasn’t sure if he was dreaming.
For a moment, he thought he was thirteen again, lying sprawled on the artificial grass of a youth soccer pitch.
Get up and run, baby! As always, there she was.
Right there cheering him on. She never missed a game. Run like the wind, Tim!
But the voice of his mother, no matter how urgent her words, only settled the man’s weary soul. Her memory fell over him like a warm blanket. He stirred like a child on Sunday morning, slowly and without alarm.
Wheels, baby, wheels!
He stood, stumbled back to his knees, and blinked a few times, disoriented.
Then sudden fear swooped upon him and his chest filled with bloody adrenaline and his gut screamed with terror as he looked around at the coming daylight.
His body was still, but his mind vibrated with the chaotic flow of panic.
A deep breath. Focus, man, he thought, in his own gruff voice again. Don’t get distracted.
He gripped the butt of the pistol and rammed it into his thigh.
Inhale, exhale.
Another jolt to his leg.
Inhale, exhale.
The man bent over and vomited.
They were there. At the waterfall. He could hear the roar of it. And two hours ago, they had been right here, where he now stood. They’d come after him. He’d seen one up close. Could’ve reached out and touched it.
The man looked to the horizon and saw that the sun was only just making its entrance. Day was nearly upon him, but he had not yet lost; there was still time. Not much, but yes, a little time before they woke and wandered.
He waded through the shallow creek, away from the falls, with sloppy stealth, then began jogging in a lopsided gait.
What had happened? He’d struck a tree. Too much time spent looking over his shoulder.
Too much fear of what followed him. Flashlight in pieces.
The digital recorder broken and gnawed. Deer shit smeared all over, falling off in dry clumps, a nauseating stench caked upon him.
But he still had the gun. His backpack and jacket. Yes, he was all right. But…
He had a concussion. He knew that. He’d had two in his beforelife. Never this bad, though. He needed to rest, needed to find a safe place to do so. How thick was the forest? How long until he came out into a clearing and found another house?
As he clambered amid the undergrowth and beneath the tall oaks, the sun began to dawn. The solar light crept above the horizon, scattered through the leaves, and that was when he heard them wake: “Krrrokkkaaa! Krrrokkkaaa!”
Their sunrise cries reverberated off the bark, and the man began to move faster. The stirring moans, like eldritch chickens ushering in the new day, were calm. Like most of the others he’d heard before. Ordinary in an extraordinary world.
What were they saying? What were they feeling? He’d woken up a baby last night, right? Yes, he remembered. A little one, young and light and new. Small enough to fit inside a dead human’s torso.
A Scorpion baby. Their baby. What were they saying then in their metal musings?
With any luck, they wouldn’t feel threatened.
Could such a force of abominable nature even comprehend vulnerability?
Would they want to hunker down with the child and protect it?
Or would they pursue the boogeyman of an infant alien nightmare?
“Krrrokkkaaa! Krrrokkkaaa!”
His body lurched into a steady pace. The details of the syllables were distorted by distance and difference, but the man was sure that the monsters were not particularly alarmed.
They spoke without urgency, as he’d heard from other nests on other mornings.
Words alone are not enough to fill the lack.
Every creature must know how to utter them.
The child. It had been nesting inside someone.
A dead person. Nestled inside them like a fawn in a meadow.
They didn’t kill each other just for food, but to reproduce too.
The news reports claimed that Scorpions implanted their young in each other’s corpses.
Each abominable larva born into a landscape of viscera and rot, forced to consume in order to break free from their macabre womb.
An immediate reminder of what awaited them if they weren’t strong enough to survive.
There had been whispers that the Scorpions could incubate inside people too. The man had never encountered evidence of it—he’d been hiding in the bunker during the worst of the massacre—but he now knew it to be true. Some real Ridley Scott bullshit, he thought.
But there was more than that. So much more. The Scorpion sleeping above the waterfall was a newborn. The corpse, the human corpse, was fresh. It had to be; the blood was still rinsing out in the churning current.
Yes, the man thought, it was a fresh death.
I’m not alone.
In one of my recent entries, I called it murder. What the Scorpion did to those two nameless technicians. Redshirts to the slaughter. Murder.
I’ve thought about it a bit longer now—not much else to do—and I no longer believe it was murder.
Not really. I just think it knew, by some alien understanding that we never comprehended, that we’d broken the rules.
It wanted no part in our cheating game. They weren’t merely angry with us; they resented us.
We wrote them off as mindless predators. We thought that nothing cannibalistic could think and feel. Not on our oh-so-holy human level. But what would we do? What did we do?
I know what happened when America fell, when the rules ceased to exist. In the days when there was something to listen to on the radio, there were tales of pillaged cities and countrysides, located hundreds of miles from the nearest Scorpion sightings.
The citizens had snapped under the pressure, turned on each other.
Talk of bodies strewn up on crucifixes, sacrifices to a God we had already conquered and shamed.
Horror stories straight from a ravaged war zone, but it was Seattle, Houston, rural Wyoming.
Not on the other side of the planet this time, but right here.
And how did we act? How we always do.
The prime directive of all living beings is simple—do what you must—but only the wicked do what they can.
Beyond the tree line was a shriveled field of stalks. The man entered the brittle, yellow decay and groped atop his head for his ball cap.
Instead, he found a tangle of musk-sweat hair, still caked with deer scat. Shit! The man swiveled and looked toward the woods. He’d barely entered the corn, but his vision was already obscured by the rows of thick husks.