Them #15
—and their tails snagged the lifeless bodies by the legs.
They scissored into the cornfield, their stilted scythes working in that slow, comfortable spin.
As the tripod terrors waded deeper into the crops, their obsidian carapaces looming above the overgrowth, the distant human shapes disappeared beneath the wilting leaves.
The Scorpions were satisfied.
The man breathed a sigh of relief. He was safe. For now.
Was it worth it?
I’ve always had trouble sleeping. Could you have guessed that? That’s one way to gauge yourself, I suppose. Litmus test of the conscience. It’s better now. I guess it got better in the bunker.
My underground fortress was built into the lost hills of Virginia beneath a log cabin owned by one Joaquin Cisneros. No fake name necessary. Just an old friend with a hunting cabin out in the Shenandoah that he didn’t use much.
Jojo didn’t raise an eyebrow when I asked to build a bunker beneath his cabin, at no cost to him, of course. He only asked if he could join me when the time came. He didn’t know what I was worried about, and he didn’t bother to ask. Even over the telephone, he could tell I was scared.
He never made it here. Nobody did. I’m all alone.
Dominic Marino, another relic of my younger days, owned a construction company based in Baltimore. He, too, asked no questions, not even when I asked him to get the military-grade stuff. Knew I was good for the costs. His crew was quick. Did quality work.
It didn’t seem to trouble them much, a government official looking to go off the grid.
I told Dom he should start working on his own bunker.
In response, his thin lips parted, and his laugh bellowed the birds out of the trees.
He thought I was paranoid. He told me that I needed to retire, talked about all the golf we could play when I finally did. I told him I fucking hated golf.
Sometimes I wonder what’s left up there. I know I need to open the door eventually. If I don’t go soon, then I never will. I’ll let myself die down here if I don’t go soon.
All my equipment is still working. Generator.
Air purifier. Rainwater system. Plumbing.
The radio. Enough supplies to last a few years.
Nearly six down here already, and only a few hiccups.
There’s just no one left to share it with.
To listen to. No one left to talk to. What’s the reason for it all? I’ll have to find one, I suppose.
Do you like thought experiments, reader?
I don’t, but I have a lot of time on my hands now.
There’s that business with the cat. Schrodinger’s.
Is the rest of humanity alive or dead? They’re both.
Everyone who was still breathing when I came down here.
They’re survivors and Scorpion fodder. All at once.
But this is different. Now I’m the one closed up in the box. I know I’m alive. But does anyone else? Am I alive and dead to them too?
What does that make me? A coward? Or both cowardly and stoic at once? I don’t know. I want to leave, but it’s not right yet. I look at that door and it seems impossible. Unopenable. Not because it’s too heavy or stuck. Nothing’s blocking the path or wedged up against the steel.
The hinges whisper to me that they don’t want to open. Not yet.
The door glares at me. Waiting.
The minutes passed. And passed.
The Scorpions sat huddled around the juvenile alien corpse, their cries and metallic weeping having ceased some time ago.
By dusk, the man had already been watching their silent vigil for hours.
They remained there, a cluster of living artifacts among the corn, until the sun crept low and dark.
Until it was the man’s time. His adopted hour.
He pulled his gaze away from the window only to prepare food and water for himself. Throat and stomach felt bone-dry. Bare. Fragile. But his meal, a handful of protein bars scavenged from MRE cases, sat better in his belly than expected.
The man didn’t yet dare to leave the house. His earlier ideas of escape vanished the moment he saw the creatures pull out the bodies. He would go, yes, but not until the funeral party had gone first.
What were those people in that farmhouse thinking? The man couldn’t even hazard a guess. Surely, they must’ve known about the nest. The waterfall. The monsters. Insane to sleep so close to the stingers, he thought in a cool, windy voice that sounded like a stranger’s.
Wouldn’t have been long. Wouldn’t have been long at all.
He shook his head. Shouldn’t say that. Those two saved my life.
Say what you want, his frigid and jaded mind taunted. There’s no one left to hear.
Last week the man didn’t think there were any other humans left, yet clearly he’d been wrong.
What would his reaction have been had he successfully stealthed through the waterfall and corn?
If he’d gone about his usual scavenging business, turned a corner, and suddenly found two living humans staring at him?
What would they have thought of a nameless stranger?
Could he have even mustered the courage to share his story and earn their trust?
Or would his mouth have frozen like the rest of him, tongue caught between stagnant time all because he could never shed his calloused shell?
This hardened epidermis that had kept him whole?
He wasn’t sure, and knew he probably would never get another chance to find out.
As night finally arrived, the mourning party began to stir. The motherly Scorpion was the first to go. The rest followed, one by one, until only a single creature remained. It was the stoic leader who had directed the others to demolish the farmhouse.
As the last of them disappeared into the woods, dragging the human bodies—future hosts to replace what he’d taken; an eye for an eye—over shattered ruins of tree trunks and enormous clumps of uprooted brush, the man watched from the window.
It’s all my fault, he thought with a flush of shame.
Too weak to get up before sunrise. Too stupid to notice his stalker. Too human.
Once the others had departed, and the remaining Scorpion was sure that it was alone, it raised its tail and poised it above the dead youngling.
The man had to squint in the encroaching darkness to see what came next. On later nights, when sleep would elude him and wicked memories would come, he would wish he hadn’t.
The end of the creature’s stinger appeared to molt. Folds of hard biometal peeled open, and a vibrant glowing tentacle slithered out, even brighter than the eyes. A deep, cosmic purple radiated from within the corn.
The Scorpion found where a bullet had entered one of the shredded eyeholes and injected the organ into its dead kin. It held that position for a minute, slithering and sloshing around in its cousin’s draining skull, and then, with a chill crawling up its exoskeleton, shuddered.
Without an utterance, it withdrew from the corpse, sheathed its naked flesh back into the metal folds, and coiled its tail around the child. Like an undertaker, it dragged the adolescent brute back to the tree line and toward the waterfall basin, leaving a wake of broken cornstalks behind.
Another host. A parasite injected.
He was finally alone.
When he was sure that none of the grieving pack would return, the man collected his belongings and tiptoed toward the back door, feeling ill.
The hat was gone, reduced to a chewed-up pulp.
Even if the cap was in one piece, he couldn’t go back.
It was too dangerous. There was a black hole sitting inside his chest. Sucking his innards into the void.
Whatever adrenaline he’d mustered in the corn had petered out hours ago, and now his concussed head ached with every step.
The deer shit, still caked upon his flesh, had dried out and grown hard and coarse and begun to flake off in small clods.
The rest would have to stay, at least while he slept, but the smell no longer nauseated him, now that he’d acclimated to the stench over the course of nearly an entire day.
What was one more? He only yearned for a shower on account of the itching.
The man walked in a slow, crooked stagger for a mile or so before finding another house, this one well out of sight from most everything. He made it no farther than the living room couch before his legs gave out, and seconds later, his mind and eyes followed.
But as sleep approached, so did new dreams.
Whenever I had trouble sleeping, I read.
When “Adam” first arrived, the book of the week, a blind pull from my overstuffed suitcase, was All Quiet on the Western Front.
I didn’t know it was about the Germans at first. Only bought it because I recognized the title as an acclaimed war novel. I liked those.
But it was all about the Germans. The bad guys. But not quite. Not all of them. Some were really just guys like us, like me and Jojo and everyone else. Maybe like you, too, reader. Just regular people trying to survive. Who did what it took. Who had bad dreams.
I’ve had a nightmare for a dozen years. Ever since I laid eyes on a Scorpion in their full towering form. Want to hear about it?
I open my eyes and I’m there with it, in Artemis’s chamber.
I’m in there with him. Adam. I watch him rise and struggle to stand under the bright lights.
See the nervous pulsations in his ocean eyes.
I watch him take small glances outside the blast window, watch his head dance around to catch sight of the hazmat aliens who draw closer.
We are afraid of the men.
When Adam kills the first one, he turns to me and speaks in clicking metallic beats that I somehow understand. He asks me to come with him. Adam knows my name. He says, “Help me, Lane, help me get the bad guys. They’re poisoning us. They’re killing us.”