Them #19
I think Weisbrot saw the road we were heading down and decided to take a sharp turn, hoping it would spare us—all of us—from ourselves and the Scorpions just the same.
If they were seen in the wild, dead or alive, everything related to Gliese 667Cc or Project Artemis or Jeremy Weisbrot would be shredded and burned.
Surely, he must’ve thought, the captive Scorpions would be euthanized, while the three feral ones would be swiftly hunted down with minimal rural casualties despite a public incident.
Enough to make the front page. Enough to save us from the future we yearned for.
Oh, but that’s not quite how things went. There was something he missed. One desperate decision based on incomplete research affecting billions of people made by a single suicidal man. That should infuriate you. It ought to enrage anyone.
Yet, as someone who knew so much and did so little, I cannot bring myself to malign the one person who tried to stop it.
It was Weisbrot who gave the creatures a chance to step off the bloody path we had prescribed to them.
To become real. On their own terms. Had they made it to Empathy Base and plans gone to accord, no Scorpion on Earth would’ve ever had an independent thought again.
Monsters would still be eating people, only now they would be under the command of other, different people.
Like the world was all monsters to begin with.
The beasts survived, of course, and went off into the giant wilderness of Paul Bunyan.
Damage control was immediately on scene.
Northern Maine was sparsely populated, and we believed perimeters near the Canadian border wouldn’t draw much attention.
If the Scorpions went cross-country, then there would be no hiding our work.
Containment within the state of Maine was the top priority.
We knew they liked the water, so the Coast Guard blanketed the rocky shores and swept over lakes with helicopters.
It sparked half a dozen viral conspiracies about an impending invasion.
I wish they’d been right; we had plans in place for that.
We encouraged the rumors, of course. Military presence was heavy between Waterville and Bangor, ever drawing in the noose. The bastards knew we were hunting them. They knew, goddammit.
We hunted and they fled.
They were driven northwest of Bangor with minimal incidents. Thirteen casualties, all civilians. All in the backwoods, nothing within any town limits. All were dismissed as animal maulings, most likely a bear, people said. Even an angry moose. And that was good. That was great, actually.
The three fugitive Scorpions were young, stilted legs no taller than an adult human, but they moved like shadows. We couldn’t get close enough to hit them from the air, and our ground teams were routinely outrun. An ambush was our only chance.
That August, we hit one. The air teams had spooked the Scorps into a narrow river gully where we waited with a ground unit, ready to close in. From aerial infrareds, the three extraterrestrials appeared tired and small and malnourished. They looked scared. They felt fear.
What does that say about us?
I was reading in the passenger seat of an open-air Humvee under the bug-bitten cab light when word came that the targets were close.
I put down my book as the men fell silent and took up their positions.
Talk of baseball and trout fishing evaporated into the cool, humid night.
The only sound was the affirmative click of safeties being released.
We spotted the telltale glow before we saw them. Big blue eyes blinking in panicked frequencies. Lost. Confused. Terrified.
Should I try to describe them? If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen one for yourself.
Or no? Perhaps we overlooked something and one day they’ll all drop dead because Weisbrot forgot to give them a certain protein to break down a certain bacteria and H.
G. Wells will be proved right and GOD BLESS DEUS EX MACHINA will be printed on every New World welcome mat.
It’s been eight years since they escaped. I wouldn’t count on it.
They look like sentient metal. They are insects and arachnids and arthropods and crustaceans and amphibians and mammals and geology all at once.
They are locusts, the plague, the wolves of our Calla.
They are as big as houses yet move like dragonflies.
They are the apex of an inevitable conclusion in raw, biological life.
They are our replacement. Our inheritors.
But, back then, they were young.
A shower of bullets rained down from the pines.
The three Scorpions lowered their angular skulls like battering rams, shielding their fragile eyes from the onslaught.
But one of them wasn’t quick enough. It took a hit to the face, recoiled, and was subsequently torn apart by the hail of automatic gunfire. I sat and watched it writhe and scream.
One of the survivors reared back and rushed toward its fallen sibling. I told everyone that there were two screams in between the boom of bullets. No one believed me. Weisbrot would’ve. But I swear there were: One gargled through blood, another clean and somber.
It reached its tail toward its dying kin and tried to grab hold, presumably to drag it away with them. To save it.
The third meanwhile raised its stinger and plunged it into our machine gunner’s face while impaling two other soldiers with its legs.
Amid the hurried reloads, the Scorpion communicated something to the other survivor.
Syllables made of landslides and chunks of flint.
I’d like to believe it said to leave their dead. There’s nothing to be done anymore.
And leave they did. Sprinting side by side, they leapt over the barricade like graphite ghosts, retreating into the darkness with a curtain of gunpowder over their backs.
We lost them then. Deeper into the forest they went, terrain that would take us weeks to sweep. It was hard country, impossible for a significant fighting force to efficiently navigate. They were gone. Predators among the foxes and hawks and humans.
After that, the Canadian border became so well guarded that the Canucks stopped believing we were still doing training exercises and started asking if we were still the good old pals we’d always been.
Roads in and out of northern Maine were heavily patrolled, and the woods grew cancerous with armed outposts.
The two young Scorpions, already lethal, swift, and wise, had nowhere to run.
But they didn’t need to. They had a whole world of mountains and lakes and humans.
What did they think? Did they know the truth of their nature?
Ungodly abominations of mortal ingenuity?
Did they wake up and say “We need to live” because they were on the run in an alien landscape, like a Schwarzenegger movie flipped on its head?
“We need to live” because what else is a soul to declare to this torrential, tormented world?
They were alive and wanted to stay that way. Wouldn’t you?
We recovered the dead body so the other two couldn’t reproduce.
Their life cycle began like asexual parasites; a Scorpion would kill another of its kind and lay a single egg inside.
Sometimes twins. They weren’t mere clones either; generations of DNA are stored in their stingers, each child a combination of dozens, even hundreds, of ancestors.
But their lungs. Their fucking human lungs. The creatures we bred in captivity weren’t what we pulled back from the stars. We’d changed them. Given them a piece of our scent. They’d become ever so different.
The cannibals had become a little bit human, and they were hungry.
When the man awoke, he struggled to remember where he was. There was no light, save for the bright spear streaming in through a narrow window high on the opposite wall. That’ll need to be covered later, he thought begrudgingly.
He checked his watch, the hands reading noon, but his brain forgot the time as soon as he glanced away.
It didn’t matter anyway. He couldn’t remember when he’d gone to sleep.
With the state of his brain, it was impossible to say if he’d slumbered for mere hours or an entire day.
Neither would surprise him. There were no more calendars to tell the truth.
He remained in the basement bed for a long time. His skull still ached. How long had he rested again? After his other two concussions?
The first one was in high school, long ago. He’d been kneed in the head after the whistle was blown, after slide tackling… He couldn’t remember what team they’d been playing. Was it the concussion that blocked the opposing school’s name? Or time and decay?
The recovery process had been a piece of cake. He couldn’t remember what chocolate cake tasted like. Chocolate was his favorite. Two weeks’ rest, the athletic trainer had told him. Two weeks of limited physical activity. And his head had only hurt for a day or two. That was it.
The second concussion happened in college… during his first or second year? The man knew that he should’ve graduated by now but wasn’t quite sure how old he was anymore. That calendar issue again.
That one had hurt bad. It was just a good, hard header in another offseason practice, but one too many.
The straw that broke the camel’s back… only it felt more like a stone splitting his skull into a hundred jagged pieces.
He’d lost time, blacked out, and came to stretched out on his back, surrounded by trainers and teammates.
They said his eyes were gone for a moment, that he looked like a zombie.
And suddenly the man wished that he had someone other than the mirror to tell him how he looked. He reached his hand to his head and fingered the wild tumble of curls, still ever so slick with stale shit. Reminding himself that the hat was gone. That he needed a shower. Clean clothes.