Them #22
The man waited in silence for the next song to begin.
It was not “Atlantic City.” Instead, the distant voice gave way to a chorus of guitars and drums beating hard and fast. “Refugee.” Tom Petty.
It was not “Atlantic City.” The dead had not come back.
When the song ended, another began. Then another.
After a few more songs, the DJ’s message played again.
The exact same one. It was automated. No Atlantic City. Jesus fucking Christ, it was automated.
The man stood and seized the radio. He raised it above his head, wanted to spike it into the cold, hard floor, have the plastic shatter just as quickly as the fluttery feeling inside his chest had been wrenched out, like someone yanking a feeding tube up from the bowels of his throat.
And he might have done it, were it not for the silky, smooth sound of Fleetwood Mac filling the room.
The man suddenly lowered the radio and cradled it to his chest like a sleeping baby.
His lost love had gifted him three or four Fleetwood Mac vinyls.
They used to listen to Rumours while they showered and got dressed in the morning.
Eyes misting over, he hung his head, shuffled downstairs to the basement, and crawled into bed with the radio.
His chest heaved and his heart ached and his eyes wept as the sonic relics of humanity made themselves remembered.
Prince. The Mamas & the Papas. The Spinners.
Bob Seger. Louis Armstrong. Chicago and Boston and America.
There was even some newer stuff mixed in: Kendrick, Paramore, Beyoncé.
“Rockin’ Ray” had everything, and so much more.
An hour before the sun rose, the station went silent.
No static. No automated message. The music was replaced by the sounds of yawning bats and restless insects, and the man felt lonelier than ever before in his life.
Her face, the face he’d once held in his hands so many times, was slipping away.
The others already had. Teammates. Friends.
Coaches. Teachers. Aunts and uncles. Cousins.
Grams. Pop-Pop. Even Mom. They had kept him company in the bunker, their memories and kindnesses, but the man had been a coward.
He’d hidden until even their silhouettes had begun to blur.
His eyelids lowered. How long had it been since he’d seen another living person?
Lying to yourself.
Would he ever see another? Would he ever find Her?
He had no way of knowing if She was even still alive.
The last time they’d spoken had been years ago, right before the East Coast went to hell beneath high water.
A FaceTime call. She knew he was all alone, that he was scared.
She thought She was safe and he wasn’t, so She told him to come find Her. Come to the Chesapeake.
The Chesapeake. A massive brackish bay once whispered to have attracted some of the largest Scorpion armies.
Clips from Annapolis and Baltimore showed massive shadows rising from the harbors, goliath skulls piercing up through historic battleships that had been recommissioned and refurbished to fight the alien menace.
Washington, DC, didn’t stay safe much longer after that.
That meant She was probably dead. But that was okay.
Because everyone else was certainly dead.
What else was the man to make of his apocalypse?
He was the hero of his own story, as many an elementary school counselor’s poster had assured him.
What else was he supposed to do but save the girl?
He’d never learned how to be alone anyway.
Perhaps that’s why he’d forgotten so much… so that he might force himself to become someone else.
For a while, nearly a year if you can believe that, we kept the growing horde contained to the wilderness, but time was running out.
Every passing month meant a new wave of beasts reaching reproductive maturity, another trailer park town obliterated.
Each skirmish with the pack drew more public attention, and casualties.
We should’ve hit them with everything we had while their numbers were still in the double or triple digits, but then we might as well have thrown up our hands and come clean. Confessed.
And when was the last time the United States government confessed to anything?
We called it wilderness. But maybe it wasn’t.
There were too many towns like Turner’s Pass, full of working people without the sort of wealth or affluence that dictates the difference between preventable loss and necessary triage or a scandal versus a cover-up.
Some of the braver predators began to creep into developed areas.
There were only sightings of them at first. Then a few isolated killings.
Closer to civilization than they’d ever dared, but we thought they were afraid of us.
Sort of how we told our children that spiders feared us more than we did them, like any other frightening animal, because we thought they were like any other animal, spurred on by the reptilian drive to survive.
Akin to any other mortal creature set upon the succession of its DNA and that was it.
But their hearts wanted more, just like ours.
Those Scorpions tiptoeing around towns and city limits weren’t lone wanderers looking for an easy meal. They were scouts. They were waiting.
In March of ’23, the aliens stopped biding their time and launched a surprise assault on Bangor—the third-largest city in Maine—with over 250 adults.
The oldest among them were as tall as the treetops, the two escapees that started all this mess.
That’s when their existence immediately transformed from substantiated rumor to presidential statement.
That’s when the strangest and most futile war in all of Earth’s history began.
No one wanted to admit that the apocalypse was upon us, that the Anthropocene was drawing to a close.
It wasn’t until Maine was overtaken that residents in New Hampshire and Vermont began to panic and evacuate.
It wasn’t until the folks who didn’t evacuate died that those in Massachusetts and Connecticut ran for the hills.
And so on it went for nearly another year, city after city falling to silence.
Augusta, Portland, Portsmouth, Manchester, Concord, Montpelier.
Underneath it all was a ripple of realization that old Uncle Sam had finally found himself outmatched and outgunned.
It was the first time humanity had ever encountered a problem for which it saw no solution, beating climate change to the punch by about seventy years.
People waited for soldiers and salvation, gunslingers and Jesus, but all they got were ghosts and gore.
We sent extermination squads all over the Northeast. Every armed employee of the United States government was called upon to fight against the shining Scorpion tide.
But full-scale war requires logistics. Despite our iron grip on international arms trade, relatively few heavy munitions sat designated for ready use on American soil.
Our weapons were assembled in the global market for use in global conflict.
Offensive inventions. Somewhere along the road of history, we forgot how to play defense.
We thought a big, swinging nuclear dick could deter heaven itself.
Had all the heavy firepower in the world, but only half of it ever made it home.
We could’ve recalled more, but risk losing our foothold in foreign interests?
Inconceivable. Soldiers stationed abroad started going AWOL, obviously.
They would grab as many guns and as much ammunition as they could carry and commandeer a plane back home, trying to reach their families.
In the end, it might not have mattered anyway.
The Scorpions were more cutting-edge than any drone fleet.
Tanks were very effective when we could corner them, but heavy guns were too damn slow.
Air strikes worked well enough, but they had incalculable consequences.
We learned that lesson in New York City.
New York. Halloween 2024. That’s when I quit.
That’s when I could take no more, stole all the information I could, and hid.
Had a buddy in MI6 offering British amnesty in exchange for what I knew.
I told him friends don’t make deals with friends and sent him everything I had, then made my own escape.
Uncle Sam knew it was me. My name was all over military channels. Wanted for treason. I guess that’s fair, but other nations needed a chance, you know? To fight back. I thought someone else could find a way to kill them.
My former colleagues never found me, or if they did, they certainly never came knocking. A coward like me probably wasn’t worth their time. Not when they had real monsters to worry about.
Canada went down almost as quickly as the States did.
South American officials spent their final days cursing our hubris.
Europe and Australia began to accept refugees by the millions, but guess what?
The Scorpions clung to the bottoms of ships like giant barnacles.
Africa and Asia suffered the same fate. A few remote islands held on, including Hawaii, but I haven’t heard chatter from there, or anywhere else, in almost two years.
America the Great went first and the rest of the world followed like dominoes.
I guess that’s one thing that remained the same.
Even in extinction, we were the innovators.
I heard the stories. Crippled radio static spoke of Scorpions so tall they could swat aircraft from the sky.
Two messages on an encrypted military channel: “China has been exposed” and “China has fallen.” Those were sent six days apart.
Live broadcasts from Humvees as they were run down.
When did we stop chasing them? When did they start chasing us?