Them #23
Reports spoke of the beasts fervently guarding their young and their packs. There was even one Scorpion that dove in front of a tank shell to save another. I saw the drone footage. A twenty-foot-tall monster sacrificed itself so that its brother wouldn’t be struck down. Is that so alien?
Listening to my radio, I continued to hear the stories of people all around the world who would not live to pass them along.
Some tried to flee through the air, stocking private planes with massive food and fuel supplies.
But they had to land somewhere at some point, and airplanes were such loud things.
The creatures were always waiting. Others tried to stay far out at sea, but Earth’s successors began to swim across oceans and walk along their trenches.
By the end of 2025, there were barely any radio transmissions left on the North American continent. Sometime in the five-year gap between now and then, the rest of the world went silent too.
Fifty-four, the number of human beings used for the initial incubation, divided by 343, the total population of Turner’s Pass, equals 15.74 percent. For every hundred of us they killed, they created sixteen more of themselves.
Before humanity went extinct, we were greater than eight billion. But let’s round down. Fifteen point seven four percent of eight billion is roughly 1.26 billion. That’s the approximate number of Scorpions currently roaming the earth.
And the Scorpions that have died? Each a potential host to another. Renewed and regrown.
I suspect the final living humans are buried or boarded up somewhere in the dark, cold reaches of our planet. We never figured out if they hated the cold, like that old Steve McQueen movie my father loved so much. The one with the Blob.
If they don’t, if their metal hides are thick enough and their blue blood warm enough to spin through snowdrifts and shatter icebergs, then I suspect that I may be the last man on Earth, cowering like a rat in a bunker deep and thick enough that they can’t smell me, all because I had the dirty dollars to pay for it.
I told my old friends to come find me. But none of them ever made it. None of them got lucky.
Lucky. Someone else out there. Alive. That’s a dangerous thing to think about. To hope.
There might be someone else. Someone else to listen to. Someone lucky. Maybe I’ll even speak up this time.
Hell, how about it? What do I have to lose?
Excuse me, dear reader. I have to check if my radio still works.
The man was no longer alone. Someone stood at the foot of the basement bed.
A shadow loomed over him, blocking the dim sunlight washing in through the cellar window.
Neither of them said a word, or made a move, and though the man desperately wanted to leap out of bed and run like hell, he found his legs unwilling, his body unmoving, and his eyes unblinking.
The figure at the foot of the bed lacked definition, as though it was not fully formed. He’d seen this shadowy silhouette before and knew what had been done to it. He should be in a bathtub in Florida, but he’s here. The man I stole the bunker from.
The three-dimensional silhouette stood half a head shorter than it had in life, because half of its head had been blown off by the same pistol that the man now eyed on the bedside table. His hand wouldn’t reach for the gun, no matter how much he willed it to. He was frozen with fear.
The ghost, for that’s exactly what it was, held him within its eyeless gaze.
Ragged strips of scalp hung from what remained of its jaw, bony chunks of cranium still clinging to skin.
The man saw no color in the gruesome mask, only the black, empty shade of what once was, and he knew that if he shone a flashlight on the silhouette, it would remain nothing more than a bottomless shadow.
A writhing pit of slippery, midnight serpents.
The dark figure shifted, raised a decrepit hand toward the window behind it. Pointing. Beckoning.
At last, the man’s body allowed him to move, but not for the pistol. Nor did he bolt for the staircase. Instead, he rose slowly, as if submerged in a warm, shallow pool, and shuffled forward with bare feet.
The specter gave no sign of acknowledgment as the man approached. He tried to avoid contact as he drew closer, but his shoulder grazed the shadow, and though the flaps of skin and hair that hung down from its shattered skull possessed no color, the man felt a spear of cold, wet death.
Once he reached the window, he pushed himself up onto his tiptoes and peered outside. He felt a sweeping sense of relief. There was nothing there waiting for him. Only the front yard and the quiet neighborhood street a dozen feet beyond the glass. There was nothing—
Two bodies slammed down onto the road, as if they’d fallen from the gates of heaven. One of them large. The other small.
They lay there crumpled and unmoving. Both resembling the figure behind him. Ghosts. Shades.
On some level, deep inside, the man knew this was a nightmare.
The shadowy corpses in the street were not real.
He knew he should be waking up very soon.
The nightmare should have ended at the moment that their bodies hit the pavement.
Like overripe watermelons tossed from the roof of a skyscraper.
Then he would’ve jolted awake in bed, bathed in a frigid sweat as he cursed himself for forgetting, refusing his own history.
He should have saved them.
He should have woken up. And he should have known.
But he didn’t.
If he hadn’t taken the shortcut or gotten caught. Hadn’t killed the young Scorpion eager for its first hunt. Hadn’t escaped and left the blame to strangers.
But he had.
Yes, all his fault.
The man slept alongside his demons until the sun finally set on the dreaming street. People that could’ve been allies or friends instead watched on as ghosts; he was still alone. He deserved to be. He was apparently incapable of anything else.
When his true body finally did stir, it was not with a sudden shot of adrenaline, but with a blink. A single shutter-flash of his eyes, and he was back in bed. Another blink, and he was once again looking outside at the street. At his mistakes.
He blinked once more, and he was back under the blanket, head on the pillow. There was no half-headed ghoul at the foot of the mattress, and when he crawled out of bed and crept to the darkening window, the shrouded corpses were gone.
Yet when the man shut his eyes, he could see them still.
He began pacing around the basement, willing himself to stay awake, taking a mental inventory.
His head still ached, but the intensity had thankfully lessened.
For a time, he focused on sorting through a tower of stacked canned goods in soft candlelight.
He eyed the pistol on the end table and the shotgun leaning against the nearby wall, but quickly turned away from them.
He was tempted to start walking again, anything to put this basement behind him, but the sun had only just set. Some of them could still be lurking. The smartest thing would be to stay and rest, but…
But.
Don’t deserve rest. Don’t deserve much at all.
Not only did he get two innocent people killed—he tried to forget about them.
To abandon his guilt like an unwanted kitten.
Cast it aside like all the other difficult sensations his heart once pounded with.
Christ, what’s left of me? Got the soul of Theseus.
He thought it would be easy to fall back into his human ways. Like riding a bike.
His stomach churned. It wasn’t easy, whatever it was that he was trying to do.
Swallow his grief. Shoulder his burden. Face his fears.
All were half correct and none fully so.
He could forgive himself for his mistakes, but not for forgetting them.
Even if it was the concussion or some inscrutable trauma response that had masked his memory of the two people from the farmhouse, it was inexcusable.
There was nobody left to hold him to account.
It was his own responsibility, but there was nothing left to do but mourn and simmer in the death.
The man’s head raced with questions, the answers to which had died with the strangers. Were they nomads, like him? What was their favorite canned food? Could they have known what year it was? Did they do anything fun to pass the hours between waking and dusk? When di—
Behind him on the bed, the radio roared to life. He’d forgotten to turn it off.
Rockin’ Ray repeated the same words as before: “This is Roanoke Radio on 93.1, bringing you the hopeful hits of humanity. We’ve got ’em all, folks.
Stay safe and stay human, all you newly nocturnal.
And, remember, we’ve got enough juice to keep you listenin’ from sunset to sunrise for the next decade.
So, if you’re out there wanderin’, if anyone’s out there, stay tuned, stay groovin’, and stay lovin’.
This is Rockin’ Roanoke Ray signing off. See you on the other side, listener.”
He was about to turn down the volume as Rockin’ Ray’s voice gave way to the careful, measured plucking of a guitar, and the man recognized the song at once.
“Stairway to Heaven,” a Zeppelin classic.
He couldn’t help but smirk; only during an ad-free apocalypse could an unabridged eight-minute tune make it on the radio.
As the voice of Robert Plant wondered and wandered through the radio speakers, the man thought about what had become of Rockin’ Ray.
Could he still be alive? Was there any chance?
He didn’t think so. Why record the message then?
Why not ask for help? Wherever that radio station was located and however it was still running didn’t matter.
Irrelevant. Whether it was Scorpions or suicide, it doesn’t matter. They win either way. They always win.