Chapter 1 #5
Despite his struggles, the Scorpion paid the man little mind.
The obelisk legs rotated with smooth, choreographed thrusts, but the head and the torso remained eerily in place.
It didn’t even bother to look at him, those six blue eyes focusing on the road ahead.
But that didn’t matter. The man could recognize their shine.
It was the Nightwalker, same as last night. He was sure of it.
The man scooted up onto his rear as best as he could, increasing the pressure on his imprisoned leg in the process. He looped the backpack around his chest and lifted the shotgun.
If I die here, then I got those folks back in the cornfield killed for nothing. It was the ugly truth and he knew it. Killed a man back in Florida and stole his bunker and for what? The butt of the weapon found his shoulder. He pumped and aimed—
Still, the beast didn’t turn to face him.
Was it protecting its eyes? Did it know he had a gun?
What a gun even was? The man called out, “Hey! You! Hey, you fucking tripod freak!” but the insomniac did not respond to his taunts.
The predator just kept dragging him farther down the road, in the direction from which he’d first come, past the black van parked on the double yellow lines, past the wreckage of the other vehicles…
He kicked at its stinger with his free leg, stomped it with the barrel of the shotgun, and even groped for loose chunks of pavement to hurl at the back of the creature’s head.
The Scorpion acknowledged none of these attacks, not even when a baseball-sized rock struck it on the base of its skull.
There was a loud clang! as the rock fell harmlessly to the ground.
Even now, on the verge of death, the man felt insulted.
The damned beast couldn’t even be bothered to appear annoyed.
The Nightwalker merely looked preoccupied as it glided over the asphalt, like a vast eagle deep in thought as it soared in the moonlight.
Which left the man to be the mouse clutched in its talons, watching helplessly as the ground fell farther away, waiting for the claws to crunch down on his spine.
He imagined his captor so agitated, so riled with anxiety and frustration, that it couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t help but get up and go hunting in the middle of the night.
Did they already take all this for granted…
this world that they’d stolen from him? From everyone?
The world humanity had fought so hard to hold on to?
No. Wait. Not him. All he ever did was cower and hide.
At least the dead had risked something, humans and Scorpions alike.
But not him. What did he have to show for his time in the apocalypse, save for his own futile life?
He pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The metal pellets ricocheted off the back of the Scorpion’s head in a flurry of sparks. The creature didn’t even flinch.
The man’s heart sank. Christ, does it even realize I’m fighting back?
His answer came as the long tail twitched like the snap of a whip, flicking him high into the air and then slamming him back down again. The impact jolted his spine and sucked the wind from his lungs. He wheezed, rolling onto his side, clutching the shotgun to his chest. Am I gonna die how I lived?
The Scorpion still did not deign to look down at him. That’s it, isn’t it? I’m no more than simple cargo… a meal to be transported from one place to another. That’s what you really think of us, Nightwalker.
He closed his eyes and considered never opening them again.
Head bumping against the pavement, the man could only wait for the end.
Didn’t stand a chance. Wasn’t strong enough.
He never had been, truth be told. Even as a child, when the world was right and regular, he’d recognized himself as an unimpressive creature, pouty and futile.
Endowed with neither size nor speed nor smarts nor sheer ability, success in school and sports only came in the pursuit of spiting himself.
Nothing had changed since then. No matter how many times he resolved to make it to the Chesapeake and find Her, regardless of whether he heard L.B.
or the goddamn president on the radio, even if there was a chance his mother was still alive and he was on his way to New York City right now…
it was all to punish himself. The final man’s repentance.
A self-flagellant wandering the wasteland. That was all he was good for.
You’re wrong, baby. Mom’s voice in his brain again.
The man thought his life was beginning to flash before his eyes as the vivid image of his childhood bedroom formed…
but then lingered. Mom sat right by his side, still dressed in her scrubs.
Came home from work early one Sunday afternoon and heard him crying in his room.
Saw him slapping, punching himself in the face. Seventh grade.
There are too many wonderful things about you, Timmy. Don’t give up on them.
Don’t give up.
Don’t. Give. Up.
The man’s eyelids flew open, the hazel irises within aflame.
He jerked his upper body upright, sweat and blood misting the air around him.
Heart electrified, he scanned the hideous chimera awash in its own unearthly light, and searched for anything that could save him.
If his hunch was correct and the Nightwalker called that farm pond home, it would soon turn off the main road and they’d be just minutes away.
He didn’t have much time. Doesn’t matter if I’m as insignificant as a mosquito.
Use it. His eyes traced its plate-mail tail and lumbering talons, and then…
There!
Where the armored stinger and jointed legs adjoined the central stalk. The armor plates there were… shifting. Faint blue meat shimmered between the narrow gaps. An inner layer.
The man’s free foot scrambled for footing at the bottom of one of the stinger’s plates.
With the strength of countless nights spent walking, he ground his heel into the demonic armor.
After a dozen seconds of red-faced effort, the plate inched upward, revealing the thinnest strip of pulsing skin the color of a summer sky after a storm.
Intense heat swept over him, as if he’d uncovered a flesh-fueled starship.
The man immediately stabbed the shotgun barrel into the fleshy opening and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
The night exploded with gunpowder and blood. A segment of the tail disintegrated in a burst of lava lamp liquid and biometal shrapnel. The Scorpion stumbled forward, tottered, and then crashed to the pavement, sending shock waves down the road.
The man emptied the final two shells into one side of the Scorpion’s face. Its big blue eyes exploded into glowing raindrops, alien cries echoing in the night.
“KURRAAAA!”
The man rose to his feet and hobbled toward the moon-shadowed shoulder, the amputated stinger still coiled around his leg. He bashed at the tentacle with the butt of the shotgun until it finally relinquished its grip and began flopping around on the pavement like a scaly black eel out of water.
“KRRRAAAAA!”
Moving as fast as his injured leg would allow, anxious to put as much distance as he could between himself and the wounded Nightwalker, the man fumbled in his pockets for more shells.
But his palms were slick with blood and sweat, and he dropped one.
No time to stop now. No time for anything.
He gave up on reloading the shotgun and instead focused on readying his flashlight.
Stealth and defense be damned; right now, he needed to run.
“KUKURRAA!”
Behind him, the goliath struggled to stand, three bladed legs rising as one.
A fountain of blood leaked from the side of its face, a deep luminous waterfall gushing onto the street, the inner light rapidly fading as it puddled on the pavement.
All three of its right eyes had been shredded by the shotgun blast. Nothing remained but flaccid bioluminescent tissue wavering in the breeze.
Towering over the road again, the living tripod slowly pivoted to face the man, revealing three intact and functional left eyes. The Scorpion was wounded, but none of the shots had penetrated its obsidian skull. Instead of slaying the dragon, he’d merely earned its furious attention.
In a show of horrific dexterity, one orb stared at the amputated stinger discarded on the side of the road, and another was fixed on the bloody nub left behind, while the third gazed directly at the man.
The brilliant blue color hadn’t faded from any of them, not like the youngling’s had.
The Nightwalker wasn’t dying yet. Not yet.
“K’ORK KURRAAAAA!”
A screech of unearthly ire, like a million minerals thrown into a grinder, pierced the man’s eardrums as he fled deep into the woods.
Tree trunks soon exploded behind him, sending shards of wood shrapnel into the air.
The same thick oaks the man struggled to dodge in the dark, the enraged Scorpion burst through like a children’s pinata.
That horrible, undulating glow was gaining.
Razor-sharp splinters dug into the man’s back with increasing force as the three-eyed titan with no stinger descended upon him.
It didn’t blaze a trail so much as razed one as maples fell upon pines, which in turn fell upon hickories falling upon cedars.
It drew closer, leaving total destruction in its wake, ripping through Earth’s giant pacifists with but one purpose in its hellish hearts: to show that it was made of something greater.
The man could feel the sky opening up behind him, the thick, interwoven canopy disintegrating at the monster’s touch.
He could sense the cold heat growing closer, like frostbite gnawing at the back of his neck.
The whirlpool of blue lightning thirsting for him, hungering for him, drowning him, pulling him down, down, down…