Page 12 of Them

Surrender to concussions and creatures? Let his body slip slip slip into deathly, blissful unconscious?

Or try to hold it together?

The man opened his eyes as wide as he could manage. His right arm was tucked beneath him, and his left grasped a hanging vine of root. The rhythm of his lungs was tight and shallow in his ears.

Click-click echoed above him, their footsteps. Their prodding at the digital recorder. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click. Click-click-CRUNCH and the sound of pixelated screams disappeared at once. Broken.

One of them uttered a grunt of annoyance and began to move again. Clink-clink-brip, clink-clink-brip. Was it going back? Was it satisfied? Clink-clink-brip, but more distant now; they were leaving. Going home.

The man’s fogged mind processed as well as it could, desperate to determine if he should flee or remain hidden. Hush, he told himself. Listen.

Clink-clink-brip… clink-clink-brip… clink-clink-brip…

Yes, they were leaving. Just one of them. Fading. But there had been others, hadn’t there? How could he be sure they’d all left? That none would remain to stand guar—

As if in answer to the man’s questions, three or four more distinct clusters of sounds followed the first one away from the creek. Clink-clink-brip, clink-clink-brip, clink-clink—

Wait. No. One was coming closer. Clink-clink-brip.

Louder.

CLINK-clink-brip. CLINK-CLINK-brip. CLINK-CLINK-BRIP.

The man wrapped his arm around the slimy roots and sucked his chest in so tight that his skin seemed to rub up against his bladder and lungs and intestines. Ribs mingling with soft tissue.

CLINK-CLINK-CLINK. So close now, above him. His esophagus began to clog with half-digested canned food. He arched his back into the overhanging dirt and felt the soil pulsate with every scythe-step. Crumbs of earth showered his face. An animal so powerful its mere footsteps birthed shock waves. Evil angry elephants.

The man curled his hand around the butt of the pistol and thumbed the safety with a silent click.

The world began to shine with a horrible alien sun; the violent bright blue light pressed into the man’s skull.

He raised the pistol.

The light grew stronger, illuminating the creek into clean baby-blue ripples—

—and into the ripples stepped a lone pillar of slick, curved steel.

Then another.

Both unequivocally wrong.

Out of place the same way the first blimp must’ve looked floating in the sky to those ancient, forgotten people.

Unnatural. Impossible. Alien.

His fingers tightened around the weapon. The light squeezed further into his mind as the photons crawled and wriggled through his nervous system. The brightness pressed his senses—shattered inside his skull like cyan stained glass—and his brain begged him to find the trigger.

The light drew ever closer, and lower, now divided into six distinct searchlights that swept over the trickling pools. The man saw three hungry jaws dip below the dirt shelf, each unhinging as the mandible mouth approached the water.

Behind them followed the eyes, then the endless spire of a null-colored neck, and how it reached down, down, down.

The man apologized to himself, squeezed his eyelids shut, teased the trigger, and waited for whatever followed.

But nothing came.

The man opened his eyes. Blinked three times.

Shlip, shlip.