Page 13 of Them

The entire creek had lit up into a single bioluminescent lava lamp. The mountainous head was submerged, the water covering its eyes, their fawning light spread throughout the shallows.

Shlip, shlip.

It was drinking. He could hear it slurping underwater. Like a dog.

Shlip, shlip.

Like a goddamn dog and suddenly it didn’t look like a blimp in the sky or a killer from another world, but just another animal.

A voice rang through the distance in a language the man could not understand. “Krrrak Rkrank?” it asked. “Krrrak Rkrank?”

It’s a question, the man thought. Ends with question mark, but how can I tell?

The drinking thing lifted its head from the water, dripping, and responded “Ekkkrat! Ekkkrat!”

The Scorpion plunged its head back into the water, took one final shlip, and rushed away like a metal ghost. It never once glanced at the root-choked cave.

Clink-clink-brip. Clink-clink-brip. The footsteps grew soft and sleepy as they disappeared into the come-home call of the waterfall. Clink-clink-brip. Clink-clink-brip.

With the beast gone, his adrenaline fading, and a swelling concussion, the man’s bark-beaten mind forced his eyes closed.

Sleep came like a gentle flood.

It took another year to get the full picture. Daily teleportation surveys. At first, we could only catch pieces of them. Biometal scales that curled around amputated segments. We started to develop bulletproof plating out of it within a few months. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t excited about that. I felt it, the energy surging through our windowless tunnels.

Now, I could look back and tell you we were utter fools, and that I was terrified and knew it was doom prophesized all along… but that would also be a lie. I was scared, yes, but I didn’t know it. The dread that shadowed me and held my hand whispered things, but they weren’t all bad. Sometimes they were exciting. Because something in the basement had worked.

Our victory over fundamental laws of space and time had promised us more. I mean, the stuff we hauled back was nearly indestructible! Bullets bounced off their exoskeletons and fire had nothing to grab hold of or eat away. Those monsters, even the fragmented bits that Artemis caught, were invincible to all but sheer explosive force.

Pieces. It was like Frankenstein’s lab in that way. Artemis could reel back only a small area of space. Everything else was left behind with biblical precision. The aliens had legs and heads and tails, but the white coats didn’t know how they all fit together. The way the muscles were constructed made the researchers believe they were built like elongated spiders. They thought the Scorpions were low, long things. If we knew the truth back then, that they were taller, towered over us, maybe we would’ve been more careful. More afraid.

But, like I said, we had trumped reality and were promised more. I don’t know who we thought promised that to us. Other than ourselves.

The man slept until sunrise.

When they finally brought back a complete specimen, it murdered two of us within minutes. It was just like any other trial at first. We’d wanted to bring back a fully intact one for the past year but had no way of aiming for it. It was blind luck; who would wander into our trap?

We heard the screams and assumed it was split in pieces. Dying, like the rest. The procedure began: wait until it expired, clean it all up, then haul it deeper into the basement.

Fifteen minutes passed. Ten had always been enough. The screaming stopped, but the creature was not silent. We all heard it, the curious tap-tap-clicks against the sterilized teleporter chamber, but we didn’t listen. Not really.

The first operative walked right up to the teleporter window, when suddenly a thick stinger pierced the blast-proof glass and drove directly into his face. The tail slurped back into the machine like the tongue of a frog, leaving a crumpled corpse behind.

The second technician rushed to his side. A neat circle straight through eyes and nose and cheeks. A gory hole where a face used to be. She was the only one who avoided the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis that plagued the lab, but her panic was futile. The man was dead. Obliterated.

She wailed, first because she was in shock. Then because the thing’s skull, that maddening head of sharp turns and evil angles, shot through the shattered glass and snapped at her left arm with three massive mandibles. Blood sprayed, pooling on the floor, working its way into the gaps between the tiles, filling them up like crimson canals.

My God, it moved so fast. I thought I was dreaming, entrenched in the moonwalk limbo of nightmares where everything travels in slow motion except the Beast.

With one thud, it ripped the chamber door off its steel hinges and spat out what was left of the technician’s arm. It stood to its full height, perhaps fifteen feet. The neck was still sticking through the porthole, and the chamber door sat around it like an alien necklace.

It moved forward. Slowly now. Blinking. The room strobed with flashes of that furious blue. One of its long spears stepped right through the second technician’s stomach and dragged her along for a few steps, a puddling trail in their wake.

Never knew either of their names.

Those of us who weren’t in imminent danger rushed to the observation windows to watch. We needed to see it, to feel it. To feed off it. Another victory.

We needed to make sure we weren’t dreaming.