Page 18 of Them

“… ra.”

And then suddenly… silence. The man knew they would hear that too. The gunshot was inconsequential. It was the screams of this dying juvenile that would bring them running. It was the hush that followed.

The man scrambled past the abandoned farmhouse and crossed the weed-choked road. In a meadow, a couple hundred yards away, another house awaited. It stood far from the corn and—

Far behind him, from the opposite side of the cornfield, thunder began to roar. The man looked over his shoulder and saw the forest begin to tremble. Then—BRRRRKKKKKHHHH—one of the trees suddenly snapped and came tumbling down. BRRRRRKKKKKKKKHHHHTTT! Another! And another! They were coming!

He bolted through the meadow, leaping over brooks and gulleys and ditches, and finally made it to the front door of the distant home. The man shouldered it open and stumbled inside. Crawled to the nearby kitchen, grabbed the edge of the sink to hoist himself up, and vomited in the basin.

He remained there for ninety seconds, legs burning, lungs working desperately to catch their breath. He needed to find a window and see what he needed to see. After a handful of fervent sips from his canteen, the man shambled over and peered through the blinds.

Above the yellow sea of dead stalks floated tall towers of black, shining metal. They walked in slow rotisserie motion as their dark blue eyes swept and scanned the field. “Krrrak Charrrak? Krrrak Charrrak?” they inquired, rotating as they went for only hell knows what reason. There were five of them out there—

No, six. Six. Six.

They marched in a single horizontal line, as if imitating the kind of somber search parties seen on old television shows. “Krrrak Charrrak? Krrrak Charrrak?”

The man thought he could hear a rising urgency in the guttural, cragged voices. They were worried. He could see where the child’s heavy body lay; it had cut a scar in the crop before it died. They were getting closer to it. Closer.

The tallest among them stood three or four times higher than the corn and was headed directly for the corpse. Like a three-legged metal giraffe, it lifted its head up high, reaching for the clouds, and suddenly came to a stilted halt.

Its voice rose in splintered nonlanguage so devoid of syllables that it could’ve only been a cry of sheer despair. The grief-stricken Scorpion bounded to the corpse in a single leap, seemed to hover there for a breathless moment, then crumpled atop it.

The others whipped their wandering stalks around and rushed toward the commotion. When they arrived and discovered the remnants of the man’s deadly work, they joined in the weeping cacophony. It sounded like a thousand rocks being ground against one another. They wailed like distraught infants. All but one.

The second tallest of the pack stood silent at the edge of the crowd. It assumed a stoic sort of posture, stretching itself high, like your mom told you to do every year for your school picture. There was something on the tip of its stinger, held up high for all to see. The man was almost certain it was his shredded hat.

He watched as its tail flicked the tattered rag aside and pointed at two of the others. The stoic Scorpion whipped its stinger around and gestured to the nearest house, the one that the man had bypassed. A stern command.

The pair rushed off toward the house, racing through the corn like lions on the savannah. The man’s eyes followed them for a moment, then returned to the field where the second-tallest Scorpion had joined its grieving companion.

The mourner was crouched low to the ground, still wailing in agony. Its massive frame cradled the smaller corpse, nuzzling the child close with its tail.

The stoic leader lifted its stinger once again. For a moment, the man thought that it was about to slap the other.

But there was no strike to silence the mourner’s grief. Instead, the stinger slithered up the slope of the weeping demon’s spired neck and remained there. Holding. Comforting, embracing, just as anyone might do when coming across a parent who had lost a child. What else was there to do?

What would I have done?

The man gazed at the house beside the cornfield. The pair of Scorpions appeared to be sniffing at the foundation. The porch. The windows. They were searching. Hunting.

“Akkra akkra!” one of them cried out. And then gestured toward a low narrow window. “Kurraa akkra!”

The leader snapped to attention, studied its distant companions, and replied: “Ortaka!”

Without hesitation, the pair split off to opposite sides of the farmhouse and began attacking the home, tails crashing and flailing into the brick exterior, like starving sabertooths hacking away at the flank of a meaty mammoth. Their scythes smashed through the foundation and their stingers sliced through wooden beams. As their fury built, one of the goliaths actually began to headbutt the dilapidated building.

The man so desperately wanted to dismiss the act as a fit of mindless ire. A temper tantrum fit for Godzilla. Yet it didn’t take much effort to see what they were doing was more than that. It was smart. It was diabolical.

The Scorpions were performing a demolition. The strikes weren’t random; they were meticulous. Targeting foundation, weight-bearing walls, pillars. It was as if the properties of physics and architecture were wired into their brains, just enough so that they knew the most efficient way to tear down a human’s home. Savants of destruction.

No, the man thought. Remember. They’ve had practice. Close to a decade of it by now.

After only a few minutes, the house began to crumble. A loud, strained CREEEEEE bellowed out from the bending wood as the structure grew squatter and squatter until finally the last piece of frame gave way, the vine-covered roof collapsing into a tornado of dust.

The man secured the canteen to his side and prepared to run. Now that they had finished destroying the farmhouse, they would search for his body. They would make certain to find the enemy that had taken one of theirs. And when they found nothing, they would come here next.

He had no other choice but to run. But not until they were properly distracted, when they were too busy sifting through rubble and mourning their loss to notice a runaway mouse. It would take them at least five or ten minutes to confirm that their youngling’s killer hadn’t been inside the building.