Page 20 of Them

He never made it here. Nobody did. I’m all alone.

Dominic Marino, another relic of my younger days, owned a construction company based in Baltimore. He, too, asked no questions, not even when I asked him to get the military-grade stuff. Knew I was good for the costs. His crew was quick. Did quality work.

It didn’t seem to trouble them much, a government official looking to go off the grid. I told Dom he should start working on his own bunker. In response, his thin lips parted, and his laugh bellowed the birds out of the trees. He thought I was paranoid. He told me that I needed to retire, talked about all the golf we could play when I finally did. I told him I fucking hated golf.

Sometimes I wonder what’s left up there. I know I need to open the door eventually. If I don’t go soon, then I never will. I’ll let myself die down here if I don’t go soon.

All my equipment is still working. Generator. Air purifier. Rainwater system. Plumbing. The radio. Enough supplies to last a few years. Nearly six down here already, and only a few hiccups. There’s just no one left to share it with. To listen to. No one left to talk to. What’s the reason for it all? I’ll have to find one, I suppose.

Do you like thought experiments, reader? I don’t, but I have a lot of time on my hands now. There’s that business with the cat. Schrödinger’s. Is the rest of humanity alive or dead? They’re both. Everyone who was still breathing when I came down here. They’re survivors and Scorpion fodder. All at once.

But this is different. Now I’m the one closed up in the box. I know I’m alive. But does anyone else? Am I alive and dead to them too?

What does that make me? A coward? Or both cowardly and stoic at once? I don’t know. I want to leave, but it’s not right yet. I look at that door and it seems impossible. Unopenable. Not because it’s too heavy or stuck. Nothing’s blocking the path or wedged up against the steel.

The hinges whisper to me that they don’t want to open. Not yet.

The door glares at me. Waiting.

The minutes passed. And passed.

The Scorpions sat huddled around the juvenile alien corpse, their cries and metallic weeping having ceased some time ago. By dusk, the man had already been watching their silent vigil for hours. They remained there, a cluster of living artifacts among the corn, until the sun crept low and dark. Until it was the man’s time. His adopted hour.

He pulled his gaze away from the window only to prepare food and water for himself. Throat and stomach felt bone-dry. Bare. Fragile. But his meal, a handful of protein bars scavenged from MRE cases, sat better in his belly than expected.

The man didn’t yet dare to leave the house. His earlier ideas of escape vanished the moment he saw the creatures pull out the bodies. He would go, yes, but not until the funeral party had gone first.

What were those people in that farmhouse thinking? The man couldn’t even hazard a guess. Surely, they must’ve known about the nest. The waterfall. The monsters. Insane to sleep so close to the stingers, he thought in a cool, windy voice that sounded like a stranger’s.

Wouldn’t have been long. Wouldn’t have been long at all.

He shook his head. Shouldn’t say that. Those two saved my life.

Say what you want, his frigid and jaded mind taunted. There’s no one left to hear.

Last week the man didn’t think there were any other humans left, yet clearly he’d been wrong. What would his reaction have been had he successfully stealthed through the waterfall and corn? If he’d gone about his usual scavenging business, turned a corner, and suddenly found two living humans staring at him? What would they have thought of a nameless stranger? Could he have even mustered the courage to share his story and earn their trust? Or would his mouth have frozen like the rest of him, tongue caught between stagnant time all because he could never shed his calloused shell? This hardened epidermis that had kept him whole?

He wasn’t sure, and knew he probably would never get another chance to find out.

As night finally arrived, the mourning party began to stir. The motherly Scorpion was the first to go. The rest followed, one by one, until only a single creature remained. It was the stoic leader who had directed the others to demolish the farmhouse.

As the last of them disappeared into the woods, dragging the human bodies—future hosts to replace what he’d taken; an eye for an eye—over shattered ruins of tree trunks and enormous clumps of uprooted brush, the man watched from the window.

It’s all my fault, he thought with a flush of shame.

Too weak to get up before sunrise. Too stupid to notice his stalker. Too human.

Once the others had departed, and the remaining Scorpion was sure that it was alone, it raised its tail and poised it above the dead youngling.

The man had to squint in the encroaching darkness to see what came next. On later nights, when sleep would elude him and wicked memories would come, he would wish he hadn’t.

The end of the creature’s stinger appeared to molt. Folds of hard biometal peeled open, and a vibrant glowing tentacle slithered out, even brighter than the eyes. A deep, cosmic purple radiated from within the corn.

The Scorpion found where a bullet had entered one of the shredded eyeholes and injected the organ into its dead kin. It held that position for a minute, slithering and sloshing around in its cousin’s draining skull, and then, with a chill crawling up its exoskeleton, shuddered.

Without an utterance, it withdrew from the corpse, sheathed its naked flesh back into the metal folds, and coiled its tail around the child. Like an undertaker, it dragged the adolescent brute back to the tree line and toward the waterfall basin, leaving a wake of broken cornstalks behind.

Another host. A parasite injected.