Page 21 of Them

He was finally alone.

When he was sure that none of the grieving pack would return, the man collected his belongings and tiptoed toward the back door, feeling ill. The hat was gone, reduced to a chewed-up pulp. Even if the cap was in one piece, he couldn’t go back. It was too dangerous. There was a black hole sitting inside his chest. Sucking his innards into the void.

Whatever adrenaline he’d mustered in the corn had petered out hours ago, and now his concussed head ached with every step. The deer shit, still caked upon his flesh, had dried out and grown hard and coarse and begun to flake off in small clods. The rest would have to stay, at least while he slept, but the smell no longer nauseated him, now that he’d acclimated to the stench over the course of nearly an entire day. What was one more? He only yearned for a shower on account of the itching.

The man walked in a slow, crooked stagger for a mile or so before finding another house, this one well out of sight from most everything. He made it no farther than the living room couch before his legs gave out, and seconds later, his mind and eyes followed.

But as sleep approached, so did new dreams.

Whenever I had trouble sleeping, I read. When “Adam” first arrived, the book of the week, a blind pull from my overstuffed suitcase, was All Quiet on the Western Front. I didn’t know it was about the Germans at first. Only bought it because I recognized the title as an acclaimed war novel. I liked those.

But it was all about the Germans. The bad guys. But not quite. Not all of them. Some were really just guys like us, like me and Jojo and everyone else. Maybe like you, too, reader. Just regular people trying to survive. Who did what it took. Who had bad dreams.

I’ve had a nightmare for a dozen years. Ever since I laid eyes on a Scorpion in their full towering form. Want to hear about it?

I open my eyes and I’m there with it, in Artemis’s chamber. I’m in there with him. Adam. I watch him rise and struggle to stand under the bright lights. See the nervous pulsations in his ocean eyes. I watch him take small glances outside the blast window, watch his head dance around to catch sight of the hazmat aliens who draw closer.

We are afraid of the men.

When Adam kills the first one, he turns to me and speaks in clicking metallic beats that I somehow understand. He asks me to come with him. Adam knows my name. He says, “Help me, Lane, help me get the bad guys. They’re poisoning us. They’re killing us.”

I try to move forward but I trip on my third leg made of black scythe sheen and I look down at myself and I scream with hard, rocky vocal cords every night as I gasp for air because I can’t breathe right can’t breathe right, I can’t breathe right, Adam, I try to tell him but I don’t know how to talk with three jaws and a dozen tongues, so instead I just sit there and I can’t breathe right and they’re going to kill him.

I wake up hyperventilating. Used to throw the covers off and check that my pale, hairy legs were still there, then rush to my high, narrow window to see that, yes, I was still on Earth and I confirmed my rightness with deep breaths of oxygen.

But I don’t have windows anymore. I wake up screaming and the echoes cut through my skull like piano wire and I can’t see in the dark. Can’t see where I am. For a second or two, after I snap from those Adam dreams, I can’t even remember what I am.

The man’s head exploded with pain. He didn’t know where he was. It was too dark, and then the hurt. A scream against the roof of his brain, something crumbling down atop him, the immense weight of rubble bearing down on his bones, and he desperately needed to breathe.

But how? Nothing seemed to make sense anymore. He was tumbling, teetering, tearing through a field of debris. Full dark. Didn’t even know how to open his eyes, or maybe they were already open.

Another flash of pain as something hard collided with his skull… except that wasn’t quite right. He felt like he’d been thrown into a washing machine full of bricks. Something was off.

And then he realized.

It was him that was doing the crashing. Thrashing against some unseen force. Tearing it down.

His hand, but it wasn’t quite the one he knew, curled around something small. Feeble.

The man felt himself pull back, like a fisherman setting the hook, and the storm of dust and rocks fell away. The debris bounced and skittered off his skin. No. Not skin. Something else. Something heavier. He could feel it in the brisk air, feel the heat surging within his bones, and that’s when the man knew that he couldn’t open his eyes. Because he wasn’t awake. He wasn’t there anymore.

This is a dream.

This isn’t you, he told himself in fitful murmurs. Don’t look. Don’t see it. Don’t ever see it, his ego pleaded. His instincts drove him back, sent him scrambling away on legs that weren’t his own—

three of them

—but the man’s consciousness did not heed his call, and his eyes opened as his appendage, not his hand but a stinger, withdrew from a cloud of ruin, grasping a tiny fragile figure.

The man’s tail rebelled against his dreaming will, reeled back, and flung his prey into the air.

“HUEGHURGA—!” the man shouted as he jerked upright, sending droplets of sweat spraying across the dark room.

He sat there for a few minutes, a gaunt statue, legs and brain tangled, and moved only to lick the perspiration from his chapped lips. The nightmare that had woken him was already gone, immediately forgotten, but it had apparently been a dreadful one.

He looked around and took stock of the living room. The house felt unfamiliar, despite hazy memories of stumbling in the night before. Even his own body felt strange. Foreign.

You have a concussion, he reminded himself. And had a bad dream. Can’t even remember it. Be glad you didn’t walk away with worse. Be glad you walked away at all. Need to rest now.