Page 25 of Them

Weisbrot petitioned to lead the specimen transport himself and traveled in the passenger seat of a covert transport truck with three armed soldiers as company. One drove, while the other two rode in the back with armor-piercing rounds, their rifles trained on the sleeping horrors.

The three young Scorpions had been injected with a powerful mix of sedatives and were chained in thick mesh cages designed specially by Weisbrot himself. The material was slash resistant, and any attempt to escape would only result in their legs getting tangled up.

Nevertheless, the soldiers’ comms went dark shortly after the Maine state line. Weisbrot and the driver fell silent not long after.

What the local news couldn’t have told you was that the first state troopers on scene were my men in disguise. They scrubbed out the extra blood and removed the broken restraints before the townies could get there, jamming local phones to delay a legitimate 911 response for as long as possible. They packed up all the bodies but Weisbrot’s, then moved him to the driver’s seat as they replaced all of his identification with Hendrick Moe’s. Even the piss-filled Gatorade bottles were planted. It was a cover-up executed to perfection.

We had eyes all over the truck and freight container, but the footage wasn’t live. It had to be recovered from the crash site. The cameras in the cargo section showed what I suspected: The Scorpions overcame the sedatives and broke loose. Their scythes couldn’t cut through our mesh cages, but their mandibles could chew them.

Hours. For hours, the mutant prisoners bided their time. Every chance they had, they took. Every glance at a cell phone, every communications check, every conversation and knowing nod was another bite taken from their chains.

Yet the cab footage was even more astonishing. Weisbrot and the driver heard the cries. The gunshots and ricochet of bullets. They knew what was happening back there. The driver tried to remain calm. Said that the container would hold, that they could make it to the base. I’m not so sure, the Scorpions had a knack for finding freedom, but we’ll never know because he… Weisbrot…

He reached across the cab, grabbed the wheel of the truck, and jerked it toward him. The driver screamed, tried to course-correct the vehicle, but it was too late. The semi tore through the shoulder barrier and plummeted into the woods, killing its two remaining occupants on impact. Springing the container doors.

I couldn’t see his face in the footage. He took the wheel and held the gaze of the oncoming collision. A brief moment of fantastic courage. But for what? Did he think the three specimens would die in the crash? That was the official top secret explanation. But he knew better. We all did.

I think Weisbrot saw the road we were heading down and decided to take a sharp turn, hoping it would spare us—all of us—from ourselves and the Scorpions just the same. If they were seen in the wild, dead or alive, everything related to Gliese 667Cc or Project Artemis or Jeremy Weisbrot would be shredded and burned. Surely, he must’ve thought, the captive Scorpions would be euthanized, while the three feral ones would be swiftly hunted down with minimal rural casualties despite a public incident. Enough to make the front page. Enough to save us from the future we yearned for.

Oh, but that’s not quite how things went. There was something he missed. One desperate decision based on incomplete research affecting billions of people made by a single suicidal man. That should infuriate you. It ought to enrage anyone.

Yet, as someone who knew so much and did so little, I cannot bring myself to malign the one person who tried to stop it. It was Weisbrot who gave the creatures a chance to step off the bloody path we had prescribed to them. To become real. On their own terms. Had they made it to Empathy Base and plans gone to accord, no Scorpion on Earth would’ve ever had an independent thought again. Monsters would still be eating people, only now they would be under the command of other, different people. Like the world was all monsters to begin with.

The beasts survived, of course, and went off into the giant wilderness of Paul Bunyan. Damage control was immediately on scene. Northern Maine was sparsely populated, and we believed perimeters near the Canadian border wouldn’t draw much attention. If the Scorpions went cross-country, then there would be no hiding our work. Containment within the state of Maine was the top priority. We knew they liked the water, so the Coast Guard blanketed the rocky shores and swept over lakes with helicopters. It sparked half a dozen viral conspiracies about an impending invasion. I wish they’d been right; we had plans in place for that.

We encouraged the rumors, of course. Military presence was heavy between Waterville and Bangor, ever drawing in the noose. The bastards knew we were hunting them. They knew, goddammit.

We hunted and they fled.

They were driven northwest of Bangor with minimal incidents. Thirteen casualties, all civilians. All in the backwoods, nothing within any town limits. All were dismissed as animal maulings, most likely a bear, people said. Even an angry moose. And that was good. That was great, actually.

The three fugitive Scorpions were young, stilted legs no taller than an adult human, but they moved like shadows. We couldn’t get close enough to hit them from the air, and our ground teams were routinely outrun. An ambush was our only chance.

That August, we hit one. The air teams had spooked the Scorps into a narrow river gully where we waited with a ground unit, ready to close in. From aerial infrareds, the three extraterrestrials appeared tired and small and malnourished. They looked scared. They felt fear.

What does that say about us?

I was reading in the passenger seat of an open-air Humvee under the bug-bitten cab light when word came that the targets were close. I put down my book as the men fell silent and took up their positions. Talk of baseball and trout fishing evaporated into the cool, humid night. The only sound was the affirmative click of safeties being released.

We spotted the telltale glow before we saw them. Big blue eyes blinking in panicked frequencies. Lost. Confused. Terrified.

Should I try to describe them? If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen one for yourself. Or no? Perhaps we overlooked something and one day they’ll all drop dead because Weisbrot forgot to give them a certain protein to break down a certain bacteria and H. G. Wells will be proved right and GOD BLESS DEUS EX MACHINA will be printed on every New World welcome mat.

It’s been eight years since they escaped. I wouldn’t count on it.

They look like sentient metal. They are insects and arachnids and arthropods and crustaceans and amphibians and mammals and geology all at once. They are locusts, the plague, the wolves of our Calla. They are as big as houses yet move like dragonflies. They are the apex of an inevitable conclusion in raw, biological life. They are our replacement. Our inheritors.

But, back then, they were young.

A shower of bullets rained down from the pines. The three Scorpions lowered their angular skulls like battering rams, shielding their fragile eyes from the onslaught. But one of them wasn’t quick enough. It took a hit to the face, recoiled, and was subsequently torn apart by the hail of automatic gunfire. I sat and watched it writhe and scream.

One of the survivors reared back and rushed toward its fallen sibling. I told everyone that there were two screams in between the boom of bullets. No one believed me. Weisbrot would’ve. But I swear there were: One gargled through blood, another clean and somber.

It reached its tail toward its dying kin and tried to grab hold, presumably to drag it away with them. To save it.

The third meanwhile raised its stinger and plunged it into our machine gunner’s face while impaling two other soldiers with its legs. Amid the hurried reloads, the Scorpion communicated something to the other survivor. Syllables made of landslides and chunks of flint. I’d like to believe it said to leave their dead. There’s nothing to be done anymore.

And leave they did. Sprinting side by side, they leapt over the barricade like graphite ghosts, retreating into the darkness with a curtain of gunpowder over their backs.