Page 28 of Them

Something was bothering the man, but he wasn’t sure what it was. The past few days felt like a haze. He should feel grateful. He’d made it out of the waterfall. Escaped the cornfield. And then… and then what?

I’m not sure. I can’t say.

After a few more minutes of careful scrubbing, the man dried off the radio and returned it to the living room coffee table.

His memory frustrated him. He couldn’t begin to guess how far he’d walked since the waterfall. Everything that’d happened since he struck the tree was a blur, and everything after the cornfield was even more obfuscated.

The memories weren’t gone. Of that, the man was sure. They were just… slippery. He tried to grab hold of them, tried to wind the hours of his eyes back, but nothing sat still for very long inside. The past swarmed all around, a vortex waiting to collapse upon him.

It wouldn’t be long. The innards of his belly swam in nervous figure eights. What? What’s wrong with me? What did I do?

And though he had no answer, his subconscious offered one nonetheless: corrosion.

He had to make himself useful, or he would go mad. He had to find his way. On to the batteries, then. They were more difficult to locate than the baking soda. After checking nearly every closet and drawer on the main level of the house, the man began to suspect there might not be any batteries. The to-do list he’d found had probably never made it out of here, as the former resident certainly hadn’t gotten around to fixing the radio or buying a new one.

With a few hours of darkness still remaining, the man gave up his search and snuck over to the house next door. He returned a short time later carrying a fresh twelve-pack of AA batteries, an LED flashlight, and a brand-new pair of boots.

Sometimes, even now, things just seemed to work out.

We believed the last two Scorpions would die in those woods. Our perimeter had begun to tighten, so it was a matter of waiting them out. It was thought they would eventually starve without eating their own kind, that they couldn’t function without the extraterrestrial nutrients provided by cannibalism.

Their corpses were important. We had to recover them. The corpses would’ve made big-time news and required endless explanation, never mind the opportunity for reproduction. We didn’t think it would take long for hunger to set in. Only two left. How long before they turned on one another, before they grew desperate?

But we soon learned they had easier meals at hand.

In the deep, dark woods of northern Maine, there was a small town called Turner’s Pass, named for Charles A. Turner II, who had once pioneered the nearby Mount Katahdin. Most of the residents lived in sporadic trailers and cabins surrounding a small lake not far from the base of the mountain. A few more lodges were scattered along the old logging roads. It was a quiet place. Scenic. The kind of town that Hallmark Christmas movies liked so much.

There was a single grocery store: Bloom’s Foods. A trucker came by with the weekly produce delivery one Friday afternoon and found no one out back to sign for the shipment. No one inside either. Windows broken. Products scattered. Cars abandoned.

He went to the nearby post office. Same thing. Except the doors had been torn off their hinges. There was a smear of blood across the linoleum floor. He checked the shopping plaza and found similar disturbing scenes. A truck ablaze in the parking lot. More bloodstains. Not a soul in sight.

By all appearances, the residents of Turner’s Pass, population 343, had disappeared under violent and suspicious circumstances. The gentleman who discovered the ruins was distraught. Using his cell phone, he called the police, a call that was immediately rerouted to my department, then skedaddled his ass out of there. When we brought him in for questioning a short time later, his hands were still shaking.

We found no survivors. The only visible bodies were empty, exploded husks: human corpses dragged down by the lake and then carved open from the inside out postmortem. That’s when we figured it out.

The Scorpions roaming the Maine highlands weren’t the same as the ones we’d pulled from space. These two were born as gravelly worms in nutrient-rich vats, their respiratory systems mutated at conception to ensure they could process the nitrogen and oxygen on Earth. And we’d used our own damn DNA to do it. Given the cannibals our mark.

The town was blockaded; a count was taken. Fifty-four bodies were found in that ruptured condition, as if something had been planted inside and clawed its way out. Like that James Cameron movie, except these folks were already dead when the chestbursters woke up.

That’s how they reproduce. A tadpole-sized seed is implanted in a dead Scorpion, after which it matures in the host’s rotting organs, consuming flesh and bone without prejudice, until it’s eaten so much and grown so large that it breaks free from the decay like a chick from an egg. We just never knew they could do it to us. The captive Scorpions only ate humans. They merely hated us.

The rest of Turner’s Pass had been devoured near whole. We found masticated clothes and odorless spindles of purple shit. Forensics confirmed the worst. Flamethrowers burned them all. The only evidence we couldn’t incinerate were the boulders.

In the woods outside town, field teams found boulders with actual bites taken out of them, and saliva traces consistent with Scorpion DNA. In lieu of turning on one another, the escapees had apparently learned that Earth’s geology could supplement their cannibal diet. Just like that lab tech had joked about. Stomachs like alchemical ovens capable of digesting and weaving ordinary minerals into steel. Plain old rocks. Wasn’t that a kick in the head? Whether this was some unintended consequences of our genetic sorcery or a natural biological function didn’t matter. The time for experiments was over.

The entire state of Maine was put under lockdown. The country had never seen anything like it. For those who asked, and there were a lot of those nosy folks—politicians, soldiers, reporters, civilians included—it was due to a mutated strain of COVID-19, a pandemic resurgence to rival Captain Trips or the black plague.

Do you think that would’ve been better? Simpler to understand and deal with? I’m not really sure. Even now.

The two original escapees plus fifty-four offspring equals fifty-six Scorpions. Fifty-six fleeing, conniving creatures roaming the dark wilderness, avoiding human contact except on their own terms.

Fifty-six genetically engineered nightmares that had discovered they could reproduce inside human corpses.

God, they were smart. So incredibly smart. That winter they began attacking and wiping out small towns with the same swift hit-and-run precision that tormented us in the jungles of Vietnam. The older Scorps, now as tall as a house, targeted vehicles and anyone bearing a firearm, while the newborns—some as small as knee-high and others person-sized—picked off unsuspecting farmers and hikers and children. It wasn’t long before most of the backwoods towns like Turner’s Pass were erased off the map, their entire populations reduced to easy prey. Even more corpses transformed into incubators.

But it was so much worse than that. The Scorpions had gained more than intelligence. I saw it, in those woods, as one devil cried out upon the death of another. I heard it. That thing we call humanity. We thought we were so goddamn special.

By 2022’s end, entire counties were overrun. Survivors were few and far between, and they all had a dozen wide-eyed questions we couldn’t answer. Refugee camps began to appear all over New England as people fled a threat they didn’t really understand. Cities like Portland and Bangor held strong for a time, but people were afraid. There were the missing persons reports. Distraught relatives demanding to be allowed past road blockades. Pictures and videos leaking onto the internet. Rumors of monsters in the canals and sewers. Our chance, my chance, to right our wrongs had completely slipped away. Right between our greedy fingers.