Page 3 of Them

The storefront’s window-paneled front, once covered by glossy adverts for Slurpees and taquitos and ninety-nine-cent Big Gulps, had not been shattered, but torn through. And by something so big that it hadn’t been able to fit inside the wide glass display without ripping out a chunk of the roof along with it.

The corner store had stared at him with a single broken mouth, a rictus grin of sharp metallic teeth. He didn’t know what to think. It had to have been a truck, but there was no wreckage in sight. Not even tire marks. Just shattered glass.

That was before he had seen one of them, seen one of those polished monstrosities with his own eyes, instead of on an iPhone screen or in a newspaper. That was before he knew how tall they were. That was before he understood.

The man knelt, lit the fire, and stowed his lighter. He set the pots to boil, stood, and strode throughout the first floor of the house, only to soon find himself staring at the refrigerator.

Beneath a magnet like Captain America’s shield was a folded note written in marker:

Dear Mr. G., thank you for being a great teacher. It made me very happy when you stayed inside for recess to help me with my math. I’ll miss you, Annie.

The handwriting was crude and jagged, authored by a young child.

The man took the piece of paper and unfolded it. Inside was a watercolor painting. There was a bright yellow sun, a big blue sky, fluffy white tufts of clouds, and little rows of idyllic trees and brush. Whoever Annie was, she’d taken pride in her work.

It would have been the kind of thing a kid normally made in school—that is, if it wasn’t for the three black scythes rising out of the trees, each one twice as tall as the pines themselves. If it wasn’t for the long, ragged, jagged skull and the bulbous, bright blue eyes peering out from above the wood. Without those additions, it would have been a very nice painting indeed.

With a shrug, the man tossed the watercolor into the fire. Annie’s feelings would not be hurt. Neither would Mr. G.’s.

After a surprisingly filling dinner of mashed potatoes and boiled vegetables, along with a painless deposit in a toilet that had seen neither running water nor an occupant’s backside in at least three or four years, the man gathered his belongings and trudged upstairs to find a place to sleep. Dawn was gaining on him, the sun creeping ever closer.

The man fumbled for the bedroom door in the dim hallway and creaked it open…

Something was wrong. The room appeared to be located in outer space. There was a great shining blackness where there ought to have been a layer of moldy paint. The wallpaper was made of stars, and the spiders on the wall were instead trawling comets, distressed satellites wondering where their masters had gone.

The man rubbed his eyes, then opened them again. He was still on solid ground, still far, far away from the old reaches of infinity. The cosmic vision was instead a gaping hole in the roof and wall of the house. It hovered across the far end of the bedroom, on the other side of the king-sized bed, above two toppled stationary bikes: a gash taller than the man and as wide as his wingspan.

He went around the bed, stepped over one of the fallen exercise machines, and traced his fingers along the edge of the splintered opening to check for ashes. Folks used candles when the grids started to go, and the man had seen the remnants of more than a few house fires along his northward journey.

No ash, not today. This was monsters’ work.

Three-legged devils that had climbed the home and poked their fat chitin jaws inside and plucked out Mr. and Mrs. Carolina Farmhouse and taken them to whatever pond or stream or river or bay waited nearby. Even the sea. The man wasn’t sure how close that was. Perhaps they’d been Mr. and Mrs. Virginia Farmhouse.

Had the couple, after two-too-many weeks of hiding like mice, finally snapped and broken out in a daylight verbal brawl? Was it ten? Twenty? Thirty years they’d been married? Yet still not enough to stave off the stir-crazy and keep their voices down when the sun was up. Or could’ve been they hadn’t believed in all the “mumbo jumbo.” It was all a hoax. It would never be them. Or maybe they’d felt invincibly human, like most everyone else had. The man couldn’t say for sure, the details of such stories long expired.

The man undressed. He thought he’d try Mr. Ambiguous-State Farmhouse’s clothes on for size. Replace everything but the backpack, jacket, and hat. His jeans, borrowed from a forgotten house not too long ago, were cancerous with dust and much too snug.

Perhaps, the man considered, the homeowners did everything they were supposed to do. They were cautious and wise and slept during the day, but the Scorpions and their coiled stingers came for them anyway. As if some of the monsters had learned not to be afraid of the dark.

For a brief moment, he imagined himself as a tiny bumblebee, watching as the walls of his hive were torn asunder by the claws of a hungry bear. Were humans so sweet as honey? Or did something else drive their hunger? As far as the man knew, the creatures consumed only two things: people and each other.

There was a crusty stain on the hardwood floor beneath the gaping gash. A red-and-brown tint. No one had been back to clean it. The man used to catch himself wiping up water he’d spilled or picking up knickknacks scattered upon the ground, but those old habits died eventually. Everything did.

The stars through the roof. There were so many. Why did people ever build streetlights when the unpolluted night shimmered like this? The man did not know. Was it not enough? What we were given? Was it never enough?

There came no answer, so he turned away from the jagged hole and shuffled off to find a bedroom with more privacy. Not that it really mattered.

The sun, its purple warning flares now crawling upon the horizon, no longer disturbed his sleep. The light would wash into the house, but he would not stir.

The waking moans of monsters singing their sunrise songs filled what was left of the ancient abode. As always, their melodies were unbeautiful. Garbled, gravelly voices crept toward him from river and lake and pond and creek, as if the stones themselves had come to life to usher in a new day.

This, too, would not bother his rest. He slunk down the hall and into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth with chalky, expired toothpaste. Then he found the guest room, drew the blinds, and settled into the lopsided bed. His eyes traced the textures within the popcorn ceiling for a few minutes, then he turned onto his side and let sleep take him.

Hendrick Moe was, as you may have suspected, a fake name. The face, body, and mind, however, belonged to a man who was quite real.

Jeremy Weisbrot, also thirty-four, was not from Jericho Hill, Maryland. He was “born and raised in the humble suburbs of Connecticut,” as he loved to tell people, though no one could’ve called those kinds of towns anything but opulent. He fulfilled parental dreams of a collegiate experience in New Haven (premed, he would’ve added were he still alive) and kept his nose in the books. He was a gifted student in biology, the author of a research thesis that was to be locked away in some Ivy League basement full of other students’ lost works about hypothetical accelerated photosynthesis or whatever other ideas a twenty-two-year-old could scrounge up and say to themselves, “Yes, yes, this is original! This is something I can work with! Be proud of!” but ultimately were declared to be no more well thought-out than a C+.

But not Weisbrot. No, he was what folks would’ve called a prodigy, a rare talent of mind and determination. His senior thesis was a trebuchet that would soon launch him into a career in government research. I never read it. No point. I wouldn’t have understood half of the jargon. That was never my realm.