Page 30 of Them

Those Scorpions tiptoeing around towns and city limits weren’t lone wanderers looking for an easy meal. They were scouts. They were waiting.

In March of ’23, the aliens stopped biding their time and launched a surprise assault on Bangor—the third-largest city in Maine—with over 250 adults. The oldest among them were as tall as the treetops, the two escapees that started all this mess. That’s when their existence immediately transformed from substantiated rumor to presidential statement. That’s when the strangest and most futile war in all of Earth’s history began.

No one wanted to admit that the apocalypse was upon us, that the Anthropocene was drawing to a close. It wasn’t until Maine was overtaken that residents in New Hampshire and Vermont began to panic and evacuate. It wasn’t until the folks who didn’t evacuate died that those in Massachusetts and Connecticut ran for the hills. And so on it went for nearly another year, city after city falling to silence. Augusta, Portland, Portsmouth, Manchester, Concord, Montpelier.

Underneath it all was a ripple of realization that old Uncle Sam had finally found himself outmatched and outgunned. It was the first time humanity had ever encountered a problem for which it saw no solution, beating climate change to the punch by about seventy years. People waited for soldiers and salvation, gunslingers and Jesus, but all they got were ghosts and gore.

We sent extermination squads all over the Northeast. Every armed employee of the United States government was called upon to fight against the shining Scorpion tide. But full-scale war requires logistics. Despite our iron grip on international arms trade, relatively few heavy munitions sat designated for ready use on American soil. Our weapons were assembled in the global market for use in global conflict. Offensive inventions. Somewhere along the road of history, we forgot how to play defense. We thought a big, swinging nuclear dick could deter heaven itself.

Had all the heavy firepower in the world, but only half of it ever made it home. We could’ve recalled more, but risk losing our foothold in foreign interests? Inconceivable. Soldiers stationed abroad started going AWOL, obviously. They would grab as many guns and as much ammunition as they could carry and commandeer a plane back home, trying to reach their families.

In the end, it might not have mattered anyway. The Scorpions were more cutting-edge than any drone fleet. Tanks were very effective when we could corner them, but heavy guns were too damn slow. Air strikes worked well enough, but they had incalculable consequences. We learned that lesson in New York City.

New York. Halloween 2024. That’s when I quit. That’s when I could take no more, stole all the information I could, and hid. Had a buddy in MI6 offering British amnesty in exchange for what I knew. I told him friends don’t make deals with friends and sent him everything I had, then made my own escape.

Uncle Sam knew it was me. My name was all over military channels. Wanted for treason. I guess that’s fair, but other nations needed a chance, you know? To fight back. I thought someone else could find a way to kill them.

My former colleagues never found me, or if they did, they certainly never came knocking. A coward like me probably wasn’t worth their time. Not when they had real monsters to worry about.

Canada went down almost as quickly as the States did. South American officials spent their final days cursing our hubris. Europe and Australia began to accept refugees by the millions, but guess what? The Scorpions clung to the bottoms of ships like giant barnacles. Africa and Asia suffered the same fate. A few remote islands held on, including Hawaii, but I haven’t heard chatter from there, or anywhere else, in almost two years. America the Great went first and the rest of the world followed like dominoes. I guess that’s one thing that remained the same. Even in extinction, we were the innovators.

I heard the stories. Crippled radio static spoke of Scorpions so tall they could swat aircraft from the sky. Two messages on an encrypted military channel: “China has been exposed” and “China has fallen.” Those were sent six days apart. Live broadcasts from Humvees as they were run down. When did we stop chasing them? When did they start chasing us?

Reports spoke of the beasts fervently guarding their young and their packs. There was even one Scorpion that dove in front of a tank shell to save another. I saw the drone footage. A twenty-foot-tall monster sacrificed itself so that its brother wouldn’t be struck down. Is that so alien?

Listening to my radio, I continued to hear the stories of people all around the world who would not live to pass them along. Some tried to flee through the air, stocking private planes with massive food and fuel supplies. But they had to land somewhere at some point, and airplanes were such loud things. The creatures were always waiting. Others tried to stay far out at sea, but Earth’s successors began to swim across oceans and walk along their trenches.

By the end of 2025, there were barely any radio transmissions left on the North American continent. Sometime in the five-year gap between now and then, the rest of the world went silent too.

Fifty-four, the number of human beings used for the initial incubation, divided by 343, the total population of Turner’s Pass, equals 15.74 percent. For every hundred of us they killed, they created sixteen more of themselves.

Before humanity went extinct, we were greater than eight billion. But let’s round down. Fifteen point seven four percent of eight billion is roughly 1.26 billion. That’s the approximate number of Scorpions currently roaming the earth.

And the Scorpions that have died? Each a potential host to another. Renewed and regrown.

I suspect the final living humans are buried or boarded up somewhere in the dark, cold reaches of our planet. We never figured out if they hated the cold, like that old Steve McQueen movie my father loved so much. The one with the Blob.

If they don’t, if their metal hides are thick enough and their blue blood warm enough to spin through snowdrifts and shatter icebergs, then I suspect that I may be the last man on Earth, cowering like a rat in a bunker deep and thick enough that they can’t smell me, all because I had the dirty dollars to pay for it. I told my old friends to come find me. But none of them ever made it. None of them got lucky.

Lucky. Someone else out there. Alive. That’s a dangerous thing to think about. To hope.

There might be someone else. Someone else to listen to. Someone lucky. Maybe I’ll even speak up this time.

Hell, how about it? What do I have to lose?

Excuse me, dear reader. I have to check if my radio still works.

The man was no longer alone. Someone stood at the foot of the basement bed. A shadow loomed over him, blocking the dim sunlight washing in through the cellar window. Neither of them said a word, or made a move, and though the man desperately wanted to leap out of bed and run like hell, he found his legs unwilling, his body unmoving, and his eyes unblinking.

The figure at the foot of the bed lacked definition, as though it was not fully formed. He’d seen this shadowy silhouette before and knew what had been done to it. He should be in a bathtub in Florida, but he’s here. The man I stole the bunker from.

The three-dimensional silhouette stood half a head shorter than it had in life, because half of its head had been blown off by the same pistol that the man now eyed on the bedside table. His hand wouldn’t reach for the gun, no matter how much he willed it to. He was frozen with fear.

The ghost, for that’s exactly what it was, held him within its eyeless gaze. Ragged strips of scalp hung from what remained of its jaw, bony chunks of cranium still clinging to skin. The man saw no color in the gruesome mask, only the black, empty shade of what once was, and he knew that if he shone a flashlight on the silhouette, it would remain nothing more than a bottomless shadow. A writhing pit of slippery, midnight serpents.

The dark figure shifted, raised a decrepit hand toward the window behind it. Pointing. Beckoning.

At last, the man’s body allowed him to move, but not for the pistol. Nor did he bolt for the staircase. Instead, he rose slowly, as if submerged in a warm, shallow pool, and shuffled forward with bare feet.