Page 5 of Them

The Scorpion, as the invaders had been branded before the end, was something of a gigantic steel snake. A towering, crouching spider with the plating of a lobster. A three-legged titanium lion with a javelin tentacle for a tail. The result of a praying mantis’s intercourse with a skyscraping crane. A scorpion from the stars.

That night, after he saw one for the very first time, the man climbed high into the branches of an old Southern oak and waited until it lumbered out of range. Not just out of sight, but until its bone-chilling, earth-tearing wake could no longer be heard or felt. Then he ran back through the forest, to the house he’d stayed in two days prior, and remained there for two more weeks.

The next time he dared to leave, he’d left at midnight.

But that was a long time ago now, a year and a half about. Winter or spring. It was late summer now. He’d grown, right? Or had he only grown more familiar? When he wasn’t near them, when they seemed more like bad dreams than reality, the fiends reminded the man of something from Starship Troopers. But he knew that was a flimsy comparison. These things had a life to them. They weren’t like bugs because all ants acted and looked the same. In that sense, the Scorpions were unlike anything. Unlike everything.

Since then, he never again dreamed of monsters gnashing at the clouds. Just of, on occasion, Her. Sometimes they were a release, dreams of staring up at Her too-high ceiling with the wooden beams She’d once dared him to climb, staring at the wooden beams as She rode him and nibbled secrets of love and promises of eternity in a house on the Chesapeake into his ear, dreams that ended with waking in the dust of dusk and scavenging a clean pair of underwear.

But mostly, when he dreamed, he dreamed of Her walking on train tracks beneath an innocent sun.

In this dilapidated farmhouse, the man had no dreams. Not any he could remember. He eased out of bed on tired legs, brushed his teeth, and returned to the master bedroom, moonlight shining through the exposed gash in the ceiling.

Inside a tilting wardrobe tucked against the far wall, he found clean socks, underwear, a plain white undershirt, and a pair of jeans that were several inches too large at the waist. He thought they would be fine with a belt and a few rolls at the ankle, and began to change, but as he did, his eyes wandered to a nearby dresser.

A framed photograph, not of husband and wife, but of two middle-aged men. One was bald, the other with a full head of long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Smiling and holding each other close atop a pyramid of hay bales. The sides of their heads touching.

The man felt a pang of guilt for having assumed yesterday. It was Mr. and Mr. North Carolina-or-Virginia Farmhouse. Sorry, fellas, he thought. My fault.

The bald man on the left in the photo was tall and full with a thick neck and barrel chest. His partner, dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt, appeared much closer to the man’s own lean build.

He crossed the room and opened the top drawer of the dresser, searching for the thinner of the generous couple’s wardrobe. Before long, he was dressed in a clean pair of well-fitting jeans and the same black-and-red flannel shirt that appeared in the photograph. A perfect fit.

The man cooked his turkey breakfast, threw on his coat and backpack, checked inside the standalone stone garage—still North Carolina plates—and began to walk under the crooked smile of the moon. North.

My administrative career was divided between Washington and New Mexico. The former was more permanent, an office with five walls that was undeniably my own. The latter I was called upon to visit so frequently that it just as well could’ve been, but people love centrality. All their eggs in one closely clutched basket, bunkered together.

I traveled often to check on the progress of the various projects I’d approved. As hard as the president and his men made it for me to deny proposals, regardless of party or generation, they trusted me a great deal with their cancellation. Trees that bore no fruit were mulched to fertilize the hypotheses that did. I spent most of my time in desert hangars, where the majority of the “practical” technology was stored. Advancements in radar and the evasion of it were at the forefront of the 2010s.

I avoided the basement. The hollowed core of the desert was filled with men who didn’t know how to stop. The smartest looney bin you’d ever seen. Mind control, cloning, mutation. Bullshit straight out of a comic book. It was a depressing waste; I took particular joy in scrapping those sorts of projects.

In the half decade that Dr. Andrew Brown spent building Project Artemis, I must’ve erased a dozen crackpot ventures into resurrection, telekinesis, and the like. I appreciated Brown; he’d played a large role in my favorite of the base’s aircraft: the Celestial, a terrestrial jet capable of extended space flight and orbit. The sort of machine that could’ve dished out an atomic surprise if push came to shove, even targeted strikes against enemy satellites. Possibilities beyond our atmosphere.

Brown’s Celestial received most of the basement mulch, so his eccentric pet projects were often allowed an extended lifespan. I considered it a favor, but either way, as the lab’s chief scientist, he had significant free rein.

While I knew that Artemis’s eventual cancellation would be a bureaucratic headache, I also believed such a thing to be inevitable. The science-fiction fairy tales inevitably got canned, not that it stopped us from trying.

The first five or six years Brown and Weisbrot spent in the basement were uneventful, the master preoccupied with his teleportation cannon and the apprentice without any fresh extraterrestrial material to experiment with. I frequently forgot about them. I went about my business, which was minimal in all aspects but paperwork and travel.

I never had any immediate family to keep up with, so I picked up books. I wasn’t much of a reader growing up; my youth was composed of weight room sweat and barracks poker. When my friends got out and got married, I got a desk job and never left. I stayed in the dirt and played around for a while. Do that long enough and you get muddy. That’s why they stuck me with the basement creatures; I didn’t have anyone back at home to lie with.

So instead, I read, which I suspect is the reason I’m still alive and writing all this down. Only now, after rereading the same thirty or so beat-up paperbacks over and over—what few I could carry into this hole in the wall while I waited for the world to end—do I realize how much I miss it. How much I need the stories. The words.

If I had any guts, I’d get up and walk to the closest library, let myself in, and peruse awhile. The trek might take a few nights, but it would be worth it. I’d bring a whole suitcase of books back with me, or maybe just set up shop and live there, among the moldy rows and unlooted stacks. I could sleep in the bathroom. Only come out in the dark and study my scrolls beneath candlelight.

Am I a coward? Or am I simply not ready yet? Once I walk up those stairs, I’m never coming back here. But what if I never scale them? I think I want to die. But then why am I so afraid?

The first book I read, not in school but with my own eyes, was an impulse buy in an airport convenience store on my way to my brother’s wedding. After that, I only ever communicated with him through Christmas card courtesies. My cards always had the same picture, Montana horizons. I wonder if Montana is still whole. Are the horses safe? The mountains? Or have they crumbled? Could mountains, too, go extinct? Have they crushed Granite Peak under their immense weight? Maybe they think it’s as beautiful as I once did. Is that even possible?

The book was The Mist, by that famous Maine Democrat who my same brother always disparaged on his Facebook posts. I picked it up because it was thin and green. I read in slow pauses on the flights to and from the wedding. Have you ever read The Mist, pal? Would you like to know something?

In the book, we lose. Can you reckon that? Humanity loses. There’s a static cough of hope, a whisper that the struggle may continue, all hope may not be lost, and then? The end. The Mist might’ve never made it to Boston. The Mist might’ve swollen to cover the world. You never learn. You aren’t allowed to know.

In the movie—I had the good habit of only watching the adaptations after I’d finished the book—we win. Sure, there’s that downer of an ending, but the military comes in and torches the mist-borne freaks. We incinerate them. Game over. Good guys win. Maybe I should’ve felt proud of that, what with my career path and all, but I didn’t.

I watched The Mist on a fingerprint-smudged New Mexico–hotel flat-screen hours after witnessing unextinguishable basement napalm ignite a death row prisoner into a dancing sun.

But in the book, we lose, and the monsters dance on.