Page 8 of Them

The giant observatory, a dome 124 feet in height and radius, shone a swampy black as the white metal turret fired out its invisible hands. Folding stardust. It only glowed, as far as I could tell. That’s all you could really see. But then the scientists shuffled out from their blast chambers toward the once-vacant chamber porthole and, like a magic trick…

Sometimes it came back with nothing—the times they missed—but usually it was rocks and piles of dirt, indistinguishable from our own earthly minerals. When that happened, the hazmat suits would evacuate us and open up the chamber’s heavy doors and collect and catalog and vacuum and escort the rocks and dirt to the basement observatory’s own subbasement, where learned men in long white coats would discover that it was all just rocks and dirt.

I wish they had found something. Some novel mineral or element, anything to keep them busy and interested. A deadly bacterium. Virus. Something to scare us. But the cosmic was all too ordinary, and we were hungry.

I spent most of my days in what became my room, one of the base’s dozen meager guest suites. They tried to put me in the basement. I leveraged what hierarchical authority I had to get a hovel-room with a narrow window that bordered the ceiling. It was the only dwelling on base that got any daylight.

I brought two suitcases. One was filled with clothes and toothpaste. The other with books I had purchased five hours before my flight at a strip mall Barnes & Noble. I filled my arms and let them spill in blissful release onto the counter as the clerk gave me a raised eyebrow. There were no bookstores in the heart of the desert.

I miss bookstores.

Sometimes, when I wasn’t chained to the confines of live fire tests and debriefings on rocks and dirt, I took sandy walks and I read. No one noticed me the first few times. The fourth or fifth walk, on my fourth or fifth day there, I must’ve wandered a little too far; some poor enlisted drove up to me in a jeep and held me at gunpoint. He was quite embarrassed when I eased my badge out from my pocket. No one ever bothered me on my walks after that.

It was four days until the moon would flee the sky and darkness would reign. The man passed the nights sorting and scavenging supplies while in shallow observance of the bats roaming the adjacent woods. They were some of the only animals that didn’t immediately flee his presence. Deer and ducks, cats and cows, pigs and pigeons… most creatures unshackled by humanity’s absence seemed to believe he was contagious. As if merely gazing upon a human might spur the new apex predators to expand their narrow palate. But not the bats. The bats liked to brag.

In truth, they weren’t really much of an apex at all. They took no place in the food chain. They ate only people. And themselves. One another.

He’d witnessed it once. The cannibalism, not humans; there were plenty of videos online of Scorpions tearing people apart, probably lost to the digital ether now. The man watched one before he went into the bunker. Just to see what his options were.

One evening, sometime last summer, he’d awoken to a sharp metal screech. Slunk out of his temporary bed and fumbled for his firearm, whatever good it could offer. Even back then, he’d known a bullet would be much more effective on himself than them.

He recalled creeping up to the window and peering out between the dusty curtains, like a child through stairway balusters on Christmas morning. As the midday sun scorched his nocturnal eyes, the squinting man could make out two lumbering shapes approaching one another. There, four or five houses down the street, were a pair of the monsters, skittering in long, slow orbits around each other.

It was the first and only time the man had observed them in unabated daylight. They were not the lazy life-forms of sleepy sunsets and sunrises with which he was familiar. They did not move in dreary, dragging creeps but hyperaware threefold gaits beating with an alert tempo that caused gooseflesh to rise on his forearms. No clink-clink-gash but clinkclinkclinkclinkclink, and their eyes did not droop into a cozy gaze but were instead wide open, so bulbous and bright that the six blue spheres seemed to swallow the gaps between them. Their tails didn’t drag but somehow rose above the ground, weaving their way between footsteps, levitating, moving through the air as easily as a person lifting their arm. It was a limb like any other, controlled with utter instinct and ease.

At first, the man didn’t know if they were going to make love or kill one another. Their tails, those stingers, how could they lift them? They appeared so heavy, so weighted down by biometal. He’d seen city roads with a single gash etched down their center, as if a giant biblical warrior had dredged their sword through the pavement. It used to take forklifts to move their dead and yet here they stood wielding their serpentine bulk as if it were nothing more than a whip-quick rapier.

The man had watched their ritual for ten breathless minutes. They clicked and scraped at each other with their voices. Could it have been that they were taunting one another? Sizing each other up? Were they dogs barking or men snarling? He had little tangible clues as to where the Scorpions fell on the intelligence spectrum, but it was far from foolish.

He’d never seen two together before. Not in person. They were frighteningly individual. The larger one, at least twenty feet tall, had deep-navy irises that hardly blinked beneath their diagonal lids. One of the six eyes had been wounded, a crystalline scab growing over it. A battle scar. This older one “talked” less. It moved precisely and confidently and never stuttered.

The other terror was skinnier, shorter by six or eight feet, and it acted younger, like the runt of the litter. Its six sky blue eyes blinked in nervous fervor. Could it feel nervous? It chattered so much. Louder too. The way it talked was uncanny. There was something about its voice that the man hadn’t been able to shake. Not when it happened, and not now as he recalled the sound of someone who’d swallowed a pack of razor blades. Like the little brother that talked his way into the house party. A cyborg cicada bleating out hard words with sharp wings. The freshman on campus who had something to prove. Each at once. But, above all, the gritty chirps and impossible syllables sounded both foreign and familiar on a great galactic scale. The tongues were different, but something was shared. The man felt it.

It was the big one that made the first move, halting its orbital dance and darting toward the younger Scorpion, who met its opponent head-on, and their blades began to clash.

Of the eleven dueling eyes, at least four stayed locked upon one another while the others scanned their environment and searched for openings. Steel-plated stares. If either ever considered retreat, it didn’t show.

The younger dashed, not in rotating steps but with small pokes against the ground that propelled it through the air, like a contestant on one of those old ninja-warrior game shows. Suddenly, it dug all three spears into the ground and leapt. Soaring, it coiled its stinger around the elder’s towering neck.

The larger one countered the choking embrace by whipping its stalk around in circles, using its assailant’s momentum to its own favor. After four or five full spins, the youth relinquished its neck hold and crashed onto the street like a meteorite half a football field away, hurtling past the house from which the man watched, sending rabbits and squirrels and crows all scattering out from beneath worn-down porches and overgrown shrubbery.

The elder ran, bounded, toward its victim like a three-legged wrought iron wolf until it reached the crater in the middle of the neighborhood road, reared onto its hind scythe, balancing all its weight on a single leg, and began jab-jab-jabbing its opponent.

The younger demon’s eyes exploded into azure confetti.

The brawl took no more than a single minute after a standoff that lasted tenfold, but that was all the man had needed to see. In the bunker, he’d always wondered how humanity had lost. There were signs that a great war had been fought during his hiding. Demolished tanks and abandoned artillery and obsolete outposts. Ruins.

We had cannons and missiles. Jets and helicopters. Nuclear bombs. Never knew how we got beat. Why New York wasn’t enough.

But then he saw them fight one another, and he knew that it had not been war. Humanity was not a contestant or combatant in some grand defense of its home world, but merely a victim of its own genocide.

The man thought of an old home, before time moved on. He had been visiting family—Uncle Dwayne, his name was Uncle Dwayne—when he heard a horrid screech from somewhere outside and hurried into the small yard to find that his uncle’s German shepherd, a scarred-up rescue named Bailey, had chased a fat rat into the fence. It couldn’t squeeze through the narrow chicken wire. The way it wailed and begged and pleaded as Bailey tore it apart from the ass up and dragged it back into the yard. Didn’t know rats could scream.

Didn’t know Scorpions could either.

But how the younger one had wailed. Huge, hollow metal bellows that spoke a familiar language. The man had heard it before. It wasn’t any interstellar dialect, but the universal tongue of pain. Suffering.

The elder had crouched over its victim, feeding itself hunks of young Scorpion meat with its tail. Like a fork, or an elephant drinking water with its trunk. Its three jaws reached in and pried off the armor to get at the pale blue meat.