Page 10 of Them

But no one looked closely enough at the weigh stations. Weisbrot… Moe’s truck was recorded as hauling thirty-three thousand pounds.

The other three thousand got away.

The man crept upward, his teeth fragile beneath the strain of his jaw. A memory of an ancient locker room rushed in. A vision of a past life, a scene from a black-and-white film in which all the actors are dead. Older teammates stood above him and his friends, putrid pouches of tobacco festering inside their gums. Hold it in tight, they said, the nausea will pass soon, but the sensation only inflated itself inside his intestines, creeping up through his throat like a balloon of rising hot bile. And now, he felt it again.

He crawled higher with the intention of a hunted goat, taking note of noisy twigs and loose rocks as they appeared from within the darkness. One slip could send a dirt slide all the way to the bottom. A late-night dinner bell.

His arms, underused in his travels, grew heavy and weak as they hoisted him over the deeper ledges. The man was grateful that he’d lost weight, even if the biceps that had once strained his sleeves now hung loose in the dirty fabric. The less meat he had, the less they could enjoy him.

He scrambled up the final ledge with a heave and a gasp. He drew in repressed breaths, steadied his mind, then listened, his near-blind gaze trailing toward the pool below.

Beneath the roar of the waterfall, the dark stalks did not stir.

He’d made it. He was safe.

The man wanted to laugh, to burst out in something that might’ve once been jolly but would now sound merely human. He felt a wave of sudden energy, an urge to flee to somewhere far away. Somewhere where he could laugh and grin and grunt the sounds of victory. One hand readied the lighter, while the other drew his jacket closed, concealing the spark. Thin rays of candlelight poked out from his collar and puddled near his feet. He looked around, eager to make his escape, yet still wary of his surroundings. A wrong step could send him shooting over the falls, or expose his light. Failure dominated the possibilities. Even if everything went right, what if one of them simply woke up?

There was a retention pool at the top of the waterfall, but it was small, speckled with semi-submerged rocks that formed a stepstone bridge. The other side was barely visible in the muted flame’s glow.

Feeling as if his legs were infallibly silent stilts, the man began to walk across.

The creek wasn’t so wide here at the head of the falls. The scattering of rocks measured a dozen and a half feet across, each stone slick and slippery. No matter. He tiptoed as stealthily as a midnight shadow. The only sound was the howl of the water below him, and he was sure that it would mask any noise he ma—

Suddenly, his confidence waned to nothing, as the moon had done. That tremoring quake in his gait returned, and the man was sure that he would slip. That he would fall. But why?

Something in the air. Something in the air.

He closed his ego and opened his senses.

Something was in the air. A scent. It smelled like old, sweet metal. Blood set out to rust. It smelled like gore.

There, in the pool above the waterfall a few yards upstream, the man saw a flat, imperfect lump in the current. A shape barely visible in the lighter’s weak shine. It was a body, lying on its back. One that, the longer the man looked, seemed to shake and tremble with some unseen force.

The man leaned over the running water. Was it an illusion? The current producing postmortem shuffles? Was this person alive or soggy leftovers?

Are they breathing? Head above water? Hiding? Just need a look. Just need a look because because because I just need a look just need to know just need to see just want t—

The night suddenly shimmered with an aurora of alien blue as the person supine in the water began to glow like a jack-o’-lantern. The man gaped at the corpse’s rotting chest cavity, hollowed out and aflame with turquoise tremors.

A small dark helmet rose up from the viscera crib. Six startled eyes, each no larger than a golf ball, fixed themselves on the man—and the monstrous infant began to wail.

The planet was Gliese 667Cc.

One hundred and twenty-nine trillion miles away.

I was there that day. The machine blasted its lights, and then silence. Stillness among the basement dome and galactic cannon, the stale air and bunker walls. And then a scream shattered it all. A single earsplitting scream.

Paralysis was replaced by panic. Pandemonium spreading like a wave across the test chamber. We thought someone was injured, that the machine had blown a fuse and blasted the shins off some poor engineer. I’d heard that sound before. Unearthly pain. A fellow I never got the chance to know had made it through a shrapnel-mangled mouth. A dog tag lost to the jungle.

The radios went ablaze, and it wasn’t until everyone was accounted for that the scream weakened to a guttural inhuman moan, and that was when we opened our ears and really heard it. Coming from inside the chamber.

Then the radios went dead, and the stillness returned.

They opened the doors remotely, from the safety of the observation room. A gush of dark, odorous water poured out. There were plants unlike anything I had ever seen. Odd-looking weeds and flowers that immediately shriveled and wasted away when they washed upon the cold laboratory floor. And there were the usual rocks. And mud.

And there was a monster.

Its body had been severed by the teleporter. A single stalk, four feet in length, writhed in fluid pain on the laboratory floor. Angry ocean eyes studied us through the blast windows. Its mandible chomped at us, foaming. The legs and stinger didn’t make it. I wish they had. Then it could’ve properly scared us. We might’ve been afraid to press on.