Swarm

-2-

The second night—the bad night—started off good. Both my kids were in a fine mood. School was out next week, and the excitement of the coming vacation had caught up with them. We went to bed late, after watching movies over the net and eating popcorn. It was one benefit of growing up without a mom. There was no one around to tell Dad it was a school night.

The ship came to loom over my little farm sometime after midnight. It caught Jake first. I don’t know why, perhaps because his room was on the eastern side of the house. I heard later they had come from the east, following the darkness around the world in a wave.

I was asleep at the time of the ship’s arrival. The walls shook, and my TV fell off the top of the armoire. That’s probably what woke me up. The TV crashed and broke and I threw myself out of bed, believing we were in an earthquake. I shouted for the kids, ordering them out of the house. This quake seemed like a bad one.

In movies, when they come for you, there are always lights in the sky beaming brightly into your windows. There were no bright lights at my house. In fact, the entire farm was bathed in deep shadow. This only made sense, I realized as I ran down to the window at the end of the hall in my tee-shirt and underwear, because there was a huge ship looming over us. It blotted out that strange, purple sky. I saw it hanging up there without a sound. It was maybe a hundred yards long and half as wide. It was completely dark, with no lights or visible engines. As black as pitch at the bottom of a well, my grandmother would have said. I paused and stared in amazement for several seconds.

I heard another crash, in Jake’s room. I ran down the hall, calling his name. There was no answer. His bed was empty. His window had been smashed inward. Shards of glass and a torn out black screen lay on the floor. Jake hadn’t even screamed, as far as I could recall. Then I looked out the broken window and my brain froze over for a second or two.

Jake hadn’t been taken away by some kind of magic beam. Instead a thick, cable-like, multi-segmented arm had reached down and plucked my boy out of his bed. It resembled the body of a two-foot thick snake—long, sleek and black. Was there someone up there in the ship working a joystick and collecting specimens? That was my first stunned impression. I got the feeling that to them, we were things that crawled under rocks at the bottom of the sea. They were the scientists who had come down to our world to poke about and disturb our tiny existence.

When I’d gotten over my shock enough to move, I ran out front. Kristine joined me on the porch. She stared up with me at the ship with the snake-like arm. Jake was in the grip of the hand. He still wasn’t screaming, but he was squirming, so it hadn’t killed him yet. As we watched, he disappeared with the arm up into the ship’s belly.

Kris’ mouth hung open, full of braces. Her eyes blinked in horror. “What do we do, Dad?”

“Get in the car,” I ordered.

“What about Jake?”

“I’ll get him,” I said. I had no idea how to perform such a miracle, but I was determined to try. I raced back into the house and snatched up my keys and my Remington 12-gauge with a box of shells. I was going to blow off that snake-arm, or at least blast away at the ship. What else could I do?

I ran back outside. The screen door had latched itself shut. I straight-armed it and the flimsy aluminum thing snapped off the frame with the sound of ripping wood. Kristine sat inside the car looking out the passenger window, terrified. I thought to myself, in a disconnected moment, that Jake would be angry when he found out she had taken the front seat. He was the oldest, and since time immemorial in our family, the oldest kid had always gotten to ride up front with Dad.

I loaded the Remington and trotted out into the gravel driveway, craning my neck to look up. Jake and the arm had vanished, but I kept loading. The ship hadn’t moved, so maybe they could be convinced to give Jake back. It was the only thing I could think of.

When I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw a darker spot open up on the bottom of the ship. It was then that Jake fell back down to earth, plummeting out of the ship. He landed in the horse trough, or rather half-in and half-out of it. That broke his spine, I think, but he was probably dead before they’d dropped him. I ran to him, making choking sounds. Kristine was screaming inside the car, her high-pitched cries muffled by the closed windows and doors.

There was my boy… dead, with his face looking up at me from underwater in the trough. The rest of him was bent at an impossible angle, limp and draped over the steel edge of the trough. There was blood everywhere. He had been gutted, then dropped.

I fired a shell at the ship, then. Probably, it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I no longer cared. I left Jake and half-ran, half-staggered, still in shock, toward the car. It was time to run for it.

That’s when I saw the snake-arm clearly for the first time. It had slid silently down again while I had stared helplessly into my dead boy’s eyes. It punched through the passenger side window of my car and grabbed my daughter, who was struggling to escape. She had managed to get the driver’s door open. She crawled over the seats and tried to run, but the snake-arm had a loop around her mid-section. The arm dragged her backward.

I raised my shotgun and fired a second shell at the snake-arm. I saw a tiny cluster of orange sparks, as if I’d hit metal. There was no other visible effect. I kept running to my daughter, but I didn’t make it.

Kristine held onto the steering wheel with grim determination, but that didn’t last more than a second. She was ripped screaming from the car, dragged through the broken window and hauled up into the ship.

I could see a darker spot up there, where she had disappeared. I circled under the ship, all around the farmhouse, raving. I thought about firing up at it, but feared I might hit Kristine somehow. I suppose I could have driven off in the car, or ran out into cornfield to escape, but I didn’t even think of these things.

Soon, it didn’t matter. Kristine’s body fell, flopping, out of an opening that yawned in ship’s dark belly. She crashed down onto the roof of the house. I could tell right away she was broken, but I climbed up there anyway. I got on top of the garbage cans, then onto the rickety fence which my wife Donna had told me to fix until the day she died, but I’d never gotten around to. From the fence, I managed to scramble up onto the shingles and ran to where Kristine lay. My face was wet, either from tears or blood, I’m not sure. I’d been clawing at my own face by that time and it was difficult to see, so it could have been either.

Her eyes were open, and there was terror imprinted forever on her brow. I’ve never forgotten that look. The memory has hardened my mind like nothing else in my existence.

The snake-arm got me next. Coming up from behind, it plucked me off the peak of the roof. I no longer cared. In fact, my only thought was to hang onto my Remington, which I somehow managed. I had lost the box of shells, probably back when I found Jake.

I held my gun, and I held my fire. My only hope was that I would get the chance to blow a hole in something. Something softer than steel.

I was deposited in a quiet chamber. It wasn’t big, maybe the size of a bedroom or an examination room. I wasn’t thinking too well at that point, so I just kept turning around, aiming my gun at the walls. I didn’t try to find a way out. Right then, I didn’t care about escape. I was no longer trying to run away. Everyone I cared about was dead, and all I wanted now was revenge. I wouldn’t say I was calm, far from it, but I was cold inside.

I think now, looking back, that my unusual behavior saved my life. Part of the wall opened, and a being took a half-step forward.

This being was an alien. There had never been anything like it on Earth, at least not to my knowledge. It would have made an interesting subject for a documentary if we’d discovered it in some remote spot of the globe. The thing stood about four feet tall and had four hooves. But it had hands, too. Well, not hands, exactly. Three opposed digits would describe them better, each hand looked like a tripod of thumbs. It had blades too, natural ones that sprouted from its head like antlers. Imagine a deer with horned knives for antlers and a set of three-thumbed leathery hands. It reminded me of something from Greek mythology. What had they called them? Centaurs. Half-man, half-beast. But this centaur leaned in the direction of pure beast with freaky hands.

The eyes swept over me with some level of intelligence. I could only pray this was one of things that ran the ship, because I wanted some revenge. It took a step forward, and maybe it had expected me to retreat, I don’t know. But I was not in a cooperative mood. There was red blood on those horn-blades. I suspected it was my kids’ blood.

It took a second purposeful step, lowering its horn-blades in my direction. That was as far as it got before I blasted it. I had no doubt now those blades were showing me my own kids’ blood. It was too fresh. The hard part was to stop blasting, even after the centaur went down. It managed to cut me once, being faster and tougher even than it looked. I didn’t care.

I stopped firing and heard something. I turned around quickly. There stood a second one. This one didn’t wait around. I fired as it charged, taking one of those freakish three-pronged hands off, then the shotgun clicked. The magazine was dry. The centaur-thing picked itself up and came at me again, and I met its head with the butt of my shotgun.

The fight went on for a while, and it became dirty at the end. I gouged at the eyes and hammered its skull with the barrel of my weapon. It took a long time to die, but it finally did so. My legs and arms were slashed and bleeding freely in spots, but I’d won. I roared at the centaur, snarling and gleeful. I hoped it was one of the ones that had gotten the kids. Mad with grief, I hoped that it had kids of its own.

At this point, I figured I had to expect more of these things. Would they give up after only two tries? There had to be more of them.

Some part of my brain that still insisted on thinking was stuck on the detail that these beings didn’t seem overly technological. Could such creatures have built this ship? They had hands, after a fashion. But why risk themselves to fight me without weapons? What was the purpose? Both the centaurs had been males. Was this some kind of tribal hunting expedition? A rite of manhood, perhaps?

I decided to stop worrying about anything other than making sure I kept breathing and they kept dying. Accordingly, I checked my wounds. I couldn’t find any serious injuries, just cuts and bruises. I used my teeth to tear my tee-shirt into strips and tied bandages around the worst spots.

Panting, I waited for the next centaur. The next one would take me, I was pretty sure. I was tired now, and out of shells. Even as a club, the Remington had done well, but I doubted it would win a third fight for me.

Getting an idea, I bent and tried to rip loose one of those foot-long horn-blades. Maybe, if I could snap it off, I could use it as a knife. The idea appealed to me, using the same blade they’d used on my kids to slash open the next one.