It’s almost three months since they appeared. One day there was a barely noticed news story about a team of missing miners (too bad, that’s what they’re paid extra for), the next there was a flurry of parka-clad reporters at the site offering breathless conjecture and absolutely no information after three of the miners’ bodies were excavated with mutilations allegedly not fitting the results of a cave-in. They could offer no explanation for the localised tremors and/or earthquakes (the wording depended on the station; one reporter insisted on referring to them as “ground-shakes”) that surrounded the site. A few days went by with a lot of boring footage that mostly consisted of the reporters asking harassed looking men in hard hats questions they were unable or unwilling to answer.
The world, with its short attention span, poised itself to move on to the next distraction but then, before there was even time to organise the celebrity-studded relief concert for the widows that would act as the signal that it was really time to excise the situation completely from your thoughts, there was a thunderous, rending crash followed by several TV channels worth of screaming, topsy-turvy footage as everyone’s news cameras followed everyone’s news reporters freefalling into whatever horrific womb the hapless miners and the waiting creatures had forged together.
Everything fell apart quickly after that. There’s too many of them and they’re too fast. They spread like a virus, like fire. I don’t know if they swam, flew or teleported around the world. I don’t know if they breed like hyped-up rabbits or multiply in some other way or if there was just that many of them hidden in whatever forgotten pocket of the earth those poor guys opened up. I don’t know any of these things because nobody had time to make a Wikipedia page, nobody got close enough and lived (as far as I know) to pull them apart and figure things out. There were social media posts from cornered people saying goodbye to their loved ones, then there were no posts, then there was no social media.
If we had been given more time we could have done something. Banded together, built shelters, bunkers, tunnels. Stockpiled. Our governments would have had time to save us, the armies and the navies and the air forces and anyone else willing would have had time to protect us. I like to think they are still out there, soldiers and scientists, making big plans, making big moves. I know they’re not here, not anywhere I can see them or the good they might be doing but hopefully they are somewhere doing this good.
My wife was in the wrong place at the wrong time when they spread to our part of the world. Stuck in a traffic jam, trying to get home to me, to safety. If we had taken the ridiculous images we were seeing on the news more seriously she would have been with me. If we had associated the horrific things we were seeing happen to people in other countries with anything that could ever have possibly happened to us she might be here with me now.
She called me, told me she could see them working their way along the packed cars in front of her. She used the word “monsters” and I told her to lock her doors. She used the words “I love you” and I told her I knew, told her the same. I used the words “It’s not fair” and she told me fair had nothing to do with it. She never believed me when I used to tell her she was the bravest person I ever knew. I hope she believed me the last time I told her.
People were trying to ram their way out of the gridlock and get away. People were trying to escape their cars and run. My wife saw what happened to these people and decided to stay where she was and call me instead. I hope I was worth something to her in the end, I hope I made her at least a tiny bit less afraid or less alone. She told me she was going to hang up because she didn’t want me to hear what they would do to her. I told her not to dare, she used the word “goodbye” and I tried to tell her it wasn’t goodbye yet, that she still had a chance, but she was already gone.538Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtW0REA84ao
