Insert a lot of jeers, yelling and accusations of dishonesty and insanity from us in the role of angry villagers. It didn’t trouble our guests, they were used to it.
When there was no light, the things died.
They had scientists who couldn’t explain it any more than they could explain the creatures themselves. The things were dead for all intents and purposes, then the moon came back or the sun came up, and they were alive. They learned this in the worst possible way which was, we could all agree, how too many things got learned lately.
A member of a scouting party from one of their camps had been out on a food run and had tripped over one of the things. Then, feeling around, the poor guy had realised that he and his crew were standing in a whole field of them. Considering they weren’t being ripped to shreds they figured something was up. They dragged two of the things back to camp with the idea of studying them, maybe figuring out what had killed them in case it was something they could replicate. But when the light of their camp hit the creatures…well, according to Steve, from a camp of over a hundred people, there had been two survivors to tell the tale and one of them was the guy who’d tripped over them in the field.
Never let it be said the universe does not have a sense of humour.
This was why Al had said “fully dead” for Cecil. You took their heads off or you took their hearts out. You could bomb them or grenade them but the residual light created by those methods was less than helpful which was another hard lesson with a tragicomic story attached. Guns were ok but apparently you had to just about pour bullets down their throats for them to have any real effect and you wanted to be sure to use a suppressor to avoid muzzle flash. The simple tools were the best. Knives, picks, crowbars.
So, the expensive lesson was, by all means bring one in for study if you could grab it on a full-dark night, just be sure to make it full-dead first.
And what had these years of study, of daring to watch, follow and kill the creatures, taught these people?
The creatures loved to destroy.
This one we knew already but thanks for the info. We’d all seen it. Cars ripped open long after anyone would have been in them to be attacked. Buildings reduced to rubble, trees knocked down and taken apart. To be honest, I’d never really spent any time dwelling on it. The creatures were dicks; this was just part of our decades’ old reality.
The creatures loved eating people.
No shit, right?
But the sad fact with which they followed this bit of non-news was; they didn’t need to eat people. They weren’t even carnivores. They took a passing interest in killing other animals for fun, but we were the only species that really made them hard and hungry. They just loved us. Loved hunting us, tearing us apart, devouring us. But they couldn’t even digest us properly.
“What really sustains them? What do they live on? Any guesses?” Al, sounding like a gameshow host. I think he really would have waited for us to start guessing if Steve hadn’t backhanded him on the shoulder to hurry him up. We wouldn’t have had any guesses anyway because it was another part of our shitty reality that we were what they were living on.
“Rocks. Stones. Pebbles.”
He wasn’t joking. And eventually, I’d learn he wasn’t lying or exaggerating either. The things ate rocks to live, they just ate us for the taste. I mean, we all knew they were dicks, but that was extra shitty behaviour. Al said that the only other animal known to live off rocks was a rare type of clam called Lithoredo abatanica and since they didn’t have any of those on hand to interrogate, the connection didn’t help to shed much light on anything.
“So, to summarise,” Al said, his voice noticeably hoarse after almost two hours of talking, “they couldn’t really be any more vicious or more perfectly designed to kill if someone had really been trying. Just a thought, class.”
We’d all wondered, since Day One. Freaks of nature or acts of God? Visitors from outer space or handcrafted, man-made weapons of self-destruction? We’d never know and we’d all made our peace with that. At the end of the day, at the end of days, it didn’t really make a big difference if the vehicle running over you was a Japanese truck or a European sedan. You were getting run over just the same.
Eventually, Al, Steve and Fred had nothing left to tell, they only had something left to ask. The question they had risked their lives to bring to us.
Q: Knowing what you now know, knowing who we are, will you fight with us?526Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUFfTCPGklA
