Invasive

The man with one arm came out of the dark desert and sat at their campfire the night before the assault. He did not look anywhere but at the fire, and they thought maybe he had gone mad in the wasteland. Their fingers slipped to smooth rifle butts and worn knife grips. They moved and thought as one now, after so long together, but they still looked to their leader for guidance. Kat's studious face was closed off, everything soft made hard.

“Help you?”

The stranger still didn't look away from the fire. His arm stopped at the middle of his bicep. His long sleeve had been pinned up against the stump. It drew the eye, the rest of his plain appearance funneling their gazes to that single point.

“Only if you want to,” he said at last.

They were all soldiers, even if they hadn't all started life with that in mind. Road-weary bones laced with the gristly lean muscle of survivors, all wearing the blue armband that passed for a uniform since so many of theirs had worn out and would never be replaced. They were visibly armed, and had the look of those who have seen horror and expect to see more.

This stranger had nothing, not even provisions, but he wasn't afraid. He stared into the fire as if seeing some other place.

Kat nodded to the soldier sitting closest to the newcomer. “Give him some water, Wes.”

The skinny boy started to protest, but at a single dark look from his commander, he sullenly handed over his canteen. The man drank only a few sips before handing it back with a nod. Wes's scowl evaporated into confusion as he studied the man's desiccated look and cracked lips.

“Where'd you come from?” Kat asked.

“Camp Ulysses.”

“On the coast?” Rex, a man with a full bristling beard and arms as big as the gun propped next to him, whistled low under his breath. “You cross that desert alone?”

The stranger nodded.

“What happened to your arm?” Wes blurted.

The man glanced down as if he'd forgotten about the pinned sleeve. In the quiet moment, Kat pursed her lips at the teenager and he hiked his shoulders up around his ears. Ford, a woman with close-cropped white hair who sat next to Wes, cradling her rifle like a baby, gave him a light backhand to the shoulder.

“One of the larvae got me,” the man said at last. “I was drunk. Being an idiot. Fell into the sea. My brother dragged me out with one of them clamped into my forearm, all lamprey teeth and muscle. I'm lucky to be alive.”

He said these last words like a recording of someone else. He'd worked his shirt off his shoulder and they could see now, in the dim flickering light, the sickening gray pallor to the skin, the green-black veins beneath it like seaweed under ice, the tips of the slender tendrils fraying, slithering further, invading.

“It's still a race to see if the venom hits my brain or my heart first,” he said with the calm finality of a man proclaiming the sun will rise. “Taking the arm only gave me some time.”

“You cut your own arm off?” Wes whispered.

“Don't be stupid.” The man's sharp look was softened somewhat by a tiny smirk. “I asked someone else to do it.”

Wes stared. The man's eyes were like two black pits, empty, and the boy looked away.

“Why come out here?” asked Ford.

“I'm going to Henderson.”

“What's in Henderson?”

“My brother's wife.”

Rex laughed as though this were a naughty joke, but stopped quickly when no one else joined.

“What happened to your brother?” Kat asked quietly.

“He dragged me to shore, pushed me up onto the rocks. But he didn't climb up after me in time. When I'd turned around, there was only red seafoam.”

They all dropped their gazes into the fire now. Rex fingered the bands of automatic ammunition. Wes traced tally marks on the arm of his makeshift body armor like a man praying a rosary. Something miles away screamed in the dark and they told themselves it was just an animal.

“How are we gonna clean out the frigging ocean?” Rex muttered.

“We're not,” Ford said, her eyes glittering in the firelight. “We're going to fight them forever.”

“I heard that's where they came from,” Wes piped up, back straightening. “They lived at the bottom of the ocean until it started losing salt and getting warmer. We made them come up because they couldn't live there anymore. And now...now we can't live here anymore.”

His words had grown quieter as he talked, and now he looked toward the desert beyond the light of the fire. He had not been alive when the land around them had been green foothills building to the towering mountain range, but he had heard the stories. Rex disturbed the silence with a quick spit at the base of the fire.

“Scientists keep changin' their minds every day,” he retorted. “You ever seen one of the big ones up close, kid? That ain't of Earth. Aliens. Gotta be.”

The stranger had watched this exchange, his eyes leaving the fire to bounce between speakers. He looked back to Kat when it was finished.

“Are you out here hunting?”

“That's all we do,” Rex muttered.

“Yes,” Kat answered, ignoring him. “There's an old flooded cistern in the area that's become infested. From what we can tell, it seems to be a nest.”

The man looked away from her toward the other campfires dotting the darkness. The topography of the land could almost be determined just by connecting points of light. The shadows hunched around them were harder to count.

“Lot of soldiers for one nest.”

“That's the only way to do it,” Rex said. He was grinning, but it made his jaw flex. “We practically gotta throw bodies at 'em just to get the payload to the center.”

The man thought about this. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a sparkle of silver. Like one organism, they leaned forward to see the firelight flicker on polished metal, the curving shape of a heart well-worn by constant touches. They watched the man dig one dirty fingernail into a hidden seam and open the locket, turning one heart into two. He studied the inside for a long moment before speaking.

“This was my brother's. His wife gave it to him on the day he and I left to go build the bombs to fight the invaders. He kept it under his clothes so it would be clean. Always took it off before getting into water. Even before...” He swallowed, the first flicker of a frown creasing between his eyebrows. “He must've... He jumped in, you see. I fell in and he jumped in after me. He must've taken it off before he jumped. I found it tangled in the rocks when I went back to the cliff to... Well, never mind what for. I'm bringing it back to her. She needs to know what happened.”

He looked up, directly at Kat.

“Her picture is in here. With his. Do you think you could find her if I gave you the last address I had for her?”

Kat made her voice hard like her face. “What are you saying?”

“In the desert, I came across a hunting pack,” the man said. “They crawl slow when they're hunting, I think. Pull with all their limbs and drag instead of lifting their bodies up. I ran when I saw them. I thought I could— They looked so awkward on dry land. I didn't know how fast they could move. But once they'd caught me with all those limbs, grabbed and pinned and opened their mouths, all they did was prod around my shoulder. And then they crawled away again. They didn't leave a scratch.”

The soldiers didn't breathe. Kat wanted to ask again what he meant, but she didn't want the answer and her throat had tightened and closed.

“I think I smell like them,” the man said. “That, or they decided I was too rotted to eat.”

He looked up directly at Kat.

“I could get your bomb past them.”

“No.” Her answer came firm and immediate. “It's a short timer. You'd never make it back to the surface with...”

Her gaze faltered to his missing arm.

“How many men will you lose tomorrow?” he asked.

She closed her lips tightly.

“How many?” he asked, harsher now.

“The average reported losses on a nest this size is half.”

“Half.” The man's empty eyes were a little fuller now. “You'd lose half the people sitting here rather than one man?”

“I can't ask you to do this,” she snapped. “I can't let you do this. You're a civilian.”

“Not anymore. And you're not a soldier either. We're all just survivors. A sad species crawling through the dust looking for a way out. Except the planet's dying under us, and it'll all be over before your grandchildren grow up, probably. But I'll be dead long before that, and who knows what'll happen once I'm gone? I can do this. I can do something.”

Kat had no response, but she shook her head and looked away. She tried to look at his strange eyes, his missing arm, the glimmer on his palm, even at the fire, but only the dark night was comfortable.

“How...how long do you have?” Wes asked, nodding toward the man's covered shoulder.

The man only shrugged.

“You've still got time, though,” the teenager pressed. “Don't you want all you can have? Don't you want to live?”

“Don't you?” the man snapped back.

Wes looked down at his hands and the gun cradled in them. He looked suddenly very old. No one had anything else to say. They looked to their leader for guidance. Kat could feel their eyes and stared at the man once more, who gazed back at her without flinching. Waiting.

“Stay here tonight,” she said finally, quiet enough the words almost slipped lost under the crackle of the fire. “If you still want to do this by sunrise, I won't stop you.”

The man nodded. No one spoke after that. Some eventually laid down, pretending they wanted sleep. Even in the desert, there were no stars anymore, only haze. Yet, the traveler stared up into the dark vault and Kat watched him.

They stood on the lip of the cistern's opening at sunrise. The level of the water had risen to about a meter below their feet. It was not still. The one-armed man wore the bomb like a satchel. Rex had rigged it up for him so he could use his good arm to swim down to where the egg clutches lay.

Kat told him one more time that he could leave.

The man frowned at the water in silence. Already the desert sun pricked sweat on their skin. He'd told her everything about his brother and his brother's wife and where they'd lived before the world fell apart. He'd told her more than he'd ever told any person.

“What's your name?” Kat asked.

“My name was Callen Burke.”

He looked at the chain of the locket trailing from her gloved fist, and thanked her. Then he was gone. They stood around the disturbed water, watching it slosh and spray, watching the shadow of a man disappear below the murk. Behind them, arrayed across the sand, soldiers stood confused but silent. They all waited breathlessly for the thunder.