Chapter Eighteen - Cowardly Critter

Mem was scared, but she knew that she had to pretend to not be scared. Her humans were depending on her!

Nom and Bam cheered as they ran off into the dark. There were things moving there, big scary things that were stomping out of the water and heading up the beach towards their camp. Mem saw the cultivators with them moving up towards the beach while Nom and Bam’s humans grabbed their things in a hurry and followed.

“We should move up,” the mean cultivator that was part of Mem’s humans said.

Mem hesitated. She saw all the humans and her sisters going to fight, and some of them were forming lines and such, but that felt wrong. She didn’t want to fight, especially not when she knew that there were more things in the dark than her sisters knew about. “No,” she said with a shake of her head like the humans did. “There are things in the dark behind us.”

The mean cultivator scoffed. “Yes, I’m certain. But the fight is that way,” he said with a gesture towards the beach.

Mem shuffled. “If you want to go fight, then go fight,” she said. “I’m going to stay here and wait. I don’t want to fight while there’s a fight behind me that isn’t an expected fight.”

The mean cultivator shook his head. “Coward,” he growled. Mem made herself smaller as he bumped past her. “Any of you who don’t want to be remembered as fools, follow me!” he called back.

A few of Mem’s humans left, and with every one, Mem felt herself growing a bit sadder.

“Ma’am?”

Mem looked up. The young human, the one that had given her some soup just a bit ago, was standing not too far ahead of her. He had five or six others behind him. Mem spread her mandibles wide, like a smile, but more Mem-like. “You’re staying?”

“Uh, yes ma’am,” the human said. “I believe you when you say that there’re people in the dark.”

Mem wanted to hug him, but it was one of her personal rules that she could only be hugged, and not hug others. She had too many little spikes and her arms were too sharp for hugging. As of yet, she hadn’t received any hugs from others, but she hoped that one day that would change.

Looking over her shoulder at the camp, Mem came to a decision. “Okay. We will stay here. Can we make the fires brighter?”

The humans, Mem’s humans, nodded and jumped to it. Soon, more wood was piled onto the fires in Nom and Bam’s camps, and the darkness around receded a little.

There had to be more she could do.

Mem scurried over to the side of the camp closest to the beach and tried to peer into the dark. It was helped by some of Nom and Bam’s humans having torches lighting the world around them. They were mostly gathered around some big dead thing. Mem could make out Nom attop the big thing, chopping down at it with both arms.

Was it already over?

The humans seemed to think so. Some were already making their way back.

Mem felt very silly. She had refused to go out and fight, and it turned out that she wouldn’t even have been needed in the fight.

She started thinking of excuses to give to Nom and Bam and the mean cultivator when they returned when she noticed one of the humans coming up the hill near the beach drop.

Had he tripped?

Mem could sympathize.

Another human ran over to him, then screamed when something jumped out of the ground and crashed into his front. Metal glinted in the starlight as that human was killed.

Mem stepped back a little, closer to the cover of the tents and the warmth of the fires. There were still things in the dark.

The humans charged at the one thing, but it ran off into the bushes and craggy rocks around the shore, and soon the humans chasing after it had to spread out, with their few torches held high to illuminate the dark.

Mem flinched when one of them flopped down, a pair of arrows sprouting out of his side. He was one holding a torch, a torch that fell and that was extinguished a moment later.

That was enough for Mem. She ran back to the middle of the camps. “Come here! Here here, please!”

Her humans came closer, they looked a little confused, Mem thought. Or maybe they needed to poop. It was hard to read human faces. They didn’t move their arms and they didn’t have mandibles.

“We need to be ready,” Mem said. “There are things coming. They’re killing the other humans.” Something screeched. Something that wasn’t in the direction of the water. It sounded big. “We need to be ready!”

“Right,” the human boy said. “Do we have bows? Spears? Maybe we can make walls with the tents?”

Mem shook her upper body up and down. “Yes, do that kind of thing,” she said.

Her humans started running around, and soon they were moving tents around and pushing rocks and lifting logs together. Their walls weren’t very big, but they were coming up quickly. Some more humans joined them, looking more pale than usual as they ran out of the dark and to the edge of the camps.

Mem’s humans screamed at them and soon they were helping to move things too.

Mem wanted to help, but she didn’t have hands. All she had was her ability to be kinda sneaky for very short periods of time before she got bored.

She would put that to good use! Scouting was supposed to be important. She’d heard some of the older soldier-humans talk about that kind of thing.

The problem was that scouting out in the dark was scary.

Mem looked up at the stars and prayed a little. Not to her mom, who was always a bit mean, and who sometimes ate the sisters that were nicer to Mem, but to anything out there in the sky that would be nice to her.

She found her humans, still preparing a wall of stuff. Their little walled area wasn’t very big, but the walls they were making were growing taller by the minute. They were nearly as tall as a man’s hips already.

“I’m going to go in the dark to see what’s coming,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

The humans looked to each other, then nodded.

Mem waved them good-bye, then scrambled over the wall, tripped on a cleverly placed bit of wood, then tumbled down the other side.

Mem was impressed. Her humans had had time to put traps on the walls already!

Shaking herself off, Mem scurried into the dark, then slowed as she reached the edge where the light of the fires faded out and the true dark of the night took over.

She stayed low, and instead of walking around as quickly as she could, stalked forwards with slow, halting movements. Her ears were peeled, and everyone of her eyes were looking this way and that to see if there was anything in the dark.

She found the first monster soon enough. A pair of skeletons, with long wooden bows in one hand and a little quiver at their hip filled with bristly arrows. The skeletons were moving the same way she was, with slow gestures and backs hunched so that they could use the bushes and outcrops of rock as cover.

Mem hesitated and looked back. The camp was still in sight. Maybe...

She didn’t know how to count distances very well.

The camp was maybe fifty Mems away, if all the Mems were laid out on the ground flat on their tummies and with their arms and legs outstretched.

She was pretty sure someone good with a bow could fire that far, which meant that her humans were in danger from these two.

This wasn’t scouting anymore, not if she tried to fight.

Mem didn’t have a choice!

She bunched up her legs under her, shuffled her rear to make sure her stance was good, then leaped forwards. She hissed as hard as she could when she was in mid-air, because hissing was a good way to scare things, then landed on one of the skeletons.

The skeleton was fast to react, but it was too late for it to guard against Mem. Mem was atop it stabbing down as hard and fast as she could.

Most of her strikes glanced off bones, or missed outright, but some of them chopped into the skeleton. One lucky strike snipped the string on the skeleton’s bow, and the wood straightened with a snap.

Mem hissed when the bow wood smacked her in the face.

She tripped back, but her foot caught in the skeleton’s legs, and instead of falling like she normally did, she crashed into the other skeleton and accidentally stabbed it through the skull.

Mem fought a bit more, but after a bit, she realized the neither skeleton was fighting back.

The mantis raised her arms and hissed victoriously. She’d done it!

Screams from the camp had her turning, and she felt her blood running warm.

The huge monster that her sisters had killed at the beach was back! No! It couldn’t be the same one, because there were two of them lumbering towards the camp, with a bunch of strange people next to them that were walking with strange, clumsy gaits. More undead?

Mem forgot stealth and ran back towards her camp. She only tripped twice along the way, but she made it there before the monsters had time to reach the walls.

Her humans, and a few more besides, were hiding behind the walls, spears out and poking over the rocks and bits of wood and camp stuff that they’d stacked up around them.

Mem climbed up the wall and landed on the other side. She stood up and saw that the humans there were very pale and some of them were shaking a little. There was a stink in the air, like meat that if she ate would give her belly the rumbles. “They’re undead,” she said.

“Oh no,” one of the humans said, his voice all trembly and scared.

“There have to be dozens of them,” another human said.

Mem didn’t know about that. She hadn’t counted them. There were only two big ones coming towards them, but she couldn’t see how many smaller, human-sized undead were with them.

“Down!” someone called.

A few humans ducked and one screamed as an arrow sprouted from his shoulder.

“Shields!” one of Mem’s humans said and they raised up planks and bits of tent all around their little wall to make it harder for arrows to hit them.

“Where are the cultivators?” a human asked.

That was a good question. Where was the mean cultivator? Where were her sisters? She couldn’t hear any fighting, so maybe they were on their way back?

Mem climbed onto the wall on the side facing the beach, then stared into the dark. A lumbering form was coming up from that way, with thinning things next to it. Most undead. And if they were coming from the direction, that could only mean...

Mem didn’t have much time to mourn her sisters, or even the mean cultivator. They were gone, but her humans weren’t, and it was her job to keep them safe.

The undead continued to approach, and occasionally an arrow whizzed by.

The tension rose.

Some of the humans fired back towards the undead, but it was hard to see anything in the dark, and Mem was pretty sure they were missing more often than not.

She had to do something.

So she did.

Mem climbed onto the wall before the humans, pushing aside some spears as she did so. It was cowardly of her to do this, but then, she was already called a coward, wasn’t she?

The mantis raised both arms as high as they would go. Not in anger, but in surrender. “Okay!” she called out. “It’s okay! Mem surrenders. Mem and her humans surrender. Please.”

She didn’t sniffle. Her mom would be angry. So would her sisters.

“Mem surrenders, please!”