The grisly sight of an open topped head coming at me with the brain spilling out almost made me brown my pants. I side stepped and gave him the old buttstroke to the head with my shotgun, but it was like hitting a rubber practice dummy. There was a little give, but his entire body tensed and he was barely thrown off balance. He grabbed my left wrist with both hands so hard the bones touched. My vision went white with pain, but I kept my left hand locked onto my shotgun. When my vision came back he was trying to pull me in and bare me down to the ground. My right hand was already drawing my pocket knife, a spring-loaded folding knife that’s somewhat illegal outside of the military or law enforcement. On instinct I started stabbing towards his lungs when his stupid flashlight, that he was still holding in his mouth for some reason, angled to shine directly into my eyes.

If a buttstock to the head and a shotgun to the dome didn’t put this guy down I'm not sure a knife in the lungs will. I wish I could say my intent was to put him down, but I was really a reflex to having that particular white led light color shine directly into my eyes, I swung my knife up into the bottom of his jaw. I felt resistance then a pop and tasted myself being electrocuted. He collapsed backwards, pulling my knife out of my grip. Slightly dazed and with the familiar sensation of adrenaline starting to drip into my system I considered what had just happened. This wasn’t a death spasm of the motor cortex not knowing the rest of the brain was dead. He somehow continued to move and attack with the lack of the majority of a brain. I reached a conclusion in those moments; I’m losing my mind.

I'm not what society would consider a stable person, I spent the last couple years in the army visiting mental health every few days, and now I finally snapped. I reviewed my actions, the choices I had made over the past thirty or so minutes, tried to objectively decide if I had a mental break. The finger impressions on my forearm and difficulty I had moving my left hand decided it for me, I'm not going insane, something crazy is happening.

I was pulled out of my mental review by when I heard a thumping that I realized was the old man walking towards me, his motions were ponderous, weighed down by his outrageous outfit. Fighting through numb fingers that barely wanted to work, I performed the practiced motions of drawing shotgun shells from my ammo pouch and reloading. Glad I had spent hours at the range practicing the movements, I dropped in two buckshot shells from my right pouch and didn’t take a chance. I immediately aimed directly for his mouth and emptied both barrels, turning his face into a ruined mess of meat and bone. Everything that was above his shoulders was now re-arranged and relocated to somewhere a few feet behind him. He had the sense to stop moving at that point, but not the sense to fall down and die.

His body rippled with motion, as the strange disks that made up his coveralls started to shift. Each disk started to shine a flashlight from one end, then they started dropping off him in a cascade starting at the shoulders. They fell in a pile around his feet and the ones at the top of the pile started sprouting wires and a small white led light activated on each of them. The glow of the lights illuminated a lot of detail I wish I didn’t have to witness. Each disk was about two inches wide and one inch thick, they had five wires coming out of their sides, equally distributed. Then they started to move, using their wire thin appendages they started pushing and pulling their way towards me. There had to be hundreds of them, the old man was far more frail than I had thought, glancing up I realized he wasn’t just frail, he was emaciated in a way that I have never seen outside of pictures of starvation. Everything I thought was bulk before was actually just layers of these disks. Only a few were left on his body, they looked to be supporting his weight. In the moments I took to reload the strange technological spiders to spread and towards me along the ground. They weren’t very fast, they must have been using that old man’s frame as some kind of transport or carrier.

I clamped down on the useless rising panic I felt trying to gain momentum in my chest, instead of indulging it I considered if I had enough ammo to address the problem in front of me. I likely did not, but I also didn’t think these things would stay put while I jogged home to get more, I also didn’t want to leave these things to attack more people. I needed something that could be fun for the family, looking around I spotted a minivan parked on the other side of the intersection that I decided would work. I just hope they gassed up.

With some effort I managed to retrieve my pocket knife from the jaw of the man I had stabbed, then took a moment to check inside his mouth. I noticed that his skin was already cold and pale, like he had been dead for longer than a few moments. The flashlight in his mouth had gone dark, but turned out to be another one of the disks that was crawling towards me. The disk in his mouth had the wires extruding down the back of his throat, these things are piloting us like we are some kind of... some kind of muppet. Whatthefuckingshit, I need to collect one for study. I pulled the disk out and the wires came with it, after I pulled about a foot of viscera coated wiring out I used my knife to cut them and tucked the disk into an empty grenade/snack pouch on my belt.

I jogged around the spreading pool of spider-things and crawled under the back passenger side of the minivan, reached up with my knife, and sawed through one of the fuel lines. I then stood up and started breaking out the windows. That set the alarm off but that was all part of the plan. I climbed on top of my bait car and saw with satisfaction that the spider-things were starting to move towards the flashing lights and blaring horn... slowly.

It took several minutes for the spiders to reach the minivan, their strange appendages seemed to not be well suited to crawling. I used the time to clean the blood spatter off my eye protection and realized that the night wasn't as dark as I thought it was, my dumb ass grabbed sunglasses instead of clear eye-pro. I tried to keep watch in multiple directions so I wouldn’t get surprised. The smell of gasoline started to get heavy in the air as the fuel tank drained onto the road. A peek over the edge of the van roof let me see some of the spiders were pulling themselves under the van while others were climbing the tires and body. Thanks to their lights I could see their legs actually end in points they are using to puncture the body of the van for grip. I watched, somewhat fascinated, as they started pulling themselves into the broken windows or up their frames as they tried to reach the roof. When the first spider started to haul itself over the edge of the roof I jumped down the opposite direction, the entire area around the van is covered in disks crowding each other for their chance to climb the van, I barely cleared them and land in a front yard then take off running down the street in the direction the vehicle’s fuel was flowing. The fuel had reached the nearest storm drain and as I ran past I fired a tube of buckshot directly into it. The mussel flash is enough to ignite the fuel and fire raced along the gutter towards the van.

I kept running and heard a loud WHUMP behind me as the fuel vapors accumulated around the van combust. When I was around 50 yards away I slowed down to look back in time to catch the fuel left in the tank combust with a loud hiss of expanding gasses turning the former minivan into an inferno. I can hear dozens of pops like firecrackers going off, I see small burning disks pull themselves free of the fire, one of them makes it a few feet before collapsing then exploding in a green flash.

Fire, it has always been one of man’s most ancient tools, I'm gladdened to see it works against these things. Not wanting to be exposed by the light, I move into the deeps shadows created by the light from the burning car. Over the sound of the burning car I can still hear small arms fire in most directions, but then it gradually dies off with only a few shots now and then. I almost want to hold my breath, that means the fight is over, one way or another.