The moon finds Sam awake lying on his bed, thoughts lost on the girl he's driven home this afternoon from the lake.
Mikaela Barnes.
A silly smile appears on his face, only to vanish with a start at the sound of shrieking metal.
Looking out the window, the teenager feels his blood run cold.
Someone's standing in front of his car, forcing open the hood.
"Hey!"
The person doesn't react to his call, leaning over the vehicle's engines much like Mikaela had done that afternoon, and the clanking of metal grows.
Sam doesn't think twice as he speeds down the stairs.
When he walks out the door, whoever is in front of his car is still there, much to his relief—
The person jerks upright with the horrifying sound of ripping metal, a big piece of something sparking in their hands, before they start to run away.
Feeling his blood boil, Sam gets on his bike and pursues, taking out his cell and calling the police about the robbery.
He doesn't know what that person has done to his car, what has been stolen, but he knows one thing.
The thief is a damned cheetah.
He's pedaling as fast as he can, but the person, on foot, gets farther and farther away.
Finally, the thief jumps a wire fence—jumps, not climbs—and Sam is forced to leave the bike behind to follow.
Luckily, the person is not too far away, kneeling in front of a small pile of metal casings and sparking wires.
The teenager stops behind a pile of boxes and observes, trying to regain his breath and figure out why he has the feeling there's something really wrong there.
And then, as the thief moves in their crouch, he realizes what it is.
There's light bathing the pile, illuminating whatever the person's doing with what has been taken from his car and the other parts.
Pale blue light.
When the thief cocks their head to look at something on one corner of the thing, Sam's heart skips a beat.
The eyes are glowing.
The—the whatever that thing is stands, touching something on the pile before stepping back.
A beam of red light flashes upwards, and the teenager has to turn away.
When he can look again, his eyes meet two shining pale blue orbs in an eerily illuminated pale surface, wisps of something almost translucent dancing in front of it while two—two horns rise on the thing's head and—oh God it's staring at him.
Without time for even a second thought, Sam is running away, shrieking like a madman and ignoring the small cuts on his fingers as he climbs over the fence, not caring that he slams to the ground on the other side with enough strength to empty his lungs, not caring that he's almost running on all fours as he finds himself unable to get to his feet in his haste to get away.
It takes him some seconds to realize he's on his back, and that the thing in front of him is a police car and the light in his eyes is white, not blue, and coming from the lantern the very much human policeman is pointing at him.
He doesn't remember the ride. To him, it's like he's suddenly transported from the junkyard where that—that demon, alien, thing put on its light show, to the office he sits in, a cop on the other side of the desk and his father on the chair flanking his.
"So, the Devil stole your car's engine or something?"
"Or something, yes, I don't really know what it took, don't know all that much about car parts, but whatever it was it used it to… to finish and activate that alien flare!"
"Wow, I've gotta get me one of those." The policeman cuts dryly, leaning a bit forward over the desk. "What're you rolling kid?"
Frustration overwhelms him, and whatever his father solves with the cop is lost to him.
The worst of all is getting home to see the hood of his car open and have his father tell him that nothing was taken. Yes, it looks like someone rummaged a bit around, some wires are unplugged and a tube's disconnected, coolant all over the concrete under it, but all parts are there.
And yet, that alien-demon thingy definitely took something.
Or did it?
Was it even real?
William Lennox is not happy.
He's been in Qatar long enough, he was supposed to be on an aircraft back to the USA to reunite with his wife and meet his daughter for the first time.
Instead, he trudges through a desert with the survivors of his base, trying to locate somewhere to get a call to the Pentagon about the thing that attacked them.
It was nightfall. They were talking about their plans once they got back home, happy, laughing.
And then, they received the news about the unidentified copter approaching base.
They saw it be escorted down, and shrugged it off afterward. They were supposed to go rest, they had a plane to catch in the morning.
He put on the video-call, saw his ladies, talked a bit…
The base exploded.
The landing strip blasted off in a bubble of white light and blue flames, quickly followed by the red flares of crafts exploding, the shock-wave sending them all to the ground and covering them with sand as screams and cries and explosions and shots filled the air.
Communications was down.
Hysterical, worried and scared, they climbed to their feet.
And couldn't do more than watch.
It was chaos in its purest representation.
Blue blasts of light or energy collided against tanks, sending them flying and tumbling one over the other, explosions in their wake.
Chain explosions followed and soldiers ran all over the place like headless chickens, no one knowing what was going on, what to do.
And then, they saw it.
Something jumped out from the exploding main building, human-shaped yet completely alien, shooting those blue blasts from its right arm as the lights from them and the fire reflected on the armor covering it.
Epps lifted his binoculars, and took a picture.
And promptly fell back with a yelp as blazing red spheres looked right back at him when the thing turned its head.
The next shot of blue energy went to them, followed by the thing jumping down from the ruins of the burning building to land between the tanks as easily as any of them would if they jumped from a brick.
Something at its back stretched outwards, and it grabbed it, revealing its newest weapon.
The only thing that Lennox could think about was the rotor of a helicopter, each of the six blades as tall as a man and their edges glinting from their sharpness.
With a sweeping gesture, the thing threw it at them.
Two men were cut in half effortlessly before it went through a tank and turned around, cutting where they were standing less than a second ago before the thing grabbed it again, not even looking as it shot down more of the soldiers and armored vehicles.
When the burning red orbs turned to them again, the rotor already flying through another line of tanks and its right arm trained on them, Fig shot it.
Right on the face.
Only the Captain risked a quick glance as his men ran away, hidden behind the line of mostly intact tanks.
The thing's shot went astray due to the blast to the head, but it didn't act nor look even tickled by it.
It caught the rotor when it returned, a big piece of something detaching from its back and burrowing in the ground, and Lennox ran.
Even hidden behind who knows how many dunes, they were still able to see the fire and hear the explosions.
The thing wasn't taller than Epps.
And so here they are, trudging under the unforgiving Middle East sun after being witness to the decimation of a whole military base by one man.
One man-like creature.
The sight of the village in front of them makes Lennox's knees tremble, and not only from exhaustion.
The water tower falls down with an almost pained groan of metal.
While Fig shouts about, he guesses, his near death experience at being almost crushed by the tower, Lennox feels his stomach clench and something cold grip his backbone.
They aren't alone.
Sand explodes under Donnelly, and, next they know, the man is hanging from the air by the spear-headed cable through his heart, the sound of gears and metal grinding and an inhuman shriek coming from the boiling sand the tentacle-thing is coming out of.
They start running even before their comrade's dead body is flung to the side and the tentacle vanishes under the approaching and growing wave of sand.
They are running down the last dune between them and the village when Lennox, at the front, risks a look back.
The thing jumps from the sand with a swipe, trying to get at his fellow soldiers, before vanishing under it again.
It is like a gigantic metallic scorpion with drills instead of pincers.
Rushing into the village towards the man with the telephone in his hand, the Captain corrects himself.
They've seen their whole base destroyed by a single human-like creature.
Of course he's just seen a gigantic metallic scorpion with a spear-headed tentacle for tail and drills for pincers moving through the sand with as much ease as a shark in the sea.
The real question now is, can they survive it?
Shouting through the phone at the idiotic woman on the other side of the line for her to patch him to the Pentagon, he can only watch with growing unease and horror as the thing jumps to the surface and starts shooting at his carefully positioned men with its tail, using the same kind of bluish energy the human-like one used back on the base.
It isn't very big, its body as long as a ten year old child's height, but those enormous, bladed, constantly spinning and also shooting pincers make it appear bigger, not to mention that nimble metallic tail.
Its body is a dark brown dull metal-plated thing covering gears and cables and more metallic pieces, every part moving swiftly against each other, easily, better than the best coiled machine, more like a real scorpion's body-plates than one of those clumsy reconnaissance robots they saw on a trial run some weeks ago.
It is almost organic in its movements, in its fluidity, in its acting, except for the fact that—well, that it isn't.
When the planes appear on the sky, he can't be more grateful.
And then they fire, but they only manage to raise sand and annoy the thing, that tries to shoot down the crafts, and his heart sinks.
He hears Epps, hidden next to him and using their short-distance radio, shout something, most likely at the planes, but he can only look in desperation as the beast keeps firing, keeps moving, almost like it is—
Four balls of red light land on them, and the screech the thing lets out is almost triumphant.
Both pincers and the tail turn to them, its six feet taking it closer and closer to them—
The beast's scream is pained as the next round of shots proves accurate, a wall of sand hiding it from sight.
And then, as their visibility returns, he sees it vanish under the sand, tunneling away from danger with those drill-like pincers, as the tail moves to the sides before detaching, falling to the sand twitching as the beast disappears.
When Lennox approaches what is left of their attacker, something clenches in his chest.
The smell coming from the charred appendage is a mix of the acrid of molten metal and burnt flesh, purplish rust-red liquid staining the sand and falling from the cuts and perforations and the broken end of the tail, even as sparks flash from broken wires and dance on the dark plating.
"What was that thing?" Epps whispers, horrified, and his Captain finds himself without words.
