ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #42: Giant Scorpions vs. Spider Squadron

Terlingua, Texas – Mid March

Agent Three, Suzanne “Rocky” Rockford

I pressed myself against the mud-brick wall and shielded my ears, but the concussion from the exploding shell still rattled my bones and cascaded a cloud of the ghost town’s ever-present ochre grit into my face and eyes.

I glanced at Agent Eight, “Wild Bill” Hayes, braced against the adobe wall next to me. “You okay?”

He bobbed his head and clutched his M3 submachine gun eagerly. “Never better. Let’s kill these suckers and find out what they did to Donna.”

After discovering his wife had been replaced by some kind of oversized duplicate, I’d thought Bill could use a “regular” mission to keep him occupied. Now I hoped his gung-ho enthusiasm wouldn’t get us both killed. It would have been pointless to remind him that the real enemy was whoever created both the giant scorpions we were fighting and the titanic version of his wife.

The ground trembled again, but not from another explosion or one of Spider Squadron’s tanks.

“They’re coming!” I pointed toward a nearby crumbling structure. “Move!”

We dashed across the dusty main street just as a black scorpion the size of a school bus toppled the wall where we’d been hiding.

Bricks and debris cascaded harmlessly off of the thing’s segmented black armor. Pincers big as kayaks threshed, snapping and seeking prey. The bug’s doll-like black eyes glinted wickedly under the beating sun. It hissed, filling the hot afternoon air with the stench of rotting meat.

Bill fired a couple of rounds to discourage our foe, but I think that only enticed it to chase us.

Somehow, the scorpions had set up a nest near the abandoned mining town of Terlingua, Texas, little more than an unpaved thoroughfare and a maze of narrow alleyways between two dozen ruined buildings. Before the few remaining locals could react, the place had been overrun.

The U.S. Science Bureau mobilized Spider Squadron—the bug-fighting branch of our agency—and sent me and Bill along to coordinate. But despite having Huntsman Company and a couple of Sherman tanks, with air support from an Orb-Weaver wing on the way, we’d underestimated the size of the problem.

Right now, that problem was large enough to slice Bill and me in half with two quick snips—if it caught us.

“Bill, go left! Crossfire on its eyes!” I cut right, trusting that Agent Eight would follow my orders.

He did, and—as I’d hoped—splitting up baffled the scorpion.

Bill and I wheeled and emptied our M3 “grease guns” into the monster’s face.

The bug’s thick shell blunted the damage, so it didn’t die, but the slugs from our greasers blew its main eyes all to hell.

“Let’s finish it!” Bill shouted, raring to move in.

But I waved him off, remembering from a Teragon lecture that many scorpions have lateral proto-eyes, sensitive to light and movement. Even half blinded, the brute could still mince us.

I pointed to a nearby rise, hoping to gain an overview of the battlefield.

As the scorpion snapped and twisted from side to side in confusion, Eight and I crossed a rocky defile—dodging a rain of mortar debris—and scampered up a low, sandy hill. The air stank of gunpowder, dust, dry brush, and the foul reek of the scorpions. The roar of the Squadron’s two M4 Shermans, the punt and boom of mortars, the occasional sharp blast of bazookas, and the snapping hiss of the titan arachnids echoed in our ears.

Our side was well equipped, but the scorpions were tough, and there were a lot of them.

Unfortunately, the USSB hadn’t yet fabricated enough Compound T—our new “bug spray”—to deploy against an incursion this large.

Spider Squadron’s main group stood massed in the north end of the ghost town, while a still-unknown number of scorpions were swarming in from the rugged terrain and abandoned mineworks to the west.

I spat some of the town’s ever-present yellowish grit from my mouth and cursed. Eight and I had ended up in the south section of the old settlement, cut off from our forces.

Fighting proceeded from alley to dust-caked alley. Squadron members dodged between the ghost town’s crumbling buildings, avoiding the bugs while getting in some solid hits. Despite our initial surprise, our command structure looked to be rallying.

Unfortunately, the enemy’s eight legs gave them both speed and mobility, plus their enormous claws and deadly stings. These arachnids were bigger and tougher than the giant ants the Squadron usually battled.

As Bill and I reconnoitered, four flamethrower jeeps fanned out to the west and south—heading our way—trying to herd our foes toward the deserted town’s center. Crackling spouts of fire churned up the reek of smoke and gasoline. If we failed to wipe out this incursion, the invaders would quickly spread to Mexico—assuming they didn’t have nests of king-sized bugs down there already.

“Suzanne, look out!”

Eight barreled into me, knocking us to the ground, as a venom-dripping stinger whipped overhead—barely.

Bill and I grunted as we rolled down the hillside, obliterating clumps of dry scrub and careening over the rocky ground. This was gonna hurt tomorrow—assuming we lived that long.

We landed in a heap at the bottom of the rise and clambered to our feet, expecting to be arachnid chow at any moment.

But our falling off the hilltop flummoxed the scorpion. It took the black-armored monster’s primitive eyes a moment to track us down.

Luckily, we’d held onto our greasers during the tumble.

“Eyes!” I yelled, taking careful aim.

CLICK…!

I’d forgotten we hadn’t taken time to reload after our last foe.

Eight apparently remembered. So, rather than pointing a useless machine gun at the menace shambling downhill, he drew his pistols and gave the thing’s face what for.

Our tumble must have thrown off Bill’s aim, though, because he only took out one of the thing’s primary eyes.

He might have stood there shooting until his clips went empty, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him away at top speed.

We dashed across the desert landscape again, scant yards ahead of our doom, knowing that one wrong step meant death.

The scorpion clattered after us, hissing, mouth parts dripping, claws clacking an angry challenge that we’d have been fools to accept.

With a roar and a WHOOSH, a wall of flame erupted between us and our pursuer. One of Spider Squadron’s two-man jeeps had arrived.

A high-pitched whistling shriek filled the air as the scorpion turned away from us and toward its new foe. It gave chase, and the jeep accelerated away, spouting flames as it went.

Eight and I found cover behind a nearby crumbling mud-brick hovel.

“Reload!” I commanded.

Bill laughed. “Like you need to tell me!”

A thundering new roar, and explosive chatter much louder than our machine guns, shook the battlefield. The scorpion pursuing the jeep crumpled and fell dead, still burning, though the flamethrower hadn’t killed it. Our air support had finally arrived.

Bill leapt to his feet and waved as the Orb-Weaver Company’s P51 Mustangs zoomed overhead. “Yeah! Look at those babies go!”

The lead fighter strafed the scorpions advancing on our troops while the trailing one dropped bombs, lighting up a wall of fire and smoke on the bugs’ back lines.

“We’re not out of this yet,” I observed. We were still trapped behind enemy lines, dozens of yards from our allies. “Follow me.”

I ducked between two decrepit adobe buildings into one of Terlingua’s maze-like alleyways. The structures on either side had crumbled to just above head height with a narrow path—too small for the bugs—between them. The alley ran roughly north, back to our people.

Bill and I hurried down the deserted lane, ducking each time an explosion erupted.

Ahead, flamethrowers whooshed and heavy machine guns barked. A scorpion stumbled back, and hope filled my breast as a squad from Huntsman Company pursued it, an M4 Sherman in their midst.

Then the wall to our left collapsed, battering Bill and me to the ground as a wounded scorpion lurched into view.

It limped on just a few of its spider-like legs, but its claws and tail remained deadly.

The monster reached for Agent Eight, whose legs were pinned under the rubble.

He screamed and shot it in the face, puncturing the main eyes.

It flailed wildly with its tail. The stinger arced toward Bill’s chest.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

I emptied my pistol into the poison bulb, obliterating the sting before it could hit. The tail thrashed futilely from side to side,.

“C’mon, Bill!” I grabbed him under the arms and pulled, but I’d underestimated our enemy’s reach.

Using its vestigial eyes, the scorpion zeroed in on our movement, claws ready to filet us.

BOOM!

The report from the M4 cannon nearly deafened me, but its shell exploded just behind the massive arachnid’s head.

The monster still didn’t die. Its claws groped wildly as I yanked Bill to his feet, and we stumbled away.

Screaming with incoherent rage, Bill turned and emptied his greaser and both pistols into what remained of the scorpion’s face.

Eventually, the bug stopped moving and disintegrated into foul-smelling greenish slime.

As the sounds of combat faded to an eerie silence, I blew out a long breath. We’d won. Again. Though not much remained of the ghost town.

“Small cost to pay,” Bill mused.

Bone weary, I clapped him on the back. “C’mon. Let’s rejoin the squad. I could use some rest.”

Hatred gleamed in my fellow agent’s eyes. “Not me. I’m gonna kill every last one of these brutes until I find out what happened to Donna!”

THE END

About “Giant Scorpions vs. Spider Squadron”

There’s something about a battle between army guys and giant bugs…

Who doesn’t love that?

Clearly, I’m a big fan. If you’ve been following along with this series, you know I’ve loved giant bug attacks at least since the release of the Hamilton’s Invaders toys in the early 1960s. “From science fiction bold and true!” as I remember the ads saying.

This was “true!” This was our future! Who could resist that kind of pitch?

My brother Mark and I had a bunch of ’em; we played those toys to pieces—literally.

So, I was predisposed from then on to love giant bug movies. And I do. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a sincerely made giant bug movie that I don’t like. (Yeah, that means I might exclude some SyFy channel knock-offs and that kind of stuff.) Even The Strange World of Planet X (a.k.a. The Cosmic Monster(s)) has its moments.

One of the best, though, is Black Scorpion, with stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien and Pete Peterson. Aside from the moments where they clearly ran out of money to complete the matte work, I love every minute of that film—and that includes the giant scorpion face, which other “fans” often make fun of.

Not me. I think it’s brilliant! I don’t mind the fact that it doesn’t match the stop-mo models at all. It’s a great prop and super cool! (And I love the fact that Christopher R. Mihm and Mitch Gonzales tributed that slightly incongruous puppet face in The Giant Spider, back in 2013.)

Though Black Scorpion has a great army battle with the final boss scorpion at the end, I’d have loved to see even more army combat.

And probably that’s what brought the idea of a running battle between giant scorpions and army guys—or in this case Spider Squadron—to my mind.

You all know that a lot of stories come from images that spring into my head, so you won’t be surprised to discover that this is another one. Naturally I had to have a couple of USSB agents in the tale for our point-of-view and to make the danger more personal.

The town of Terlingua, Texas is real. I stumbled across it while looking for ghost towns that might match the images I had in my head of giant scorpions raging through ruined mud-brick buildings. Nowadays, the ghost town is not so deserted that you can’t visit it and even stay there, I gather.

Weirdly, checking for photos online, the town even seems to have a giant bug statue—or what looked like one to me. Is it a dragonfly? Maybe someday, I’ll be go check it out myself.

I’ve tried to base all the locations in Atomic Tales on real places, and I do quite a bit of research on them, as well as pinning them on my Google Map for the series.

But please forgive me if I’ve gotten any details wrong.

As I write this “about” section, I remain a poor writer still often secluded in his home by the residual pandemic. Despite not getting out much, I do the best I can!