The woods surrounding the campsite is too quiet. Palpable stillness falls like snow on the surroundings. The very air is holding its breath. The usual sounds of rustling leaves, distant birds chirping, and the low murmur of a brook are replaced by an unsettling stillness. The only noise is the occasional soft crunch of fallen leaves underfoot as I scout around.
The carapace tenses, tightening around my body in a rapid wave of a shiver. The feeling starts from my core as the carapace flexes outward and then each plate of black mass interlocks and hardens. It’s the symbiote’s precognitive attunement to danger. It registers the bleating of a goat breaking the silence before the sound reaches my ears.
I twist around to the sound and realize it wasn’t the cries that it was reacting to. It was the tormentors, sleek beasts on all fours. They weaken their prey with flailing whiplike appendages from their back.
One slithers their appendage around the limp goat and lifts it in the air. The goat hangs their looking at me with an expression of why, and I realize it’s more than just an animal when it barely whispers for help. I am already reacting before the words finish in its mouth. I imagine a sword, and the carapace provides. It feels like bone wrapped with sinew, and it pulls from me with a crack and snap.
The first two are easy, two cuts, two severed heads, but the ambush ends there. The other two forget their prey and turn on me. Those appendages are faster up close than seeing them at a distance. They strike at uneven tempos between the two of them. When I think there is some pattern is when a third must have come from behind.
I barely can see the detail of the bladelike tail sticking through my chest. It’s covered in black from my blood. I fall to one knee, buckling in pain.
“No, no, no . . . ,” I scream. It’s not the pain that I’m afraid of. It is the inevitable crawl rippling from underneath. I grasp at my neck trying to pull off the symbiote advancing up against my wishes. More crawls upward to push past my fingers. My screaming stops when it covers my mouth and fills in my throat. I can feel its touch connect to my eyes. It reaches over from behind my head and connects with the front.
I can’t tell if it’s my will moving my body. The motions are faster than I can register.
The tail is cut, and is ripped out by our own hands. We yank the stubbed appendage hard, pulling it closer. Crush its skull, we whisper thought to our hands.
The other two look to be transforming, flesh peeling from their bodies, but we move faster than they can adapt. We don’t see the cuts we make with the sword, but we feel the lingering recoil of our motions. The two monsters drop in pieces, and there is a purge of air between the plates of the carapace.
I look down to the goat. Small. Childlike. Breathing.
“You’re like me,” it says weakly.
I touch my face, carapace fingers touching more carapace. I follow it and find a single horn protruding from the symbiote’s helmet.
I need to get them back to camp. I reach down and pick the goatlike creature up. They’re bipedal form is light.
“Who are you?” it strains to ask me.
The words don’t form from the lips, but there is a guttural reverb that resonates from a choir of moving tendrils shifting that responds, “We are August.”