Because It Is My Nature by Derek Wagner

I feel the city.
My tarsus heavy, my chitin soft. I am too old for the mission they believe that I am on. For the destruction they believe me capable of.
Sensing the helicopters in the distance, feeling the steady vibrations of their blades through the air, my lateral eyes catch movement on either side. They are coming for me, but they are late. Only atomics can stop me now, and they will not use them this close to the city. Not for just one of my kind. Not even the last.
Hot sunlight burns my eyes. Had there been less urgency, I would have chosen a nighttime raid. The humans have forced my hand. They prepared for the night, so I must brave the day. I don’t need eyes for what I’ve come to do.
They believe they can kill me with fire. That they can stop my ravaging of the city before too many lives are lost. The thoughts of their leader, unshielded as foolishly as any hatchling, her certainty in her course of action present in every decision I’m forcing her to make.
She doesn’t know what lives beneath my chitin. She doesn’t know my dreams.
Civilian transports rush through my legs, awe-struck passengers leaning out windows, small devices in their tiny hands, grins on their faces. A single, muscular twitch could kill them, yet still they smile. A strange species. The strangest of all, perhaps.
When the first wave of helicopters fire I brace, spiracles in my side sucking in air, closing off just before the first missiles impact against my hard mesasoma. Fresh air will be precious this next hour. These first attacks are meant to soften up my shell, weaken my outer layer for the next wave, which will drill down through my chitin, expose the soft tissue underneath. Ancestral memories flood my mind; memories of fear, memories of panic, the tarsus of my legs quivering as I push through, levelling building after building. My fear amplifying from the waves of alien, human terror flooding in through my pectines, making me want to skitter back to the portal whence I came. But I push on.
That portal is closed now.
This has always been a one-way trip.
The next wave of missiles crests as I whip out with my tail, clipping two helicopters from the air as they fire, the deaths of their crew registering in my mind as keenly as my own pain. It is the curse of my race that I must feel the pain I inflict, that the death throes of my enemies hurt me nearly as much as the drilled metal that bores into my carapace, twisting through my chitin, searching for my heart. I feel their hope, a collective gasp as another wave fires, even as my tail lashes their aircraft from the sky.
When the napalm drops I am unprepared. They have somehow masked their bombers presence above me. Some of the fiery substance makes it inside my lungs before I’m able to close my spiracles. Humans grow cleverer by the year. Ichor spills from my wounded tail, pouring onto the denizens of this human den like acid. I strive to remain calm, searching the air for vibrations. The helicopters were a feint, a deception.
I pinpoint the jets position before they make their next pass. Tens of thousands of feet above. This will not save them. Aiming the venom from my tail in a massive arc, I feel the vibrations in the air cut off one by one by one. One jet careens into a building near my feet, and I feel the pilots’ fear snuff out before his pain hits me.
But I cannot hit them all. The next bomb—a bunker-buster—knocks one of my back-legs clean off at the joint, the tergite armor of my back still aflame. The pain is immense, filling my brain like the wailing of a thousand souls.
They think they are killing me.
They are only half-right. I am dying. But it is not their bullets, their missiles, their napalm, that is killing me. That would take more time than I have left. I am hard to kill, even aged as I am.
It is my children. They are eating me from the inside.
Their eggs hatched before I surged through the portal, my babies’ blind eyes sheltered from the harsh, foreign sun of this world. Sheltered beneath my carapace. They are so hungry. Their voices cry out, the psionic force of their pleas almost wilting my resolve as I tramp forward, looking for my target.
Soon, my loves.
As the next wave explodes off my right side, chipping pincers, blasting off another leg, I see it.
The beach is lined with tanks, tiny guns firing up at me like so many grains of sand. Foolishness. It is beneath the human leaders’ sense, and a dim awareness shows me that this line-up of tanks was not her request. These soldiers have defied their queen’s orders. They are not to be mourned. I set upon them with the lack of respect they deserve, swiping them out to sea with a lazy flick of my burning tail. They are in my way. I have need of this ground.
Another wave of missiles slam against my side. I slump into the sand, feigning injury most mortal. I barely need pretend; my brood has reached the lining of my heart, mandibles tearing through my sternum, some devouring each other in their mania to find satiety.
I have memories of this time of my life-cycle—the hunger, the terror, the fight to live. Only a handful will survive this; will grow, change, harden into a full-formed Chactoid. Perhaps only two or three. Fully sated by my flesh, they will burrow into the sand, under the pyre of my hollow shell. They will dream. They will grow. They will hunger again, as these humans slowly forget them.
They will rise.