The Gladiator

It wasn’t that it was cold at night. It was that the temperature dropped from mid nineties to high fifties. In the morning, we would freeze as we stirred, some going so far as to keep an empty water bottle with them so they didn’t have to get up to piss.

Something called "stand-to" required us to remain immobile in the chill from half an hour before sunrise until half past. Theory held it as the most likely time for an attack. But we were so far from the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders that we’d know a day in advance if anyone was attacking on any given morning.

It was September, and we were just practicing. But we sat and shivered as told.

Once the sun rose and security was placed, we started preparing for the day. But the preparations started well before that. In pre-dawn darkness, we shook out our boots and helmets. Scorpions spent the night hunting, and as dawn approached, they’d hunt something else, solitude, more darkness.

So after boot shaking and breakfast, we’d flip rocks and sandbags to see what the night had provided. It’s easy to get bored half a world away from everything you know. Reality was all we could cling to, and reality was war, casualties, and possible death. We found hobbies, some our own, some shared.

Scorpions liked to gather beneath sandbags, and we liked scorpions. They came in three varieties. Black, white, and green. None of us had ever seen the white ones. Legend told of a white scorpion named Moby Dick.

We had modified a box to suit our needs. Cutting the corners off and layering sand across the bottom, someone had scrawled "Madison Square Garden" on the side. It was our Coliseum. We held battles daily with scorpions culled from under rock and sandbag.

The battles were all perfunctory, nothing to write home about. Usually, the bigger scorpion wandered around the arena while we used bayonets to push the smaller ones back toward him. Eventually, fear would lead the smaller ones to strike preemptively, or annoyance would make the big one kill them off.

The reigning champ was a green scorpion about three inches long, not counting pinchers and tail, about five inches total, almost an inch wide, luminous, translucent. He was the arachnid equivalent of the soft-shell crab. His veins weren’t quite visible, but they were easily imagined. He looked soft, squishy, like a bug should be.

We never pitted him against anything except smaller green ones because we had never seen anything bigger or different.

***

No one was sure who found it because it was already in the Coliseum when we gathered that day. Black, like see-in-the-dark black. About three inches, Black sent a chill down the spine, the kind of thing one is loathe to have crawling across his chest in the middle of the night. His lobster claws looked solid, like he could use them to smash stones. His textured tail, equally armored, looked incapable of extension—the way the green ones spent most of their time. Where the green tail rose only when agitated, the black tail looked like it rarely came down.

We gathered. Out of his box, Green landed on the battlefield. He knew instantly something was different. Where previously his stinger had taken time to show, it swung up immediately. He moved quickly around the rocks and across the hills and valleys of the sand floor. He covered the two feet in seconds, searching out his adversary.

And their eyes met.

Stingers wet with venom showed immediately as they felt each other out. The dance took them each a step left in concert, two steps right, and back. They circled, neither an aggressor.

Green advanced and withdrew. Then, Black advanced. They mimicked each other two minutes or more in attempts to get the advantage.

Green had size, weight, and reach in his advantage. Black mirrored him, his perpetually curled tail twitching. His presence alone had put green on edge.

It happened instantly. Green took the offensive. His tail like the trail of a whip swung forward. He aimed for the only soft spot Black offered, the spot that would have been a mammal’s neck.

Before it could find purchase in flesh, Green’s stinger slammed harmlessly into Black’s right claw, captured. At the same time, Black snatched Green’s right claw in his left, pulling him close.

Black’s stinger pierced above and just right of Green’s left eye, where it unloaded lethal doses. Black withdrew then, prancing around the arena, the victor, as Green’s body convulsed with neurotoxins flowing through his brain.

We stood, impressed with images of the impenetrable beast exercising its wrath on all who opposed.

The Coliseum went unused a few days.