The Scuttler Invasion

A Halloween story about addiction and dependency

It was the year 2090, and the Scuttlers had come.

They didn’t arrive in spaceships or with bright lights in the sky. No, they came quietly—at first. Small, skittering things that you barely noticed unless you were looking for them. They were crustaceans the size of a man, their shells gleaming like wet bone, legs sharp and spindly, and eyes black as a moonless night. You’d see them in alleyways or creeping along the outskirts of town, their claws clicking on the pavement in the dead of night. People started to whisper, but no one knew what they really were.

Until they showed up on your doorstep.

The Scuttlers didn’t talk, didn’t threaten. They just offered. One day, one would scuttle up to you, its beady eyes reflecting your own fear back at you, and it would crouch low, like it was waiting for you to climb inside. The first brave souls who did said it was like slipping into a second skin. They described the sensation like a rush—like you were suddenly untouchable, capable of leaping over buildings, moving faster than your mind could process.

Hell, people signed up in droves. They figured the Scuttlers had come to help, that these alien creatures were there to make our lives easier. Who wouldn’t want to move like lightning, skip the endless traffic, and scuttle across town faster than a bullet? And at first, it was thrilling. Cities became giant playgrounds, with people leaping from roof to roof, racing through streets like they were built for it. The world had never seemed so open, so easy.

But the Scuttlers needed space. They weren’t made for narrow streets or crowded sidewalks. No, they needed room to run. And soon enough, the cities began to change. Roads widened. Parks disappeared. The buildings humans had lived in for decades came down like cardboard under the endless expansion of steel platforms, wide-open roads, and bridges built for the Scuttlers’ bounding leaps.

We didn’t notice at first, not really. We were too busy being fast.

But after a while, something started to gnaw at us, deep down in our guts, like a hunger we couldn’t name. Maybe it was when we stopped recognizing each other. The Scuttlers wrapped around us like armor, hard shells and long claws hiding our faces, making us into silhouettes of our former selves. You’d pass someone on the street—or above it, on the towering walkways—and there wouldn’t be a nod, a smile, nothing. Just the scrape of legs on metal, the whisper of alien chitin against the air. We were moving too fast to connect.

And then the cities—the places where people had once walked, talked, and lived—started to feel cold. Empty. You never saw anyone on foot anymore. If you weren’t in a Scuttler, you weren’t moving. And if you weren’t moving, you didn’t matter.

It didn’t take long for us to become addicted to them. Try walking a block without a Scuttler clamped onto your body, and you’d feel it—a creeping anxiety, a panic that gnawed at you. The streets, the paths, the entire world, had been shaped for them now. Without a Scuttler, you were nothing but prey.

But the real price wasn’t just the space or the speed. It was the hunger. The Scuttlers needed things—resources, land, energy—and they ate it all, devouring cities like a plague of locusts. Every month, the platforms grew higher, wider. Every year, they demanded more room to jump, to scuttle. The old parks where we once took our kids? Gone, paved over for the alien highways. The neighborhoods where we used to live? Reduced to dust under the weight of progress, or what we thought was progress.

Some folks tried to fight it. They peeled off the Scuttlers, threw them aside, and chose to walk again. It wasn’t easy. The world wasn’t made for people like them anymore. It was made for the Scuttlers. But they tried. They planted trees in the cracks of broken streets, rebuilt small, human spaces in the shadows of the sprawling alien nests.

They called themselves The Walkers, and they started to whisper to others: We were never supposed to need them.

But even as the Walkers pushed back, the Scuttlers grew restless. They didn’t like being abandoned, and they didn’t take kindly to resistance. Their nests towered above the cities now, shimmering in the dark, always watching. And you could feel it when you walked past one—those eyes on you, black and gleaming, waiting for you to slip, to fall back into their claws.

I don’t know if the Walkers will win. I don’t even know if there’s enough of us left to fight. But I do know this: once you let something inside, once you let it take over your life, you can’t ever truly get rid of it. It lives in the cracks, in the dark spaces, waiting. It changes you.

And the Scuttlers? They’re still here, crawling through the streets, feeding off the scraps of a world we thought we owned.

Turns out, we were just the hosts all along. 🚗