WebWorld (3.10)

Stay close. Don’t split up. And we’d never meant to. Just… in the heat of the battle…

We all converged on Penny.

“What happened? Where was she?”

“She was right beside me. She was right next to me.”

Todd spoke up. His left arm was hanging awkwardly, there was blood staining the sleeve of his jersey. “They took her.” His voice sounded small, and it echoed faintly amongst the trees.

Greg said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Todd pointed. His arm was shaking.

Tristan had moved over to one of the bodies and he was picking it up now. It was the one that had been attacking me, the smallest, but it still looked like a weight in both his hands. Eight coiled legs hung from a bell-shaped sac, a bubbly kind of torso with no head visible, although I knew first hand that these things had teeth.

“It’s a fucking giant spider!” Tristan roared. He shook the thing, and it made it seem to dance. “All this time and they have always been Fucking. Giant. Spiders!”

Penny cut in on him: “They’ve got my daughter. I don’t care what they are. Can we please just go and get her back!?” Her voice rose to a shrill, piercing cry. She was all sharp edges and fury.

George tried to touch her arm, but she shrugged him off.

“Let’s go. Let’s go.”

Todd pointed again. His voice came out as shaky as his arm. “That way.”

The spiders – we could call them that now, not monsters or gum-beasts or whatever we’d half had in our heads – had slunk off further into the valley, leaving broken vegetation behind them. And carrying a child.

We hurried after them, trying not to think too hard.

Zara caught my arm: “Are you hurt?”

“Not that much.”

“It looks bad.”

“It’s fine.”

“It might be poisonous.”

“Let’s just get her back off them before… we can’t.”

The trail was clear this time, but it sloped off into thicker, darker forest, and I had a feeling that there were more of these things around us. I couldn’t see them yet, but I was sure their eyes were on me, and I’m sure they were hungry or angry, or whatever made a creature like that attack. I pictured a web, all loaded with long, cigar-like white cradles, and in all of them a human meal, bound and smothered, just waiting for when the spiders were next feeling hungry enough to eat.

We can’t fight this shit. We’ve used all our bullets.

We needed guns. We needed a shit-ton of 1080. We need a can of fly-spray the size of a building.

Trails diverged.

George swore. I saw his eyes wrinkle, tears leaking out.

“Which way?” Tamsin called out.

We were all looking around, heads whipping like we were on the dance floor.

Tristan’s face turned to stone.

“What is it?” I hurried up to him.

He gestured towards the blood on a tree-trunk. Red. Fresh.

“Crap. Don’t let George and Penny see.”

“I think they’re going to be seeing worse.” He lifted his arm up above his head, beckoning the others over, “there’s something this way. Come on. Let’s go.”

I’m not sure if the trail had more blood. It felt to me as if every shadow and every splotch, every drop of water, must be Dinah’s blood. I tried to think of ways in which that might not be true, but they wouldn’t come to me. I knew. We all knew. And we scrambled through the woods as if we didn’t.

Their nest boiled out of the grass at us, a convergence of hillsides, and the wicker-work of gum was covered by torn trees that had themselves been woven into what looked like a small cave. There was a ragged entrance, but there were spiders in the trees around it. Zara’s gun was empty.

“Okay…” Tristan started.

But Penny wasn’t waiting for him. She saw a figure lying curved and still just beyond the slit that led inside. She was barely visible, already half-covered in a layer of frost-like gum. George stood for a moment, trapped between running for his daughter and staying beside his son. Todd’s face was wet. He seemed frozen.

And then in the following moments, three spiders twirled out of the trees – like acrobats twisting down ropes to begin their performance – and they launched themselves at us.

No bullets.

Zara held the gun up like a sad little club, and a stubby little knife back-handed in her other hand. I had my still-bloodied knife in hand and raced forward as two more creatures came dancing out to meet us.

Tristan was in front, making ninja-like with his machete, and Greg was swinging his axe a little wildly. I saw one spider rear at Tamsin, striking at her with its front legs. She was quicker than I would have imagined, darting and rolling from the attack like she was trained to do it. She was up on one knee as it came at her again. As it reared up to attack, she did what I wouldn’t have credited her the steely nerves for, running in under its legs and stabbing upwards into an underbelly we could only hope was soft. I would have liked to take a moment to whistle my appreciation for that cool, unflustered move, but I saw my own moment: its attention was on Tamsin, and I rushed up behind it, leaping on top, feeling it sag against my weight and Tamsin’s blade. I stabbed with the knife, bringing it up over my head and repeatedly jabbing the blade into the tapered end of its body where a head should have had the decency to be. Its legs collapsed from under it and Tamsin barely managed to swing herself away before it would have landed on her.

I leapt off and looked around for Zara.

She side by side with George, stabbing and kicking at a spider while Todd stood at their backs, not knowing what to do with himself.

The spider’s forelegs were damp with something sticky that might pass for blood, one of them was hanging and broken. I imagined myself throwing the knife clear across the space between us and felling the spider. I also imagined it slipping a little off-course and buried in the back of George’s head. So I ran forward, getting behind the creature while George and Zara kept it busy right and left. I only knew what had worked for me last time, so I jumped it and went to town on it with the kitchen knife in my hand.

As it fell, I was slow jumping off and crunched down on the ground on top of it. It was all hard and chitinous on the outside, not at all pillow-like, and I felt the jolt go through my bones, I felt it by multiples of ten or a hundred in my shoulders. Colours blurred and cleared; I could hear my heartbeat inside my ears.

I heard screaming.

Penny.

The sound told me everything, but like the rest I went racing over. I saw Greg catch Todd by his shoulders and hold him back from seeing this. Penny was knelt on the ground, having dragged Dinah’s head and shoulders onto her lap. Her daughter hadn’t stood a chance. Just a small child. I don’t know if she’d been able to fight back or even tried to run. Her stomach was torn open, blood and strings of intestines hanging out of her like electrical wires. Her lower torso was just a gaping, bloodied hole.

I don’t know what kept me on my feet or kept me from vomiting. I thought I felt my legs collapse, they felt like water. I only know they didn’t because I remained standing up. I heard a small whimpering sound, and realised that it came from me.

This couldn’t have happened, and it had.

Penny’s voice made a shrill, anguished keening. A beacon or a siren and nobody could think to make it stop. I watched George collapse to his knees beside his wife, his head coming down on her shoulders, unnoticed. Greg held Todd a few metres away, saying something I couldn’t hear. Time warped and twisted, it lost meaning, didn’t matter.

Tristan said, at last “We need to go.”

George slid his arms under Dinah’s legs and chest. “I’ll take her.”

Penny gripped on, “No. I will.”

“Pen…:”

“I will.” Her voice turned steely. This was all she was having.

“Come on,” Tristan said, “come on, let’s get her out of here.”

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work