by Inmon, Shawn
Alex’s solution to that had been the same one he had used to keep the alligator creatures away on the island on the Okrent-ah river: fire.
Earlier, they had laid dry tinder along the entire length of the cave mouth, then piled kindling on top of that, then firewood, then green branches. They piled this more than halfway up the opening, but just left an opening in the middle.
Now, with the plague of zisla-ta upon them, the majority of Winten-ah piled through that opening and into the cave. Alex, Sekun-ak, and Senta-eh were the last to hurry through, then turned and closed the barricade.
People on both ends then moved toward each other with torches, lighting the pile on fire as they went.
Even with the pitch and kindling, it took the fire time to start and Alex leaned out of the cave and looked at the oncoming cloud.
It was indeed blocking out the sky. It was mid-day, but outside it looked like dusk.
The zisla-ta arrived slowly at first, landing on top of the barrier designed to stop them, then leaping toward whatever they first saw move.
“Fan the flames,” Alex shouted to those who had lit the fire. “Get it burning hotter!” He pointed at a group of younger Winten-ah who stood on the side of the cave, holding their cudgels. “Now, go to work!”
The youth—an equal mixture of boys and girls—surged forward wielding their cudgels. As each zisla-ta first landed on the barrier then jumped, the youth swung their cudgels like Mickey Mantle. A solid hit would completely destroy the bug, leaving not much more but a brown cloud of spores and a few stray, hairy legs.
If it was less than a direct hit, the zisla-ta would be knocked spinning across the room and younger children would jump on them as if they were playing an insectoid version of hopscotch.
Both the teenagers and kids enjoyed the game, at least initially.
Eventually, the fire built up high enough that the bugs could not land on it anymore. At least not without sizzling and tumbling to the ground already dead.
Then the fire built higher still, so that flames were leaping almost to the top of the cave’s opening. That didn’t stop the zisla-ta from trying to come in. In fact, it couldn’t.
Outside the cave, the leading edge of the cloud had swept across the forest and was just hitting the field. From side to side, the mass of zisla-ta was fifteen miles wide. As it moved along on the coastal wind, it swept over everything in a fifteen-mile swath.
The zisla-ta that spun off the spinning mass were already heavier than Alex had expected to see, even at the height of the bug storm. He knew that the onslaught hadn’t even begun in earnest.
The fire was working, though. The kids were momentarily unhappy that no more spiders were entering the cave. They stood just behind the fire line, cudgels in hand, waiting.
The wall of fire was effective, but there were two unanticipated side effects. When each spider hit the flames, it exploded like a kernel of popcorn. At first it was like a rhythm—pop, pop, pop-pop, pop-pop, pop.
As the cloud moved closer, that rhythm intensified. When the front edge hit them square on, the endless popping sounded like a machine gun that didn’t stop. The popping grew into an odd cacophony that was so unpleasant that even the teens and children moved back away from the door, covering their ears.
The second side effect was even worse. It was the smell. It wasn’t noticeable at first, when it was overwhelmed by the smell of the fire and smoke itself.
As first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of the zisla-ta hit the flames and exploded, an incredibly strong, earthy smell moved through the cave.
Alex glanced down at Monda-ak. “I’ll bet this is the first time you’ve ever wished your sense of smell wasn’t so good. I wish there was something I could do for you.”
Monda-ak shook his massive head from side to side as if trying to rid himself of the horrible, cloying odor. He sneezed. Then he shook himself top to bottom and sneezed twice more. Finally, he laid as flat on the floor of the cave as he could and looked up at Alex with mournful eyes.
“I know it’s awful, but if we were out there, they would be picking our bones clean.”
The Winten-ah tried wrapping a cloth around their noses, but that didn’t seem to stop it. Alex breathed only through his mouth, but somehow that pulled the smell deep into his lungs, where it lingered. He finally decided there was nothing to do but forget it. Alex forced himself to move forward and focus on other things.
He noticed that the fire was already burning down. As soon as the flames were no longer reaching to the top of the cave, the constant influx of spiders into the cave began again.
“More wood,” Sekun-ak shouted, and four warriors dashed forward to build the flames up again.
Alex eyed the stock of wood they had laid in, then the length of the fire line. He estimated they could keep the fire burning hot for perhaps twelve or fourteen hours.
While the fire burned down, so many spiders found their way into the cave that it took everyone working as one to keep up with them. Even then, a few got through, landed on someone, and took an exploratory bite of neck or arm.
Somehow, one managed to get by Reggie, land on Tinka-eh, and bite a chunk out of her fat little leg. Reggie flicked it off of her, then stomped it. Stomped it not once, but ten times, before plucking Tinka-eh up and holding her close, protecting her.
The popping of the spiders in the fire was so loud that although Alex could see that Tinka-eh was howling vociferously, he couldn’t hear it. Alex ran to them. He pointed to the far back of the cave and shouted in Reggie’s ear. “Go back there. We’ll take care of them.”
Reggie nodded, kept his arms protectively around his daughter and ran to the back. There was a clutch of older women standing at the back. They parted and brought Reggie and Tinka-eh into their midst. They formed a tight circle around them, then turned toward the fire, holding their own cudgels, and daring any zisla-ta to attempt to breach them.
Alex stared through the flames at the solid, apparently endless wall of spiders that spun and flew into the fire. To distract himself from the smell and the horrible onslaught of noise, he tried to estimate how many spiders there had to be in the cloud.
Millions, certainly. Billions? Probably. He was never good at equations.
He and Sekun-ak stood at the front, batting any stray zisla-ta back into the fire.
The onslaught went on for hours. It was full dark outside, but that just let Alex see that every time a spider hit the fire, it gave off a tiny spark of light as it exploded.
After they had let the fire line burn down too far the first time, Alex made sure that they kept the fire built up. It made them burn through their limited supply of wood and branches faster than he would have liked, but he didn’t see that they had any choice.
Eventually, he glanced around and saw that many of the tribe near the front of the cave were laying down, resting, and some looked like they might be sleeping.
Alex nudged Sekun-ak and pointed at them. Sekun-ak had not noticed, either and looked surprised when he saw them.
Then Alex saw that Senta-eh had also slumped against a cave wall and though she tried to rise, she seemed unable.
Alex rushed to her, knelt, and held her hand. He looked into her eyes, which seemed unfocused.
“I can’t catch my breath.”
Alex looked over his shoulder at Sekun-ak. He too was slumping to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Is There No End?
What Senta-eh had said—I can’t catch my breath—resonated in Alex’s brain.
At that moment, he began to feel light-headed himself.
That’s when the answer popped into his brain.
Oxygen.
The cave was large, but it was still essentially a closed room. The fire was drawing part of the oxygen it needed to burn from outside the cave, but drew the rest from the cave. They were all suffering from oxygen deprivation.
Alex shook his head, trying to clear it, to no avail. Finally, he dropped on
his belly, put his face against the rock and tried to breathe deeply. That seemed to help a bit, but he knew it was a temporary solution.
If I keep the fire burning, we’ll all likely fall asleep, the fire will burn down and we will be attacked by the zisla-ta. But if I don’t, we’ll be attacked by the damned zisla-ta anyway.
Alex leaped up, grabbed a long cudgel, and pushed one corner of the fire line down onto the level below. The same second he did that, spiders filled the empty space. Their hairy legs, huge bodies, and trailing parachutes covered his face, head, and upper torso immediately.
Making the opening brought more oxygen, but also zisla-ta by the immediate hundreds. Alex stumbled backwards, swiping at his face, as one industrious zisla-ta was biting at his lips and trying to get in his mouth. Sprawling backwards, he tripped over a sprawled body and landed hard on his back, knocking the air out of his lungs with a whoosh.
Zisla-ta continued to pour into the opening in the fire line at an incredible rate. The unconscious body that Alex tripped over was Wenta-eh, who sat up with a dazed expression on her face. That expression was immediately replaced by clinging zisla-ta.
Oxygen from around the hole Alex made also filled the room and people immediately began to revive.
When Senta-eh opened her eyes, she saw a horror show in front of her. White strings of parachutes being released as hundreds of the zisla-ta poured in. Her eyes landed on Alex, who was still thrashing, but was completely covered by not one layer of spiders, but a growing second layer.
She stood quickly—too quickly. She stumbled and had to lean against the wall of the cave for support. Beside her, Sekun-ak also came around. She turned to him and said, “Block that opening. I will take care of Manta-ak and the others.
The others was a rapidly growing number. Zisla-ta poured in the opening even as Sekun-ak added wood to the section Alex had knocked down. Flames licked at the edge of that wood, but would take time to catch.
Meanwhile, the infusion of oxygen woke everyone in the cave. Those who were not entombed by crawling, biting spiders set to helping those who were. Within moments, everyone in the cave had at least a few of the nasty beasties crawling on them.
Senta-eh rushed to Alex, helped him sit up, and began batting the zisla-ta off him, even as they jumped on her.
Alex leaped to his feet, dislodging fifty of the crawlers, but hundreds more remained. He jumped as high as he could and landed hard on a smile pile of spiders, squishing them into dust. When he did, more and more of the spiders fell off him, unable to hold on.
He jumped again, squishing more spiders, and knocking more off him. He tapped Senta-eh and showed her what he was doing. She too jumped, knocking off a quarter of those who were crawling on her. Sekun-ak and others saw Alex and Senta-eh hopping madly around the cave and imitated him.
In moments, everyone did the same. It was an insane Stone Age square dance, with ‘Squish the zisla-ta’ replacing ‘Allemande left.’”
The jumping, bumping, squishing, and squashing went on for long minutes. The fire caught again, making a more complete barrier, and soon the only living creatures in the cave were humans who stood ankle-deep in the bodies, legs, and cast-off spore of the zisla-ta.
Once again, the bodies of the spiders slammed into the fire, popped, and filled the cave with the horrible odor.
“What happened?” Sekun-ak asked Alex.
Alex searched his brain for a way to explain that the fire had burned out the oxygen in the cave, but couldn’t find the best words in Winten-ah. Finally, he settled for, “The fire burned away what we need to breathe. That’s why I knocked part of the fire down. If I hadn’t, we would have all gone to sleep, the fire would have gone out, and the spiders would have filled the cave, feasting on us.”
“As they nearly did to you,” Sekun-ak observed, pointing at dozens of small bites all over Alex’s body. “What can we do, then? If we knock down the fire, they nearly overwhelm us. If we don’t knock down the fire, we fall asleep and soon they will overwhelm us.”
“We’ll have to do a little of both. When we see those around us showing signs of sleepiness, one of us will have to make a hole in the fire wall—a smaller one than what I did. The rest of us need to be on the sides of the hole, and deal with the zisla-ta as they come through.”
Alex glanced again at the dwindling woodpile and wished they had more.
“When everyone is clear-headed again, we’ll build up the fire again. We’ll keep doing that in cycles until they leave.”
It felt like an endless night for the Winten-ah trapped in the cave a hundred feet off the ground. An endless cycle of oxygen deprivation, flurries of jumping and stomping, rebuilding the fire, then waiting to start again.
The children and teens, who had started the night with such fervor and energy, had all but given up and were asleep on a section of the stone floor that had been swept clean of spider corpses.
Senta-eh pointed to them. “Children can adapt to anything. The zisla-ta make enough noise to wake the corpses of our ancestors and their burning bodies make a stench worse than Monda-ak’s scat, and they still manage to sleep through it.”
“I think they’re overloaded,” Alex said. He pointed at Tinka-eh, sleeping soundly on Reggie’s lap. “But think of this. In many, many solstices, that little one might be an old lady, advising her tribe on how we managed to survive this night.”
“You are assuming we will survive the night, then?”
“Of course,” Alex said, trying to summon a confident smile. His exhaustion was too great, though, and it came off as a sickly grin.
As everything does eventually, the plague of the zisla-ta passed.
Alex and Sekun-ak loaded the last of the wood on the fire line and were discussing what to do when it burned down when Alex held up a hand.
“Wait. Listen.”
Both men cocked an ear to the fire, and they realized that the explosion of spider bodies was slowing. The steady, machine gun rhythm was falling to a point that they could almost make out individual pops.
They had just opened a hole in the firewall, so they knew they had enough oxygen to get through another hour or two. They decided to just let the fire burn down and see where they were then.
The tribe members lined up twenty feet back from the fire line and watched it burn with morbid fascination. When the wall of fire burned down enough that there was space between the flames and the top of the opening, zisla-ta came through again. It wasn’t the torrent of bugs that it had been throughout the night, though. It went back to being a game for the kids to hop on the zisla-ta before they had a chance to jump onto someone.
It took several hours, but eventually the raging storm of floating spiders slowed to a trickle, then almost stopped. Normally, seeing a few dozen spiders drop from the sky at you would be cause to freak out. After the torrent they had witnessed for the previous long hours, a few of the parachuting arachnids seemed like nothing.
Sekun-ak decided they should stay in the cave until the fire burned completely down. Outside, a cold, gray light crept in, showing that a new day had finally dawned.
When the fire burned itself completely out—leaving a charred black line that would take many seasons to fade, Alex, Senta-eh and Sekun-ak stepped out to see what was left.
The devastation tore at their hearts. As far as they could see, there was no greenery at all. Grass and bushes were gone; leaves and small limbs had been eaten right off the trees.
Oddest of all, there was no sound other than the slight whisper of a breeze. Everything else—rustling leaves, skittering insects, waving grass, birds calling out overhead—were gone.
Sekun-ak gestured for Alex and Senta-eh to follow him and climbed up to the very top of the cliffside, where they normally posted guards to look out for attacks from their vulnerable rear approach. They climbed the ladder to the top of the cliffside, which was the highest point for miles.
They looked out on a palette that colored only from the brown end of the spec
trum. Senta-eh pointed toward the forest. Typically, the forest was so dense that they couldn’t see past the first few feet of it. Now they could see all the way through to the clearing that was the domain of the ronit-ta—the dire wolves.
The trees were still standing, but they looked like lonely toothpicks jammed into the ground. The rest of the foliage of the forest—the underbrush, saplings, and berry bushes—were all gone as though they had never been there.
Alex and Sekun-ak shared a glance. It was a look that acknowledged that the tribe was in trouble.
Their food stores were already low.
Winter was coming.
There was no food of any type as far as their eyes could see.
Sekun-ak took a deep breath, held it, then slowly released it. “Let’s begin.”
They climbed back down to the biggest cave, where the rest of the tribe was just beginning to poke their heads out of the opening.
“First,” Sekun-ak said, “make sure everyone is all right.”
Alex and Senta-eh walked through the cave, laying a hand on the shoulder of each person they came to. They were all shaken, bitten, and exhausted, but they were alive.
In the far corner, Alex saw Drana-eh. Her eyes were closed. He hurried to her, knelt, and touched first her wizened hand, then her face. She was cool to the touch, but she had a small smile playing on her lips. Alex touched her throat and found no pulse. Her spirit had left her body.
“She lived long enough to see them again,” Alex observed.
“I am glad I will be dead long before we have to live through anything like that again.”
Alex didn’t like the thought of Senta-eh dying. He couldn’t imagine being in Kragdon-ah without her. Still, he understood what she meant. It wasn’t just the zisla-ta—which were horrifying—but surviving the devastation they left behind.
Alex picked Drana-eh up and cradled her. She felt as ethereal and light as the zisla-ta. He carried her through the cave and as he did, each person stopped him and touched her face.
