Even now she scared the hell out of him, but not as much as what it would say about him if he didn’t try. He would simply have to be careful. For lack of any better idea, he finally settled for laying his hand on her shoulder.
She inhaled sharply at the contact then refocused her eyes on him.
The hardened Valkyrie was gone. All the masks were gone. But as Adam looked in her damaged face, he didn’t see fear or despair. Yet neither was there the calm acceptance of death he would have almost expected of her.
There was just confusion and pain. A whole world of pain…a pain that ran so deep it now betrayed her into a final moment of weakness in front of the very man she had terrorized throughout this madness…
“What am I?” Maggie pleaded in a hoarse whisper. “Please. Just tell me what I am.”
Adam stared in dismay at the girl, and the question. This was the last thing he expected of her.
You’re a stone cold killer. You’re a one in a billion genetic variation. You’re a girl some assholes raised to be a weapon, and then had the nerve to be surprised when that weapon went off. You’re a maniac who needed something to shoot to make your Dad’s death make sense. You’re a killing machine with a companion straight out of a horror movie.
And it was true.
She was all of those things, and more.
But Adam realized that wasn’t what she was asking. She meant something more fundamental. He stared at his dying nemesis and understood this was a question she had been asking all her life…only she was out of time and whatever answer she got now was all she would ever get. And as unfair as it was, it had fallen on him to try and give it to her.
In the end, it amounted to a simple either/or question. Even though it wasn’t that simple at all.
Yet it was one he had an answer to.
“You’re a human being, Maggie,” Adam replied. “We can do some awful things, but spiders don’t grieve for their fathers and monsters don’t rescue little boys.”
He could only hope it was answer enough.
Unfortunately, that would be another thing he would never know for sure.
The girl writhed, arched her back again, then stared wide-eyed at the sky. In real life, dying hurts. She panted like a wounded animal, and a low moan escaped her lips. Then she struggled to speak, coughed, and made one more attempt.
“Mr…Sellars…” Maggie Weston gasped, her gaze still focused on the sky, “it is time…for you to leave.”
Then she closed her eyes for the last time.
“Right,” he answered, and struggled to his feet.
Adam figured she meant exactly what she said. He hadn’t known her long enough for any goodbyes, and considering the content of their short history, it wouldn’t make sense anyway. Besides, he doubted she expected one. He wasted no time in doing a fast walk to the back door. The fear of hearing the scuttle of Molly pursuing dogged him the entire way.
It was with a sincere exhale of relief he closed the back door behind him. And when he glanced back through the shattered remains of the window he saw his fears had been better founded than he thought.
Molly already stood over Maggie’s still form, legs reared threateningly in the direction of the house.
###
The next thirteen minutes were some of the longest in Adam’s life.
The three of them huddled in the small bathroom, waiting for help to arrive.
Olivia lay in the claw-footed bathtub where Billy had laid her. She barely had the strength to acknowledge Adam when he hurried in through the door. Her face had taken on an ashen hue and she drifted off almost immediately, as if she had been using up the last of her strength to wait for him. Her shallow breathing reminded him uncomfortably of the dying girl he had just left. She opened her eyes twice more to look at him, but closed them again without saying a word. Time was not her friend here.
Adam could only take her hand and pray that the help Billy mentioned would arrive in time.
Billy stood with his back against the door, staring hard-faced at the floor. There was no sign of his companion, but Adam didn’t feel like intruding on the kid’s misery to ask. He wasn’t completely clear on what the boy’s relationship with Maggie had been, and this didn’t seem to be the right time to inquire. There hadn’t been a sense of anything romantic between the two, but he was old enough to know life could be more complicated than that.
Whatever his motivation, Billy had been trying to save her. He had broken the laws of his elders, thrown himself on the mercy of his enemies, and then finally entered a fight he had been told to steer clear of…all in order to save her. And he had pulled it off each step of the way. Hell, he had probably delivered the final death blow to the monster they had all been trying to kill. And yet it hadn’t been enough.
He had failed.
Exactly like Adam feared he was failing right now.
Please don’t die, he silently begged the still form in the tub. None of this was worth a damn thing without you.
She couldn’t answer and all he could do was hold on, and pray she did the same. The silence of the house was all he got back for a response, without even the ticking of a clock to mark time. That had been destroyed in the carnage as well.
After what seemed an eternity, Billy spoke.
“They’re here,” he muttered. “It won’t be long now.”
Within a few seconds the sounds of engines coming up the driveway faintly reached Adam’s ears. He started to come to his feet, but Billy shook his head.
“No,” he warned. “Not yet.”
Adam heard more vehicles pull up. The slam of car doors echoed from outside, and he could tell there were a lot of them. It sounded like the cavalry had arrived in force. Things went quiet for almost a minute more, and Adam started to chafe at the inaction.
Then the sound of rifle fire crackled from outside. Billy visibly flinched as the first shots rang out, then continued to stare without expression at the floor. The shooting continued for ten to fifteen seconds. There was a brief pause before one final shot boomed, then everything went quiet again.
It was finally, really over.
“They’ll be here in a second,” Billy reported in a dull voice and turned to open the door.
“Billy wait,” Adam called. He knew this might not be the time, but realized he would most likely never see the kid again. After all the boy had done for him, at least he could give him this. “Do you understand why Maggie sent you away?”
Billy froze in the act of opening the door.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “She was worried I wouldn’t leave quick enough when the time came. I suppose she was looking out for me. She did that from time to time.”
“Maybe,” Adam agreed. “Okay, actually that’s part of it. But it wasn’t the only reason.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then what else was there?”
“She was dying, Billy. She knew that. She also knew it wasn’t going to be easy, or pretty, and she didn’t want that to be your last memory of her. Do you understand?”
Billy looked back at him without answering.
“How you remembered her was all she had left,” Adam concluded, “and she wanted to protect that. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there it is.”
Billy stared at him for a second longer, then looked back down at the floor again. Adam could see him trying to think it through.
“Yeah,” Billy finally muttered. The boy turned and opened the bathroom door, then paused again. “Thanks.”
Then he was gone.
A second later Grandma Lilah led two men into the bathroom and ordered Adam to stand out in the hallway. They never spoke a word, just gingerly lifted Olivia out of the tub and carried her out and down to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Adam followed along, keeping careful watch as they laid her on the bed. Grandma Lilah stooped over her and started probing the wound, while the two men started pulling syringes and tubing from her bag.
The
y worked in absolute silence, while Adam hung back at a place near the wall. He detested the idea of the old woman being anywhere near Olivia, but right now she needed a medic and the rotten witch was the closest thing available. So that left him hovering on the sidelines and feeling helpless.
“Look, boy,” Grandma Lilah suddenly spoke in a peevish tone, “she’s lost a lot of blood, but the bullet went straight through and didn’t hit nothin’ vital. If you don’t think I can handle something like this, then you ain’t been payin’ attention.”
Well, when she put it like that…
“Right,” Adam breathed in relief. He despised the hag, but decided a little diplomacy might be in order. “Thanks for the update.”
“It wasn’t an update. That was a subtle hint to get the hell out, and go mope around somebody who ain’t busy.”
So much for diplomacy.
“Right,” he mumbled and headed for the door.
The important thing was Olivia would be okay. It was the only thing that mattered now. Hovering around and irritating the “doctor” didn’t do anybody any good. He could wish a full coronary on her later.
For now, he wandered through the small house and marveled at the damage. Bullet holes riddled most of the walls, and chunks of ceiling plaster covered much of the floor and furniture. The living room, where he had fought the insane sniper woman, was completely wrecked. The kitchen and back laundry room were a disaster of broken glass, and shelf items littering the floor. He had been fighting for his life here a mere twenty minutes ago, yet now it already started to seem distant.
He stopped to watch a young man in jeans and flannel fiddling with the hot water heater. The man ignored him as he worked. It took Adam a second to realize he was doing something with the gas line.
Of course, he concluded in numb realization, they can’t leave a house full of bullet holes standing for the police to puzzle over. As soon as everybody is out of here, there’s going to be another mysterious fire in Cole County.
Adam left the man to his task and moved on.
He opened the back door and stepped out to see the cleanup operation in full swing out there as well. The fog was starting to clear and they were most likely in a hurry to be done before the place became truly visible from the highway. The van had already been pulled away from the giant spider’s corpse, and they were using a farm tractor to pull its legs off one at a time. A large trailer and tarp waited nearby for transport of the great carcass itself.
The other bodies were already gone, and several men with rakes and brooms were now sweeping the ground for rifle shells. The entire area behind the house was a beehive of activity as the men erased the evidence of the fight. They all worked quickly, efficiently, and in total silence.
And like the young man at the water heater, they all ignored Adam as he wandered through the scene.
He stopped and watched three men with brooms near the door of the barn, sweeping up piles of what Adam now realized were small spiders. Apparently they were all dead. Every single one of them. There were no signs of pesticide canisters, nor a hint of a chemical odor in the still air, causing Adam to puzzle over this development before the truth hit him.
They all died when their mother died. There was some kind of link between them. Antonio once said the spiders they steal always die, too. It must be the same principle at work. Break the link between the spider and the Matriarch, and the spider can’t survive.
Adam shook his head in dazed wonder. The unreality of the entire situation created a sense of disconnect in him…as if he were watching a strange sci-fi show that had nothing to do with him. And the unnatural quietness of the men working around him only enhanced the strange atmosphere. It felt like watching stage hands dismantle a set after a play was over.
It was while he mused over this analogy that a voice from behind brought him back to earth.
“Mr. Sellers. I need you to come with me.”
Adam turned around to see the white-haired owner of the Weyrich store, and most likely the Spider Tribe chieftain, regarding him with an unreadable expression. He didn’t necessarily look hostile, but his tone had the unmistakable politeness used by people in authority when they aren’t offering alternatives.
“Go with you. Go where?”
“Just for a talk, Mr. Sellers. I want to show you a couple of things, and then there is somebody who wants to meet you.”
###
“It happened here.” Samuel Hitch nodded at the cemetery gate. “The car we pulled the boy from was parked right there.”
Adam sat beside him in the cab of the truck and stared at the indicated spot. It was a wrought iron cemetery gate alongside what had to be one of the loneliest back roads in the country.
“Just him?”
“Just him. We found your brother’s body in the field over there. She got away with the mother, but we found her body down by the river a week later.”
Poor Karen, Adam mourned. He shuddered to think what her last moments must have been like.
“They’re buried in there,” Hitch continued, “toward the back. We got’em a stone with their names on it. I know it don’t make things right, but we didn’t have nothin’ against them and it gave the boy something of them to visit.”
Adam didn’t know what to say to this. He was finally getting some answers, and he felt it wiser not to say or respond in any way that could stop it from happening, so he changed the subject.
“What were they doing back here?”
The older man shrugged again.
“Who knows? They shouldn’t have even made it back here. No member of the Dog People ever made it one third as deep into our territory, and that’s with their spirit-hushing drugs. We’re pretty good at keeping people from wandering around these parts, and it’s been a long time since the last person even tried. Best we can tell, they were probably lost.”
Adam shook his head in disbelief as he absorbed this.
So it was just a case of “shit happens.”Only in this case the shit that happened was they wandered into a particularly horrific little corner of the world and it leapt out and ate them.
“But surely you knew about the rogue then. She was already huge.”
“We knew. We had discovered her the year before, when she was about the size of Maggie’s spider. We weren’t quite sure what to make of her.”
“I don’t understand.”
Hitch nodded at the graveyard again.
“Most of our spiders live for about a year, exactly like the ones you know. But every year a few don’t die. They become what we call yearlings. They can grow up to about ten inches in size, and those are what our spirit singers choose their companions from. We tend to gather any yearlings we find and bring them to the cemetery here, in order to have them in one place. Any that don’t become companions die at the end of the second year.”
It’s like the rogue’s hatchlings all dying. Mental connections have something to do with their ability to live and thrive.
“Anyway, we tend to come in the late autumn and scour the place to clean up their bodies. And that’s when we discovered the Young Mother. We didn’t know what to make of her at first. She must have come from the batch of yearlings from the year before and we somehow missed her. Like I said, she was about as big as Maggie’s spider, but she wasn’t nobody’s companion. And she kept growing.
She was docile though, and we could communicate with her like any yearling. Mainly sending her commands for her to follow. There was no sharing like we would with a true companion, and she seemed to have no true mind of her own like the Great Mother. We had never seen anything like her before. So we moved her to the next pasture over and turned out a few cows to keep her fed. The Great Mother was mostly quiet on the subject of her, other than telling us she couldn’t even sense this new spider’s spirit.”
“Sense her spirit?”
Samuel Hitch frowned in thought at him for a moment before resuming.
“Let’s say the Great Mother has
a passive awareness of pretty much any living thing within a good long way of her, and leave it at that.”
“Except for this enormous new spider.”
“Right. But like I said, she was docile. Harmless. Only that’s where we made our mistake.”
“How so?”
“She was harmless to us because we could communicate with her, tell her what to do. She didn’t see us as prey, and we knew how to handle her. But…”
“But David and Karen weren’t like you guys, so they qualified as prey, and she attacked.”
“Maybe,” Hitch muttered. “Maybe not.”
“Wait a minute. What?”
“The truth is we think it actually happened different than that. Your nephew is what we call a spirit sleeper…and a strong one. One whose spirit can be awoken by the Mother’s Kiss…that’s what we call a bite from one of our spiders. While a spirit sleeper is not truly awake unless bitten, the spiders are awake enough to recognize a spirit command from one to do simple things like bite, flee, or something simple when pictured. One had bitten Tucker when he tried to pull his dog in the car, and he was fully awake and projecting by the time we got there. We think his gift came down from his father.”
“David? Seriously?”
“Yes. There are signs, and from what Tucker has told us, your brother showed a couple of them. Ordinarily he would have gone through life and never known it. But that’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is,” Hitch looked at him gravely, “if your brother truly was a spirit sleeper, and he saw the Young Mother, and then imagined her attacking him and his family…”
He let the thought trail off and hang in the air.
Adam stared at him for a second, then closed his eyes in horror as realization dawned.
“Oh, God,” he groaned. “Then he would have been effectively ordering her to kill all of them.”
Hitch nodded.
“And then she went rogue,” Adam continued. “Killing David and Karen changed something and you lost control of her.”
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