Her Ruger was heavy in her hand. She thumbed the grooves of the cylinder’s chambers. Four bullets. That thing took four bullets, and it hardly flinched. But so what? A moose could endure four bullets in the flank from a .357 magnum, but put those same bullets into its skull and it’d collapse in a heap. She’d do one better and put five in its ugly skull. And if that didn’t work, she’d fight it with her bare hands if she had to.
Her journey through the grove of evergreens did not last long. Even in the darkness, she found the retreating yellow shape of the robe. She could see Kara still slumped over the creature’s—the Vant’therax’s—arm. She stopped when she reached the opening of the thinned clearing and raised her Ruger in both hands. “Stop right there!”
To her surprise, the figure stopped. The man-thing turned toward her with a look of wretched amusement. “You’re going to try shooting me again?” he said in an aged, raspy voice. “Don’t you understand that it’s useless?”
Annika’s face twitched, and the edge of a smile came to her lips. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know if shooting you will do me any good.” She pulled the hammer back with a loud clack. “But if I shoot the girl, then no one wins.”
The man’s deep eyes gazed back at her. Then, the creature returned his own sickening smile. He shifted Kara’s weight. His clawed hand wrapped itself around the young girl’s midsection and lifted her until her head blocked Annika’s view of his own. It was a challenge. A bold one. Annika could have played it off; she could have taken that challenge in stride and attempted to find some leverage, even without her bluff. But when she saw that Kara’s eyes were open, she gasped.
Holy shit, she thought, the words articulated by some other part of her. She hadn’t expected her to be awake. Kara’s eyes, childlike and innocent though they were, shone with a lucidity that belied the danger she was in. They were aware, probably scared. Annika would have been more careful with her words had she known the girl was awake. A bluff was only as useful as the facade used to deliver it, and the broadening grin peeking out behind Kara’s damp blonde hair said that hers was crumbling. Did Samantha look like that when they took her?
Annika’s hands trembled. The surreality of the situation encroached on the edge of her mind. Kara was Kara; Samantha was dead and was never coming back. But those eyes, filled with confusion and fear, hit her where it hurt. They hit her in the place where her defenses were weakest—the past.
The man’s mouth opened wide, and a throaty, croaking noise came out. “Not so eager?”
She took a deep breath to steady her shaking hands. “Sometimes you have to do things that you aren’t eager to. That’s what being human is all about.” Don’t listen to anything I say, she thought, praying that Kara was telepathic. I won’t hurt you. Believe me.
“Kara!” came a voice from behind.
Annika bit her lip, trying to maintain her composure. Oh, come on! Now you get some courage? Make up your mind and stop screwing with me! Ten feet to her right, Arthr emerged from the grove of trees and came to an abrupt stop. Annika kept her gun pointed at the combined mass of Kara and the robed creature. You finally got some spine, but now you’re just going to ruin the shreds of our leverage. She ground her teeth, waiting. Her window may have been gone already.
Arthr doubled over, panting. He looked up at his sister and her monstrous captor. Kara’s eyes were the same, and this time he knew what it was they were waiting for. He wasn’t going to let her down. And when he saw Spinneretta next, he’d apologize and tell her she was right. That shame he’d wear proudly, a badge of honor.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, shame and pride melded together into a single glimmer of hope. “Kara! I give you permission!”
Kara’s eyes lit up with a shimmer of satisfaction. Then came a moment of chaos.
One of Kara’s legs lashed out and split through the robed thing’s humanoid hand. Arthr let out a shout of victory over himself. Kara’s spider legs opened the creature’s grip and she hopped down to the ground, before ripping her blood-covered leg from its flesh. With a crack, Annika dropped the hammer of her revolver. The gun screamed. The thing’s head blew backward, blood splattering into the air. A fresh bullet hole in its forehead, the creature reeled two steps back and collapsed to the sopping mud and grass.
There was no need for a second shot.
Clutching his broken ribs with his unmaimed left arm, Simon hobbled out of the building with two Marauders flanking him. Pain clattered through his body, but far worse than that pain was the gaping wound in his mental stability. Taken for a goddamn ride, he thought. Fucking purple man, I’m going to find you. You’ve made yourself a powerful enemy in Nayor.
But then Simon felt the pain of a bullet rip through his forehead and into his mind. Staggering for balance, he grabbed his head and clenched his jaw hard. You’re shitting me, he thought, recognizing the meaning of that pain at once. You can’t be fucking serious! His blood began to boil. Is there anything that won’t fall apart around me? Why do I have to do everything my goddamn self? I’ve had it with you failures. I’ve had it with having to clean up after you.
He began to shake, steadying himself on the wall next to him and ignoring the concerned cries of his guards. I’ve had it. I’ve taken care of almost everything by myself, and I can’t even trust my own fucking men. And you make me do this when I’m already in this much pain. Motherfuckers, I’ve had it with all of you!
Simon cringed as he felt one of his molars crack from the pressure on his jaw. Then his mind embraced the network of glowing connections behind his eyelids. The spiders in Gauge’s gray matter began to move, filling in the gaps and linking together into artificial neurons. The synapses began to fire, and Simon’s consciousness left his body.
Chapter 28
Web
Spinneretta couldn’t make sense of the hallways beyond the metal door. The splitting corridors resembled those of a hospital that had been abandoned for decades, only with a more profound stench of rot. The flickering fluorescent lights revealed haphazard, forgotten piles of twisted metal. She even saw a bloodstained gurney toppled against a mold-eaten section of wall.
Their flight took them past countless four-way intersections, each leading deeper and deeper into the dead halls. After several minutes of running, Spinneretta tasted something on her legs that demanded her attention with an echo of horrifying recognition. She came to an abrupt stop at a junction, using her lower appendages to halt her momentum. “Wait!” she said.
Mark, who had bolted past the intersection without a second thought, stopped. He turned back to her with an impatient look.
There, in the intersection, a trail of dried blood and broken glass ran from the right hallway to the left. There was something about the smell—the taste—of that blood. It was not ordinary blood, the Instinct told her. There was some rancid, familiar depth to it, an artificial concoction that was far louder to her sense of smell than the blood itself. The putrid trail ran into the leftmost passage, wavering as though left by one in a drunken swagger.
Dread spread like frost through her core. The corridor extended only about thirty feet onward, and then it abruptly ended. Beyond, there was nothing but an inky, pervasive blackness. At first, she was convinced her eyes must have been deceiving her. Mesmerized, she took two cautious steps toward that well of night, and the almost imperceptible parallax in the depths confirmed its true shape. The darkness stole a gasp from her lips. It was nothing other than an entrance to a vast hollow, a cavernous expanse so deep that the sparse light from the overhead fluorescents could not even begin to scratch the edges of its walls.
“What’s wrong?” Mark said, either not noticing or failing to be impressed by the cavity.
“Be quiet.” She had ceased to care about the foul-smelling blood. There was something in that emptiness. There was the sound of trickling water somewhere far away. But there was something else.
The other smell. There was an unmistakable musk of mildew
and abandon seeping out from this underworld. It was an ageless mustiness, a damp and fungal aroma. The scent was faint but nauseating, dizzying. It was as if the smell itself was echoing, hitting her in reverberating waves. She imagined the vast cavern as but a single chamber in an expansive network of caves and hollows stretching far and wide beneath their very feet. Unconcerned with the politics and kings of the surface world, here the Morlocks or Lemurians would have dwelt in their subterranean homes, hoarding their secrets and keeping their courts. Deeper in, perhaps after an uncountable number of such chambers, long abandoned, lay their ancient vaults of secrets far too terrible to even consider. Caches of treasure unusable and undefinable.
But as she stared into the black, the buzzing in her ears grew louder. There was something else, but this time it was not in that darkness, but drawn out by it, drawn out by her now emptied perception. It was farther below and somewhere behind them, whether in cavernous depths or complexes yet undiscovered. The strange pressure pushing on the front of her consciousness—a sensation that she’d attempted to ignore—grew more terrible. Something was resonating, reverberating directly into her mind. That grinding pressure was now more nauseating and disorienting than the smell from the black chasm.
What was causing that pressure? The pulsating rhythm swept through her thoughts, deepening as it rang out against the walls of the depths. Each throb of that psychic font made her shiver, unthinkable images flashing before her eyes.
She took a step back, a more tangible panic gripping her. How long had that blood been dry, and how long had that glass lain broken? The indeterminable age of this place filled her with an amorphous terror. Whether the fear was based on anything extant or was man’s natural scotophobia running wild didn’t matter. She had to put as much distance between her and that black expanse as she could before that abyss, or whatever that beating pulse was, swallowed her and her sanity forever. She turned from the end of the hall back to where they had been heading, her footfalls hastening.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked.
“We need to leave, now. I don’t like this place.” She began to run, and Mark soon followed her example, not questioning what had spooked her so.
The wind rustled Annika’s trench coat. With a relieved sigh, she lowered her gun, arms still shaking. She’d been confident that a bullet to the head would drop the Vant’therax, but she hadn’t expected it to be so easy. As she saw Kara walking toward her, she dropped her Ruger into her holster. Arthr, too, was approaching her. “Finally found your spine, huh?” she said when she caught Arthr’s eye.
He faltered. “Y-yeah. I guess.”
Kara smiled. “Thanks, Arthr. I knew you’d come through for me.”
He lowered his eyes. “Why did you wait? Why did you just let him take you if you were in control the whole time?”
“You didn’t give me permission.”
“So you really were doing it to punish me, weren’t you? You were going to let yourself be taken just to prove a damn point, weren’t you?”
She smiled with a childlike innocence. “Of course not,” she said. “I would have gotten away sooner or later. But I wanted to see where he was taking me. But since you gave me permission I figured it must be important.”
“Of course it’s important, stupid! From now on, anything I say does not apply in a situation like this. I was wrong. I was mad, and I let that spill over and create something far worse than what I meant it to be. Please, forgive me.”
She smiled. “Okay.” The shimmer in her eyes brought a tired smile to Annika’s lips.
“While we’re apologizing,” Annika said, “I’m sorry for using you as leverage like that, Kara. I had no intention of really hurting you.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t know whose side you were on at first, so I was a bit confused about it all.” She smiled that innocent smile of hers, and it sent a chill up Annika’s spine. Just a minute before, the girl had run one of her legs through the monster-thing’s hand, and here she was smiling like a harmless little girl. “What’s your name?” Kara asked her.
“Annika Crane.”
Kara beamed. “Nice to meet you!”
Annika laughed to herself and extended her hand to shake Kara’s. “Nice to meet you, too.”
But their collective attention was usurped by the fallen mass of flesh and robe on the ground, which had begun a pattern of grotesque convulsions. In a series of violent spasms, the thing rolled itself over and lurched to its feet once more. Its head wobbled, tilting far back on its neck before slumping forward without any apparent direction.
Annika saw that the bloodied wound in the center of its forehead had begun scabbing over, and skittering spiders now crawled all over its face. She swallowed hard; those small bulbous things were the same things she’d seen at the hospital the day Morton died. Her right hand dove for her Ruger, but she was too slow. In a blur, the thing hurtled forward and smashed into them, throwing her and Arthr apart with an explosive flail of its arms. She landed on her side against an immovable flat stone covered in mud. The impact sent tendrils of pain through her stomach and throat.
The revived creature stared at its surroundings with a hollow aspect. The thing’s eyes—the two that had been functional—were different from before. They weren’t cold, nor were they calculating. They were merely dead, just like the six others embedded in its face. The creature opened its mouth to speak. “Gauge was too kind to you,” it said in a voice that did not belong. “Elizabeth Bordon. At last I’ve found you.”
Arthr found his feet, his hand clasped over his ribs. From her position on the ground, Annika saw him fly at the creature. The thing flailed its great claw in an arc, smashing against him with a force that knocked him from his feet for the third time that night. His attempt at getting up was cut short as the creature—apparently known as Gauge—threw a foot into Arthr’s head, knocking him flat into a shallow puddle.
Kara was the next to pounce upon the robed thing. She jumped onto its back, clinging to its shoulders with her spider legs, but was thrown off as Gauge spun about. She absorbed the fall with her coiled legs and pounced once more. This time, a single blow from the Vant’therax’s human arm sent her to the ground.
Annika could only watch as Gauge spread its chitinous fingers and pinned Kara to the earth with them, trapping her. The tips of Kara’s legs flew from her mouth and began to flail in concentric circles around that claw, but Gauge threw its left fist into the side of her head. As the blow connected, her legs circled even faster, a hopeless-looking gesture which Annika could not make sense of. Gauge drew its arm back again and threw a second punch into her head, followed by a third. After the third blow, her movements ceased. Gauge grabbed her jaw, tilted her head a little to the side, and finally let go of her. Satisfied that she was no longer conscious, it rose to its feet and withdrew the claw from the ground.
A pang of nausea ripped its way through Annika’s stomach. The tragic helplessness of Kara’s legs flailing around the imprisoning claw was almost too much to bear. The urge to throw up nearly overcame her, and it may only have been her rage that held her stomach contents in place. She had to do something. She had to stop it before it got away. She could threaten Nexara again; at least the girl wouldn’t hear it this time. That was a terrible idea, but she had to do something to buy them some time. “I know what you are,” she said, sitting back up. “Vant’therax. One of the products of NIDUS, I presume.”
The creature turned toward her, leaving Kara where she lay. Its face was an indecipherable mask. But Annika had hit upon something, and so she seized hold of it before common sense could talk her out of what she knew was suicide. “That’s right,” she said, chuckling. “I know a lot about you, thanks to some careful investigation. But I also know Gauge was dead, shot in the damn brain. So tell me, how can you be alive?”
Gauge remained silent for a moment. It took a step forward, and a hideous, half-limp smile cracked over its lips. “The brain is naught but a seat fo
r the soul,” it said. “These soulless creatures end when their automatic brains die. But as long as the rest of this body can function, it is a small matter to substitute my own consciousness. The body becomes my seat.”
Annika narrowed her eyes, her heart thumping painfully in her chest. “And you are?”
The thing launched into a fit of spasmodic, coughing laughter. It spread its arms into a shape not unlike that of Christ the Redeemer. “I am the master of the brood. All these creatures are my children. I am the hand of the King. I am the voice of the Mists. I am the shepherd of these wayward children, and the path of—”
In the blink of an eye, Annika raised her Ruger and fired. The bullet struck true, smashing the wall of teeth in Gauge’s mouth and splitting through the soft tissue of its tongue. It made an awful gurgling noise and lurched backward, its human hand rushing up to cover its mouth, now a gushing well of dark blood.
“Spare me your dramatic bullshit,” Annika said, letting her arm drop back to her side. “Your voice is so grating.”
The creature hunched over, emitting a low-pitched, throaty whine. It shot a hateful gaze at Annika. Its clawed hand clenched, the joints in those inhuman fingers quivering.
“You’ve betrayed yourself,” Annika said. She began to rise again to her feet. “Gauge never felt pain. Four bullets, a leg through the hand, nothing. So, whoever’s pulling his strings now has to be a human.” She planted her feet, dropping into a threatening stance. “Who’s behind those dead eyes? A human with intimate knowledge of the Vant’therax. A human able to control a Vant’therax. Who ever could that be? Perhaps a human who was born as nothing more than a Conduit to a dead god.”
The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1) Page 44
