I Bring the Fire Part IV: Fates: The Hunt for Loki Is On

by C. Gockel

  He has the drone in his hands and is about to throw it, but Amy’s eyes are riveted behind him—an adult spider is closing in, mandibles clacking.

  Amy screams.

  Bohdi turns, just in time for the spider to lunge at his midriff, mandibles open wide. In a motion too fast for Amy to see, Bohdi twists his body around with a snarl, stabbing the pointy tail end of the drone right into the spider’s largest bottom eye. He pulls the drone out of the spider’s eye with an angry shout. Ochre liquid splashes from the gaping wound. The spider’s mandibles clack in a rapid staccato, and then the whole beast drops to the ground. With a shout of triumph or anger or both, Bohdi springs onto the fallen spider’s head and then leaps into the tunnel opening, with so much impossible grace, it’s like he’s being lifted by invisible strings. An instant later, he is on his hands and knees on the tunnel floor, panting at Amy’s feet.

  In the nursery, the other adult spider lets loose a shriek that is nearly ear-splitting. Amy’s eyes rise to a point beyond the spider’s head. She gasps. “More adults!”

  Adult spiders are spilling through the other openings; a few are already on the ground, preparing to fire silk. “Run!” Amy shouts.

  At a crouch at her feet, Bohdi snarls. “No!”

  She looks down to see him jamming the drone’s sharp tail, now ochre and sticky with fluid, into the tunnel floor. He pulls on it, gives a grunt, and releases a lever beneath the drone’s core. The drone’s wings fly outward and pierce the tunnel’s walls and lights flash along its sides.

  “Huh,” Bohdi says, eyes shining in the electronic glow. “Impact must have reconnected a wire.” Bohdi gives it a yank, and she sees the glint of his teeth in a vicious smile when it doesn’t move.

  She hears a whistling in the chamber, and on instinct pulls him back. He falls on his butt just before bolts of sticky silk land on the drone’s tail end, sticking it to the floor.

  Bohdi laughs. “Heh, they’re sealing the exit for us.”

  In the nursery, all the adult spiders come to a halt. Mr. Squeakers cheeps from the floor, hops up onto Amy’s arm, and crawls to her shoulder.

  All the baby spiders stop chittering. And then seemingly at some unheard command, they surge forward, their tiny bodies swarming over the body of the adult spider Bohdi downed. With excited squeals, they try to hurl themselves into the tunnel, even as the adults rush forward and try to pull them away from the exit.

  With a gasp, Amy takes a step backward. The juveniles are small enough they can fit beneath the spider silk and the drone wings.

  “Run!” she says.

  “Yep,” says Bohdi, clambering to his feet. Even though Amy’s got a head start, he is instantly beside her. He grabs her wrist, and pulls her along. She doesn’t think she’s ever run so fast, it feels like she’s flying. And the next thing she knows, she is flying, suspended in midair as the tunnel floor drops out from beneath her feet. Before she can process what is happening, she falls with Bohdi, her wrist still in his grip. They land an instant later in a slide as the tunnel drops at an incline too steep for human feet. Bohdi shouts, Squeakers squeaks, and Amy bites her tongue, blood welling in her mouth. But even as they fall, her heart leaps… She smells fresh air!

  They tumble, Squeakers frantically clinging to the front of her coat, her hand sliding to link with Bohdi’s. And then the tunnel opens to the outside, and they crash downward into a clump of undergrowth that breaks their fall. It’s so dry beneath the nest that dust rises up around the brush in a small whirlwind.

  Beside her, Bohdi coughs. It must be near noon, but the light around them is dark and gray. She lifts her head. The spider nest is a looming gray cloud, not eight feet above their heads. They are surrounded by a dead forest of tree trunks and undergrowth.

  Bohdi laughs. “Did we make it?”

  Amy’s mouth drops. She almost laughs, too, but the laughter dies before it’s left her mouth. Beyond the copse of dead vegetation they’ve landed in, she hears angry chittering noises. She lifts her eyes above a clump of brown grasses that is nearly the height of her head. Leaning sideways, she looks between two trees whose trunks are choked with the same dead ivy they’d seen in the spider nursery. Closing in, less than fifty feet away, are more spiders than she can count.

  “No,” she whispers. “We haven’t made it yet.”

  The spiders move more slowly than they had on the roof or in the nest. Because Bohdi killed one of them? Do the spiders think they’re dangerous?

  Climbing to his feet, Bohdi turns around, surveying the distance beyond their protective little wall of trees and dead plant life. “Fuck,” he says.

  Scrambling up, Amy slowly turns around. Outside of the trees, it’s mostly underbrush. Spiders are everywhere.

  A few bolts of silk streak toward them, but the silken bolts catch harmlessly in the trees and brush. Dipping his chin, voice low, Bohdi says, “So Loki got out last time by dashing beneath the nest…”

  Amy nods. “But he had fire…”

  A gentle breeze stirs. Bohdi drops to his knees and pulls out his lighter

  “I know it won’t work,” he mutters.

  Dropping down, she squeezes his hand holding the lighter. “Do it,” she says. She hears an edge in her voice that sounds like hopelessness or hysteria. She remembers the adze, the sharp forelimbs of spiders thrust through its chest. She will try anything to escape that fate. Bohdi’s lighter sparks, and he holds it at the base of a high clump of undergrowth. The tall spikes of grass begin to smolder.

  From above them comes a sound like a child’s gleeful, “Whee!”

  Amy lifts her head to see two small spiders falling from the tunnel just above them. Before she knows what’s happening, Bohdi is on his feet. His right foot connects with a small spider body before it even hits the ground. There is a sickening crunch and the spider’s body flies through the dead trees. There is a collective clicking beyond the small patch of forest they’re in.

  The second spider scurries at Amy’s feet, mandibles twitching. Is it poisonous? She wants to kick it, but somehow she winds up only hopping backward, like her legs are bound together. Before she can regain herself, Bohdi’s already giving the spiderling a smooth roundhouse kick with his left foot. There is another crunch as his foot connects, and then the small creature goes flying between the trees.

  Amy shivers. There is something so effortless and natural in the way Bohdi fights. As though he does this all the time…

  She twists around to look at him, expecting a cocky grin and glinting eyes. Instead Bohdi just looks befuddled. “Wow,” he says. “I must have played soccer in my past life.”

  In the periphery of her vision, Amy sees two of the adults rush forward.

  She falls with Bohdi into a defensive crouch—as though they have some defense. But the two spiders merely grab the semi-crushed baby spiders and scurry backward. As they do, the mob of spiders chittering becomes so loud and fast it becomes a furious roar.

  Amy blinks. For a heartbeat nothing happens. And then the spiders surge forward from all sides with such force the ground actually shakes.

  Another high-pitched cry sounds above. Lifting her head, maybe to avoid looking at her fate, she sees a small spider falling right toward her.

  “Amy,” Bohdi shouts.

  He reaches for her, but it’s too late. The spiderling is just inches from the crown of her head. She should run, or hit it, or kick it…Instead she catches it. Her hands connect with its fuzzy, round, middle, just at the level above where its stubby little legs begin. Its fur is incredibly soft beneath her fingers, and its body is warm.

  The roaring clatter of the spiders instantly goes silent, the wave of their momentum coming to a halt just a few paces from the trees.

  The small spider in her hands gives a cheep. Its six eyes open and close rapidly, its little legs pump the empty air, and its mandibles quiver.

  “I can’t…I can’t kill it!” Amy cries, knowing she’s being ridiculous. It’s probably poisonous. It would
suck her blood in a heartbeat.

  Bohdi puts a hand on her shoulder and the little spider squeals in terror, its legs helplessly churning backward in the air.

  “Maybe you won’t have to,” he whispers, but he might as well be shouting, the spiders beyond the trees are so eerily silent.

  Amy lifts her head. The adult spiders have drawn back, their mandibles opening and closing—but so softly they make almost no sound.

  “We have a hostage,” Bohdi says.

  Amy’s heart stops. One little spider’s life…has made the whole hive retreat.

  “Don’t drop him,” Bohdi says. He pushes Amy forward a step. In front of them, the spiders draw back.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” Amy says, her voice ringing with despair. As they advance toward the spiders, some of the adults drop their abdomens low to the ground. Amy’s not sure if she imagines it, but there’s something sinister in the movement. Bohdi spins beside her, jaw hard. Flicking open his knife, he shouts, “You don’t have to hurt it, honey, ’cause I will.”

  He sounds so much more confident than Amy; she shifts nervously on her feet. The spiders crawling on their bellies skitter backward with nervous, light clicks of their mandibles.

  The little spider in Amy’s hands squeals, a line of silk shooting out its rear end. Bohdi’s eyes drop to it, and he whispers through clinched teeth. “I don’t want to hurt you, little guy…but I don’t want to be eaten.”

  There’s a sort of frantic desperation in his voice, and it’s like a spell has been broken. He’s just as human as she is, just as afraid and conflicted.

  Bohdi licks his lips nervously. Rolling his head, he flips his bangs back and whispers, “We’re in a stalemate. In the trees they can’t shoot us with silk, and while we’ve got the little guy, they can’t advance. But as soon as we leave the trees…”

  Amy swallows. As soon as they leave the trees and underbrush, they’ll be surrounded by spiders. It will be easy enough for the spiders to trap them both in bonds of silk before Bohdi can threaten their “hostage.”

  For a moment, they both stand paralyzed. A gust of gentle wind sweeps beneath the nest, ruffling dead leaves.

  Amy takes a deep breath and catches a whiff of…campfire.

  A twig snaps very close in the underbrush to their right. Expecting to see a spider, Amy turns her head, and Bohdi raises his knife.

  But there is no giant arachnid about to pounce, just a bright dancing flame, crackling in the brush. There is another crackle, another gust of wind, and a tiny spark floats gently from the burning undergrowth to the trunk of a tree. It disappears among the blackened dead fronds of ivy. And then, with a sound like a soft sigh, a warm orange flame blossoms along the tree trunk.

  More sparks rise from the first bit of brush Bohdi set to smoldering. Some land in the ivy embrace of another tree. Another tiny fire starts with frightening swiftness.

  “Uh-oh,” says Bohdi. “Errrr…”

  A patch of grass erupts into a blaze. The tiny flickers of flame dancing in the ivy fronds suddenly flare—and the tree trunks rapidly becoming engulfed in fire so dense it is like flaming bark. Spreading up into the tree limbs, the fire begins stretching orange tendrils of flame into the spider nest.

  Amy lifts her head and gasps. Where the flame touches the nest, the web melts like cotton candy.

  A whoosh sounds behind them, and another tree trunk bursts into flames, tongues of fire flicking up quickly into its branches and into the web…Amy turns in place, the fire is spreading everywhere around them. In a few minutes, they’ll be trapped.

  Beyond the flames, Amy hears the rise of more spider chitters.

  There is a loud crack, and a branch longer than Amy’s arm and twice as thick tumbles down behind them, one end of it lit like the butt end of a cigarette.

  “Death by spider or by fire?” Bohdi mutters.

  “I don’t know…” Amy says, turning to face their captors beyond the flaming brush. As she turns, a shrill shriek fills the air, followed by another, and another. It sounds like a baby’s cry, and makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

  “What?” says Bohdi.

  And then the spider in Amy’s arms raises its voice in the same eerily human shriek of terror. Above them, more wails rise up in a horrible chorus of pain and fear Amy knows she’ll never be able to forget it as long as she lives.

  Eyes widening, Amy looks upward. Above them spider silk is melting away from the flames as the fire leaps from branch to branch.

  “The nursery…” Amy whispers, but her voice is drowned out by the cries of the adult spiders beyond the trees. Their chittering rises in another roar; however, this time, it is higher in pitch, almost frantic.

  Beside her, even in the warm light of the growing flames, Bohdi looks vaguely green. But then gritting his teeth, he surveys the distance beyond Amy’s shoulder. Putting his knife away, he grabs her shoulder. “Come on.” Pushing her forward, he pauses just long enough to pick up the branch that had fallen, and begins steering Amy out of the trees that are rapidly becoming giant torches.

  Death by spider then, she thinks. That thought dies almost instantly. The ranks of adult spiders surrounding Amy and Bohdi have thinned. All around them, the spiders are jumping into the air, and disappearing into half hidden tunnels in the floor of the rapidly disintegrating nest.

  The shrill cry of baby spiders is still rising in the air. Amy’s own spiderling’s shriek is fading to a near incessant whimper. Flipping the little guy around in her arms so its back is to her stomach, she clutches it like a stuffed animal.

  Bohdi steers them beneath the nest, between clumps of smoldering grasses and trees, brandishing the branch at any spider that looks like it’ll get close…but there aren’t many. One does send a bolt of silk at them—but Bohdi catches it with an angry snarl with the end of the branch and it disintegrates without smoke or even a sizzle. After that, the spiders mostly skitter away as they approach.

  Without any spoken agreement, Bohdi’s and Amy’s feet begin picking up speed, they’re both running as they approach the edge of the nest. The fire is spreading behind and above them, Amy feels heat against her back, and the smoke is making them cough and gasp.

  The little spider she carries cries again as they reach open air. Bohdi and Amy come to a skidding halt. Amy looks up through the branches of the forest they find themselves in, slightly disoriented. Where before the sky had been a beautiful blue, now it is dark and overcast. Her heart lifts. Thor?

  “Smoke,” Bohdi whispers.

  A hot wind licks against her back. Flames jump from beneath the nest to the undergrowth in the forest around them. The forest isn’t as dry as the vegetation choked beneath the nest… Still, Amy hears the crackle of twigs snapping in the fire’s heat.

  In her arms, the little spider lets loose one of those too human shrieks, and Amy pulls it tighter on impulse.

  Behind her comes a soft clicking. Amy and Bohdi both turn slowly to see a single spider standing about twenty paces behind them, the nest melting away over its head.

  The spider in her arms wails, and its little legs pump the air. Amy feels tears welling in her eyes and it’s not just from soot. In the back of her mind, she knows this is just some primitive part of her brain responding to a baby’s cry, an evolutionary impulse—that really isn’t suited to this situation.

  The baby’s cries become whimpers. Amy bites her lip, and lowers her small hostage to the ground.

  “What are you…” Bohdi stammers.

  The large spider darts forward before Amy can answer.

  Bohdi grabs her hand, yanks her back with such force she spins around, and then pulls her into a dead run through the trees. For an instant, Amy thinks the spider is letting them go, and she feels a weird sort of kindred with the creature. And then she hears whistling behind her, and then something hits her back with enough force to knock her to the ground. Turning her head in the dirt, she watches as Bohdi shouts and sinks the end of the smoldering
branch into a band of silk that’s attached to her coat.

  As the silk melts away, Amy scrambles to her feet, and Bohdi charges the spider with a yell. Hoisting the baby on its back, the spider skitters away, chittering angrily. Without a word, Bohdi grabs Amy’s arm, and they take off again. They don’t stop running until they reach an open bluff. By that time, even Bohdi’s gasping for air.

  Releasing her hand, he walks a few paces away and bends over, panting hard. She expects him to say something about her being an idiot—for not kicking the spider and then for letting it go. She’s been holding him back and putting him in more danger the whole time.

  But Bohdi only stands there. Wiping his face, now smudged with soot, he looks back the way they came. Still panting, Amy looks, too. Clouds of smoke are obscuring the sky. She can’t see the nest at all. Wind is carrying the flames into the forest they’re now standing in.

  Jaw tightening, Bohdi says, “The drone turned on back there. Steve will keep looking for us.”

  It’s at that moment Amy realizes that besides losing Thor, they don’t have any Promethean wire…or any supplies at all, really.

  She can’t bring herself to answer.

  Bohdi closes his eyes and his body sags. He looks…beaten. And it’s so strange, after all they just went through.

  Trying to be encouraging, she says, “You did really great back there. I mean…it’s like you just knew how to…” Kill spiders. Take hostages.

  Looking down, Bohdi’s lips tighten. “I did get some combat training in the Marines.” He doesn’t meet her eyes, and she can’t read his mood.

  Amy tilts her head. “I didn’t realize the Marines taught you how to fight giant spiders.”

  Looking up, Bohdi says, “They didn’t…maybe I should suggest it be part of the standard training?”

  His lips curl up, just a little; and Amy smiles, just a little.