Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits

by Darren Humphries

  I waved at Alexei to join me in the room. He shook his head, so I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him in, closing the door behind us.

  Pitrov watched all this in silence. His lack of apparent concern concerned me.

  “So, you have finally come for me,” he said, and his voice was not as deep as I had anticipated from his wrestler’s physique. That was presumably a result of his days with the Muscovite Dogs. “I have been expecting you.”

  He looked past me.

  “And Alexei Borodinov, if I am not mistaken.”

  “He made me do it!” Alexei claimed suddenly. “I didn’t want to, but he has a gun.”

  “This is the Moscow criminal underworld,” Pitrov pointed out. “Everyone has a gun.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Alexei pouted.

  “A mistake that is currently foolish and may soon become fatal,” Pitrov said ominously.

  “Can we get back to the part where you were expecting me?” I interrupted. I did not like being sidelined in my own housebreak.

  “The path that you have carved through my former associates would have been very hard to miss,” Pitrov explained calmly. His calmness also worried me. “Following the route of this destruction, it quickly became obvious that it would lead you to my doorstep.”

  “A little bit past your doorstep, I’d say,” I gloated, just a little bit. I thought I had earned it.

  “Yes, that was impressive,” he admitted. “I could have used a man with your talents in my organisation. If you had not been hell-bent on destroying it, that is. Why is that, by the way? Nobody seems to have survived long enough to answer that question.”

  “Are you one of them?” I ignored his question in favour of one of my own. It was the question. “Are you a Soulstealer?”

  Pitrov made a show of looking confused by the reference, but I could see in his eyes that he recognised it.

  “It must be very frustrating for you,” he said, rather obliquely. “I mean, I could say yes and I assume that you would take me at my word and kill me where I sit, but you would never really know. Not really. Not for sure. And if I said no, then you would have no way of proving it one way or the other. Would you?”

  “There are ways,” I promised him grimly, “but they are not very pleasant.”

  He laughed aloud at that.

  “Torture? You are going to talk to me about torture? It is an inexact science at best and I have far more experience of exceeding its limitations than you.”

  I was glad to admit that was true.

  “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. You’re just as guilty even if you’re not one of them, but we can try out some of that ‘inexact science’ on your family; your wife and son.”

  “Empty threats,” he said scornfully, “or you would have brought them with you already. U.N.D.E.A.D. is too honourable to torture innocents.”

  “U.N.D.E.AD.?” Alexei exclaimed, shocked. “You are from U.N.D.E.A.D.?”

  “You didn’t guess?” I asked him harshly. “The bunch of big-assed spiders under the house of my target didn’t give you a clue? Not even a little bit?

  “For you, I have no place in my organisation,” Pitrov told him.

  “What organisation is that?” I taunted Pitrov and knew instantly that I had overstepped the mark. I used to be so much better at this sort of thing.

  “What are you doing?” Pitrov demanded, no longer so calm and in control of the situation. “I mean what else are you doing? Why are you really here?”

  He examined me through narrowed eyes, but I merely smiled at him, happy to turn the tables. Then the ruble seemed to drop. He looked at the computer screen and his eyes went from narrow to wide in shock.

  “You are hacking my computer!”

  “Guilty as charged,” I admitted, “or as guilty as you.”

  I took an object out of my pocket, the one responsible for the earlier tingling sensation, and showed it to him.

  “Proximity hacking spell. Cast by the very best in the business.”

  “Very clever, but you will never get out of here alive with it,” Pitrov threatened and reached for the top of the desk.

  “Stop!” I ordered.

  Unsurprisingly, he didn’t.

  I shot him three times. Though not the best marksman on the firing range back in Oxford, I was capable of hitting a seated man less than the width of a room away. The bullets, however, impacted on the thin air between us, deforming as they came to an absolute stop against nothing.

  “Did you think that I would not take such a simple precaution?” Pitrov sneered. “And now you will face my spiders.”

  It was not a threat that you heard that often.

  He mashed a button on his desk and, muffled by the floors and walls between us and the source, we could hear a siren sound.

  “That is probably not a good sign,” Alexei suggested.

  “Probably not,” I agreed, “but that one’s worse.”

  I pointed to the floor alongside Pitrov’s desk. It had begun to smoke and bubble. Abruptly it fell away, leaving a ragged hole. Long crystalline legs rose up through the hole like thin pillars before folding elegantly back on themselves in all directions until the ends rested on the floor. This created a stable platform for the rest of the spider to haul itself up through the hole. The light from Pitrov’s desk lamp reflected off, and refracted through, the spider’s body like a crazy arachnid disco ball, throwing rainbows all around the room.

  “Ruby spitter,” I told Alexei. “Not good news. Venom like acid.”

  “I guessed from the name,” he replied.

  The spider reared up on some of its back legs, the front few scraping along the ceiling. The Ruby Spitter wasn’t the largest of the crystal spider species, but it made up for that in its own special deadly way. It looked around itself with eyes that were like black pearls, globular and impenetrable. They were the only non-sparkly bit of its body. They were also featureless, which made it hard to tell which way they were looking. There were also several of them, which just compounded the problem.

  “Get them!” Pitrov ordered.

  The spider reached out with its forelegs and encountered the invisible barrier spell that had stopped my bullets. It pushed hard, but made no progress, so it turned to look at Pitrov with an intent that was suddenly obvious. When called, the spider was going to take a victim. It did not matter if that victim was the man who thought he was its owner.

  “No, not me,” Pitrov shouted, panicking as he guessed at what the spider was thinking and came up with the same conclusion that I had. “Them!”

  The spider’s mandibles clamped onto Pitrov’s neck, their gem-sharp edges neatly beheading him and flipping the head into the open mouth that lay behind them. As the man’s blood spurted over the spider’s legs, it started to chew, a process that was rendered quite visible due to the translucent nature of its body.

  “Well, that’s going to make him harder to question,” I complained, aggrieved.

  “Harder?” Alexei worried.

  “Don’t ask,” I advised him.

  The spider turned towards us at the sound of my voice, its expressionless eyes impossible to read.

  “Time to leave,” I told Alexei and started to back towards the door.

  The spider jerked and a clear liquid flew through the air. I instinctively pushed Alexei out of the firing line, which left me exposed. The fluid hit the invisible wall of Pitrov’s protection spell and the air itself started to smoke.

  “That stuff can eat through magic!” I exclaimed. I had never heard of anything like that before. Magic could be overpowered by stronger magic, but was otherwise invulnerable. Or so I had thought.

  “I’m leaving,” Alexei declared and ran for the door.

  I was right behind him. We emerged into the main hallway and Alexei turned right toward the town house’s main door.

  “Not that way!” I warned him, but he had already reached the door and threw open the bolts. I grabbed him just before he
ran straight into a web of fine, glittering filaments. The best case scenario was that he would become stuck on their natural glue and hang there, crying ‘Help me!’ piteously. The more likely outcome was that his own momentum would push the strands through his flesh, slicing and dicing him.

  “If you want any chance of staying alive, come with me,” I told him.

  I led the way around the perimeter of the wide hallway, careful to keep as close to the edge as possible. Alexei tried to cut one of the corners. I grabbed him and pulled him back just as the Emerald Facet Funneller erupted out of the floor in a shower of tiles. For a brief second, Alexei was face to face with the monster. The mandibles were snapping shut millimetres from his face. Then, the beast retreated back into the hole it had created.

  “Yellow alert,” I said.

  “Yellow?” he demanded.

  “Judging by the stain on the front of your trousers, yes.”

  People emerged onto the first floor landing. I yelled at them to stay where they were. One man hurried down the stairs, gun in hand, when he failed to recognise me. The moment that he set foot on the ground, the Funneller leaped out of its lair with terrifying speed. The gunman was immediately impaled and dragged screaming into the hole. The scream did not last for long.

  Nobody else tried to descend.

  “That’ll give us a few seconds. This way!” I dragged Alexei down the hallway that presented our best chance for escape. We passed the door into Pitrov’s study and I noted with dismay that it was starting to melt.

  “Run,” I ordered and pelted down the hallway. “Now you know why I brought you along.”

  “To help you outrun giant spiders?” he asked confused.

  “It’s an old joke, but I only need to outrun you.”

  I could see the door that I was looking for now and I repeated silently that there was no reason for it to be locked. I repeated that over and over as a sort of mantra. As I reached for the handle, the office door we had passed burst open as the spitter blasted through its weakened wood. Before the spider could orientate itself and see us, I had the door in front of me open and pushed Alexei through it. I could hear the spitter approach, its legs drumming out a frantic beat on the floor, and then the wall, as I jumped through the doorway and slammed the door behind me. It was not a solid wooden door like the one into Pitrov’s study and would stand up to the spitter’s acid for only a few seconds. Or quite possibly less.

  I snatched some vehicle keys from the nearby rack and started pressing them. Lights flashed on the vehicles all around the garage we had entered. The one nearest to us, a large 4 wheel drive car, beeped and flashed its lights. I dived in, discarding the other keys as I went. I hit the starter and the engine came to life with the kind of steady thrum that suggested it had received every full service on the very first day they were due. There was a blast of opera singing from the radio, which I silenced immediately. Alexei dove into the passenger seat and I had the vehicle moving before he even closed his door, adding another alarm chime to the cacophony of undone seatbelt warnings.

  The garage was long and low and the door at the end was programmed to react to vehicles approaching at a much more sedate pace. It was rising when we reached it, but it scraped across the roof with the sort of stomach-churning squeal that only the most accomplished teacher with a blackboard and piece of chalk used to be able to produce.

  “Look out!” Alexei cried in panic, but I didn’t know if he was referring to the close call with the garage door or the copse of crystal legs just outside.

  I swerved through the legs and managed not to hit any of them, which was quite a feat considering they were moving in all directions as the Diamond Giant turned to follow our progress.

  Alexei pushed himself up in his seat, pleased to have escaped alive.

  “I like this car,” he examined the luxurious interior admiringly, “I think that I shall keep it.”

  “Great,” I congratulated him. “Duck!”

  He reacted just in time as the windscreen impacted on a thread stretched across the street. Like a taut wire, only sharper, it sliced through the glass and metal of the car like the clichéd knife through the equally clichéd butter.

  I sat back up and looked in the wing mirror. The car’s roof lay on the road and was flattened as the Diamenti Magna ran over it, pummelling it into the tarmac.

  “That’s all right,” Alexei muttered. “I like convertibles.”

  A shadow passed over the car and I glanced up to see the Blue Widow pass over us. It hit the side of a building and hung there for a moment before leaping off towards us again.

  I hauled on the wheel and sent us swerving down a side road. It would take the Widow a few moments to change its direction, but the Diamenti Magna handled the corner easily. People scattered off the pavement as the spider thundered down the road, the giant arachnid knocking parked cars aside without even noticing. The length of its legs allowed it to match the car for speed. The Blue Widow’s prodigious leaping would keep it in close pursuit as well. The Emerald Facet Funneller had nested in the cellar of Pitrov’s town house and would probably remain there. The Ruby Spitter would be unable to chase due to its smaller size and might just remain in the house as well, leaving us with just the two big ones to deal with.

  “They are right behind us,” Alexei reported. “You are not losing them.”

  I could see this quite clearly in the remaining mirrors.

  “It’s all right,” I told him, “I’ve got a plan.”

  “Is it like your other plans?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I confirmed.

  “Oh dear,” he belatedly reached down to do up his seatbelt.

  “The Bolshoi Theatre,” I demanded. “Which way?”

  “What?” he asked, confused.

  “Which way is the Bolshoi Theatre?” I asked again. It wasn’t exactly a hard question. He was a resident of the city, after all, so he ought to know.

  “That way,” he pointed.

  I hauled the wheel to bring the car around to the new heading.

  The Diamond Giant was not as agile as the car and struggled to make the course correction. It slammed into a building, causing the façade to crumble under the impact.

  We emerged onto a road which bordered a river. Fountains plumed into the air in the middle of the water. Couples strolled along the pavements in the evening air. I hauled on the wheel again. The Blue Widow realised suddenly that there were no more buildings to leap onto and held on tight to its last landing point. Its momentum, however, dragged at it and the front of the building was peeled away.

  “The Director is not going to be happy about this,” I said to myself and swerved left onto a bridge.

  I realised too late that the bridge was a footbridge and barely managed to avoid smashing into the heart sculpture in the centre of the entrance. There was another squeal of abused metal as the car scraped along the side of it. Pedestrians rushed to either side to avoid us as we raced over the river, thankful for Russian overengineering. When they saw what was following us, the people scattered even more. The spiders, however, were fixed on us now and ignored everyone else in sight.

  We emerged from the bridge into a park whose walkways were wide enough to accommodate the 4x4 and we quickly regained the proper roads. With no buildings to leap between, the Blue Widow was falling back slightly, but the Diamond Giant was still in pursuit. I pushed the car to its limit, but we found our way blocked by another river.

  “Are you kidding me?” I demanded of the universe in general.

  “Go right,” Alexei instructed and I obeyed.

  Ahead of us, two police cars were bearing down, their lights flashing and their intent clear; they meant to stop the miscreants who were destroying their city. Then they saw the Diamanti Magna emerge behind us and abruptly found other missions with a higher priority, swerving down a side road. I couldn’t say that I blamed them. They were ill-equipped to deal with something like this. I had no equipment at all, but was still in
a better position than they were.

  “How much further?” I demanded.

  Our luck wasn’t going to hold forever and any delay was likely to see the spiders pounce upon us. It was late enough for the traffic to be lighter than at the height of day, but there was still plenty of it about.

  “Over this bridge!” Alexei yelled and I again slid the car through a harsh change of direction.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked as some brightly-lit, and very familiar, towers rose up ahead.

  “Only if you think it is St Basil’s Cathedral,” he replied.

  “Red Square? Are you serious?”

  “The Bolshoi Theatre is on the other side. We have to go around,” he told me.

  “Or not, as the case may be,” I decided and swerved left off the road and into the sparsely populated car park.

  “Oh, I think we are going to be in so much trouble,” Alexei moaned as we raced up the wide tourist walkway. “Mind the bollards!”

  I had already seen the low concrete bollards across the entire width of the walkway, their purpose to stop people doing just what I was doing. I swerved the car to the left and we rode up the grass incline on that side before dropping down onto the walkway again. I was grateful that the car nearest to the door in Pitrov’s garage had been a 4x4 and not a people carrier. We tore through the famous square at full speed, heading straight for the State Historical Museum. The late sightseers watched in surprise and then terror as one giant crystal spider rushed past them and another leapt between the oddly-shaped roofs of the cathedral.

  “Through there,” Alexei pointed to an archway on the right hand side of the aggressively red-painted museum building. “That’s the very heart of Moscow, the zero point.”

  “That’s nice,” I commented absently as we raced through the archway with very little space to spare on either side of the vehicle.

  Once through, we emerged onto another wide square and I leaned on the car horn to get more sightseers out of way. The Blue Widow appeared on the top of the archway that we had gone through and then leaped onto the side of the Four Seasons hotel. Our careering vehicle was quickly forgotten as the people ran screaming. The Diamenti Magna finally gave up on trying to find a way over the arch and just smashed through it, but we had gained a few precious seconds.