by Nick Ryder
Cara realized the man died during an expedition. Sampson thought she wanted the doll. He took it from the estate. When Cara realized this, she burned the doll in the fireplace. She never asked for anything more. She never went near estates when things came open.
“It’s how things work,” Sampson had told her once when she asked why no one seemed to care about anything but themselves. “People are selfish. Each of us has good in our hearts, but greed gets in the way. Sometimes when you’re hungry, you’ll do anything to eat.”
But Cara lived without greed. She didn’t get too close to anyone. That was before Spencer Harris.
Spencer was one of the last to arrive at the village before outsiders stopped migrating from across the desert. He came when Cara was fourteen. He was eighteen at the time. Cara found him remotely fascinating. He shared a hut with a family in exchange for three points a month. But he helped the family often. He hunted and fished, and brought back more than enough for him and them. Soon they had enough to sell to others for points.
Cara liked that about him. And she liked looking at him. He had an even tan that went right to the waistband of the cargo shorts. He wore boots. When the boots wore out, he went away for days on end to find more boots. He returned with more than boots. He was one of the few men in the village who ventured out alone.
He had a claymore that her father built in the smithy. Sampson took pride in all his weapons. Cara never had to spend any points, and Sampson gave away more than he needed to maintain an elder status. People paid in points or food, or Sampson’s favorite currency: bartering.
Spencer liked to practice with the claymore. It was routine for him to wield the weapon at phantom underbosses. Cara learned that many of the women took to doing their laundry at a certain time and place. She soon realized they liked watching Spencer practice with the claymore too.
He’d stepped up the moment she commented on leaving for the mountain. No one questioned it. What made Spencer unique was the fact he wore no colors. He’d arrived at the village without a preference. He swore no allegiance to any in his past. Somehow he’d lived without the benefit of a team at his back. And he stayed.
Cara wore blue out of respect for her father. She’d happily take off the tartan, but too many people found her a distraction when she showed more flesh than clothes.
He sat cross-legged, claymore over his knees, watching the flicker of the fire in a way that allowed him to keep an eye on the red team’s campfire.
She found herself watching him more than the fire. He had a broad nose, sharp eyebrows, and curly brown hair. He wore a tunic of saffron and boots. The soles of the boots, Cara noticed, were considerably thin and without a lot of treads. Sampson retreaded her soles every few months whether they needed it or not.
“My father can fix those boots,” she said without looking at him. Instead, she looked at the giant rattlesnake head that half-devoured Wilbert the way he sat. Its optical cavities lost the snake eyes. Someone made soup out of them. Wilbert pressed flower petals into the bone until the dye stained the ivory pink.
Spencer looked at the bottom of his boot, lifting the foot to see. He nodded and let go of his foot. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Cara liked that he was a man of few words. He observed and didn’t openly pass judgment; he used the claymore as a device to settle any question to his current cause. She decided to not worry about Spencer’s soles. Instead, she put down her head in the crook of her arm and watched the fire until sleep slipped from the hot sand under her torso and dragged her into its embrace.
Chapter Fifteen
When someone’s screams in the dark startle you from deep sleep, it’s okay to be so scared you pee a little. Cara was on her feet in moments. She kicked the stack of dry tumbleweeds into the smoldering fire pit and hefted the halberd, squinting in the darkness until the dry bush caught fire.
“Everyone here?” she whispered. Yards away, red team’s fire still had some life, but there was minimal movement around it.
“I’m here,” Wilbert said from the other side of the campfire. He crouched beside Maurice, who stood up and scanned the area.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I think it came from the red team,” Spencer said. Cara noticed he stood with his back to her, watching for anything pointy rushing them from the darkness.
“Should we check?” Maurice asked, looking at the others. He held the brackish blades in a manner that suggested they would go off at any moment.
“You stay here,” Spencer said to Cara. And he sprinted out of the dark heading toward the fire several yards away.
Cara caught up to him and passed him quickly.
“What happened?” she asked Isaiah.
The young man looked sick. He had a gash across his forehead and was out of breath.
“I don’t know what happened to Karl.” He shook his head. Mercury and Gemini were missing as well. “I went looking for him, but he’s gone.”
Spencer caught up to Cara. He was out of breath. He looked around the fire pit. He threw kindling on the fire to increase its strength. He pointed to the divot in the sand where had Karl slumbered. The area around the depression had pockmarks in the sand.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, looking up at Cara. He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
They prepared for the night in the wild. It was part of the life as a scavenger. You didn’t go into the wasteland and think you’d be back before dark every day. Some people couldn’t handle the darkness. It tested even the most seasoned of the groups.
But camping in the dark and wandering around in the dark were two very different survival techniques. One of those methods was bound to get you killed.
Cara grabbed her fire stick from the small utility belt she had at her waist. The fire stick had a life of a few hours, less if used to get a brighter flame. The steel tube had a tight weave wick at the center. The fire lit quickly, soaked in chemical accelerant, and burned white. Depending on how much wick fed at the end of the steel pipe, meant how much light she had to see the area. Maurice’s fire stick had an attachment, a piece of alloy, shined that reflected the view across the sand and to the rocks.
“I knew we should have camped farther away from the mountainside.” It was Wilbert.
Spencer tracked the holes in the sand. There were many, and farther along, something dropped on the ground and dragged along. Several poles dug into the ground around the heavy load.
There was a whimper and the scraping of sand.
When the group heard the rock tumble from the cliff face, they froze. It was an excellent measure to prepare for the worst. Sometimes scavengers went into the desert a hundred times and never saw an animal. Over time they came back with stories of vast herds of mythical beasts that migrated across the barren landscape.
This time they had one witness to what made the tracks in the sand. Cara didn’t have a lot of hope for Karl. Isaiah left the safety of the fire pit only when the rest of the blue team went looking for Karl. She was still suspicious because he made no mention of Gemini or Mercury like it hadn’t occurred to him to count them as part of his group.
The weak whimper came from above them. It was Maurice that pointed to the chunks of sandstone that had shades of red dripped on the surface.
Without hesitation, Cara jumped against the rocks and scrambled up the side. The halberd banged against the granite resolutely. Its sharp tone echoed across the blackness.
Spencer clambered up after her.
“We’ll stay here,” Wilbert shouted standing close to Maurice. He looked at his friend. “Why are your shorts all wet?”
Maurice blushed and tried to hide his crotch. “What? Everyone get startled sometimes.”
“Cara, you can’t—” Spencer said. The fire stick light spun around and dropped to the plateau. There was a hiss and screech of something but not the cries of the warrior woman; she swung the pole weapon so fast it sounded like a helicopter blade.
By the time Spencer joined her on the cliff, Cara had squatted beside Karl, holding his hand. There were four very large, very black arachnids dead around them. A few spindly legs still shivered involuntarily.
Karl’s eyes looked lost. He didn’t see her anymore. She knew that. The pink foam that bubbled out of his mouth smelled like vomit. There was a twin set of puncture wounds in his thigh, but the meat was black around the wounds. The flesh poisoned, necrosis had already set in the moment the venom from the enormous fangs injected into his leg. The poison worked as a symbiosis for the arachnids. It made it easier to suck up the juice once the meat putrefied.
Spencer tugged at Cara’s elbow. “We need to go,” he hissed. He wasn’t looking at her. He didn’t have his fire stick out. The flames from Cara’s stick illuminated the area around the body enough to see and lament the dead.
“We need to get him down.” She felt something loosen in her heart. Death had a way of infecting the living. People responded to it in different ways. Mostly they were glad it wasn’t happening to them at the time. But sometimes it just overwhelmed the soul.
“You need to leave him,” Spencer said. “We’re in a lot of trouble.”
Cara let go of Karl’s still sweaty and dead hand. She swept up the fire stick and lifted it to her hip. She found the halberd on the rock near her boot and raised it. The handle was slick with black blood from the arachnids.
“I killed them,” she said. Her boot tip kicked at one of the spindly black legs.
“That stuff they leak,” Spencer said. And there was a sound that accompanied his voice. It was the sound of a thousand birds taking flight from the side of the mountain. The flutter of a million wings echoed across the dark steely feathers scratching chalkboards. “Their blood draws more out. They swarm when one of them is killed.”
Cara lifted the fire stick higher in the air. The four dead arachnids lay in pieces. The light went higher; black blood had splashed over the rock faces. Together, Spencer and Cara lifted their heads to look at the front of the mountain, hidden in the darkness. The blackness of the mountainside cut a line in the starry sky overhead.
“Why does the mountain move?” she whispered. The rocks undulated, pitching and rolling where solid foundation should be against the night sky.
“That’s not the mountain.” He grabbed Cara by the waist and pulled her over and off the plateau. The heavy thuds of the first of the attacking arachnids hit the space where they stood moments before.
“What’s going on?” Wilbert said, trying to see above them.
The scrapes and scratches of a thousand spikes against stone descended on them. Cara was in the middle of it.
She dropped into the light of Maurice’s fire stick and rolled. The halberd imbedded its blade a few centimeters from Maurice’s sandal before Cara recovered the weapon.
Spencer landed on the ground already running.
“Run!” she screamed. Isaiah scrambled away, Wilbert waved his hands in the air screaming like a child, running at considerable speed away from the mountainside in the dark.
Maurice ran, carrying the fire stick high, so the light spilled out before him. When he fell, the light snuffed out. He turned over to look back at the peaks. Somehow he hadn’t achieved any distance; the mountain had caught up to him. In the dark, the glint of hundreds of shiny black marbles the size of soccer balls blinked from the hairy black mass that rolled like a furry tidal wave toward him.
Spencer scooped up Maurice by the arms and pulled him along.
Cara banged the fire stick against her thigh. She hooked it on her belt and waited for the darkness to blend with the starlight, so they had ambient light.
The best thing about the valley was its flatness. It went on forever, running between the jagged mountains on the far side, and the area she called home. Between those two points was open flat swirling white sand. At night, when there was no firelight to hamper the view, it was sometimes bright enough to see everything.
She looked to her right. There was a lanky figure that ran straight away from the bubbling black mass that coiled after them. Next was Wilbert. The young man had overtaken Isaiah, even though he was shorter and had to take twice as many steps to cover the same distance.
Spencer and Maurice were still behind Cara, and she had had enough running. It was her fault they’d awoken the swarm. But Karl hadn’t deserved to die in the darkness, alone.
She saw the silhouette of Maurice trip and tumble away from Spencer. A sand cloud engulfed him. Moments later, the black mass rolled over Maurice.
These weren’t normal spiders. Spiders didn’t swarm. Even hatched from eggs, they barely tolerated each other before it was survival of the fittest and see who could eat who. These arachnids had ten legs. Thin hairy abdomens, a long cephalothorax where eight eyes peered angrily into the darkness, with strong multi-elbowed legs twice the length of Cara’s pole weapon. They didn’t spin webs. They foraged and hunted in packs. And when night came, if someone was too close to the caves when they bedded down and had a fire for a nightlight, it was bound to draw the attention of these silky, efficient hunters. The arachnids ruled the night and Karl paid the price of stupidity.
The screams from Maurice tore through the night. Cara raced back to where he’d last stood before the black menace descended on him.
It was the stupidity of the arachnids thinking Maurice was an easy meal. The reverberation of the brackish blades slicing against the black horde meant they didn’t know what happened.
First, the screaming hairless thing was a quick meal. Next, the edges of the blades made mincemeat of the arachnids. In Maurice’s expert hands, his melee attack was second to none. He sliced, he diced, he created pieces of arachnids into teeny, tiny slices. He made mounds of soggy Julienne fries in just a few flashes of the blades.
By the time Cara reached her friend, his arm was too slippery to pull, and he couldn’t get any traction in the sand because he was up to his knees guts and legs.
“Quit screwing around!” Cara shouted and pushed him away from the still bubbling mass.
When they made several yards from the horde, she turned around.
“Get down,” she told him. If she knew where you were, you were safe as long as you found the lowest point in the dirt. If Maurice tried to stand up, that honed blades of her father’s weapon could easily cut him in half. She knew he knew that.
Cara saw the black horde engulf them. She closed her eyes and stepped away from herself. Somewhere inside her, the fire ignited her cells. She felt the prick of perspiration before the first turn of the wrist. The advancing mass sounded like the march of hundreds of steel tipped sticks clicking on cobblestones.
The halberd found a sliver of starlight, carving against its length and the weapon began to sing. The harmony resonated from the blades as it sliced through the air. Showers of minute black hair, carved from patellas, tibias, and tarsal claws. There were chunks of pedipalps lungs, and metatarsus flying in all directions. The more the enraged horde descended on Cara, their numbers swelling, spilling out of pockets of the cliff face where they slumbered in the day, the more she cut their numbers.
Then in one powerful moment, Cara ascended in the air, leaving the sandy earth, like stepping into shifting winds caused by the vibrating halberd.
Maurice covered his head with both hands, squeezing shut his eyes.
The blade point dropped from the sky, Cara at its hilt. The moment the tip of the halberd kissed the first sand pebble on the desert floor an eruption exploded. A bomb detonated and the remnants of the arachnids disintegrate in a white flash of ultimate power.
Flung away by Cara’s secret, Maurice tumbled and flopped in the sand. Coated arachnid juice, the sand stuck to him.
Every last one of the giant arachnids perished in one fell swoop. Cara swayed slightly. She scanned the horizon for more enemies. In the distance, just at the edge of her clear sight, twin glowing amber eyes blinked at Cara. She shifted her foot, ready to go after the massive beast, bu
t it was gone before she blinked. Its massive white body somehow disappeared, using the darkness like a cloak.
Chapter Sixteen
It was sometime later, after she’d started a fire that signaled to the others it was safe to return, that Cara felt the severe drain on her limbs. She napped, resting her head on Wilbert’s leg.
The sun had poked over the mountain before she woke. Spencer gave her a long puzzled look. Gemini and Mercury had returned to their group. After the rain of arachnids, the red team huddled close to blue team’s campfire. Isaiah sat a little way from the fire, his back to the group. He couldn’t look Cara in the eye.
She sat up. Somewhere in the battle, a venomous fang scraped across her forearm. A reasonable person would have died a screaming, painful death. The muscles turn putrid with necrosis. But Cara, as everyone learned in the dark of the night, wasn’t an average person. There was an angry black line cut vertically down the forearm. The simmering power singed the fine blond hair around the wound within her body.
Mercury, Gemini, and Maurice wandered back to the camp in the center of the desert. Wilbert wore the rattlesnake head sombrero to shade Cara from the intensity of the sun.
“I can’t count them all,” Mercury said, throwing down his spear.
“I think some of them combusted,” Gemini added. He glanced to Cara and looked away quickly in case she made him combust too.
“We need to get out of the sun,” she said indifferently.
“You want some water?” Spencer asked her. She took his leather water flask and sucked on the end. The water was hot from the sun, but it quenched her thirst.
She grabbed the halberd at her side and used the pole to stand up.
“We need to find some shade,” she said. “I don’t know why you let me sleep so long.” Maurice, Wilbert, and Spencer each shared looks.
