Part One: Link
Part Seventeen: Link
Part Eighteen
Standing a few yards back, you couldn't tell the tablet from a tombstone.
“What if this is only a signpost?” asked Li. “What if there’s a whole fucking city up ahead?”
I wiped my palms on my pants to sop up the sweat, but the fabric only drew further moisture from my pores.
“This is making my nuts shrivel up,” said Zip. “I got a couple of raisins down there.”
We kept expecting the tablet to vanish or transform into a robot the second we dragged our eyes away.
“We should go back,” said Li, but she didn't move. The toe of her boot drew circles in the dirt.
“Yes, heading for shore is definitely the correct play,” said Zip.
Strains of a violent argument reached our ears. First: deep bellows, like an elephant defending its water hole. Then the reply: a rapid-fire series of avian shrieks.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said, checking the clip in my Glock. “We’re not fooling anybody.”
Onward we went, like miners drawn into unplumbed depths by the promise of sparkling jewels.
We didn't find a city. For five hours, we didn't find anything at all, except endless, identical trees. Tangled vines and towers of steaming excrement began to seem familiar, as if we were walking in circles, although I’d been checking my compass every fifteen seconds. Our voices grew taut. Zip began to spit thin strands of phlegm into the undergrowth, trying to clear his mouth of some sulfurous aftertaste.
An obelisk waited for us in a clearing no different from the thousands of others we’d crossed. When Li saw it, she froze mid-step, and our little jungle train skidded into her back.
Beyond the obelisk, which was smooth and featureless but for a convoluted labyrinth etched at its peak, a trio of ants with heads the size of refrigerators wriggled in the tangled threads of a seven-story spiderweb.
“How’d they get up there?” asked Zip.
Li crept closer to the gray structure, and we followed, keeping a wary eye on the wobbling spiderweb.
“Did something drag them up there? Did they jump? Guys?”
I laid both palms flat against the obelisk. It was cool and damp as a stone plucked from a riverbed, and it had the same smell of earthy nothingness.
“Oh, shit,” said Zip, as a pair of bloated red spiders crept into view at the top of the web. Their titanic abdomens throbbed like human hearts.
“Gimme a lift, Tetris,” said Li, who wanted to get some close-ups of the markings at the top of the obelisk. I bent, allowing her to clamber onto my shoulders.
As she strained to hold one of the body cameras high enough, I watched the spiders lazily close the distance to their prey. Their movements seemed to suggest that they’d already feasted today, and the ants were a happy surprise, like a slice of cake discovered in the fridge after a dinner party.
Before our eyes, the larger of the two spiders grasped an ant with a few of its legs and bent in to administer a bite. At first the ant’s gyrations only intensified, but after a moment they faded to twitching, and then the ant was dead.
The spider spooled greasy thread from its pointy rear and transformed the ant’s corpse into a tightly wrapped cocoon. Its companion wove a similar casket for the second ant
As I let Li down off my shoulders, the remaining ant bucked and clacked its pincers. Sheer will or an act of God allowed it to tear itself free, and it tumbled the fifteen or so feet to the ground.
Time slowed, as it had once before, when I stood at the edge of a chasm with Hollywood and a dragon’s face sprouted from the shadows.
The ant lumbered toward us, two of its legs still clasped together with sticky silk. Behind it, the spiders plopped their hideous weight onto the forest floor.
Like bystanders in a bank robbery, we tried to make ourselves as small as possible.
Zip dove left. Li and I flung ourselves right. The ant brushed between us and plummeted through the floor, dragging a good portion of the clearing with it. The first spider pursued.
The second spider paused at the edge of the pit. While it considered a descent, it noticed us.
It turned its greedy gaze on Li, who let loose with the SCAR, stitching a path of bullets from the spider’s eye-cluttered face down the length of its swollen, translucent abdomen. On the other side of the pit, Zip unloaded his handgun, plugging the monstrosity in the rear.
For a moment the spider wavered, four of its legs pulling it towards us, the other ones reaching for Zip. It settled on us, but we were already seeking cover in a thicket of vegetation. Meanwhile, Zip emptied another clip, and the spider wheeled to face the hail of bullets.
Zip scrambled up the tree behind him. If the spider had pursued at full speed, it could have plucked him off the rough bark like a grape, but another barrage from the SCAR and my own pistol kept it off balance.
Zip once scaled a towering office building with his bare hands to impress a girl. I never met anyone who could climb like that. When the spider reached the base of the tree and froze in trembling indecision, Zip was already twenty feet up.
He could have kept climbing, reached a safe height, and grapple-gunned to safety. But something, bravery or stupidity, made him step out onto a branch that hung directly over the spider. He fired six shots into its chitinous cranium.
This was the final insult. The spider bulled into the tree, sending shivers up the trunk, and Zip’s branch gave way —
Branch and rider fell, crunching onto the spider’s upward-gaping maw. One of the pincers snapped off and ricocheted across the clearing like a gigantic boomerang, trailing goopy black bile.
The spider screamed.
Zip threw himself free, rolling to a stop on the edge of the ravine.
Again the SCAR roared.
The spider staggered back, orange goo gushing from a dozen spouts. As it fled, one of its long, cruel legs lashed out in Zip’s direction, catching him full in the chest —
For a moment, Zip floated, eyes as wide and disbelieving as Junior’s had been —
Then he was gone, hurled into the abyss, and blood pumped thick and heavy through the veins in my temples.
Submitted March 28, 2015 at 11:37PM by FormerFutureAuthor http://ift.tt/19aJjKX FormerFutureAuthor
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