Defying Doomsday, page 24
She set her cup aside and nodded. “I’m ready.”
“Be careful,” Danna said again from the corner.
“Good hunting,” Rae murmured, turning at the end of a row.
Emm hopped down from her chair and took her hunting bag from its storage place, hanging from the wall above her board. The board was a low-slung piece of wood, solid and edged in metal, with wheels at each corner on flexible axles, fashioned so that she could lie on her belly and pull herself along with her hands, or sit up and steer with a leather strap in front once she got rolling. She’d had it for years now, as long as she’d considered herself an adult. She knew every nick in the wood, exactly how long it could go between greasing the wheels, the rattling sound that meant she would make a tight corner and the one that meant she wouldn’t. She trusted it like she trusted Danna and Rae, and herself. More than she trusted anyone else alive.
The Others had thrown her out to die, more than once. Thanks to the board and her brain, now they came to her and her people with hats in hand. Another bit of spite to get her awake in the morning.
She lay down on the board, settled the bag behind her, and got herself rolling out the door. Outside it was cool, the sun hidden behind clouds and the air restless with breeze. She paused for a few moments, listening for any of the chittering and scuttling sounds that signalled Spiders passing by, or the high bloodless wails that meant they were on the hunt. The Spiders shouldn’t be here, according to Rae’s scrawled charts and records, but every once in a while she was wrong.
Emm heard nothing but the wind and the cautious squeaking of rats. Lucky vermin, too small for the Spiders to catch unless they walked right into the webs. Too small for the monsters to waste time hunting. Humanity had never been that lucky.
She pushed off and rolled down the path in the direction that led away from the surface space claimed by the Others, around the edges of the entrance to the Tunnels. The paths were still smooth, all these years after they had been roads. In some ways, she wished they had been destroyed, to make it harder for the Spiders to travel, but mostly she was glad they were like this. She wouldn’t have been able to travel if they were much rougher, and the Spiders had ten legs to carry them over broken ground. Not much could slow them down at all.
She wanted to sing as she made her way towards the nest; her throat was tight with the urge to sing, but the Spiders sensed vibration most of all, and the patterns of human speech and song were things they recognised. Human footfalls, too, the rhythms of walking and running. They knew the visual patterns, but they always seemed to pick up sounds first. If they heard you, they would see you, and if they saw you, that was it.
They’d never picked up on the pattern of Emm rolling on her board, though. There was only one of her, and only in this one place. If the Spiders did have a hive mind, like the old stories said, then she just wasn’t enough of a sample size for them to learn from.
Bad for them, good for her. And Danna, and Rae, because it meant she could do these hunts and come back with the materials they used to trade. A group of three alone would never make it otherwise.
Emm picked up a rock from the middle of the path and tossed it aside, then resumed rolling towards the nest. If this really was going to be the last hunt of the season, she needed to bring back the goods. She hoped the Spiders would cooperate. Or— No. She hoped they wouldn’t even know she was there. That was her gift to the little cluster of remaining humanity here. She could get in and out invisibly.
The surface grew rougher as she approached the nest, and her easy glide turned into a careful crawl, as she pulled the board along with her hands. She strained her hearing to its limit, listening for sounds from inside the nest above the gusts of wind. At first there was nothing, but as she moved deeper into the structure, Emm heard the soft chittering of mandibles, the click of chitin against other chitin or concrete, and the low whistles the Spiders used amongst themselves.
The nest site had been a building once, one of the tall, elaborate structures with arteries running vertically at the centre and stairwells wrapping upwards in each corner. There were openings along the outer walls, ringed in jagged shards of glass that served well for knives. Emm had collected sacks of it in the past, and Rae and Danna had carefully shaped the pieces and bound them to hilts made of wood wrapped in leather and Spider-silk. Those had traded well, feeding the three of them for a long season. But they should have rationed them out more slowly, instead of flooding the market; all of the Others had one now, and unless she came across a piece suited to a specialised blade, no one would need more for a while.
This year when the Spiders went into their long sleep, she might make her way upstairs and sort through the remnants there, if Danna would come with her for backup. The young were clumsy and less dangerous than their parents, but they hatched hungry.
The whistles grew louder and lower in pitch, and Emm slowed herself with palms flat to the ground, twisting her hips to skew the board towards the wall. She trusted the Spiders’ preference for scuttling through open spaces when they could. There were old stories that claimed they partly navigated by the sharp clicking they made with their mandibles, using the echo to identify their distance from obstacles. It fit with what she’d observed in the nest. Sometimes the Spiders veered back and forth, adjusting their path after each click, and then moved straight once they found the centre of the track. Maybe their eyes caught patterns of movement and the echoes helped them steer around things that didn’t move. Whatever the truth was, she had learned to exploit it.
Two Spiders emerged into the passageway, and she planted her hands to stop. They whistled to each other repeatedly, moving rapidly down the path without clicking or hesitating. Emm held her breath and kept herself frozen, her shoulder pressed hard to the wall. She had made this venture into the deep, living heart of the nest more times than she could count, and still, seeing them at close range made her chest clench. It left her tasting her own death in her throat.
The Spiders passed by, their whistles fading as they rounded a corner in the passageway. Emm remained still, her fingers tense against the ground. She forced herself to breathe before she moved again, deeper into the nest, where the light faded away almost entirely.
Here, the only way to navigate was by the splashes of dull-glowing fungus scattered across the space. Emm used the faint light to find bits of her real quarry, the Spiders’ silk. Once she located a strand, she could follow it inwards, towing herself along by tugging on the silk instead of pressing her hands into the floor of the nest. The ground was soft and warm in a way that made her skin crawl and screams choke themselves off in her throat.
Maybe it was only more fungus. But some instinct in her chest insisted it was flesh, liquefied in the Spiders’ bellies or churned to pulp under their limbs. She couldn’t push the idea from her mind. She could only keep moving.
She paused again, holding a strand of silk tightly in both hands. She tried and failed to count the sources of the sounds, but gave up and tried to ignore them instead. Emm resumed pulling herself along with the silk and, as she moved, she wound the length of it around her wrist, creating a coil that she could put into her bag once it was large enough to be worthwhile. The knife at her belt was the sharpest she had, just sharp enough to cut through the silk. It had been crafted from a Spider mandible, stolen from a corpse left when the Others had ringed a passage with dry brush, waited for a whistling party of Spiders to enter, and set it all ablaze. It was the one great human victory of Emm’s lifetime.
That was a long time ago. Some believed humans were due for a victory. Emm secretly belonged to this camp, although she would never admit it out loud. Rae fell on the other side, believing that all triumphs were behind them and what remained was a quiet slide into endless night. Danna never gave an opinion, no matter how gently Emm coaxed her. She always kept her thoughts as her own.
The strand of silk Emm was following ran out. She slipped the coil from her wrist and put it in her bag, then resumed moving forwards, feeling for another strand. The darkness made her want to close her eyes, but she had to keep them as wide as she could, attuned to the slightest change in the fungal glow, or a shift in the air that was easier to feel on the wet surface of her eyes than on her skin. The fungus grew more thickly around the Spiders’ webs, and the presence of prey changed the flow of air around them, just a bit.
Or more than a bit, if the prey was still alive and struggling, but she would be able to hear that.
On her board, she ought to be low enough to slip under the webs, but it would be a pathetic end if she stumbled into one. It was humanity’s common nightmare now, the shared horror that stood over everything else in the ruins of the world. The fear of being blindfolded and helpless and slowly suffocating under layers of wet heavy silk, still warm from inside the monsters that would kill you, unable to fight, unable to breathe—
Emm came to a halt and gripped the edge of her board as tightly as she could, until the wood dug painfully into her fingers. There was no time for this now. Nightmares and panic had to wait until she was safely back home, until Danna could brush her hair back from her sweaty forehead and whisper soothing things, until Rae could hold her hand in the dark. Giving in and letting fear take over would get her killed, either by blundering into the very webs she feared or by sending her directly into a Spider’s path.
She can taste the dull, faintly metallic scent of the Spiders all through her throat and tongue. If feeding them was humanity’s common horror, hating them was their common purpose. She opened her eyes to the dark again and moved forwards.
Now that she’d let the nightmare into her head, though, it was hard to push back. She couldn’t quite forget that the silk she was seeking on the ground was dry precisely because it had been wrapped around some other poor dying thing, and had been sliced free at random lengths by a careless motion of the mandibles when the Spiders fed. Winding up the silk rubbed death all over her hands.
But she couldn’t stop. She gathered three more lengths of silk, none of them as long as she would have liked, and continued deeper into the nest. The air grew stale and heavy, the almost-metal taste nauseating on her tongue. As her hands groped patiently along the floor, she shied away from identifying the shapes she touched any further than useful or not. Cold practicality could keep her alive as surely as superstition.
Deeper and deeper. She couldn’t help but think of it as spiralling downwards into an abyss, though rationally she knew the surface was level. She found dry silk, wound it, stashed it away. She collected things that had a promise of being useful. She listened to the clicks and whistles in the dark and strained to feel any change in the air against her eyes.
She stopped to rest, wiping the sweat from her face on the sleeve of her jacket. She was surrounded by silk, imprisoned. But instead of being spun in hunger, her cocoon was woven with love. It was enough of a difference to matter.
She reached out again, making a slow sweep along the floor with her hands. One more good length of silk and she would call it a day. Not her most successful hunt ever, but not a bad one, and enough to keep them all going. She had hoped to end this season on a triumph, but if life had taught her anything, it was that survival was good enough…
Her fingers brushed against the cool, smooth surface of an object that clicked as it moved against the stone. Chitin.
Spider.
Emm froze, her breath stopping in her chest and her heart tripling its pace. This was her fate, what she’d always known under her skin, the way she knew her darkest fear.
She was going to die alone in the dark, just like everyone else.
She was going to die, here, like this, eaten by a Spider that—
The Spider wasn’t moving.
It took a long moment for that to settle in her mind, the realisation that the chitin shell was still under her hand. The click she had heard was dull and hollow, an exoskeleton bumping against stone, not feet skittering or mandibles snapping at prey.
She moved her hand, following the curve of the thing as lightly as she could, barely brushing the surface. It still didn’t move or react, and after a moment of exploration, she realised why. She felt a dry, ragged edge, parts of it peeling away to feathery thinness.
It was a moult, a shed exoskeleton, cast aside when a baby monster grew up.
She scooted her board closer and used both hands to explore the rest. She could make out the front and upper portion of the thorax, broken off behind the joint where the second leg would meet, and maybe—maybe, if she was lucky—
She lurched to bring the board forwards, nearly slipping off. Not directly in front of the thorax, everything must be scattered and scrambled by the Spiders running around their lair, but maybe nearby—up against the wall, because it might have enough of a shape to bounce or even roll—
Again, she made a heedless reach into the dark. Pain shot through her fingers as they wrapped around a sharp edge, and she shoved her other hand into her mouth, biting down to keep from laughing. The head. She had found the head, with at least one of the mandibles intact enough to cut herself. Intact enough to craft into a weapon and trade. This made the hunt a success all on its own; this made the whole season.
She moved her hand along the mandible, careful not to catch her fingers again, finding first the point and then tracing back in the opposite direction until she reached the base. From there she scouted around, finding that the other mandible was broken halfway along its length.
She got her arms around the head and pulled it up onto the board with her, before sitting upright and clutching it to her chest. She wanted to spit on it. She wanted to smash it. She wanted to kiss it with all the pale, thwarted love the scum of the earth could have for a god.
She had been down here too long.
She put the head into her bag and turned the board around, blinking against the dark. This was always the most terrifying part, retracing her path to the exit. It was why she always kept close to the wall, even though it meant missing out on whatever lengths of silk and bits of useful debris the Spiders might keep at the centre of the nest. Following the wall was the only way she could be sure she would find her way out again.
The urge to hurry was nearly overpowering. Emm had to set her teeth and concentrate on going at a slow, steady pace, stopping to listen every few breaths. Getting careless and getting trapped was another bad, arrogant death. She was going to have a better ending. Dying of old age in her bed with Danna at her side, or setting a fire to stop a Spider advance; those would be worth it. She wouldn’t settle for this.
She crossed the nest, board length by board length, until she could see her arms moving in the edge of the light coming from the entrance. It wasn’t safe to pick up speed, not yet, but her hands moved of their own will, reaching for the surface and yanking the board forwards faster, sending the wheels rattling as they crossed the ground.
Emm heard the rapid clicks coming from behind her and bit down on her tongue hard enough to taste blood. It wasn’t a scream she held back, but laughter—the helpless, broken kind.
She slammed the heels of her hands against the ground, bringing the board to a halt. The clicking continued, the staccato rhythm of Spider legs skittering over the floor accented with the off-beat click of mandibles. She wondered what the Spider was saying. Maybe it was calling out a name, like Emm herself coming home from hunting, stepping into the house looking for Danna and Rae.
Spiders didn’t have lovers or friends, though. They had their fellow monsters, and they had meals.
Her chest was tight. She opened her mouth wider, struggling to bring in more air without moving her body. The bag holding the silk and the Spider head was wedged under her chest, the edge of the broken mandible digging hard into her ribs.
The footsteps stopped, but the click of the mandibles was so close she felt the vibration on her skin. The Spider was right beside her. She looked out of the corner of her eye and she could see it, the light from the entryway just enough to bring a dull gleam to its exoskeleton.
The Spider clicked again, expectantly, and her heart leaped painfully in her chest, beating hard enough that she could feel it against the broken bit of chitin still jammed against her ribs. Maybe it was this Spider’s own former body, outgrown and left in a corner.
She fumbled with the bag, the movement dangerous and stupid but the only chance she had.
The Spider clicked more rapidly, as Emm pulled out the head and shoved it towards the sound. The hollow mandible met the live ones with an impact that sounded wrong to her ears, too bright, too insubstantial, but at least it was something.
The Spider’s feet stuttered against the floor, but didn’t carry it forwards. Maybe that was how they showed surprise, by dancing in place. Maybe that was how they celebrated catching painfully stupid food. She bit down on another round of frantic giggles and moved the head again, tapping the mandible against the living Spider’s.
It clicked one more time, slower, and then moved back into the darkness of the nest. Not far; she could still see it reflecting the light. She moved the head again, wagging it back and forth. Deliberately showing motion in front of the Spiders was suicide, but if it had the look of an old friend saying hello, or a corpse risen from the dead, well, neither of those things was food.
Not food, she thought, shifting her weight on the board, her shoulders aching from holding the head aloft and outstretched. Not food means not interesting, right? Go away!
The Spider clicked again, softly, and she heard the patter of ten feet carrying it back into the nest.
She lowered the head slowly, settling it on the board again where her chest would rest. It would dig in even more painfully for the journey home, but she didn’t care. It had saved her life; it had earned a little of her pain.
She moved the board along with shaking hands, stopping for breath as often as she’d stopped for caution before. She had always gone out alone when she hunted, steady in the belief that in solitude lived both safety and strength. Now, though, she carried the ghost of a Spider with her, and she would have given anything to have Danna and Rae waiting to meet her at the first edge of sunlight.
