Rob Thurman - Blackout

Niko moved off to the side in the living area and cut a spider in half with his sword as it leaped through the air. Right in half. Did you want to know what the inside of a Nepenthe spider looked like? Me neither, but I found out. If the Incredible Hulk ate a spaghetti dinner, then puked it up …

“I think this may be Ammut, not spider vengeance. Now concentrate,” Niko said sharply. “You might’ve gotten lucky with one bite, but ten will guarantee you won’t be that lucky again.”

“I am concentrating,” I shot back as I ducked one spider that went over my head. Spider vengeance? Did I live in a world where spider vengeance was an actual concept? I had so fucked up in my former life.

“On what?” The next one he impaled, flung it off the blade, and cut the spider chimp’s head off by a third.

“The bodily fluids of superheroes, but it’s relevant to the situation.” I whirled as I felt a tug on my boot. The bastard that had gone over the top of me had snagged me with a line of webbing and yanked me off my feet the moment I turned. This was no beagle or the seventy-five-pound Charlotte from the motel bathroom. This bad boy was huge, a hundred and fifty pounds easy. I wasn’t afraid of spiders. When you woke up with four giant dead ones and killed another one with a fork, you’d find out whether or not you had a phobia. All those legs, their impossible speed, fat abdomens full of God knew what; they weren’t pretty, but I wasn’t arachnophobic. That was before I discovered there was a line between nonphobic and holy-fucking-shit-I-think-I-wet-my-pants—and that line sat firmly on one hundred and fifty pounds of a big black, venom-dripping, six-eyed demon from Hell. And not the biblical Hell either, but some alien, unknowable hell from a distant dimension that would drive you insane with one glimpse.

One hundred and forty-nine pounds and maybe I would’ve been fine. But one hundred and fifty pounds equaled full-blown arachnophobia right out of nowhere. It filled my guts with a cold worse than the searing burn of dry ice. My brain did its best to curl in on itself, a frightened child seeking the fetal position. All the air was sucked from the room and if I’d tried to say anything, it wouldn’t have passed paralyzed vocal cords. In my life, almost six days now, best guess, I’d never been so fucking terrified. If my heart had exploded I wouldn’t have been surprised—relieved, but not surprised.

Not, of course, that any of that stopped me from pulling the triggers on both guns and emptying the clips. Fear is fear. It only kills you if you let it. If I felt the need to seek a support group, I’d do it later. Blowing away the motherfucking, disgusting tarantula big enough that you could ride its hairy ass across the plains to settle the West was more pertinent at the moment.

“Cal?”

I waved a gun at Niko, who was behind me, as I put down the other gun to tear at the webbing around my ankle as I kept my eyes on the giant spider riddled with bullet holes lying limp in front of me. “Just throwing up in my mouth. Doing fucking great. No problems here.”

“Good. In that case I’m sending you a present.”

I snatched a glance over my shoulder to see Niko kick a spider in my direction as he took on three more. I jammed the muzzle of the Glock into its pulpy underabdomen and blew it away as its legs scrambled for purchase on my arm. You always keep a last one in the chamber. Just in case … for them or for yourself. The thought swam in and out so quickly, I almost didn’t have time to think what a high-class job it was that had that particular rule carved into the neurons so deeply that even amnesia couldn’t erase it. College grads everywhere were praying to get an internship here.

I had a new respect for exterminators now. These creepy-crawly bastards did not give up. I knelt, dumped the empty clips, reached into my pocket for a full one, rammed it home, and then did the same for the other. Ever see those movies? The ones where people are running, empty their clips, drop them, toss the guns up in the air, throw new clips out, and the guns flip back down with the downward pull of gravity combined with the upward motion of the clip to meet together in perfect harmony and, damn, you’re reloaded in half a second flat.

If I ever found the fucker that came up with that bullshit, I would beat him until he would make weekold roadkill look like an adoptable and perfectly viable pet. It doesn’t work that way, and if anyone needs that spelled out to them, then they should find a coupon for a lobotomy, because why carry extra weight if you’re not using it?

Put down one gun. Eject the clip in the gun you’re holding. Get the new clip from wherever you were hiding it and slam it in. Put that gun down, pick up the other. Shampoo and repeat. It takes a few seconds more, but you don’t get hit in the head with a falling gun or trip over the clip you threw in the air that obeyed gravity instead of your dumb-ass wish upon a star. I was back up and ready to go, when I saw Niko had moved again, from the living room to stand between the kitchen area and me. The window above the kitchen was where the spiders were coming from. It wasn’t Niko blocking my way to a sandwich or some leftover pizza to save my twenty-some-year-old arteries—how old was I again? No, it was Niko doing the bus thing yet one more time. Hey, here comes an MTA bus and on time too. Pardon me while I throw myself under it.

If he was going to keep this up, I would’ve been better off convincing him that in that one-second slip of the tongue, he’d been right. I was totally not his brother. Not his family. Not his responsibility. And there was no reason in the world to keep trying to get himself killed in my place. Jesus, it was irritating. There might’ve been some sort of warm fuzzy feeling, a scrap of belonging, a tiny crumb of appreciation, but mainly it was just goddamn irritating. “Leandros!” I shouted. He didn’t turn as he faced ten more spiders coming down the walls. The name thing, right. Not only was he irritating, he was stubborn in the face of hideous death. I wasn’t impressed or happy about either quality. “Niko, you fucking kamikaze asshole! Why don’t you yell banzai and get it over with?”

That he acknowledged. “‘Banzai,’ contrary to popular belief, means ‘Long life to the emperor’ or ‘Ten thousand years of life to you.’ It wasn’t the Japanese version of ‘Eat hot lead, you sons of bitches.’ “

“And who says that?” I was to one side of him now, taking the heat too, while giving him enough room to swing his katana.

“You do. You talk in your sleep. I assume you picked up that saying in those pulp fiction books with the extremely large-breasted women on the front with a gun pointed at the protagonist.” His blade sliced another spider, three pieces this time. Now that did impress me—a horror movie combined with performing sushi chefs at intermission.

“He probably has a gun too,” I said. I knew I would. “If you both have guns, it’s not attempted homicide. It’s love. The kind that ends up with them naked on the second page.” Hopefully. That was the way I’d write it. “That’s a rare love. Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

I fired three times and took out two spiders on the wall. The other one fell but dragged itself behind the refrigerator. Wasn’t that always the way? Off to the ultimate spider sanctuary. Fifty pounds and you wouldn’t think there was any way it would fit, but it proved me wrong. I shot again, at one up by the window nine feet above the cabinets. “Do I really read those kinds of books?” Good question. Then I asked an even better question. “Do I really talk in my sleep?”

“Endlessly on the second. Once or twice a year on the first. We wouldn’t want you to strain anything.”