Rob Thurman - Blackout

Alligators you could live with. Other things you couldn’t. When I was seven, I’d heard a story about a sanctuary for lost children and then I’d learned there was no such thing. I’d forgotten both, and I couldn’t blame that on any spider bite.

“Cal!”

The small patch of Nevah’s Landing evaporated from the night and I could see the roof again. I couldn’t have been out of it any more than a few seconds, but sometimes only seconds are needed. Now there were at least thirty Nepenthe spiders, black blots of shadow to the casual eye, that had crawled up the side of the building and jumped over the edge of the roof. Advertised as spacious, the terrace wasn’t cutting it for that many giant arachnids. Everywhere was a clacking mandible; everywhere was the scuttle of their legs. There was no place you could turn and not see six alien eyes staring back at you. After this experience and Spider-Man 3 , if I ever saw Tobey Maguire, I was going to punch him in the face.

They were on the chairs, crushing the small tables, spilling over one another and, though I turned to aim at the ones behind me, they ignored me. They all teemed in one direction—toward Niko on the other side of the terrace. I’d seen my brother fight nearly every monster alive, and I’d never failed to be awed. I was a hybrid of a creature that every other creature in history had feared, loathed, lived in terror of, and I could kill easily, too easily, but there wouldn’t ever be a day in my life I’d have anything on Nik in sheer skill. But sometimes all the skill in the world wasn’t enough. This many of them—Niko was only human. The most skilled human I’d ever seen at fighting, but at the end of the day … human. Sometimes you needed something that had less in common with unadulterated ability and more about having a soul you could pack away at a moment’s notice.

Souls … inconvenient scraps of nothing.

The spiders had Niko backing up, but he was taking down every single one within reach and some that weren’t. I lunged forward, shooting them from behind, which wasn’t the best location for putting a bullet in a spider. Blowing huge ragged holes in their abdomen to leak out was good, messy, but ineffective in the short term. A fork in the head, my favorite, worked great but shooting from behind while gory wasn’t good for killing them. For that I needed a head shot, but not one of the sons of bitches would turn around. Intent on Niko, I could pop them like party balloons and they didn’t care.

Fine. I would see exactly how much they didn’t care. I waded into them, a Lovecraftian version of a herd of Shetland ponies. All we needed was Cthulhu singing “Rawhide.” I moved up beside one spider and blew its brains all over the one next to it, climbed the dead one, and took out its buddy before it had even managed to get the brain goop out of its eyes well enough to see. Those daisy, sunshine eyes. I moved on to the next one. It was beginning to get how things were going and was starting to turn. “It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day, Shelob,” I said with enthusiastic dark cheer. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.” Another round, another spider brain turned to pudding.

Niko was swinging his katana with one hand, his tanto with another, and if the son of a bitch would just let me get a machine gun or carry those convenient grenades to parties full of people, I’d have kicked his ass for not using them. One blade sliced through the head of the spider closest to him, bisecting it neatly. The other shorter blade he used to nail a jumping spider in midair. The silver, sheened with green-gray slime, exited the top of its head, but the mandibles thrashed on in the death throes and Niko swiftly flung the spider off his weapon. One bite had sent me to la-la land. One bite would kill him.

That was not fucking happening.

I moved to the next poisonous piece of shit, put it down, and was about to do the same to the next, but it was too late. Niko had tried to get around them, to fight back to back. We did that when the attackers were this many, but there wasn’t enough time and too many had never been this many. The closest ones to him were rearing on their back four legs to block the most of any escape route that they could—not that there was one. They had a plan and a purpose. Their goddess couldn’t kill me and get what she wanted, information I didn’t have, not yet. It was coming. Close … so close, seconds away, but not yet. And she wanted that more than anything, because what could be better than eating a half-breed Auphe? Having a literal buffet of them. She hadn’t tried to kill me in the canal, only take me … to where she could ask and I could answer.

Niko continued to take out the spiders right and left, his sword slinging spider blood in all directions as I continued to move toward him, even though we both knew it wouldn’t be enough. Plastered in sweat, covered in their blood, he couldn’t climb over them when they stood more than seven feet tall, but he could bury his blade in their vulnerable underbelly. It didn’t help. As each one fell dead, two more stretched high in its place, upper legs ending in curved claws striking. And when they died, the same happened again. Death meant nothing to them. They had only cared about one direction, one thing—getting him to take two steps backward. Niko knew it and I knew it, the same as he knew to watch his back if I wasn’t in a position to do it. He knew when he was being herded, but options could sometimes be limited. Having thirty Great Dane-sized spiders in your face was one of those occasions. It was only two steps, and as many bullets as I fired, as quickly as I tore my way through them, those two steps happened. And they were enough to get him within reach of Ammut.

She’d been behind an arched wooden covering that protected a couch and table with small candles lit in glass bowls. Following that, she was on top of the covering and her tail was wrapped tightly around Niko’s upper chest and throat. I’d forgotten her speed from the brownstone. When something can move that fast, you can’t remember it, not in accurate detail. How can you remember what you can’t see?

Snakes were swift and she was all snake again. She lay sinuously on the wood, her claws scoring it. Bronze and green, copper and gold, with that flower smell so strong it could’ve come from a hundred funeral homes. It was cloying and thick, never quite covering the ripeness of decay. She was beautiful still, in the way of nature if not woman, but I could smell what she really was. It didn’t matter. She could’ve smelled as beautiful underneath it all as she appeared.

Nothing mattered—not a goddamn thing in the world except that she had my brother.

He swung his katana, only to have it bounce off the scales, not doing any more damage than my bullets in the brownstone basement had. He couldn’t turn to strike at her face or eyes as the coils tightened around him, holding him in place. But this was Niko. He didn’t need to see his target; he needed only to know where it was. He reversed the grip on each of his blades and jabbed them backward and up. It was useless. I never thought I’d see anything faster than my brother. I was wrong. She avoided every blow with ease, her gold eyes strobing because her head moved so quickly. But Nik kept striking behind at Ammut’s face and then finally at those coils around him. Metal bounced off its equal. Ammut was copper and bronze, not only the appearance of it. Metal scales met the metal of his sword, and the faintest of sparks was the sole effect.

Niko didn’t give up, though. He didn’t know how to; he never had. He kept fighting because he was who he was, all the while turning more and more blue in the candlelight that was left from those he hadn’t knocked over in his struggle. Too quick, that color blue. She wasn’t going to asphyxiate him. She was going to break his neck—my brother’s neck. She wasn’t going to bother to take the time to suck out his life force. That wasn’t what she wanted. She was impatient and tired of waiting for me to give her what she did want. She was going to kill him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. I’d shot her before. It didn’t work. What the fuck, I tried again. It was the same as Nik’s attempt. I couldn’t hit her eyes. Her head weaved so fast, I saw only the afterimage of it. After she broke his neck, then broke me only in a different way, she no doubt thought, she’d have more time to pry what she wanted from my lost memories.