Joseph D'Lacey - Snake Eyes

In the hatching chamber of the fourth tier the final spider advanced towards Agent Johnson.

He had one round left in the shotgun. The shot would scatter a little as it flew towards the creature but he still had to be accurate enough to kill it.

The eyes…

That was where its overgrown brain was.

Behind those ten red eyes.

His hands were shaking now. There had been so many of them. More than he’d ever anticipated and his backpack of ammunition, which had once seemed plentiful, was now used up. One of the smaller spiders had bitten him and he could feel the toxin slowing him down. He trudged like he was wearing an ancient diver’s suit with weighted boots and a brass helmet. As he backed away, the last spider gained ground.

This was the female, the guardian of the nest. She was huge, too: a leg span of almost three metres supported her body a metre above the ground. At such a size, she lumbered rather than ran but each ponderous step made huge gains. Johnson knew that if she caught him it didn’t merely mean an agonising end for him. She was pregnant and would lay her eggs at any time. She’d use him to feed her offspring and the whole nightmare would start again. Everything he’d fought for through the corridors and labs of the fourth tier facility would be worth nothing if she survived and he did not.

The stench of decomposition clotted the hatching chamber. This was where she’d brought the bodies that the male spiders had paralysed. Most of the carcasses had been devoured now and what remained rotted in the choking humidity. He knew that she’d been fertilised—he’d watched as she mated with one of the larger male spiders before sucking every drop of fluid from its body and discarding its monstrous husk.

Agent Johnson’s stomach knotted and spasmed in response the miasma in the chamber but he fought back his bile. He could afford no lapses in concentration, no mistakes.

He thought of Angelina and Professor Alpert. He remembered the other members of his team, Shuckman and Fiori, Matthews and Becker. All gone now and him soon to follow if he didn’t keep his nerve. He gripped the shotgun tighter to stop his hands from trembling. It helped but only a little.

Johnson chambered the last shell.

She was close enough that he could smell her venom now. It dripped from her fangs in a viscous plasma, steaming slightly where it spattered onto the cadaver-strewn floor. It smelled of sulphur and a sweet spice like cinnamon. He gagged again, knowing that same arachnid bane now flowed within his own blood vessels, slowing his reflexes and dulling his wits. The muzzle of the shotgun drooped downward.

He lifted it up once more.

Have to concentrate …

Wait for the perfect moment.

She was within fifteen feet now. Another step or two and he would—

She lunged; he wasn’t expecting it so soon. No time to think—he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun leapt back in his grip as it had so many times that night and her face, if such it could be called, imploded. The spiny palps with which she’d held her prey shattered, her fangs disintegrating in an ochre mist. Every eye disappeared in the blast. She took two more steps and collapsed, spider blood and venom commingling in a sickening stream below her shattered head section.

Johnson was ready to collapse. Rest a while before he made his way along the dim corridors to the elevator that would take him out; sleep before he headed for the third tier and detonated all the charges.

He didn’t have the chance.

From behind her body he heard a pattering sound that reminded him of cows defecating on barn floors. It was the noise made by hundreds of eggs falling from her spinnerets and bursting as they hit the ground. Already he could see the frantic scurrying of hungry infant spiders as they raced towards him. Even these newborns were the size of his hand. He turned and pounded towards the chamber’s exit. There was no door so he couldn’t stop them from following. As he fled he discarded the shotgun and the pack, flinging them into the path of his pursuers.

All he had left were the detonators. He held one in each fist as he sprinted ahead of the spider brood so close behind him. He could hear their legs scrabbling against the walls and the ceilings of the corridors as he ran. Every door he came to he slammed, buying him a few seconds before the sheer weight of them forced the doors open once more.

By the time he reached the lift shaft he’d opened a small distance between them but he didn’t believe it was enough. He smashed on the call button. The elevator was right there but the doors opened too slowly. As soon as he could squeeze through the opening, he hit the icon for the third tier, the way out, followed by the ‘close doors’ button. As the steel panels laboured shut, he saw the army of spiders seething along the corridor like a flood. The first ones reached him and leapt through the narrow opening as the doors met and the elevator began its final upward journey.

Three of them made it through, one already biting his neck. He smashed the one climbing his chest against himself with a fist. He tore at the one needling his neck and flung it against the wall of the elevator, the impact crushing it. The third spider’s fangs probed his ankle. He kicked it against the wall and it slid, wet and broken to the floor.

Their venom took its toll.

He couldn’t allow himself to black out; not without first detonating the explosives he’d placed throughout the facility but doing so before he reached the level of the third tier would kill him. He waited as long as he could, the blindness of sleep settling onto him, smothering his consciousness like a blanket. He knew there was a strong chance he’d die from his bites even if he survived the explosions.

Out of time and out of choices, he depressed the detonators.

Far below him a deep rumbling began.

The spider dream clung like web to the corners of his mind, running a thread into other less exciting reveries about his day to day life, until at last he was no longer dreaming of spiders but instead of his role as a family man. When these wraithlike visions became fantasies he could control and he felt the pressure in his bladder, he knew he was awake.

It was the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday, the day Robert Johnson first became aware of his tube. It was such a shock to him that he forgot the spider dream until a long time later.

The evening before had been a quiet affair; a bottle of Chardonnay shared with Angelina after the kids were asleep. Love, made a little clumsily, on the sofa. Whispered memories of other birthdays—their own and the children’s, hushed talk of birthdays yet to come and all that would arrive with them.

“Matthew is going to be a great sprinter. None of the other boys his age run anywhere near as fast.”

“What do you care about sports, Bob? You never played any.”

“I played Table Tennis. The trophy’s right there in the tall boy.”

“That doesn’t count and you know it.”

They had laughed.

“Truth is, I’d be proud of a sporting son. Being able to do the things I never could.”

“You should be proud anyway.”

He knew Angelina was right. His own father had tried to make a sportsman of him. It had caused of a parting of minds that was never resolved—unless Johnson’s sporting failure could be considered an end to the matter.