The lights are on but nobody’s home.
They moved quickly away from the river and entered a long narrow roadway, tall sandstone buildings looming like a ravine on either side. He sent Hynd and Brock to the left and took the right with Wilkins.
“Watch the rooftops, mind your lines of sight, and don’t wait for an order to shoot if you need to take anybody out. Remember that there are civilians here somewhere. Let’s get them home.”
There was enough light from the stars to show their way, but the harsh street lighting in the narrow roadway only threw the scene that met them in even sharper relief. The same gray, fibrous material they’d seen in the well on their arrival hung everywhere they looked, fashioned in intricate webs that stretched across doorways and windows and, farther along the roadway, had been spun across their path between two lampposts. Something bulbous hung there in a cocoon, too small to be an adult person but whether it was a child or a dog, Banks didn’t feel like stopping for a closer look.
He noticed that Wilkins had come to a halt, unable to take his gaze from the webbing.
“Keep moving,” he said softly in his headset. “Remember the mission.”
Across the road, he saw Hynd and Brock making their way past the open awning of a shop that had been completely enmeshed in more of the web, a mass of fiber that ran across the whole face of the building, covering the windows even on the second story.
How many of these fuckers does it take to do that?
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
They reached the end of the road where it opened out into a wide market square beyond and he realized there had to be even more of the fuckers than he had imagined. The gray web blanketed everything; stalls, carts, camels, ponies, and people…a great many people, all dead. Some of the bodies were in pieces like the one they’d found up in the city, others were cocooned and wrapped up tight, hanging, suspended in web, between buildings and light fittings.
Young Wilkins threw up noisily beside the torn, dismembered body of a child. Banks put a finger to his lips for silence but in truth, he didn’t blame the lad; he felt gorge rise in his own throat at the sight.
“Eyes up here, lad,” he said, putting his face close to Wilkins’. “Remember we’re on a rescue mission. There might be someone alive to tell us what the fuck happened here.”
*
At first, that was a forlorn hope. A circumnavigation of the square found no one alive, no signs of life either in the bodies on the ground or in the suspended cocoons. Hynd drew Banks’ attention to a squat building in the north corner. A military jeep was parked outside, one that had a large-caliber gun mounted on the back.
“First sign of non-civilian activity, Cap,” he said. “Worth checking inside?”
Banks nodded and waved Hynd forward to investigate. The sarge motioned Banks over to join him ten seconds later, standing at the doorway of the squat building. Banks had seen Hynd stand up to some rough situations in the past but he’d rarely seen him look green around the gills.
“It’s bad, Cap,” the sergeant said as Banks reached him. “Maybe keep the younger lads away. It’s nothing they’ll want to see.”
Banks walked past him and headed inside. He had thought he’d seen carnage in the square but the scene inside the building was far worse. Bodies and body parts lay strewn across the floor, tables, and bar of what had obviously been a café. A head, only the head, sat on top of an electric hob, cooked and still cooking, burned into a black ball, eyes popped and running down scorched cheeks. Banks turned off the hob and covered the head with an upturned cooking pan but he knew it was a sight and a smell that would be revisiting him in his dreams.
There had been plenty of shooting in the cramped area. The bodies mostly wore military-style clothing, webbing and flak jackets and discarded weapons. Those, along with a scattering of shell casings on the floor, told Banks they been firing at something, not only each other. He suspected more of the spider-things, whatever they might be, but the only dead present were the men who’d been doing the shooting.
The bodies all felt cold to the touch, the blood congealed, dried, and gone dark; Banks guessed, from bitter experience, that whatever had happened had gone down at least a day ago, maybe even longer. With Hynd at his side, they picked their way through pools of blood and gore, breathing shallowly through their mouths.
Banks headed for a darkened doorway at the rear. His gut instinct, honed from too many such situations over the years, told him they were in the right place, that the hostages were here somewhere. It also told him that they were too late for any rescue attempt.
The hallway at the rear of the café was lit with a flickering neon strip but was dim and dark due to the now recognizable gray web hanging in sheets from the ceiling. Banks and Hynd managed to part it carefully with the barrels of their weapons, neither of them in any hurry to get any of the stuff on their hands.
They found their hostages in a cramped room, little more than a large walk-in larder, at the rear of the property.
*
There were six bodies, packed standing upright, and all had been cocooned and wrapped like the ones hanging between the buildings outside. Hynd had to work hard using his knife to cut the web away from their faces; they didn’t look like locals and further cutting revealed western T-shirts, jeans, work boots, and one passport in a jacket pocket; Tim Woods, from Chislehurst, Kent.
Banks gave up all pretense of maintaining silence.
“Sarge, take Wilkins and see if you can get that vehicle going. Send Brock in to me. We’ll pile these poor buggers in the back of the jeep and get them back up the hill. The least we can do for them is see they get home.”
“What about these fucking spiders, Cap?” Hynd said. “There must be dozens of the fuckers if they did all this. If so, where the fuck are they now?”
“I don’t have a Scooby, Sarge,” Banks said. “And as long as they stay out of our way, I don’t care. Let’s get back up the hill so I can call in an evac order and get us the flock out of here.”
*
Banks and Brock cut the dead free from as much of the web as they were able to remove. Three of the bodies bore slashing wounds similar to the one he’d seen on the sick man earlier; the others had broken necks and bite marks at their throats so deep that their heads lolled alarmingly, making the blackened wounds gape wide. Brock looked green around the gills.
“If you’re going to spew, lad, take it outside. The smell’s rank enough as it is without you adding to it.”
To the young private’s credit, he stood his ground, helping Banks free the bodies and drag them out into the hallway outside the larder. Hynd came back a few minutes later.
“We got the jeep running, Cap. There’s not much fuel in her,” he said, “but she’ll get us back up the hill okay.”
“Let’s get to it then,” Banks replied. “We’ve left Wiggo alone with those women long enough. Knowing his patter, he’ll have got at least one slap by now.”
- 6 -
Jim White died sometime between four and five in the morning; no one noticed until Maggie went to check on him.
“Jim?”
His eyes were closed and he wasn’t breathing, whereas the last time she’d looked his chest had been rising and falling in steady breathing. She thought him to be asleep, put under by the morphine, but when she put a hand on his ribs there was no movement and, where he’d been hot to the touch before, now he felt quite cool, chilled.
“Private Davies,” she called out and the man was at her side in seconds, having heard the panic in her voice,
The lanky private worked hard on the dead man with CPR and mouth to mouth but after a few minutes, it was obvious they weren’t getting him back. Davies looked up at Maggie.
“He’s gone. I’m sorry.”
“Aye, me too,” she replied. “The poor bastard probably saved our lives taking a chance on making the radio call. And this is his reward?”
Davies put a hand on h
er shoulder.
“This isn’t on you,” he said. “It was one of those bloody spiders. If you need to hate anything, hate them.”
“They’re dumb beasts, doing what dumb beasts do.”
“Same as it ever was,” Davies replied, then looked back at the body. Black sepsis had seeped through the earlier bandaging and the smell of it rose from the body.
“Give me a hand here,” he said. “We’ll put him in one of the other rooms; you don’t need to be looking at, or smelling, a dead man for the rest of the night.”
Maggie took the legs, expecting to struggle, but White looked to have lost half his body mass in the time he’d been lying on the rucksacks. What was left of him was skeletally thin and wasted like a famine victim. It was as if they carried a bag of dried skin stuffed with wood and it held about as much semblance of life. She had tears in her eyes for the colleague she’d lost but couldn’t recognize the man he had been in the dead thing in her hands. She was thankful when they reached the second room down the corridor and Davies spoke quietly.
“Thank you, miss. You can put him down now, I’ll take it from here.”
She returned to the chamber. Kim had her head down, sobbing, and Reynolds refused to meet her gaze. She busied herself in making three mugs of coffee and took one out to where Davies now stood at the window in the first room across the corridor. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, miss.”
“The name’s Maggie,” she replied. “I stopped thinking of myself as a miss a long time ago.”
“And I’m Joe. I stopped thinking of myself as Joshua after a few weeks on the Easterhouse estate.”
She managed a smile at that.
“Thanks for what you did for Jim.”
“I wish it could have been more,” he said and returned to his watch at the window as Maggie took the other two cups through to the main doorway where Corporal Wiggins stood guard. He took the mug carefully, then went to light a smoke.
“Can I have one of those?” Maggie asked on a sudden impulse.
“I didn’t have you pegged as a puffer,” he said.
“Five years stopped,” she said, taking a light and inhaling deeply. “But if I ever needed an excuse to start again, this is it.”
“You’re an Edinburgh lass, aren’t you?”
“Dunbar,” she replied. “And you’re a Weegie, like Davies through the back.”
“Guilty as charged. So what’s a nice lassie like you doing in a place like this?”
She nearly laughed.
“Don’t give me any of your Glesga patter,” she said. “This isn’t the Barrowland Ballroom and I’m not in the mood.”
Wiggins laughed.
“Maybe later then,” he said, then saw she was serious.
“Sorry, lass, it’s just my way. How’s your friend doing?”
“He’s not,” she said bluntly.
“Oh fuck. Then I’m really sorry,” Wiggins replied, then went quiet.
Maggie looked out over the courtyard as she smoked and drank the coffee. Everything looked still and quiet, as it had when they’d first arrived.
Shit, was it only a week ago? It feels like months.
She thought for the first time in a while about the others, the six they hadn’t seen since the rebel attack and wondered now whether it was rebels that had taken them, or whether it had been the same beasts that did for Jim White.
Wiggins had been silent for several minutes. She had the impression that might be something of a record for the man and was proved right when he spoke up again.
“So what’s the deal with these big fucking spiders?” Wiggins asked.
“Sorry, no idea. That one you shot was the first we’d seen of them. If it was them that got Jim White, we didn’t see it.”
She looked out the doorway again; somebody had moved the spider carcass outside and off to one side. It lay in the shadows, a broken thing, all twisted legs and strangely deflated body.
“Spiders don’t grow that big,” she said.
Wiggins laughed.
“I guess they do now.”
“No, I mean they can’t grow that big. The circulatory and respiratory systems aren’t built for it. Once they get past a certain size, about the size of your hand, they can’t get enough oxygen inside them fast enough to drive their functions.”
Wiggins laughed again.
“That one was coming for us fast enough. And the shadows on the roofs are faster again. They’re still up there, watching us right now I’ll bet. I don’t think they know they have a problem.”
“I don’t understand anything that’s going on here.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Wiggins replied. “It happens to me all the time.”
*
When she returned to the chamber, Kim was down in the trench, working on the mosaic with a soft brush and a trowel.
“There’s not enough light for that kind of work,” Maggie said.
“I tried to tell her,” Jack Reynolds replied dully, “but she’s not talking. Leave her be; she needs something to take her mind off the rest of this shit.”
“I know how she feels.”
Maggie sat on the floor, watching Kim scrape layers of dry dirt from the mosaic. Reynolds was first to break the silence.
“That corporal at the door…he’s got the sat-phone, hasn’t he? Did you persuade him to make the call, to get us the fuck out of here?”
“He’s waiting for the others to come back.”
“If they ever come back. This is fucked up. We should never have come here.”
“We’re archaeologists. It’s our job to save this kind of thing.”
“Sure. But nobody told me I’d have to be Indiana Fucking Jones as well.”
Kim hadn’t spoken but was now working faster, furiously, sweeping dirt aside from directly over the mosaic. Maggie looked down. She’d already cleared a large patch, depicting Roman centurions both on foot and in chariots, all with weapons facing inwards to a central point in the design. The central area was now under Kim’s brush as she swept and cleared ever more frantically.
Maggie stood and fetched a light, taking it over to see more clearly but Kim was bent over, brushing, obscuring the two-foot circle that was the central motif as it was finally fully revealed. It was only when Kim sat back and let out a long gasp that became a wail when they saw what was there.
A fat dark spider lay directly in the middle of the mosaic, surrounded by Romans stabbing at it or spearing it with lances. Dead men lay under its legs, which spread far out into the mosaic itself. Maggie now realized that the whole thing was cunningly depicted as a single huge web. The face of the spider was the worst thing. It smiled, an evil grin under compound eyes as it sucked the life from a man it held in its mouth. The man was dwarfed by the bulk of the body, which, if the proportions of the thing were to be believed, was at least ten feet from head to rear.
- 7 -
It was a tight squeeze to get everybody and the bodies into and onto the jeep. When Banks sat in front beside Wilkins, the nominated driver, the sarge and Brock were, somewhat precariously, perched in the back beside the gun, with the dead stuffed, haphazardly and with little in the way of respect, on the floor at their feet. It didn’t help that they were partially encased in web, or that the black wounds were suppurating, an advanced decay having set in that stank even worse than the cooked head on the hob had done.
The only good thing about the situation was that Brock had found a belt of ammo for the big gun and had loaded it up; if anyone came at them, they were going to get a blast of high-caliber shells in their face as introduction.
The main road out of the square was the one they needed to take to head back up to the escarpment and the ancient town on the hill. Banks kept an eye on the rooftops, fearing an ambush as Wilkins drove them away.
“We’re not stopping for anyone or anything, got that, lad?” he said.
“Got it, sir,” Wilkins replied. He handled the jeep like someone used to dri
ving fast. He put his foot down hard as they left the square and they sped through the empty town leaving a cloud of dust and sand in their wake. Banks checked his wing mirror and saw that the sky was lightening in the east at their back.
Dawn was coming.
*
The rest of the town looked as dead—murdered—as the part they’d left. Gray web cloaked many of the shops and dwellings and more cocooned bodies hung from balconies and light fittings, swaying in the breeze. Some of them oozed, dripping black noxious fluids and again Banks glimpsed a wavering, oily vapor in the air, one that he thought might be luminescent in full dark. He was glad of the approaching sunrise as they barreled through the empty streets.
It was going too well to last. They approached the edge of town and could clearly see the road winding upwards towards the escarpment but the way ahead was blocked the full stretch across by a mass of web, thick enough to be nearly solid. It was also eight feet high and definitely impassable.
“Sir?” Wilkins said. “What do you want to do?”
Banks considered telling the lad to put his foot down, try to blast through but the risk of getting tangled up in that gray shit was too large to take.
“Hang a left,” he said. “Let’s see if we can go round it.”
A left turn, taken at speed, brought them into a narrow alleyway, fifteen feet high, where the night held off the approach of dawn. Wilkins put on the jeep’s headlights, which showed another gray mass blocking their exit fifty yards ahead.
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