She doubted that would save her, though. The bulldozer above them thundered with a colossal impact.
They were found.
***
Max knelt on the ground, unable to believe his eyes. The monster had passed him without stopping, headed exactly in the direction that Marianne and Vasily would have gone if they hadn’t seen anyone in the parking lot.
He didn’t need to be psychic to guess that it was still following them. It was always following the main body of their group, even as it chopped that group to pieces. Tatiana was dead. Sun-Lee, though hardly a friend, was buried somewhere in the old basement factory. Max hadn’t fallen to the spider, but he’d fallen—quite literally—from the trail.
So unless the creature was seriously pissed at Vasily or Marianne, it was following the scent of the largest group it could locate.
Max didn’t care why. All he knew was that one of his friends, as well as the most alluring woman he’d ever met, were in mortal danger, and he needed to help.
The monster disappeared from view over the side of the hill, and he followed after as fast as his injuries allowed. He laughed at himself ruefully: did he really think he was going to be able to do anything? Short of stumbling over a cache of abandoned RPGs or an armored division just waiting for him to tell it what to do, he didn’t have much chance of pulling off the impossible.
But still, Max ran after the monster; his conscience would never allow anything else. He reached the crest of the hill and groaned. The descent was steeper than he would have liked, and the thing was already halfway down. He spotted two small dots in the distance, just on the other side of a tall fence and realized that they must be Vasily and Marianne.
That fence wouldn’t be much help, he reflected. They climbed into a machine and he realized that Vasily must be trying to start up a road grader. That might be a good idea. With the blade retracted, the machine might just be able to outrun the monster on their tail.
But the road grader remained resolutely in place. No movement, no sound of a diesel engine coughing to life, not even a cloud of blue smoke.
The spider, meanwhile, had stopped fighting with the fence and was advancing on the machine they’d selected.
Max kept running, always on the verge of rolling the rest of the way, ignoring any number of alarming pain warnings from his body. His hand was killing him, but his butt, at least, seemed to have gone numb save for certain fiery lances of agony.
He still had no clue what he was going to do.
The spider-monster attacked the cab of the machine, sending glass flying everywhere. He huffed in relief when he saw two figures scurrying away.
Max stopped at the uprooted fence. This was realistically as far as he could go without being seen immediately. The machines blocked him from sight of the monster’s forward-mounted eyes, but if he got any closer, he was, quite simply, toast.
He looked around. Absent a tank battalion, Vasily’s idea of trying to make a run for it seemed solid, but the machines in that compound weren’t built for speed. There were a few forklifts, and another pair of road graders that seemed like they might be able to move at a decent rate. The rest were tracked vehicles, great for navigating mud, but slow as hell.
If only…
There! Half-concealed by a huge crane with a wrecking ball hanging from the tower was a dump truck. Not a sports car, but that should be able to keep up a steady hundred kilometers an hour—more than enough to outrun any monster.
He ducked under a section of mangled fence and, keeping watch on the monster, edged around the perimeter of the compound towards the truck. He needn’t have been so careful: the spider appeared to have anointed the road grader its new worst enemy, and was tearing it back to its component molecules. He sprinted—or more likely hobbled a little less slowly—towards the truck, staying behind as much cover as possible.
A sudden silence announced that the time for stealth was past. He looked back to see the monster advancing on a bulldozer, and he would have bet any amount of money that his companions were under it.
But he was nearly at the truck. He just had to pass the final vehicle, the crane.
Max ground to a halt.
The truck had only three wheels, the axle where the front right should have been was supported on a pile of cinder blocks.
Behind him, he heard a thump. Then another.
The monster was attacking the bulldozer. Vasily and Marianne would be dead in minutes, if they weren’t already.
Max leaned his hand on the fender of the enormous yellow crane and screamed in frustration.
***
The monster on top of the bulldozer appeared intent on going through the metal above them to reach the tender morsel inside. The first two blows had landed hard enough to sink the tracks into the ground as dust and gunk fell from the floor of the machine onto them.
Marianne screamed in pure terror, certain that they would be crushed. She put her arms around Vasily and pressed him close. He said soothing things in Russian, not bothering to try to speak English. But even in this extremity, with the certainty of an unpleasant death looming, Vasily remained calm. It was a pity she would never be able to ask him how he managed to keep his emotions under control. Or maybe he was just the classic soldier stereotype who thought emotions were for the weak.
Maybe it was best not to know. People’s pasts often hid horrors of the worst kind.
The beast struck again, but this time, though more crap fell on her head, the treads didn’t sink further. For some reason that was extremely important to her. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that the creature would ever be able to tear away all the metal above them, so if they weren’t crushed, they might live. Hope, as they say, dies last.
She pulled away from Vasily and crawled towards the track, where a sliver of light indicated that she could see out through a chink among the wheels.
Vasily whispered something in Russian. She couldn’t understand the words, but it wasn’t hard to guess the content.
“It already knows we’re down here,” she replied. “No harm in having a look.”
He said nothing more and she pressed her eye against the gap. The opening was near the top of the track—the bottom was buried in the earth—where one of the road wheels met the steel tread. She had to bend her neck to see through it.
What she saw was breathtaking. The creature was right there, less than ten feet away. She saw thick legs and then, by contorting her neck even further, she looked higher up and was able to see the circular torso in all its glory. She wished she hadn’t. The bottom four eyes were visible from this angle. Those eyes were mad, black, watery. They appeared to be looking everywhere at once, as though they could see straight through the iron right into her soul.
If someone had told her that the creature was feeding on her terror, she would have believed it without a second thought.
It was certainly tracking her through everything. You could almost feel the hatred in those enormous orbs.
The creature reared back and brought a pincer down on the metal above her. She wondered how the bulldozer was holding up under the ferocious onslaught.
Her question was soon answered. A grinding screech sounded and, moments later, a large chunk of yellow metal thudded to the ground beside the monster hard enough that the earth shook.
The piece was big, too big, and her sense of security evaporated. At the rate it was working, the shield above them would be gone in minutes, if not sooner.
The claw came down again, the metal screamed, another piece, a jagged sheet this time, landed beside the first. That piece wasn’t even painted yellow: the monster must be tearing at the machine’s insides. Those were soft, unarmored.
The next strike actually lifted the bulldozer slightly when the creature pulled the metal from it. Then it came down, striking her head hard enough to make Marianne see stars.
But her eye remained pressed against the makeshift peephole. She might be about to die, but at least she would
see what happened and face it with her eyes open. Unfortunately, she had the feeling that the easiest way to face her death would be through the floor of the bulldozer. It would soon be showing daylight.
The monster reared back once more and Marianne braced for the strike. It definitely looked like it was preparing to demolish their makeshift hideaway once and for all.
She saw it begin to move, both pincers coming straight towards her when, with a sickening thud, the creature lurched to one side. Marianne saw a huge dent on the side of the exoskeleton, with a network of cracks radiating out from it. Dark fluid began to gush from the wound.
Had someone hit it with a missile?
No, there was no explosion.
She tried to see what the hell happened. Maybe the bastard had been hit by a meteorite? It wouldn’t stop it, but it definitely deserved it.
Movement to one side caught her eye and she looked away from the battered monster to focus on it. A large grey sphere, apparently floating in midair hovered out of sight.
“Oh good,” Marianne said. “Now we’ve got flying saucers.”
Then she laughed until she cried.
***
“Yes!” Max exulted.
The ball had actually struck true. He would have bet any amount of money that it wouldn’t have worked, that he’d have hit anything other than his intended target. When he fired the crane up and began to move the wrecking ball, it seemed utterly unwieldy, impossible to control. This crane was much taller—and the ball much bigger—than what you saw in old movies, and his first clumsy attempts had nearly wrapped it around the crane and, for a terrifying moment, he was certain that it was about to crush the cabin where he sat.
But it had swung harmlessly by and he’d managed to swing it on a wide arc in the intended direction.
Of course, the creature he was aiming at was so big it was hard to miss.
After the first strike, he moved the ball away slowly, but the monster appeared stunned, unable to understand what had happened to it, where the unseen assailant had materialized from.
So Max swung the ball again, on a longer arc this time. He aimed at the monster’s torso but missed, so instead of delivering a killing blow, all he did was shear off two of the spider’s legs as the ball flew past.
It still felt incredible to actually be able to damage it.
He expected the spider to roar, but it kept an insect-like silence. That was the creepiest part of it. The loss of two legs—even when the complete complement was eight-had to hurt like hell.
The creature had now identified its tormentor and struck at the ball with its stinger. The entire valley seemed to ring with the metallic clang of impact. More seriously, though, the ball accelerated and Max thought the momentum would topple his crane.
But the crane was balanced by outriggers that dug into the ground and absorbed the movement. Now he was at an angle, but still mostly vertical. He swung again.
He missed. This was harder than it looked, and the monster was now mobile. As the ball went past a mere three or four meters from its eyes, the creature’s attention was suddenly drawn to the crane itself. Max could see the monster angling its torso to look up at the moving pillar. Then, it scanned downward… downward until all eight eyes found Max.
He swallowed as the creature lurched in his direction. It no longer moved quickly and every step appeared to be the prelude to a disaster, but it came inexorably, leaking whatever black liquid passed for blood in giant insects.
Max swallowed. The ball was reaching the outer part of its arc and he needed to correct the angle. There wasn’t much time remaining until the thing reached him and if he had to abandon the crane… well, they were pretty much fucked.
He had time for a couple more passes, though, as the monster navigated the maze of vehicles separating them.
Max began to swing the ball to try to hit on the first pass when he realized the monster had begun to climb over a bulldozer and then stepped onto a grader, bending it like a banana.
It would be on top of him much quicker than he expected.
The ball missed by a mile and he frantically tried to line it up for a final blow before the monster pulled him out of the glass cabin and tore him to pieces. The projectile was moving very quickly and went way out.
The spider was nearly on him. A pincer hit the crane and jolted the entire structure. He moved the lever and realized that the impact had straightened the ball out. Now there were two colossi heading straight towards the cabin: the monster and the wrecking ball.
He watched, transfixed, as the monster reared back.
A second before the tail lashed out, his attention was drawn to the ball. It was coming at enormous speed right towards him, at eye level.
His training took over. A giant insect might mesmerize him, but a huge chunk of metal on a gravity-fueled collision course with his favorite head was something he knew how to deal with.
Max dove out of the cabin and onto the ground, rolled and ran as fast as his lacerated leg could go.
A deafening crash sounded behind him and liquid splattered onto his back before something much more solid hit him in the back of the head and he fell to the ground… which also hit him in the head.
***
Max rubbed his head and gasped in pain. His wrist, he remembered was badly hurt. His head as well, but he needed to feel it with his other hand.
He’d nearly been knocked out, and was still a little woozy, but he got to his feet. He needed to run.
Wait.
Was he running away from something? Was he running after something?
He sat down. He must have been hit harder than he realized. He needed a couple of minutes to get his thoughts together.
He was sitting on grass. The closest thing to him, five meters away, was a twisted and mangled crane. It must have hit the ground pretty hard, because it had dug in quite a ways.
Crane… wrecking ball. That crane had had a wrecking ball on it. He was pleased to have remembered that.
And then he remembered the rest and sprang to his feet. Ignoring the sudden dizziness, he looked around. The monster had to be there somewhere. He might have managed to hit it with the wrecking ball, but it was one tough son of a bitch. He followed the collapsed crane to its base.
There.
There was no need to run. The monster would never again be a threat to him… or to anyone.
From where he was standing, it looked like the mad scientist who’d created the spider-monster had decided to take things one step further and merge monster with machine. The crane and the spider, under the irresistible force of the out-of-control wrecking ball, had blended together, proving that at least parts of the spider’s armor were softer than metal.
Though the crane had broken off about six meters from its base, the bottom segment had embedded itself into the spider’s body—or rather, the blow of the ball had driven the spider into the crane. The top of that broken column protruded from the monster, covered in black gore.
The ball itself had lodged into the back of the creature, tearing the segmented tail off and adding to the force with which the spider smashed into the structure ahead of it. Everything was covered in liquid goo.
“Well,” he said, raising an imaginary glass in its direction, “fuck you to hell.”
Then he went to look for Marianne.
***
“That thing’s been gone for a long time,” Marianne said. “You think we should go out?”
Vasily just looked at her, obviously not understanding a word.
She pointed. “Out? Run?”
He shook his head and then, as if to prove him right, they heard the biggest crash yet. Only one thing could have made that noise, and the hope died inside her. The monster was still out there and whatever had injured it was now receiving its punishment.
“Oh God,” she said. “I wish it would just be over already.”
Marianne heard footfalls approaching. The creature was treading carefully, probably beca
use of its missing legs. She moved away from the peephole and towards the center of the battered bulldozer. She didn’t want to watch any more. She just wanted to curl up in a ball and wait for death with her eyes closed. As long as there wasn’t any suffering, she was fine with whatever.
“Marianne?” a voice said.
She opened her eyes to look at Vasily, but he hadn’t spoken and looked just as surprised as she did.
“Marianne?”
“Max?” She knew it couldn’t be. She’d seen him fall. But it certainly sounded like him.
“You’re alive? Can you get out of there?”
She was already moving, pushing herself towards the back of the bulldozer. In a couple of places, the floor was battered almost to the ground, but she squeezed through, thanking her stars that she hadn’t had anywhere near enough to eat over the past couple of days. That probably made the difference between being able to make it out and not…
Marianne finally got her feet out, then her legs. Her butt was a tight squeeze, but after that, it was smooth sailing. A moment later, she sprang to her feet.
Max stood in front of her, holding his wrist, covered in sludge and smelling like a sewer.
She didn’t care. Two steps later, she had her arms around him and kissed him. Then, when she was sure he was real, she pulled away. “What happened to you?”
“You mean after I fell off the chairlift?”
“Yes.”
“I killed the flying thing. Then I killed the spider thing. In hand-to hand combat.”
She felt her eyes widening and said: “Really?” which she hated herself for saying as soon as the word left her mouth.
Max laughed, and then grimaced.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“Not really. Sprained wrist, maybe broken. Also I have a punctured… leg… from one of the bird-thing’s talons. That’s why my pants are covered in blood. Oh, and I think I cracked some ribs.” He held her gaze. “In other words, I’m perfectly fine. This could have been so much worse.”
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