Jazmin played nervously with her fingers and watched the spiders through the window. Some of them were spreading out from the drill now and crawling across the underside of the helipad, down gantries and across windows. “Betty, there are more of them. And they’re climbing onto the rig.”
Betty joined her side, and watched with her. “You’re right. There must be nearly a thousand by now.”
“Some are larger, too. That one must be twelve inches across.”
“You’re not wrong. Ugly little fuckers, aren’t they?”
The radio crackled and burst into life. “Tempest Outpost, are you receiving? Over.”
Betty ran to the handset and grabbed it. “Tempest Outpost, receiving. Go ahead, Icecap McMurdo, over.”
“UH-60 Black Hawk and medical crew is readying now. They should be with you in approximately one hour.”
Betty’s heart sank. She knew they were miles from anywhere, but had been hoping for a miracle. “Acknowledged, Icecap McMurdo. Thank you. Over.”
“Sit tight, Tempest Outpost, and watch for them from the helipad. Over and out.”
Jazmin couldn’t take her eyes from the window. “We’re going to have to hold up here for an hour, then make a dash for the helipad.”
Jazmin couldn’t take her eyes from the undulating mass of spiders that were now leaping onto gantry ways and climbing up ladders, some spinning webs as they jumped, which others of them then used to climb across.
“I don’t know there’ll still be a rig here in half an hour! We could all be webbed up. Betty, I don’t think we’re going to make it. I don’t want to die here, Betty! I was just supposed to do filing and clean beakers in the lab! I can’t do this.”
Betty pressed the rolling pin back into Jazmin’s sweaty palms. “You will. We both will. We just have to hold out and we’ll be just fine.”
Her heart leapt into her mouth as there came a tapping on the door’s window. “Jazmin? Are you in there? It’s Claire. I’m…I’m all right now. When Betty clocked me, I woke up. Cameron’s fixated on the drill. He didn’t notice me sneak out. I saw Anna. That was... Are you in there? I thought I could hear you.”
“Fuck…” whispered Betty.
“What?” hissed back Jazmin. “She says she’s okay!”
“We can’t believe her!”
“If she’s telling the truth, we can’t leave her to die!”
Betty was about to respond when a percussive vibration ran through the whole of the rig, and her first thought was that something had exploded.
EIGHTEEN
The two of them ran to the window, looking out to the Prospero and the vast army of terrible spiders that were crawling even faster now, as though some sense of agitation or excitement was sweeping over them.
“What are they doing?” whispered Jazmin.
Betty felt her arm hairs rise up. “They’re…they’re hatching. I remember seeing it once. When I was a kid we found a spider with an egg sac in our garage, and I saw it hatch. The spiders just pour out in a near constant stream. They just…flow. It was amazing, they just…”
They were both thrown sideways by the force of what felt like another explosion. Betty fell hard, bruising her lower back, and Jazmin hit a desk, sending papers flying. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know. Could it be the boiler room? That was where we thought the nest was,” grunted Betty.
“No, it’s coming from the other direction. It’s…oh god…”
Jazmin turned pale, and Betty had to grab a hold of her arm and shake her to get her attention. “What? What is it?”
“What did you say about what you found in the garage?”
“An egg sac?”
“Yeah. Describe it.”
“It was, like, small, and white and encased webbing, and full of little tiny eggs that hatched really, really super-duper tiny spiders. What are you getting at?”
“Where was it?”
Betty didn’t follow, but Jazmin was obviously upset. “I told you. In my family’s garage.”
Jazmin grabbed a hold of Betty’s jacket and whispered hoarsely into her face. “Was it hanging from the ceiling? Embedded in a web?”
“No, the mother was carrying it on a…No. It can’t be…”
The two of them jumped up to the window, and peered through the spray and encroaching darkness. There, on the outside of one of the corner pylons supporting the main structure of Tempest Outpost, a colossal spider’s leg, easily the length of a train, was straining into it. As it did so, the rig shuddered under its weight, and another limb rose up from the deep black ocean, this one reaching and stretching blindly out for purchase.
Jazmin’s eyes filled with tears and she whispered: “We’re not going to last an hour.”
Betty forced herself away from the window. “Don’t look. Just, let’s focus on getting up to the helipad. We can wait for the Black Hawk there, and we’ll be better positioned to keep an eye out for any of the spiders. There’s nowhere for them to hide up there. We can improvise some flame throwers maybe?”
“How do we do that?”
“Grab a gas canister from stores, maybe? I don’t know!”
The banging came at the door again, and Claire said: “I can hear you in there! Open the door and let me in!”
“We’re going to have to deal with her,” whispered Betty. “There’s no other way out of here.”
“What do we do?” asked Jazmin. “Do we kill her?”
The knocking came again, louder and more insistent. “Please! Let me in! There are hundreds of them out here! I need you!”
Betty cursed. “Fuck it. No. We take her with us.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m fucking serious. If she’s lucid, and has broken their control, then we can’t just stab her, and leaving her here with these spiders is as good as killing her. We…we have to take her with us.”
Jazmin tried to grab Betty’s sleeve as the woman went to answer the door, but missed and simply watched her, terrified. Betty glanced back at her one last time before unbolting the door and opening it slowly. Claire pushed the door open wide and crashed straight into her, knocking Betty to the floor and landing on top of her. Betty screamed to Jazmin to close the door, and she rushed for it, slamming it shut, catching and exploding two spiders in the doorframe. She slammed the bolt home hard.
Claire had staggered to her feet and was looking around, dazed and confused. Betty got up and shoved her down into a chair. “Okay, talk…how did you get up here?”
“I…I don’t remember. I woke up in the control room, and those things were just everywhere. They’d covered everything. The only light came from where the ceiling lights glowed through their webbing, and from the screen of the control desk. I could hear Cameron moving around, but I couldn’t see him. I just crawled out of there, and I made my way up here. I tried the canteen first, but you weren’t there, and then I just wandered. I thought I could hear you in here, so I tried the door. Thank you. Thank you for letting me in. Thank you so much. I thought I was going to die.”
“Okay. You were hypnotised by the spiders somehow. We can’t figure out quite how it works, but basically, they influence your thoughts and you then have no memory of it. They got me, at one time, but there’s a way to break you out of it.”
“What? No. I’m fine. I’m fine now! I promise!”
Betty nodded to Jazmin, and then pushed Claire from her chair onto the floor. Jazmin jumped on top of her and pulled her arm out straight. Claire struggled, drumming her feet on the floor and pleaded for them to stop. “Wait! What are you doing?”
“Sorry about this, Claire. We have to be sure.”
“What? What’s happening?”
She felt Betty grab her hand and Jazmin’s palm slap over her mouth, and then she heard the metallic ping of Betty’s Zippo opening.
***
The three of them pushed open the door into the store room, Claire still whimpering about her burned hand. “Grab a
nything you can find as a weapon,” Betty whispered to Claire, before turning back to Jazmin. “Help me find something that we can make a flame thrower from.”
Claire went shuffling off into the darkness, and Jazmin tugged on Betty’s sleeve. “I’ve been thinking, and…might that be a really bad idea? I mean, didn’t heat accelerate these things? All the time they were asleep down there, they were deep in the freezing cold ocean. I’m…really not sure I want to warm them up more. It’s like the stinger thing they killed Kurt with. Maybe that only became an option once they warmed up. You douse them with fire and they could sprout wings for all we know!”
“Fuck. Yeah, you’re right. Okay, we ditch the flame thrower. Just grab some supplies, and any weapons you can find. Two minutes, and we’re heading up to the helipad.”
They had hidden in the Captain’s office for half an hour, and only decided to make a run for it when more and more spiders started crawling across the window, and they were worried they’d be spotted. The occasional rhythmic thuds told them that mother spider was still climbing the rig and their only hope was that they’d be on the Black Hawk out of there before she reached the helipad.
Claire rejoined them, holding a fire axe. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Hold on. Jazmin’s grabbing some things.”
Jazmin had disappeared down one of the aisles, and they could hear her pulling out boxes and packets. Betty wondered what she could be looking for.
Finally, they heard a cry of satisfaction, and Jazmin jogged back to them, carrying a fire extinguisher. She handed it to Betty. “Here. Carbon dioxide. Reverse flame thrower.”
Betty had a brief flashback to Roger, holding the extinguisher above the fallen Anna Morris, but pushed it from her mind. “Jazmin, you’re a genius! There’s got to be two or three of these on the way to the helipad, right? We could easily take one each, and use those to hold them off on the helipad until the Black Hawk arrives.”
Jazmin’s eyes opened wide and looked past Betty. Claire screamed.
Betty spun around and saw a tarantula the size of a dinner plate hanging by a thread in the middle of the door back out of the store room. Betty yanked the pin out of the extinguisher and pulled the nozzle straight. The spider let out a weird chittering sound, and Betty squeezed the handle. With a hollow, gasping bark, the carbon dioxide belched forth, obscuring the spider. When the fog dissipated, the spider had withdrawn back up to the top of the doorframe, pulling all of its legs up close to its body. Claire dashed forward and smashed the spider with the back of the axe head. It exploded into shards and dust, which dissipated into the corridor.
“I hate these things,” she muttered. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Betty smiled and was about to agree, when the floor tilted beneath them.
NINETEEN
Ducking out of Captain Anna’s office, they turned a sharp left and began jogging along the corridor. Betty threw open a pair of fire doors leading through to a flight of stairs, and they all took them two at a time. Shoving aside another pair of doors they re-entered the corridor system, and came to a dead stop as they turned toward the quickest route to the helipad.
The entire corridor was covered with webbing.
“How the hell did they get up here so fast?” asked Jazmin.
“They’ve had the run of the air ducts this whole time,” said Betty. “They could have started work on this hours ago. I guess they knew this was an entry way, and instinctively they wanted to cover it up; like ants hiding the entrance to their nest with a stone.”
“Or a funnel web,” said Claire. “This might not be a defensive fortification. It could be a snare. Like a trap door spider.”
Jazmin tugged at Betty’s sleeve. “We need to get out of here. We don’t know how many of them are watching us right now.”
Betty nodded and whispered. “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, we need to go. Claire? You coming with us?”
“Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“This way.”
Betty ducked them into a wood panelled cloakroom, and pulled on a thick parka. “Come on. We’ll cut across to the other side via the gantry ways.”
“Are you kidding?” said Jazmin. “There has to be a thousand spiders out there!”
“Yeah. Plus Kumonga. But I’d rather take a run across out there.”
“Why?” asked Claire. “What kind of thinking is that?”
“Because it’s cold out. It’s the Antarctic. Most of the time, out there, it’s barely above sub-zero. They’ll be slow. They’ll be stupid. In here, they’re warmed up and full of beans.”
Jazmin pulled on a coat and threw another to Claire. “She’s right. They’ll be dopey. Slow. Let’s go for it.”
Claire tugged up the zipper, and threw the hood over her head. “This stinks. Whose was this?”
“It’s a communal. Not everyone had their own. Just the regulars,” said Betty, feeling a lump in her throat when she found a Twinkie in the pocket of hers.
Stepping outside, the cold hit them like a brick wall, blasting the breath from their lungs. This was a good thing, as all three of them would have screamed when they saw the monster spider climbing up the legs and struts of the oil rig. It was easily the size of the rig itself, its massive body impossibly huge. It was the mother of all spiders. Betty could see its fangs moving above them; its vile, bloated abdomen nearer, just about clearing the water now, pulsing and swaying. A vile groaning sound screeched across to them and they saw a gantry under one of its legs bend chaotically.
“It’s too heavy for the rig!” shouted Jazmin, over the wind. “It’ll pull the whole thing down!”
“There’s no time for this!” shouted Betty, pulling them into motion. “We’ve got to run!”
The three of them jogged across the gantry ways, running along the opposite side from the colossal spider creature, although all threw worried, nervous glances in its direction. One of its legs shifted again and the entire gantry rocked ten degrees to the right, eliciting screams from all of them as they grabbed hold of the safety railing. Several of the spiders on the floor – which they had been carefully running around, and occasionally kicking away – were not so lucky, and went tumbling into the cold, black water below.
The distance was further than any of them had anticipated, and Betty stopped for a breather when they reached the halfway point. The spiders around them didn’t seem to notice their presence. “I must have been right about the cold,” she gasped around lungfuls of air. “They’re really slow – they don’t even seem to have noticed us.”
“Maybe. Maybe they’re just waiting for her,” replied Jazmin. “It worries me that she’s climbing up top. What if the Black Hawk can’t land because she’s sat up there?”
“I’m more worried that there won’t be a helipad in a few minutes,” said Claire. “That thing is just…too heavy for Tempest Outpost.”
“If the rig is going to collapse, there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Betty. “Come on.”
They jogged the remainder of the way, and once they had reached the far end, they almost flew up several flights of stairs, never letting go of the handrails, as the entire structure was now shuddering and lurching with each footfall of the goliath arachnid. At last they reached the top, threw open the fire door and…looked into blackness.
“The lights are all out,” whispered Claire. “Why are all the lights out?”
“My guess?” asked Betty. “The Ungoliant out there pulled a wire or crushed a fuse box or something.”
Betty flicked on a torch and swept its beam down the dark hallway. There were no signs of any webs or spiders anywhere. “Come on. Looks like the coast is clear.”
Jazmin felt a strange sensation as they reached the next cloakroom leading to the helipad. It had only been a few days since she had landed here and come through that door with the Captain and Kurt, and now they were both dead, and she was running from a Godzilla sized spider that was threatening to collapse Tempest Outpost underneath t
heir feet.
She caught Claire’s eye, and it was obvious that she was feeling something similar. “Never a dull moment, huh?” she asked.
Betty opened the door, and it was like opening an oven door. They all recoiled from the heat that gusted around them. Betty scanned her torch around the floor of the darkened room, and saw that all five of the fan heaters had been turned on full blast. She swept her torch up and gasped out loud. There stood Cameron Barnett, with one of the spiders riding his shoulder. She swept the beam around and counted ten more of the things crawling up the walls.
Cameron gave them an eerie smile. “Three lovely ladies…coming in to meet mother?”
Betty stepped forward, torch held up high in an attempt to lighten the room. She could make out the door on the other side, which led out onto the helipad. It hadn’t been webbed up, and she couldn’t make out any spiders keeping an obvious watch on it. “Hello, Cameron. What’s going on?”
Claire and Jazmin followed her in cautiously, keeping close together. Cameron rubbed his lips with the back of his hand and shook his head a little. “Nothing. Nothing much. I just…ran the drill.”
“You did. Looks like you’ve made quite the discovery.”
Another screech of metal and a distant explosion meant that the monster spider had clambered up another floor of the rig. “She’s impressive, isn’t she? And you know what the best part is?”
“What’s the best part?”
“The babies.”
“What about the babies?” asked Betty. She was still holding the fire extinguisher and really wished that she’d ditched it for a more conventional weapon.
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” he smiled. “Every one of these babies has the potential to grow just as big as their mother here. It’s not just a geological discovery, Betty. It’s a zoological one! A whole new species, previously unknown to mankind has awoken from hibernation!”
A spider had crept a little too close for comfort, and she nudged it away sharply with her boot. She was now only about a foot away from Cameron. “So, what’s the plan now?”
Cameron shrugged. “Keep them warm. Keep them fed. See what happens to the world now a creature from the Hadean period is back.”
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