“Move it!” Annika yelled.
Spinneretta snapped her head around and saw the gleam of metal in the woman’s hand. She threw herself into a roll to make space, spider legs alive with Instinctual fire.
A mechanical click came, and then a deafening bang. Splinters exploded from the door, and the beast’s trapped legs began to flail. Annika pulled the trigger four more times, and each shot tore through the wood and into the spider-thing on the other side. When the last bullet hole appeared in the wooden barrier, the thing’s twitching slowed, and finally stopped. Through the gaping cavities in the woodwork, Spinneretta saw the furry mass slump against the floor, purple blood pouring from a mangled skull. The thing, whatever the hell it was, was dead.
Annika’s left arm shook and fell to her side. She let out a quivering breath. “Welcome back. Want to tell me what the hell that was about?”
Spinneretta looked up at her. She scarcely recognized the woman without her cliche-colored trench coat. “That’s . . . Uhh, I don’t really—”
Annika cut her off. “Whatever. Explain it to me later. We’re leaving. All of us.” The woman grabbed a comforter off one of the beds and jerked her head at Arthr, who was cowering in the corner of the room. “You, grab the other side of this. We have to get rid of that thing before someone comes looking for an explanation for those gunshots. Give me a hand, will you?”
Arthr looked like he himself had been shot. “Uhh . . . y-yeah.”
“Spinzie, be a dear and help out too.”
“Right,” she said, feeling a tingle dancing along her spine. She stood up, her muscles stiff, and watched as the woman peeled open the demolished door to the bathroom. All five shots had found the monster’s skull. Annika prodded it with her foot and then draped the comforter over it with one arm, gesturing for Arthr to help. “What’s wrong, Marky?” she said. “Not even a hello for me? Or for them? We’ve been waiting here for days, you know, the least you can do is say hello.”
With a palpable effort, Mark struggled to his feet. His left leg shook as he reclaimed his balance, and he steadied himself against the wall with one hand. “Well met, everyone. Forgive us for keeping you waiting.”
“Welcome back!” Kara shouted.
Spinneretta stared at her sister, and a wave of relief came over her again. It was a euphoric dream birthed from nightmare. But even as she reached out and wrapped her sister in a tight, jealous hug, she couldn’t ignore a sudden malaise that rose in spite of the spider-beast’s death. “Kara, I’ve never been so damn happy to see you. But, but you did this, didn’t you?”
Kara groaned from the force of the hug, and her spider legs coiled about Spinneretta’s shoulders. “Did what?”
She winced as one of Kara’s plated legs grazed her blood-raw shoulder. “You helped us get back. That’s what you said, right? That you saved us.” An unexplainable dread rang through her own voice, and hearing it startled her. “You were the one who got us out of there. How did you do it?”
Her expression grew puzzled, as though she’d been asked what color the sky was. “You had his symbol. So I just drew it.”
That frozen dread now coalesced in Spinneretta’s stomach. Mouth dry, she asked the question that she was afraid she already knew the answer to. “His symbol . . . Who is he?”
Kara’s bemused expression went blank. She tilted her head to the side, and the innocence of her liquid blue eyes belied her haunting reply. “The Yellow King, of course.”
Chapter 13
On the Road
The beast wrapped in the custard comforter was heavier than Spinneretta would have thought at first glance. Perhaps it was just that she was already exhausted, but the dead creature seemed so much more massive than it had when it was alive. She and Arthr dragged the thing out the door and around the back of the shady-looking motel, which Spinneretta now saw for the first time. She looked about, disoriented, trying to place the grungy stains of the street lights on a mental map.
Annika walked behind them, glancing about as though expecting someone to emerge from the shadows and accost them. When they came to the large dumpsters in the back, the woman leaned against the wall of the building and gazed off in the only direction that wasn’t blocked off by trees. She kept watch while Arthr and Spinneretta, with a great effort, dumped the wrapped carcass into the dumpster with their spider legs. There was a distant wail of sirens somewhere beyond the facade of the buildings on the other side of the street. “Wonder if those are for us,” Annika said of the sound.
With the evidence disposed of, they headed back to the room. But before they could depart and leave behind the growing danger of Grantwood, there was a pressing matter to be dealt with: Spinneretta desperately needed a shower.
The bathroom was in disarray. Despite the wipe-down, there were still dark purple bloodstains in the tile floor from the spider-thing’s death throes. Chunks had been torn out of the cabinets under the counter from its wrathful legs, and the cabinets themselves had been left ajar. The fiberglass bathtub had miraculously survived the force of the creature slamming into it, which otherwise would have made showering difficult. Hot water felt awesome after being deprived of it for what felt like days, though she cringed as it flowed over the open wound in her upper arm and her half-skinned shoulder. For a while, she just leaned her head against the tile and embraced the tactile sensation of that water, trying to contain her elation.
They had made it home. They had actually made it home.
When Spinneretta finished her shower and got her wounds bandaged with Kara’s silk, the spider children and their temporary guardians left the motel under cover of darkness. Wrapped in jackets to disguise their features, they walked in silence and avoided the prying eyes of the street lights. The night was clear, but the moon was still dark; pinpoint lights hung in the sky, and the thought of the strands of reflective planetary mass sent racking shivers through Spinneretta’s spine. She kept her eyes on the ground, still unable to shake the sight of the web-filled sky in Zigmhen.
Kara walked in the middle of the group, her shoulders sagging as she hauled her bulging bag behind her. No matter how often Spinneretta asked if she needed help, Kara insisted fervently that she had it under control. What are you carrying, anyway? Spinneretta wondered, feeling how light her own bag was on her unwounded shoulder. She wasn’t eager to care too much, however. Her immediate attention was focused upon the throbbing pain of her wrapped injuries. Her arm bandage was already mottled with blood.
After close to an hour of walking from the relatively undeveloped outskirts of Grantwood, they arrived at a small parking structure that sat beside the shell of a once-popular mall. The Warren children were all familiar with the area; it was the presumptuously named Grantwood Mall, which had all but gone out of business when the Centerpoint Mall opened several years prior. Entering the nearly abandoned parking structure, Spinneretta couldn’t help but feel that she was stepping back in time. She remembered the first time she’d come to this mall with Amanda and Chelsea without parental supervision; it made her nostalgic for a less hectic era. She thumbed the keypad of her unpowered cellphone, wondering what her friends were doing.
“Here we are,” Annika said as the group approached a modern-looking silver Ford sedan, the only vehicle on the floor.
“You had a car this whole time?” Arthr asked.
“Are you stupid? This is America, of course I have a car.”
“Then why the hell did we have to walk all this way?”
Annika flashed a glare over her shoulder at him. “Ever heard of keeping a low profile?”
“Are you able to drive with one arm?” Mark asked Annika.
She flashed him a smile. “Power steering. Could drive with one finger if I needed to.”
With no further complaint, the three Warren children piled into the back seat of the sedan. Kara took the unenviable center position, while Mark dropped into the passenger seat. When Annika flopped into the driver’s side, she shoved the key into the igni
tion and the engine hummed to life. “Well, kids, hope you have no regrets. Because this is goodbye to Grantwood. Goodbye to home, to memories, whatever.”
Spinneretta choked a little, her thumb still pressing into the keypad of her phone. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.
“Where are we going now?” Arthr asked.
Annika took a slow breath. “Unfortunately, your mother has been nice and quiet about possible safe places to take you kids. It’d be rude to wake her up in the middle of the night, so we’re going to slum it out of the county. Head toward the ocean, get a bit closer to civilization. Figure that’ll give us all plenty of time to catch up on everything that happened—like what that gigantic bug was, for instance.”
Beside her, Mark nodded. A low groan clenched his eyes shut. “Aye. We have much to discuss. All of us.”
Spinneretta stared at the back of Annika’s head. She was eager to hear about what had happened as well, but the weight of leaving her home—without even a pretense of ceremony—was depressing. But there was no way around it. After everything Mark had told her, she knew there was no other way. She hugged her knees to her chest, pressed her forehead against them, and closed her eyes.
“Well, off we go, then,” Annika said. The humming in the seat intensified. The world began to move. With a low groan, the sedan pulled out of the parking lot, and they drove into the night.
“Well, Mr. Warren,” Doctor Reynolds said the next morning, “you’ll be happy to know that you tested negative for the full battery of genetic anomalies we check for.”
Ralph stared at him, and the horrific realization of the doctor’s words began to fade in through the holes in his psyche. “Everything’s fine,” he said. “There’s no, no fused chromosomes or autosomal whatsawhizzits?”
“Afraid not,” the doctor said with a laugh. “Everything is fine, as far as we can see.”
Ralph shook his head, unable to accept the answer. “There has to be something wrong with me.” He wanted to believe it, but blindly believing was the worst thing he could possibly do. Everything that had happened in the last two months had come upon them as swiftly as a bolt of lightning. Mark’s arrival, Kara’s kidnapping, the revelation of the West Valley Medical Group’s puppetry, the alleged assault of the yellow-coats on their own home, and now the possibility that the genetic anomaly that produced their miracle children did not even exist. It was too much. If the anomaly was a fiction created by the Golmont Corporation, or whatever agency controlled it, then what was the cause of his children’s legs and fangs and webs?
“Something wrong, Mr. Warren?”
“Listen. I really want to level with you here. I just . . . I know there has to be something wrong with me. Our kids, they have this deformity.”
Reynolds flipped through the records on his clipboard. “Well, if you’re looking for something specific, then it would’ve been helpful to have your children’s medical records on hand. There are lots of birth defects, Mr. Warren, and they’re all so different from one another that—”
“Look,” Ralph said sharply, “I just want to know if it’s my fault. The deformity doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is closure. I have to know if I’m the one who contributed the . . . the faulty genes, or whatever the right terminology would be.”
“With all due respect, your genetic testing came out normal. The report doesn’t list any abnormalities that I can see.”
Ralph glared at him. “Then give me another test.”
The doctor chuckled. “Are you naturally distrustful of medical professionals, Mr. Warren?”
“Something like that.”
The doctor whistled and looked back at his clipboard. He tapped his pen against it in a gesture that reminded Ralph a little too much of the late Doctor Morton. “I personally wouldn’t recommend this,” the doctor said, “but if you’re really insistent I could send you next door for sperm analysis. Other than that, I don’t really know what to say.”
“Sperm analysis?”
“The thing about sperm is your body is constantly producing them. Every time a sperm cell divides, it introduces the possibility of small changes in genetic makeup. It’s sometimes cited as an explanation for why more children with autism are born to—”
“So it’s possible?”
“That your sperm is the culprit?” A tired shrug lifted the doctor’s shoulders. “I suppose it’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it. If you really want the test I can schedule you for later this afternoon. Expedited, you could get the results as early as tomorrow. Then you could probably stop blaming yourself for your kids.” His voice droned with exhaustion, and just a hint of manufactured, cough-syrup sympathy.
Ignoring the doctor’s irritation, Ralph spun the offer about in his head. Slowly, he began to nod. “I’d like that test.”
Spinneretta slept like a rock for several hours, until muttering voices and the lack of vibration roused her. Golden light gleamed from the windows of the sedan. It seemed they were stopped, pulled up at the side of a forested road. The warm scent of sausage and eggs hit her like a wall; despite her tepid relationship with meat, her mouth began to water.
“ . . . and then three of those spider things found us,” Mark said from the front seat. “Those things were savage; were it not for that portal opening when it did, I have no doubts we’d have been killed there.”
Annika hummed. “Sounds like you two had quite an adventure.” The way she mumbled said her mouth was full. “Wish I could say our day was as exciting.”
“It was exciting!” Kara interjected. She was sitting between Spinneretta and Arthr, her duffel bag hugged to her chest with her spider legs, atop which sat an unopened Styrofoam tray of budget beef cutlets. “Super exciting!”
“If almost dying is your idea of exciting,” Arthr muttered.
“In any case,” Mark said, his voice little more than a gravelly whisper, “Dwyre’s death concerns me. No matter who killed him, I have a feeling things are going to grow more dangerous now that NIDUS is in motion.”
“Cultist’s intuition give you any ideas?”
He grew quiet. “My first thought was that the Vant’therax or the rest of NIDUS were disappointed in his failures. But now I’m not so sure. I need time to think on this.”
Spinneretta shifted and yawned. A number of fast food wrappers littered the floor of the back seat. “You guys got breakfast?”
In the driver’s seat, Annika stiffened. “Ahh, the ruiner is awake.”
“Annika, please,” Mark said.
“No, Marky, hold on a second, I’ve got something to say to her.” The woman turned around and glared at Spinneretta between the gap in the seats. “Let me just verify what Mark told me is true, alright, sweetie? Is it true that you knowingly defied Marky’s order to run, and instead went after him?”
Something thudded in Spinneretta’s chest; there was no way it wasn’t a rhetorical question. She swallowed hard. “Why are you asking when you know the answer?” Besides, who the hell says I have to follow his orders, anyway? It’s not like I’m a damn child.
Annika breathed an impatient sigh. “I have to weigh all the evidence. Testimony from the horse’s mouth is invaluable.” Her gaze sharpened. “Now answer my goddamn question.”
Spinneretta gritted her teeth. Who the fuck do you think you are? “Yeah, it’s true, alright?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Annika’s arm shot forward like a striking cobra. Her fingers took Spinneretta by the collar of her T-shirt and dragged her forward. Her spider legs unfurled from beneath her jacket and braced against the door and the seat. Annika’s face was an inch from her own, her chocolate eyes sparkling with brimstone fury. “If that’s the case, then you and I have some bad blood now, you little free spirit.”
Spinneretta grabbed the woman’s wrist and pried, trying to break free. “Let go of—”
“Shut your damn mouth and listen to me, then I’ll let you go!”
The whole car went si
lent. The will to fight melted from Spinneretta’s ligaments.
“Good,” Annika said of the quiet. “Now, let’s just get one thing clear: do you have any idea how close you came to getting the three of us killed? Do you?”
Killed? Mute, she shook her head.
“Because here’s how things break down, min spindeltjej. If you’d met me at the appointed time, we’d have been able to get to your house and pull your siblings out of there before the machine gun circus showed up. But because of how long you made me wait, I had to weigh the merits of sticking with the plan you so callously defied, or going on my own to keep our ratio of living spider-things positive. And because I was late getting to them, we all nearly got ourselves killed by the damned Vant’therax that was making off with Kara. If you had just stuck to the plan, we’d’ve been in and out without any of the drama. Do you understand that?”
The accusation sank under Spinneretta’s skin and began to boil. “You say that like I was clued in,” she said through her teeth. “I didn’t know shit about your goddamn plan, so don’t—”
“You don’t have to know,” Annika barked. “You didn’t need to know. All you needed was to come meet me like Mark told you to.”
“How was I supposed to—”
“All you had to do was act like a rational human being, and your siblings’ faces wouldn’t be shining with bruises, and my arm wouldn’t be broken. And on top of that, you two wouldn’t have nearly died on some alien space adventure. Now we’re a day late for the tea party, and the Hatter isn’t amused. Can you understand, even a little, why some of this might piss me off, Spinzie?”
She held her tongue. Her lungs filled with two full breaths before she choked her reply. “Yes.”
Annika sighed. The fury in her eyes seemed to disperse just a little. “Good.” She released Spinneretta’s shirt and turned back around. “You may have the reasoning power of a jelly donut, Spinzie, but you’re still cute. So I suppose I can forgive you. Just remember: I will not be so keen to forgive you next time you do something stupid. Alright, min spindeltjej?”
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