“Dammit,” I muttered, and took a deep breath to try and calm my nerves. I’m not afraid of the dark, but I sure don’t want to wander around in a magical dungeon if I can’t see what’s going to try to kill me.
After psyching myself up for a few seconds, I finally decided to step fully into the room. The second my entire body crossed the threshold, I was fully inside the room’s magic, and I could see. I immediately wished I couldn’t.
I took one look at what lay between me and the door across the room and turned around to leave. I didn’t want those things at my back, but I didn’t want to have to fight my way through them, either. I mentioned I hate magic, right? Well, I was reminded why when I turned around to find the door closed right in my face. Now there’s no way in the normal world that door could have shut without knocking me down, but we were a long way from the normal world, and that previously unlocked door wasn’t just locked tight, but the knob was gone, too.
I was not getting out of here without a fight. And judging by the clicking and skittering sounds behind me, every single critter in the room with me knew it. So I turned, very slowly, and looked at the dozen or so giant spiders that filled the twenty-by-forty room. They were about the size of ponies, with glittering green and black carapaces, and poison dripping from their fangs. Or maybe it was acid. I’m not sure which, but I knew it was something bad because every once in a while, a drop fell to the floor and sizzled on the stone for a few seconds.
That wasn’t all, even though it was more than enough. Oh no, it couldn’t just be huge spiders, that wouldn’t be nearly nasty enough for Robin Poorly Named Goodfellow. Nope, he also scattered a couple hundred relatively normal-sized scorpions all along the floor, just to keep it interesting. That’s what I’d heard crunching under my foot when I stepped into the room.
That’s also what was crawling up my legs like my nuts were a homing beacon, jabbing little stingers into my boots like they were testing the soil to plant a row of beans. I reached down with my shield and flicked one off, watching as it soared across the room and landed in a puddle of spider spit. My suspicions of acid were quickly confirmed as the scorpion immediately turned black and started to smoke.
The nearest spider turned to me, all its eyes locking in on my position by the door, and it started forward, placing its little spider feet carefully as it advanced, not stepping on any of its poisonous cousins. I wasn’t so careful, shuffling my feet around like I was trying to clog or two-step hoping to stomp as many scorpions as possible before the main event got to me.
Three spiders moved toward me, forming a triangle a few feet away. Their pincers clacked together excitedly, and they waggled forward and back, like they were trying to build up momentum to pounce. I could see the hairs on their legs twitching in the breeze they made as they rocked back and forth.
“Come on, Shelob,” I growled. “Lemme show you what happens when you catch a real big damn hobbit.” I readied my sword and shield, stomped a couple more scorpions, and hoped I could figure out a way not to become spider food in Fairyland. Then the spiders pounced, and it was on.
12
I caught the first spider on my shield and was surprised at how light it was for its size. I mean, I was expecting something that weighed about as much as a medium-sized dog, since the thing was at least the size of Great Dane. But nah, it was more like catching a chihuahua on a dinner plate. And then smashing the dinner plate into the wall and getting covered in slimy, nasty spider guts. The thing hit the wall with a crunch like a really sad bag of pretzels dropped onto the kitchen floor, and green ichor sprayed frigging everywhere.
The only upside to the spider showering a five-foot circle in acidic venom and nasty gut-slime was that the acid melted the scorpions, so I had a couple of places to put my feet while the rest of Clan Charlotte charged me.
In case you’ve never battled a horde of giant spiders in an enclosed space while tap-dancing on scorpions, and I hope you haven’t, there are a few things you need to know. First thing—spiders are faster than you’d expect. These chittering little bastards were on me in a flash, covering the distance between us almost before I could bring my shield back around. Second thing—spiders are stupid. I’m not talking garden-variety dumb as a box of hair stupid. I’m talking faking a punt on fourth and thirty-five pinned up against your own end zone when you’re the visiting team in Death Valley. So I mean really stupid. That was about the only thing that saved me. That, and the third thing—spiders will eat damn near anything, and they don’t have the societal restrictions about cannibalism that humans do.
The stupid came into play when they all tried to rush me in almost a straight line instead of fanning out or taking advantage of the fact that they can climb walls. Peter Parker would not have been proud of his namesakes because not only did they not utter a single witty remark while trying to kill me, not a single wall was crawled in this fight. Nope, they rushed me in basically a double line of fang and hairy legs, allowing me to take out the first three or four of them just by slashing a sword through their little google eyes, stabbing them in the head, then pivoting around to bash the next one with my shield, then repeating the process.
That’s when things got almost funny. Instead of trying to kill me, the spiders in the back of the line started chowing down on the corpses of the ones in the front. It was kind of like Lord of the Flies, except for bugs. The littler spiders, who apparently had been pushed to the back of the chow line for years and were damn tired of it, started eating the bigger spiders, the scorpions, and then started looking at each other all side-eyed like they thought anybody could be lunch. Except me. They left me alone, which gave me just enough breathing room to make my way around the room hacking and slashing like a bad horror movie villain, killing spiders with sword and shield and stomping scorpions to bits under my feet. I kept up my crazy-ass tarantella until my legs got tired, then I just grabbed my shield by the edges and slammed it into the floor, mashing three or four scorpions at a time.
I managed to get through the fight without getting bitten, stung, or doused with acid venom, and after about fifteen minutes of stomping, slamming, slicing, and a whole lot cussing, I stood alone, panting, in the middle of a roomful of disassembled arachnids. The walls were painted green with blood, and puddles of venom steamed on the floor. I walked over to the door opposite the one I entered through and tried the knob. Still locked.
“Okay, asshole. I killed all your pets. Open the damn door.” No response. I looked around, trying to see if there was anything still moving in the room, but I couldn’t see under all the carapaces and severed spider legs. I took a step toward the largest pile of spider carcasses, figuring if there was anything hiding under a corpse, that’s where it would be, but just as I moved, a line of fire cut across my left shoulder.
“Goddammit!” I yelled, dropping my sword and slapping at my skin. My fingers came away covered in green fire as I wiped a big glob of the acid venom off onto my hand. I yelled louder as my flesh started to bubble and the agony set in, and I moved to wipe my hand clean on my thigh. Somehow, I managed to stop myself and wipe the acid off onto the wall instead. The last thing I needed was to burn off my leg to go with my scalded shoulder and mangled fingers. I got myself wiped down the best I could and examined the damage to my fingers.
The whole palm of my right hand was angry red, with blisters popping out along my first three fingers. My pinky and thumb were mostly unscathed, but wielding a sword was gonna be difficult, even if I hadn’t dropped the hilt of my blade in another puddle of acid. I watched in horror as the bindings dissolved, and the dead spider’s venom ate clean down to the steel.
“Shit,” I muttered, looking at my hand. Then a really, really bad thought took hold. If venom dripped down on me from the ceiling, then that meant…I looked up. I didn’t want to, but I looked up.
Remember what I said about none of the spiders climbing on the walls or ceiling? Well, one of them did. And it was the mac daddy of the bunch. This thing wa
s easily six or seven feet around, and I swear it grinned down at me from where it hung, ten feet above and slightly in front of me. I looked up at the spider, then down at my destroyed sword, then at my blistered fingers.
“This is gonna suck,” I said, then I pulled the mace from my belt, wincing as the rough leather wraps on the handle tore open the blisters on my fingers. “Come on, asshole,” I called up to the spider. “Let’s get this shit over with. I’ve got a woman to save and a fairy to kill.”
So apparently giant spiders with acid slobber understand English. Who knew? Whether it really understood me or not, the boss spider dropped from the ceiling about five feet in front of me and lashed out with a leg aimed right for my face. I blocked with my shield and quickly realized that this one was a lot bigger, stronger, and heavier than the other spiders I’d made meat out of. Its foot smacked my shield hard enough to knock me back a step, and I had to hop to make sure I didn’t step in a puddle of acid. While I was distracted, the spider swung another leg out at me, going low this time, and I had to jump to keep it from sweeping my leg.
“What are you, a Cobra Kai spider?” I grumbled, catching another strike on my mace and barely hanging on to the weapon because of the pain in my palm. I took another step back as its leg clanged off my shield again and barely caught myself as my foot slid in spider guts. This was fast turning into one of the worst fights I’d ever been in, and that includes the one where I ended up with a fistful of sasquatch dick.
The spider kept advancing, and I kept retreating. It struck; I blocked. It lunged; I swatted legs aside with my shield. The mace was almost useless, thanks to its short reach and my jacked-up hands. Every once in a while, I could parry with the mace, but usually all I did with that arm was wave it around trying to keep my balance as I danced backward away from a spider the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Then it got worse. I took one more step back and felt something against my heel. A quick glance confirmed the sinking feeling in my gut—I’d backed up all the way into the wall.
There was nowhere else to go. I had solid stone behind me, a giant spider with acid dripping from its fangs ahead of me, and trying to dodge to the side would just put me right back in its clutches. Apparently, the same idea occurred to the spider because it decided that would be a great time to shift its weight onto its back four legs and lash out at me with four feet instead of two.
I took a deep breath, cast up a prayer to Great-Grandpappy Beauregard and everybody else who ever looked out for stupid rednecks, and did the only thing I could think of. I raised my shield up in front of my face, and I charged the big son of a bitch.
The spider slammed four giant spiky-hairy feet into the wall where I stood seconds before, and I rushed forward, slamming my shield right into its clicking, clacking mandibles. I wedged that rectangle of steel between the spider’s nasty, dripping fangs, gripped my mace with both hands, and smacked the big bastard right between its eight google eyes.
The mace wasn’t very long, so my reach sucked, and the angle was shit on account of my hand being all burnt to a crisp and having to reach around the shield, but it turns out that if you smack a giant spider in the eyeball with an eight-pound chunk of metal, you really don’t have to hit it all that hard to do some serious damage. Or at least hurt like a mother. The spider shrieked as well as it could around a mouthful of smoking steel and reared up as it tried to skitter back, on the retreat for a change.
I wasn’t having it. I knew if I let the thing get any kind of distance on me, I was screwed, blued, and tattooed. As long as I stayed inside the radius of its arms, it couldn’t skewer me with its pointy-ass feet, but the second I took two steps back, I was going to find out what my insides looked like. Again.
So I hung right in there with ol’ Auntie Shelob, staying in close where it couldn’t kill me and taking whatever pot shots I could on its head. It skittered around the room backward like a Roomba on meth, and I stayed on it like body spray on a frat boy. It turned its head this way and that, trying to shake the shield out of its way so it could bite my face off, but it was wedged in there tight. I kept landing half-assed strikes to its noggin, and it kept slinging its head side to side and spraying my bare chest with acid. I was losing chest hair like a molting turkey, but the spider was getting more concussed with every shot. Finally, it went down on one foreleg, and I moved in for the kill.
Except the damn bug was playing possum. I hate it when the friggin’ creepy-crawlies are smarter than me. It had chewed away enough of the shield to shake it loose, and when I came in high for a big overhand killing stroke, the spider opened its mandibles wide, dropping the pitted, scarred, and mangled shield to the floor, and turning those razor-sharp, acid-laced fangs my way. I looked down in horror as my hand descended toward the spider’s mouth, and somehow, at the last second, I managed to change course just enough to swing the mace straight down on a fang and snap it off at the root.
“GODDAMMIT!” I bellowed as acid-venom sprayed up my arm, searing away skin and hair and cutting a line of fire through the tattoos on my right arm. I dropped that arm to my side, useless, and acting on nothing but adrenaline and sheer redneck fury, I snatched the mace out of my bleeding and smoking right hand with my left, spun around in place, reversed grip on the haft of the weapon, and stabbed it down through the spider’s head like I was Van Helsing staking Dracula in his coffin.
The spider’s skull collapsed in a wet crunch, covering my face in brains and spider eyeballs, and the monster fell to the ground, finally dead. I staggered over to a spot of clear floor by a nearby wall and slid to the ground as I watched the doors to the room pop open.
As my consciousness fled, chased clear of me by the agony shooting up my arm, I looked up at the ceiling and slurred out one last threat. “You’d better kill me in my sleep, you little bastard. Because if I wake up, I’m going to teach you a whole new kind of pain.” Then the venom and the burns were too much, and I passed out.
13
I woke up tied to a post in the middle of a big room standing on my tiptoes with my hands bound and hung from a hook a few feet above my head. I blinked the crust from my eyes and looked around. Amy was strung up about ten feet away, looking pissed but pretty much okay. Skeeter and Joe were there, too, also hung up. Skeeter was only tied by one arm, but with his other one in a sling strapped to his chest, I didn’t expect that to get us a whole lot of anything. I felt mostly okay, except for my right hand, which throbbed angrily in time with my heartbeat. My shoulders were screaming from holding up my bodyweight, and I felt a few bruises on my knees and legs, but in general, I could fight if I could just get loose. Admittedly, that didn’t look real likely.
We were in a big throne room, fastened to wooden poles that just seemed to have grown straight out of the floors, or had the room built around them, or been stuck there with magic, because every shitty thing that happens to me has to be magic. Just once I’d like to get in a car wreck because a dog runs out in front of somebody and they rear-end me, or some such crap. Anything, really, just as long as there’s nothing magical about it at all.
The room was huge, close to the size of half a basketball court, and we were in the middle of it, at least from what I could see by twisting around from my hook. Our posts were arranged in kind of a half-circle, with enough space between us that there was no way we could reach each other, not that I think we could do much by tapping our toes together regardless. Behind us were huge double doors and a long red carpet leading past where we hung, up to a dais with two thrones on it.
Puck sat on one throne, looking considerably worse for wear than the last time I saw him. His skin was completely gray now, and even though he was healthy, there was a general shabbiness to him that hadn’t been there before. He was a dapper little guy last time we met, but now his clothes hung loose on him, and there were stains all over him like he hadn’t bathed or changed in weeks. I mean, it’s not like I was fresh as a daisy or anything, but he hadn’t been traveling through a maze fighting skeletons and
giant spiders.
On the throne next to him was a young woman, and she looked like death warmed over. She was pale, with a yellow cast to her skin that gave her a jaundiced look, and sweat poured down her face. She was unconscious, but not sleeping. No, she was trapped in some kind of fever dream, with her head tossing from side to side, and she would occasionally mutter something too low for me to hear. But even as rough as she looked, I could see a familiar shape to her nose and cheekbones. My mother’s stamp was strong in her face. This was Nitalia, my sister, and by all indications, she was not doing well at all.
Puck must have seen something in my face because a slow grin stretched from one pointy ear to the other. “Ah, Bubba. So good to see you again. How have you found my kingdom so far?”
“Well, I turned left at Shitsville and followed the signs to Assclown Castle, and that led me straight to you.” I gave him my best “go screw yourself” grin, and he launched himself off his throne like his butt was spring-loaded. I never even saw him move. He just did that annoying teleport thing, and suddenly he was standing in front of me.
“You think you’re funny, human?” I think he tried to get in my face, but my face was about a foot taller than him, so all he really did was threaten my armpit, and given my exertions from the past few days, that probably went worse for him than it did me.
“I think I’m hilarious,” I replied. I looked at the others. “What do y’all think?”
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 36