Looking down at Laurence, lying on the floor with blood splattered around him, his arm swelling like a balloon and the fingers on his other hand doing the same, she began to wonder. Would killing him be right? Or should he be taught how to behave? She was pondering the question when she caught sight of the whiskey bottle that was half under the sofa. She pulled it from its hiding place, opened it up and took a decent sized nip from it. She needed to think this one through very carefully, very carefully indeed.
18.
It was Shannon that saw it first. She tore in a huge gasp that made the rest of them jump. Then, one by one, they all saw what had made her react in such a way. The view of Newtown was opening up in front of them in the valley below. Johnny pulled the van up to a complete stop. His mouth was hanging open and he was shaking his head, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“Jesus,” said Briggs.
Lorna began to feel the old nausea begin to stab at her. Looking at the scene in front of her, she couldn’t quite believe that they were really going in there. Her first instinct was to turn and run in the opposite direction as fast as she could without ever looking back. It was a clear day and Newtown could be seen in all of its glory. You could almost make out every line of every building in there, such was the clearness of the day. But, to the right hand side of the town, there was a large black mass covering the buildings. It looked to Lorna like a small child had attempted to draw a dome over the picture with an infantile, wobbly hand. If you focused on it hard enough you could see that the black mass was alive somehow, it was in a state of perpetual movement. They all knew what it was, they knew it was the spiders, but Briggs still got out of his seat and went to grab his binoculars. He returned to the front window and peered through them, as he focused in on the mass of spiders he began to utter quiet curses. He lowered the binoculars slowly and then he became aware that the rest of his crew were watching him and waiting for a response.
“Well, there’s something you don’t see everyday,” he said. He was trying to sound flippant but he couldn’t quite pull it off. The scale of the problem was far bigger than even he had anticipated. He was feeling the same way that Lorna was, perhaps it would be better to turn and get as far away as possible. Both of them were hiding their feelings about the situation. Briggs waited for a response, but there was none. Everyone had been stunned into absolute silence. Briggs looked out of the window again and then he raised the binoculars again. He focused in on the writhing mass of spiders that were covering one end of Newtown. He could just about make out body shapes and legs. They were unlike anything he had ever seen before. They were horrendous, an abomination and yet somehow he felt a sneaking pride at the fact that it had been him who had created them. He supposed that it was the same feeling you would have if you saw your own children doing well, not that he had any frame of reference for it, he had no children to think about. He lowered the binoculars again and sat back down in his seat.
“Well, that’s what we are up against,” he said.
“Doc, how in the hell are we going to get in there? You’ve seen them. Even with the suit on the sheer numbers of them would overwhelm us,” said Johnny.
Briggs sighed, “Yes, you are probably right. I guess our only option is to go back and face the music, unless….”
“Unless what?” said Shannon.
“Unless we find a way to draw them away,” said Briggs.
There was silence amongst them whilst everyone processed what Briggs was saying.
“You mean bait don’t you? You want one of us to be the bait,” said Lorna rising to her feet.
Briggs offered her a weak smile, “Yeah, pretty much.”
Lorna felt the strength start to go from her legs. She flopped back down in her seat.
“So, who gets the short straw?” said Johnny.
Briggs shrugged, “We have to make enough space to go in and get the queen. From what I have researched, the queen will be significantly larger than the soldiers. It stands to reason. We would need at least two people to go in and get it.”
“And just how are you supposed to capture it? Are you going to whistle it like a fucking dog and hope it follows you?” said Shannon. There was a tone of irritability in her voice.
“No, we use the tranquilizer gun on it, and then we can strap it to the roof using the elastic ropes.”
“Jesus Christ…,” said Johnny. He turned away from the conversation and resumed looking out of the window.
“Do you have any better suggestions?” roared Briggs, jumping to his feet. He turned away and walked to the back of the van. He began to pace up and down slowly in the confined space.
“Perhaps we could try and think of ways to help, rather than putting road blocks in the way,” said Shannon.
Johnny turned towards Shannon, “What he is suggesting is suicide, plain and simple. You only have to look out of the window to see that.”
“If we do nothing and those spiders head off for a city then suicide might be the only option we have,” said Shannon. Johnny opened his mouth to protest again, but there was no argument for him to make. He clicked his mouth shut and shrugged.
Lorna was sitting in her seat listening to it all going on. Perhaps there was no real way to get out of it all alive, but it came down to something her father once taught her. He had liked Laurence, probably the only person in her family that did at the time. She had been pretty angry about the resistance to the man she wanted to marry. She had even thought about breaking the engagement off, just to get everyone off her back. Her father had invited her over to the family home one afternoon and she had gone, just to see what he had to say. They had talked for well over two hours before he had told her to marry the guy anyway.
“It’s your life, not anybody else’s. Do you really think any of them are going to be sitting with you, helping you pass the time if you were living on your own? Of course not. Do any of them know what goes on behind the closed doors of your relationship? Of course not. You do what you want to do kidder, and fuck anyone who tries to tell you different,” he had said. She hadn’t argued because she knew he was absolutely right. From that day forwards, she didn’t take on board any negative commentary about her life, even if it was right on the money. The other thing she had been told by him was that if you were going to go down, go down swinging. That was the pearl of advice she was thinking of right now. They would probably get killed by the spiders either way, but she would rather go down having taken a shot at getting rid of them, rather than running away with her tail between her legs. She stood up and took a step forwards towards Shannon and Johnny. “Look, I know it isn’t ideal, but if we are going to get killed, wouldn’t you want to take some of those bastards with you? I’m pretty sure that most of my friends have been killed by those fuckers, and I want a little payback before I get turned into spider food.”
She turned away and went to the back of the van to where Briggs was standing. He stopped pacing when he saw Lorna approaching.
“Listen, I’ll be the bait,” she said.
Briggs turned his head towards her, his eyes growing wide. He was about to protest when Lorna put up her hand to silence him.
“Nobody knows Newtown like I do. I have lived here pretty much all my life. The last thing you need is for someone to lead those spiders down a dead end. I can lead them a merry dance long enough for you to get in there and do what you have to do,” she said.
Briggs shut his mouth and regarded her for a moment. His eyes looked different, almost as if there was gratitude in them. “O.K. you’re elected,” he said. Lorna began to walk away. He tapped her on the shoulder and she turned back, “Oh and one more thing, thanks for stepping up, unlike others I could mention.”
“Oh don’t worry about them, they are just scared I guess.”
Briggs shrugged again, “We’re all scared. But we can’t just sit back and do nothing.”
Lorna nodded. She began to feel like she could probably trust this guy, no matter what he had do
ne to cause all of this. They both went to the front of the bus to talk to the others. There was an uncomfortable silence between them all at first.
“This is the plan. Lorna is going cause a distraction. She told me that she is a resident of Newtown and she knows the place like the back of her hand,” said Briggs.
“She can’t go out there by herself, she isn’t even armed,” said Shannon. She looked at Lorna for a moment. “I’ll go with her.”
Briggs smiled, “Now there’s an offer you can’t refuse. Take your piece with you and don’t be afraid to use it,” he said.
Johnny was staring a hole into Briggs, “I guess that leaves you and me for the extraction does it Chief?”
“Exactly right. You get the tranquilizer gun, you’re a far better shot than I could ever be. We go in, we find the queen, we take her down and then we get her and us the hell out of there.”
“You make it sound so simple,” said Johnny shaking his head.
“When it comes to theory, everything is simple,” said Briggs. “Now why don’t you drive on Johnny, we need to get this in the bag.”
Johnny shook his head. He wanted to say something but Briggs had already moved on. He turned his chair back to the wheel and started the engine again. “This is fucking suicide,” he muttered to himself and started the van moving.
“Right, you two. You need to come up with a plan. You need to know where you are going and I mean exactly where you are going and then you can minimize the risk to yourselves. We won’t know how many of those spiders are with the swarm or how many are just doing their own thing until we get there. Shannon, get your things ready to fight them, just in case you get into a tough spot. Lorna, you can use my computer to plot a route on the map. Do we all know what we are doing?”
Shannon gave him a thumbs up and Lorna just nodded silently. She was beginning to feel sick, such was the danger of the situation that she was about to be put in. But she knew that she had to put that all to one side, she had to live up to what her father had taught her. She stood up and went over to Briggs who was powering up his computer.
“Right then, let’s get on with it,” she said.
19.
Simon reached the viewing point exactly half an hour after he had set off again. The viewing point was set back off the main route and you had to make sure that you saw the small track that led off road. It was easy to miss to the untrained eye, but Simon had been up here before. He had been on an assignment to shoot some footage of the town just after he had started employment with the station. The story was about the Newtown Ripper as Jamie liked to call it. People were being picked off and murdered in the town and it appeared at first that there was no motivation, nor any link between the killings. It was developing into one of the biggest mysteries that had ever plagued the town and then just as suddenly as they started, the murders stopped and the story died. He had been up to the viewing point and shot some pretty good footage of the town from afar. The station had ended up using his footage on the evening news. He and Krissy had celebrated that night with a big slap-up meal and several drinks and they had ended the night making love in the kitchen side and then collapsing on the sofa with the television on. It had been a hell of a night and they had tried to celebrate the same way every time his footage was used. Unfortunately, his footage was used so often that they would have run out of money had they continued with their lavish evenings. Turning into the viewing point, he was making a mental note that if he got out of this one alive he and Krissy would be out tonight, no question. The van rolled down the little road. The view was obscured by trees on either side of the route and then they began to thin and the view of Newtown opened out in front of him. When he saw Newtown with its dome of spiders covering part of the town his mouth dropped open. He was so shocked that he almost forgot to put the brakes on and bring the van to a halt. He hammered the brake and the tyres screeched their protest at being engaged in such a brutal manor and then he sat still for a moment tearing in breaths and trying to get his hammering heartbeat back under control. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing in front of him and he couldn’t believe that he had almost sent the van sailing over the edge of the viewing point. He wouldn’t have done much in the way of celebrating with Krissy had he not managed to hit the brakes in time. He reached for the keys to turn the engine off and then he realized that the engine had stalled during his emergency stop. His hand wandered to the door handle instead. He still needed to get some more footage to send back to the station. He had the motivation of the bonus that Jamie talked about. If he was happy then he could be looking at doubling his wage for the month. Perhaps he could take some time off whilst this whole spider thing blew over. His thoughts were interrupted by something moving out of the corner of his eye. Someone was coming over to the van. Simon thought that he recognized the face, a face that had caused him trouble in the past. He pulled the door handle and he stepped out of the van.
“Hey buddy, are you O.K?” said the man approaching him. Simon’s memory clicked into gear. He knew who it was, it was Ken Foggart from Granada television. Simon wasn’t a fan of Ol’ Ken. Ol’ Ken was somebody that Simon had developed a hell of a rivalry with. Ol’ Ken worked for a station that had better funding than his, so that meant that they had better equipment, including a radio scanner that had a much better range. Ol’ Ken likely knew more about the spiders and the steps that were being taken to get rid of them better than anyone else in the world right now. Simon couldn’t help but hate Ol’ Ken, even though he was a far better cameraman than anyone that they had at Granada. His footage always wiped the floor with anything anyone could send in. But, Ol’ Ken had the right contacts which would almost guarantee that his footage would make the air. Simon knew that he was pretty much running head to head in the quantity of aired footage and one day he wanted to be the leader in that little race, but he would have to put some serious hours in to get that title. The one redeeming feature of Ol’ Ken was that he was a blabbermouth. It was easy to glean information from him with a bit of sweet talking. Making Ol’ Ken feel important was his Achilles heel. If he felt important then he would spill the beans every time. Here he was right now walking over and trying to offer a helping hand to his main competition. What a prick.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine thanks Ken. It was just a bit of a shock,” said Simon pointing towards the entombed Newtown.
“Shock isn’t the word I would use. Fucking unbelievable is one I would use,” said Ken gesturing wildly.
That’s two words you cock, thought Simon, but he nodded his agreement nonetheless.
“I just ran into some of them down the road. It looked like they were making their way down to Newtown to join the rest of them,” said Simon. He almost let it slip that he had caught some footage of them but he managed to bite his tongue just in time.
“Well shit, I haven’t seen one of them up close yet. We have been camping out up here since all this first kicked off. They don’t look like they are even doing anything, they are just sitting there,” said Ken.
“Why though, why aren’t they moving?”
Ken looked around at his own van and crew who were parked right in the center of the viewing point. Their cameras were all set up and already filming the bizarre view in front of them. Ken turned back to Simon and lowered his voice. “I heard on the radio scanner. The army and the police are both looking for a man called Briggs. They say that it was him that started all this, that he put out a virus. The virus caused our domestic spiders to mutate into what you see before you. There was some talk about the bee population, but I couldn’t make it all out. Briggs is a wanted man, a bio-terrorist which is a first, not only for this country but for the world. Man, I would love to get an exclusive with him.”
“Where is he?”
“There was a radio contact with one of the roadblocks leading into Newtown, right over on the north side. They said that Briggs and his gang had walked right up to the front door and demanded to be let in. Not heard a thing abo
ut it since. I called it in, but apparently the military are not allowing it to go public just yet.”
Simon thought it over for a moment. He had a pretty good mind for solving a mystery like this. It didn’t add up, none of it added up. “I don’t buy it. How can one man be responsible for all this. Where would he have got the knowledge from to pull something off like this, and more to the point, where would he have got the resources, the funding and all that shit. I smell a patsy Ken.”
Dawn of the Spiders: Special Edition Page 12