“Jack,” Rudy’s voice rasped. His chest heaved like he’d just run a marathon, but his breath was lost in a thick gurgling sound. He gagged and coughed. “I can’t… I can’t…”
“Rudy, it’s okay. We’ll get you out of here. Just hold on.” Jack’s own heart was pounding now. He felt utterly helpless. “Stay with me. Just try to slow your breathing. Take deep breaths. Stay with me!”
“I… can’t…” Rudy managed two last words before his entire torso stiffened. His head arched back in a wide-eyed, silent scream. A tremor shook his body once, and then he was still.
“Rudy!” Jack shook his shoulders. “Rudy!”
Ben shone his flashlight into Rudy’s eyes, still wide open in a look of terror. His pupils were dilated; there was no sign of any reaction to the light.
“Rudy!” Jack’s voice trembled, and a strange sense of detachment flooded over him. A feeling that he was outside of his body somehow, sitting in a theater or at home watching a horror movie.
“Jack!” It seemed Ben’s voice called him from the other side of the cavern. “Jack, we have to get out of here.”
Jack looked up to see Ben nose to nose with him. His lips moved as if in slow motion.
“Jack… he’s dead. There’s nothing else we can do.”
Ben shook him by the shoulders, and Jack blinked back to consciousness.
“He’s gone,” Ben kept saying. “We have to get out of here.”
“No!” Jack grabbed Rudy’s shoulders and tried to drag him toward the bones. “We have to get him to a hospital. Help me!”
Jack felt his head snap sideways as Ben’s hand connected with his cheek. The sharp sting brought him out of his fog. The whole side of his face seemed to burn.
Ben glared at him. “He’s dead! We have to leave him and get out of here.”
The clicking noise was growing louder and now seemed to fill the entire cavern like an approaching chorus of castanets playing somewhere in the dark. But it was more intense now than when Jack had heard it before. And he could hear other sounds over the distinct clicking noise. Growling and hissing, like the animal that had attacked them.
Ben leaped onto the bone pile and scrambled toward the top. Bones slipped and cracked under his weight, but he kept clawing his way up.
Jack looked back at Rudy, his body limp and contorted. And still.
He grimaced, fighting back tears as he picked up Rudy’s backpack and slung it over his shoulder along with his own pack. Now Jack could sense a growing shadow approaching from somewhere in the darkness behind him. He jumped onto the bone pile and clawed his way up to the ledge.
It was like climbing a snowbank; his own weight caused him to sink farther down than he was able to pull himself up. His hands clutched at thick leg bones, round skulls, and smaller ribs and hands and feet. Hard and cold to the touch, they shifted and snapped like old branches beneath his feet. The putrid scent of decay wafted up from the heap with each move he made, choking him in its stench.
He struggled to turn his brain off to the horror of Rudy’s death and the corpses beneath him and focus solely on climbing, forcing his hands to keep moving and his legs to keep pumping.
As he neared the top, he saw that the ledge was higher than he’d expected. He clawed at the rock wall to find some kind of handhold. And even as he did, his feet sank deeper into the bones. It was as if the corpses were grabbing his legs to pull him down into their tomb.
But then he looked up again and saw Ben’s arm extended toward him. Jack gave one final push with his legs, hoping there were enough bones beneath him to hold him stable. He jumped…
And felt Ben’s hand close around his wrist. Jack reached his free hand up, kicked his feet against the rock, and scrambled over the ledge.
He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, gasping for breath.
But he had left Rudy behind. Down on the cave floor. A few minutes ago, he was alive. Lungs breathing, heart beating. And now…
Jack peered back over the ledge into darkness. Ben switched off his light and hunkered down beside Jack, peeking over the ledge as well.
Below them, Jack could see an eerie blue cone of light shining off into the dark. It was Rudy’s flashlight. Everything else around was lost in the inky black of the cavern. But the clicking sounds flooded the cave now, sounding as if they were coming from all around them.
Jack reached for the video camera and peered into the view screen. Through it, he could see the pale-green shape of Rudy’s limp body lying in the mud. Then, beyond, Jack saw movement. Several shadows appeared over the rim and scurried down the incline. Sharp, bony limbs scuttling in a flurry of movement.
It was more of the spiders, some nearly as big as the one that had been hiding in the bone pile, others considerably smaller. They skittered down into the pit, converging on Rudy’s corpse, tearing into it like a pack of wild dogs. Hisses turned to coarse growls and high-pitched shrieks. The flashlight shook and jittered, shooting its beam in various directions until finally it went out.
Jack closed his eyes and rolled onto his back, suppressing a sudden wave of nausea.
He thought of Rudy’s parents. How would he tell them? How could he explain the kind of gruesome death their son—his best friend—had just experienced?
These creatures were everything they had feared. Ravenous and violent. Despite the presence of the enormous millipedes, the food supply in this isolated ecosystem must have been scarce.
And yet it wasn’t so isolated, for they had stumbled across a subterranean killing field. Someone had been feeding these monsters human flesh, and now Jack wrestled to keep his fear from controlling him.
His nausea rose again, and this time he couldn’t stop it. He rolled to his side and vomited onto the rocky ledge, convulsing in choked sobs. Rudy had been the only real friend he’d ever had. The only one he’d ever trusted. They’d been a pair of outcasts in school. A couple of geeks with only each other for company.
And now, just like that, he was gone.
Jack felt Ben’s hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He choked back his tears and wiped his mouth. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t get bit too, did you?”
Jack scooted himself away from the ledge and sat up. “No… sorry, I just lost it there.”
In the darkness, Ben’s voice replied, “I’m sorry about Rudy.”
“He was my best friend,” Jack said. “My only friend. He didn’t even want to come on this trip, but I talked him into it. I put a guilt trip on him.”
“This wasn’t your fault.”
Jack wiped the tears from his eyes. “Yes, it was. If I wouldn’t have made him come along, he’d still be alive.”
Below them, he could still hear the noises of the spiders feeding. He shook his head, dazed. “He seemed fine. You bandaged his leg…. He was okay.”
“It must’ve been some kind of venom. But it was so fast-acting.”
“What did his wound look like? When you were cleaning it, was there any discoloration or swelling?”
Ben paused before answering. “There were two puncture marks on his calf. Big ones. And the area was pretty red and swollen. I cleaned it as best I could with antibacterial ointment and wrapped it up. It didn’t seem to bother him that much.”
Jack just stared into the dark and shuddered.
“Bottom line is, we need to avoid getting bit at all costs,” Ben said with a grim tone.
Jack rubbed his eyes as a rush of frustration and anger ran through him. “This whole trip was a bad idea.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ben said again. “There wasn’t anything you could’ve done.”
Jack fell silent for a moment as his thoughts returned to Rudy. “How am I gonna tell his parents? What do I even say to them?”