It took less than a minute before nothing was left alive in the tight alley. Maggie looked up to see a dozen more spiders on the parapet but these were already slinking away across the rooftops to the north, seemingly having lost their appetite for a fight.
“Is that all of these fuckers?” Wiggins said.
Once they were safely back in the main doorway, the captain set Brock and Wilkins on guard duty and led her into the empty room beyond where Davies was on watch.
“I wanted to do this quietly and tell you before the others, as you’re the only one that looks strong enough to take it right now,” Banks said.
Maggie knew from the look in his eyes it wasn’t good news and couldn’t bring herself to ask, so let him continue.
“We found the rest of your team down in the town. I’m not sure what got them first but it was the spiders that got them in the end.”
It was too much information to take in at once.
“They’re dead? All of them?”
Banks only nodded.
“And the bodies?”
Banks told her the story, from the soldiers’ entry into the town downstream, to their narrow escape on the waterfront. She was left with the one vivid image in her mind, the cocooned corpses floating serenely away down the great river where so many had gone before them in aeons past. She wanted to say something, maybe to thank the man for his efforts, but nothing would come. Banks took note and patted her softly on the shoulder, the only comfort he could offer.
“And now I need coffee and a smoke,” the captain finished.
He turned away from her and only then noticed that the door to the chamber was firmly closed against them. Maggie finally found her voice.
“Reynolds and Kim are in there,” she said. “Jack took fright and locked them in. We haven’t had a moment to try to open it up again.”
“Aye, well we’ve got one now.” He shouted along the corridor. “Wiggo, Sarge, get your arses through here.”
In the end, they needed Maggie to put her shoulder to the door alongside them but slowly, creaking rasping millimeter at a time, the door eventually swung inward.
Maggie noticed two things immediately; the crack in the upper corner where the breeze had come in was now a gaping hole three feet wide. A gray, wispy gauze of fresh webbing covered the area, like a frosted pane of thick glass. The webbing had a scrap of material in it, a piece of Reynolds’ flannel shirt, red with fresh blood showing against the gray. Kim sat in the far corner of the chamber, as if trying to press herself as small and tight as possible, hands over her head as she sobbed uncontrollably. There was no sign of Reynolds save the scrap of shirt but it didn’t take many smarts to figure out what had happened to him.
Wiggins stepped up to the new hole and prodded it with his rifle.
“It’s not thick,” he said. “We can cut through, if you need to, Cap?”
Banks looked grim.
“I don’t need to. We’re not going chasing around after lost lambs. Not when there are more predators about. He brought this on himself, the stupid wanker.”
Maggie didn’t say anything but found she was in agreement with the captain, at least on that point.
Banks had his men move everything out of the chamber; food, lights, rucksacks, camp stove, and Kim and the squad pulled the door shut as much as they could manage from out in the corridor. They set up a new temporary camp in the main hallway by the front entrance while Banks went through to the quiet empty room along the corridor to call the situation in to his H.Q. The sergeant, Hynd, set to making coffee while Maggie and Wiggins tried to pry Kim out of what looked like catatonic shock.
“Please, tell me what happened?” Maggie kept saying, softly but Kim had retreated somewhere unreachable and sat in a corner, balled up tight. Her eyes stared straight ahead, gazing in horror at something only she could see.
After a futile five minutes with no other information forthcoming, Maggie joined Wiggins and Hynd in a smoke with a mug of coffee.
“How’s your pal?” Wiggins said.
“She’s stopped crying. That’s a start. But whatever she saw, it’s scared her, bad.”
“Aye,” Wiggins replied. “I’m not too happy about it myself. I fucking hate spiders.”
She was starting to get the soldiers clear as individuals in her head now, all apart from the two younger privates, who, as yet, were merged into one fresh-faced, barely out of their teens, quiet blandness. Private Davies she had spoken to, he was the tall black lad from Glasgow. The corporal, Wiggins, was a cheeky, chatty bundle of nervous energy, a cigarette smoking machine, also from Glasgow but with a harder edge, a sense of violence always present under the smile. She didn’t feel uncomfortable in his presence, for she recognized the type; she’d spent long enough fending them off at university discos in her youth. Hynd was different again, maybe ten years older, the experience sitting easy on him. If Wiggins was a flighty sparrow, the sergeant was an owl, a calm center that saw everything around him, a coiled spring ready to unleash but yet content to stay still and ready for as long as it took.
The captain, on the other hand, to continue the bird analogy, would be an eagle, above everything else, looking down in search of trouble or opportunity and ready for either. She smiled at her own fancy and was smiling when Banks arrived at the doorway.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
It was a question she’d been asking herself. There was only Kim and her left now, two out of the large team that had set off from London last week so full of excitement as to what they might find. She’d had dreams of academic success, maybe even of finds to make a career from. Now all she wanted to do was get out of here in one piece.
“I’ll survive,” she said in reply to Banks’ question. “You need somebody to take home with you.”
Banks gave her a thin smile.
“Aye, this is a fucked up trip all ‘round. But it’ll be over soon. There’s a chopper waiting across the river that we can call on this evening as soon as it gets dark.” He checked his watch. “Nine hours or so. We hunker down here ‘til dusk, then they’ll pick us up somewhere in the open. You’ll be home before you know it.”
“If the spiders let us go.”
He smiled thinly.
“One way or another, we’re going,” he said. “We’ll kill every bloody one of them if we have to and trample on what’s left.”
— 11 —
Banks took his sergeant out along the hallway to the main doorway for a smoke and brought him up to speed with the news of the proposed rescue.
“Nine hours? That’s a long time to spend waiting,” Hynd said. “We could sweep the area, clean out these fucking things completely?”
“We don’t have enough ammo,” Banks replied. “Not if there’s even more of them hiding somewhere.”
“Spiders as big as horses? It’s not fucking natural, Cap.”
“Tell me about it. But it’s about par for the course for us these days. Maybe Wiggo is right. Maybe we are fucking monster magnets.”
Hynd patted his rifle.
“These ones seem to go down quickly enough though, so there’s that to be grateful for.”
“Aye, speaking of that, take an inventory. We did a shitload of shooting out there today. See if anybody’s running low and make sure everybody’s got a full mag. I aim to lie low and not look for trouble but I said that earlier too and look where that got us.”
He turned to the two younger men at either side of the doorway.