“You’re an Edinburgh lass, aren’t you?”
“Dunbar,” she replied. “And you’re a Weegie, like Davies through the back.”
“Guilty as charged. So what’s a nice lassie like you doing in a place like this?”
She nearly laughed.
“Don’t give me any of your Glesga patter,” she said. “This isn’t the Barrowland Ballroom and I’m not in the mood.”
Wiggins laughed.
“Maybe later then,” he said, then saw she was serious.
“Sorry, lass, it’s just my way. How’s your friend doing?”
“He’s not,” she said bluntly.
“Oh fuck. Then I’m really sorry,” Wiggins replied, then went quiet.
Maggie looked out over the courtyard as she smoked and drank the coffee. Everything looked still and quiet, as it had when they’d first arrived.
Shit, was it only a week ago? It feels like months.
She thought for the first time in a while about the others, the six they hadn’t seen since the rebel attack and wondered now whether it was rebels that had taken them, or whether it had been the same beasts that did for Jim White.
Wiggins had been silent for several minutes. She had the impression that might be something of a record for the man and was proved right when he spoke up again.
“So what’s the deal with these big fucking spiders?” Wiggins asked.
“Sorry, no idea. That one you shot was the first we’d seen of them. If it was them that got Jim White, we didn’t see it.”
She looked out the doorway again; somebody had moved the spider carcass outside and off to one side. It lay in the shadows, a broken thing, all twisted legs and strangely deflated body.
“Spiders don’t grow that big,” she said.
Wiggins laughed.
“I guess they do now.”
“No, I mean they can’t grow that big. The circulatory and respiratory systems aren’t built for it. Once they get past a certain size, about the size of your hand, they can’t get enough oxygen inside them fast enough to drive their functions.”
Wiggins laughed again.
“That one was coming for us fast enough. And the shadows on the roofs are faster again. They’re still up there, watching us right now I’ll bet. I don’t think they know they have a problem.”
“I don’t understand anything that’s going on here.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Wiggins replied. “It happens to me all the time.”
When she returned to the chamber, Kim was down in the trench, working on the mosaic with a soft brush and a trowel.
“There’s not enough light for that kind of work,” Maggie said.
“I tried to tell her,” Jack Reynolds replied dully, “but she’s not talking. Leave her be; she needs something to take her mind off the rest of this shit.”
“I know how she feels.”
Maggie sat on the floor, watching Kim scrape layers of dry dirt from the mosaic. Reynolds was first to break the silence.
“That corporal at the door… he’s got the sat-phone, hasn’t he? Did you persuade him to make the call, to get us the fuck out of here?”
“He’s waiting for the others to come back.”
“If they ever come back. This is fucked up. We should never have come here.”
“We’re archaeologists. It’s our job to save this kind of thing.”
“Sure. But nobody told me I’d have to be Indiana Fucking Jones as well.”
Kim hadn’t spoken but was now working faster, furiously, sweeping dirt aside from directly over the mosaic. Maggie looked down. She’d already cleared a large patch, depicting Roman centurions both on foot and in chariots, all with weapons facing inwards to a central point in the design. The central area was now under Kim’s brush as she swept and cleared ever more frantically.
Maggie stood and fetched a light, taking it over to see more clearly but Kim was bent over, brushing, obscuring the two-foot circle that was the central motif as it was finally fully revealed. It was only when Kim sat back and let out a long gasp that became a wail when they saw what was there.
A fat dark spider lay directly in the middle of the mosaic, surrounded by Romans stabbing at it or spearing it with lances. Dead men lay under its legs, which spread far out into the mosaic itself. Maggie now realized that the whole thing was cunningly depicted as a single huge web. The face of the spider was the worst thing. It smiled, an evil grin under compound eyes as it sucked the life from a man it held in its mouth. The man was dwarfed by the bulk of the body, which, if the proportions of the thing were to be believed, was at least ten feet from head to rear.
— 7 —
It was a tight squeeze to get everybody and the bodies into and onto the jeep. When Banks sat in front beside Wilkins, the nominated driver, the sarge and Brock were, somewhat precariously, perched in the back beside the gun, with the dead stuffed, haphazardly and with little in the way of respect, on the floor at their feet. It didn’t help that they were partially encased in web, or that the black wounds were suppurating, an advanced decay having set in that stank even worse than the cooked head on the hob had done.
The only good thing about the situation was that Brock had found a belt of ammo for the big gun and had loaded it up; if anyone came at them, they were going to get a blast of high-caliber shells in their face as introduction.
The main road out of the square was the one they needed to take to head back up to the escarpment and the ancient town on the hill. Banks kept an eye on the rooftops, fearing an ambush as Wilkins drove them away.
“We’re not stopping for anyone or anything, got that, lad?” he said.
“Got it, sir,” Wilkins replied. He handled the jeep like someone used to driving fast. He put his foot down hard as they left the square and they sped through the empty town leaving a cloud of dust and sand in their wake. Banks checked his wing mirror and saw that the sky was lightening in the east at their back.
Dawn was coming.
The rest of the town looked as dead — murdered — as the part they’d left. Gray web cloaked many of the shops and dwellings and more cocooned bodies hung from balconies and light fittings, swaying in the breeze. Some of them oozed, dripping black noxious fluids and again Banks glimpsed a wavering, oily vapor in the air, one that he thought might be luminescent in full dark. He was glad of the approaching sunrise as they barreled through the empty streets.
It was going too well to last. They approached the edge of town and could clearly see the road winding upwards towards the escarpment but the way ahead was blocked the full stretch across by a mass of web, thick enough to be nearly solid. It was also eight feet high and definitely impassable.
“Sir?” Wilkins said. “What do you want to do?”
Banks considered telling the lad to put his foot down, try to blast through but the risk of getting tangled up in that gray shit was too large to take.
“Hang a left,” he said. “Let’s see if we can go round it.”
A left turn, taken at speed, brought them into a narrow alleyway, fifteen feet high, where the night held off the approach of dawn. Wilkins put on the jeep’s headlights, which showed another gray mass blocking their exit fifty yards ahead.
It’s the perfect spot for an ambush.
“Back up. Back up now,” Banks shouted.
It took the lad a few seconds to brake, then find reverse gear on the unfamiliar stick, and that was long enough for Banks to look in his mirror and see two of the dog-sized spiders already spinning web side to side across the alley entrance behind them.
“Contact rear!” Banks shouted and felt the jeep rock as Hynd and Brock tried to get the mounted gun turned to the alley entrance. Wilkins had the vehicle reversing, slowly back towards the fast-growing web. Above them black shapes loomed, darker humped shadows on the rooftops against the lightening sky.