Screech. Chatter.
The bugs were back.
I was in no shape to get up and start running. I was too dizzy for that. But I still had enough sense to realize they would be on me any second. I looked around for something to defend myself with. At my back was the splintered crate. It was made from long slats of inch-thick wood. The one side had cracked open and I was able to yank off a long piece of wood. It was about four feet long and a few inches wide. More importantly, it was solid. I tested it against my knee. The rotten boards must have all been on top. This side piece was intact. It wasn’t exactly a wooden stave like the one Loor had taught me to use on Zadaa, but it would have to do.
I got weakly to my feet, with my eyes looking up at the top of the crate I had just fallen from. If the bugs were coming, they’d come from there. I gripped the rough piece of wood, turned my body Loor had instructed, and lifted my weapon. I was ready… or at least as ready as I was able to get.
So were the spiders. They attacked by flinging themselves from the edge of the crate above. These devilish bugs couldn’t jump up, but they could definitely jump down. I briefly thought how it was incredible that these bugs could be so focused. So smart. There was definitely intelligence going on here. They were smarter than any quig I had faced so far. The thought quickly flashed through my head that all the inhabitants of Quillan might be bugs, like the cat klees of Eelong. But that gruesome thought only distracted me from my mission, which was to survive. If I was going to have to fight a race of intelligent, vicious bug people, the battle for Quillan was under way.
They came at me, flying through the air, screaming. I batted them with my makeshift wood-plank weapon, knocking them away like, well, like bugs. These guys may have been smart, but they weren’t very strong. The first bug I hit screamed and flew back across the aisle. It smashed against a crate on the far side, and fell to the ground. It looked dead. Of course, I wasn’t going to go and check its pulse. I had a few thousand other things to deal with at the time. But seeing this gave me hope. These spiders were fragile. They had the numbers, but I had the power. The question was, would I burn out before they ran out of reinforcements?
They flew at me from above; I swatted at them quickly. Whap! Crack! It was like high-speed batting practice. Good thing I knew how to switch-hit. It wasn’t much different from fending off Loor’s attacks when we sparred in the training camp of Mooraj. I was on fire. The dizziness was long gone. Thanks again, adrenaline. I cracked the attacking bugs as fast as they came at me, sending them crashing against the hard wooden crates.
But the bugs weren’t done. They were leaping in ones and twos. That’s how I was able to smack them all away. I feared that once they realized my defenses were limited, they’d send more than a few at a time and I’d be in trouble.
“Ouch!” I felt something bite my leg. I didn’t need to look down. I knew that a spider had made it to the floor and was on my ankle. I shook it off, only to feel another stinging bite on my other ankle. I knew I couldn’t stand my ground anymore. There were too many of them. I had to get out. While still swinging away at the leaping kamikaze bugs, I started to back out of that aisle. The bugs countered. I could see them above me, gathering on top of the crates across the aisle, getting into a new position to attack. As I backed off, I could feel the bodies of the beaten spiders crack under my feet. If I weren’t so charged up, I probably would have been grossed out. But that was the least of my worries. I was losing. I had to retreat.
With one last swing of my wooden plank, I knocked another spider into next week, then turned and ran. I rounded the corner of another aisle, hoping to see a straightaway where I could turn on the jets and sprint out of there. What I saw was the straightaway I hoped for… but it was filled with more spiders. At the front of the pack (do spiders come in packs?) was the fatboy. Its bright yellow eyes were trained on me. It was a showdown. No, worse. It was over. I had nothing left. The big spider reared back on its legs, like a cat ready to pounce… and charged. The others were right behind it, screaming and scrambling.
I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t go forward. All I could do was climb again. I looked up and saw that the crates here were stacked just as high but were smaller in size. The top crates were about two-feet square. I got an idea that sprang from pure desperation of one of the smaller crates. But rather than pull myself up…
I pulled the crate down. It was heavy, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. For what I wanted to do, heavy was good, and timing was everything. I pulled the crate down so hard I felt the muscles of my arms burn. But it toppled. The spiders were nearly on me. I dove out of the way. The crate came down and smashed on the cement floor… right on top of the fat leader. I heard it scream. It sounded almost human. But I didn’t have time to be grossed out. I hoped this move would buy me the few seconds I needed to escape, so I jumped onto the broken crate and launched myself up to where it had been. I was about to continue my escape across the carton tops, when I glanced back to see something impossible: The spiders were retreating. Fast. I stopped to watch as the wave of black little demons slipped back like the receding tide. They kept chattering and screeching, but there screams sounded more scared than angry. It was like the queen bee of a hive had been destroyed, and none of the other bees had a clue what to do, so they scattered. Psych! I didn’t even mean to crush the fat little monster. All I wanted was a few extra seconds to escape. But hey, I’d rather be lucky than good anytime. I sat on a crate to catch my breath, and watched the spiders disappear to who-knows-where. I didn’t care. All that mattered was that they weren’t after me anymore.
Once I was sure they were gone, I jumped back down to the floor. I’m not sure why I did what I did next. I guess it was out of some morbid curiosity. But I moved to pull the broken carton off the lead spider. I wanted to get my first close look at a quig. Most every time I saw a quig in the past, whether it was a bear on Denduron or a snake on Zadaa or a dog on Second Earth, I was usually running too fast to get a good look at it. But now I had the chance to see one up close. Saint Dane created these things somehow; I thought that by taking a closer look, it might give me some clue as to how he was able to make these mutants appear at the gates to do his bidding. Or maybe I just wanted to make sure it was dead and not waiting for me to relax so it could call its buddies back. Either way, I wanted to see it.
As I began to pull away the wooden crate, I saw that one side of the container had almost completely broken off. My curiosity shifted to the box. I wanted to know what was being stored in this monster tomb of a warehouse. I yanked the side off the rest of the way to reveal… a stack of plates. I’m serious. Plain old white plates like you’d see in a diner or something. I picked one up to confirm that there was nothing special about it. Somebody had packed away about a dozen white boring plates. The one thing that was of any interest at all was the logo printed on the back of the plate. In simple black one-inch letters was a single word: blok. That’s all. blok. A quick check showed me that all the plates had this same word printed on their backs. This meant exactly nothing to me, so I put the plate back and reached over to pull the crate off my victim.