Micro

Chapter 27

Fern Gully 30 October, 12:15 p.m.

Rick Hutter felt Karen King lift him up by his shirt, dragging him out of what he thought was a good hiding place, and heard her say, “Get up—go!” He noticed his blowgun lying on the ground, picked it up, grabbed the dart kit, and sprinted for cover. He lost track of Karen; he had no idea where she had gone. He ran underneath a stick, bashed through some leaves, and began to run among fern stems looming over him. That was when he saw the insect vehicle. A six-legged truck up there on the fern, clinging to a frond and moving along it, making a faint whine, driven by a man wearing armor. It was a man just Rick’s size. A micro-human. The man seemed experienced and confident.

The man stopped the vehicle, held up a strange-looking gun with a large-caliber muzzle. He loaded a metal needle in the breech, took aim through a scope, and fired. The gun kicked, giving off a hiss.

Rick had flung himself down behind a rock, where he lay on his back, panting, while he watched the man shoot. The man seemed relaxed. Comfortable with murder, Rick realized, while a hot rage welled up in him. The man had butchered Peter and Amar in cold blood. Rick was still holding the blow tube. Get off a dart at that bastard, anyway. I think Karen just saved my life. It was dumb to stay crouched like that. She pulled my ass out of a bad place.

He opened his dart kit and took out a dart. Looked at it with a sense of futility. It was just a splinter with a metal point made from a dinner fork. Never get through that bastard’s armor. He opened the curare jar and jammed the tip into the sludge and twirled it, choking back a cough as an odor wafted from the jar. Put a hot load on the dart anyway.

He fitted the dart into the tube, and rolled over, and looked out past the rock.

The vehicle wasn’t there. It had moved out of sight.

Where?

Rick crept out from behind the rock, listening, looking around. He heard a whining sound to his left. The bug truck. He got up and ran toward the sound, and when it got louder, he dove into a clump of moss and waited. The sound got closer. Carefully he looked out of the moss.

The bug truck had crawled up on the moss and stopped almost directly above him. He was looking at the bottom of the truck. He couldn’t see the man from here.

There was another hiss. The man had fired again.

Rick had no idea if anyone but himself was still alive. Karen could be dead. Erika, too. They were being slaughtered.

It made him furious.

It made him want to kill. Even if it cost him his life.

The man had stopped firing, and now the truck advanced. It came to a halt a short distance away, and he heard the man talking on a radio. “There’s a female at your three o’clock. Bitch has a knife.”

Bitch.

Karen.

No—she was about to be shot. He started crawling frantically through the moss, then got himself wedged under a fallen leaf. He was looking right up at the man. The man wore a helmet, a breastplate, armored plates over his arms. His chin was bare. Bare neck.

Rick aimed for the man’s neck. Try to hit him in the jugular. He inhaled slowly, trying not to make a sound, and blew with all his might.

The dart missed the man’s neck, but landed in the soft flesh under his chin, and drove deep, buried up to its fluff. It had entered the man’s chin just above his Adam’s apple and gone upward. Rick heard a choking scream and the man tumbled down into the vehicle, out of sight. He heard wet cough, then thrashing, thumping. The guy was seizing, flopping around like a fish inside the truck. Then silence.

Rick loaded another dart into the blowgun, and jumped up on the truck. Ready to shoot again, he looked inside. The man lay sprawled, face cherry-red, eyes popping, frothy mucus drizzling out of his mouth—cyanide poisoning, Rick realized. Only the tail puff of the dart remained visible, a wisp of cotton stuck under the man’s chin. The dart had punched vertically upward through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and pierced his brain.

“That was for Peter,” he said. His hands were shaking, then his whole body began to shake. He had never killed a person before; hadn’t thought he was capable of it.

Off to his right, he heard another hiss.

Oh fuck, not another one, he thought—another sniper out there. Shooting at my friends. Get the bastard. Rick leaped from the truck and began running toward the sound, holding the loaded blowgun. As he ran, he noticed that things had gotten darker overhead, and then he saw…a shadow moving in the ferns. He stopped running. Suddenly he felt very, very small and completely powerless. He couldn’t believe how big the damned thing was.

Karen saw the man rise up between two fern stems. He was a small man, agile and catlike in his movements. He wore camo armor and a glove on his right hand. His left hand was bare and was closed around the gun’s trigger, and the gun was aimed at her. He was about one meter away. Close enough.

She had drawn her knife. It was no match for the gun. She glanced around. No cover.

He moved out from behind the fern stems, keeping the gun trained on her. He seemed to be playing with her, for he could make the shot easily. He spoke into a throat mike: “Found her.” After a pause he added, “You copy?” Evidently he didn’t get an answer. “Copy?”

He still didn’t get an answer. He stepped forward.

It was then that Karen saw the shadow behind the man. At first she didn’t know what it was. She saw something brown and covered with fur, buried in a cluster of fern fronds. It moved slightly, then stopped. She thought it must be a mammal, maybe a rat, because of the brown fur and because it was really big. But then a leg appeared, a long, tapering, jointed leg, an exoskeleton covered with bristly brown hair. Then a fern frond was pushed aside, and she saw the eyes. All eight of them.

It was an enormous spider, as big as a house. The spider was so vast it seemed almost unrecognizable as a spider. Karen knew the species, though. It was a brown huntsman, common in the tropics. It was a carnivore, too. Huntsmen spiders don’t build webs. They are ambush predators, and they hunt on the ground. This one was holding its body close to the ground—a sign that it was hunting. It had a flattened body, protected by hair, with sickle-shaped fangs folded under bulbous appendages. This one was a female. She would crave protein, Karen knew, since she was making eggs.

Karen was struck by the stillness of the spider. Since it was an ambush predator, the fact that it wasn’t moving was bad news. This meant it was hunting.

The man stood with his back to the spider, unaware of it. Its constellation of eyes stared at the man, like droplets of black glass. Karen heard a soft, moaning intake and exhalation of air flowing through the spider’s lungs, located in the spider’s abdomen.

“Johnstone. Do you copy?” the man said.

He paused, listening for his partner.

“What happened to your friend?” Karen whispered. Make him talk.

He just looked at her. Not a chatty one.

She kept her body very still. No sudden movements. She knew that a spider couldn’t see very well, even with so many eyes, but a spider had highly accurate hearing. Ten “ears” were scattered over each leg-holes in its armor that picked up sounds. Eighty ears, all told. In addition, the thousands of hairs on its legs were also listening devices, vibration sensors. The hearing organs on its legs gave the spider a 3-D sound-image of the world.

If she made any noise or vibration, the spider would form a sonic image of her. Would recognize her as prey. The attack, she knew, would happen in the blink of an eye.

She knelt, very slowly, and picked up a rock. Raised her arm slowly.

The man smiled. “Go ahead. If it makes you feel better.”

She threw the rock at him. It struck his breastplate and bounced off with a thump.

He raised his gun at her and took aim through the scope and chuckled just as the fangs closed around him and yanked him into the air, crushing his gun. He screamed.

The spider took a few steps forward and then, surprisingly, flipped itself over on its back, while Karen sprinted for safety. Lying on its back, it lifted the man into the air, sinking its fangs deeper. The razor-sharp, hollow tips punched through the man’s armor, and began pumping venom into him.

His body swelled up as the venom pressurized it, until his armor began to make popping sounds, and blood mixed with venom began squirting out of the cracks in the armor. As the venom went to work, his spine curved backward and his head whipped back and forth. Neurotoxins in the venom set off a firestorm in his central nervous system. He began to writhe, and went into convulsions, a grand mal seizure. As he seized, his eyes rolled up into his head until only the whites showed. Then, abruptly, the whites turned hot-red. Blood vessels had burst in his eyes, as they were rupturing everywhere in his body, for the venom contained digestive enzymes that liquefy flesh. Internal hemorrhages flooded the man’s body, until his heart stopped.

The spider venom was Ebola in thirty seconds.

The spider continued to pump poison into the body until the armor began to crack and split. The breastplate popped open, and the man’s viscera peeked out, drizzling venom.

Karen had taken cover behind a fern, where she found Rick crouching, blowpipe in hand.

They watched the spider process its meal.

Having killed the prey while it lay on its back, the spider flipped over and stood upright on its eight legs again, and began cutting up the prey. It gripped the man in its palps, a pair of hand—like appendages on either side of its mouth. The fangs opened like folding knives; they had serrated inner blades. The blades macerated the body, chopping it into a bloody mash of flesh, broken bones, and intestinal contents, mixed with scraps of Kevlar and pieces of plastic. Using its palps, the spider handled the meat-mass deftly, molding and shaping it into a food ball, while squirting digestive fluid into the mass through the tips of its fangs. In a minute or two, the human remains had been turned into a spheroid of liquescent pap speckled with bone fragments and shredded armor.

“Interesting,” Karen whispered, and turned to Rick. “Spiders digest their food outside their bodies.”

“I didn’t know.”

Having digested its prey, the spider placed its mouth firmly on the food ball and began sucking fluids out of the mess, while its stomach made a steady pumping noise. The eyes gleamed with a faraway expression, Karen thought, or maybe a look of satisfaction.

“Do we need to worry?” Rick asked.

“Nah, she’s busy. But we should get out of here before she starts hunting again.”

They began calling for Erika and Danny. Erika had hidden herself under a hibiscus flower, and Danny had tucked himself under a tree root.

There were four survivors now. Rick, Karen, Erika, and Danny. They gathered themselves, put on the packs, and hurried off into the ferns, abandoning the bodies of Peter and Amar, while a sense of terrible emptiness swept over them. Amar Singh, a gentle person who loved plants, was gone. Peter Jansen, gone. It had not seemed possible that Peter could die.

The loss of Peter had devastated them. “He was so steady,” Rick said. “I really thought he could bring us through.”

“Peter was our hope,” Erika said. She began to cry. “I believed he would save us, somehow.”

“This is what I predicted,” Danny said. He sat down and adjusted his arm sling, then, with his good hand, unstuck some duct tape on his grass shoe and stuck it back in place, trying to tighten his shoe. Then he put his head down between his knees. His muffled voice rose up: “The inevitable has happened…The catastrophe…We are completely, totally, utterly…dead.”

“Actually we’re still alive,” Rick said.

“Not for long,” Danny muttered.

Karen said, “We all had faith in Peter. He was so…calm. He never lost his courage.” She wiped sweat from her face, and hefted her pack, adjusting it, and kept walking. Karen could hardly admit it to herself, but for the first time she had lost her nerve entirely. She was petrified. She couldn’t see how they would ever get back to Nanigen. “Peter was the only person who could lead us. Now we don’t have a leader.”

“Yeah, and it’s clear that Drake knows we’re alive and is trying to kill us—sending hired killers to take us out,” Rick said. “We got rid of two goons, but who knows who else is out there with orders to kill us.”

“Two of them?” Karen asked him.

Rick answered her with a grim smile. “Look straight ahead.” The hexapod stood crookedly on top of a mound of moss. Rick leaped into the vehicle. A moment later a body was flung out, spinning through the air, and landed with a crash at Karen’s feet. She saw the man’s armor, the dart embedded in the man’s chin, the eyes bulging…the foamy tongue, thrust out…

She drew in her breath. There had been two snipers. Rick had said nothing about it until now. “You killed—this man…”

“Get in,” Rick said, busying himself with the controls. “We’re driving to Tantalus. And we’ve got a gun.