Operation Syria

— 10 —

Maggie stood in the hallway, fingers plugging her ears as both Davies in the room across from her and Wiggins at the main doorway along the corridor fired volley after volley out into the street. It felt like an age until the shooting stopped and even when she took her fingers out of her ears, the echo of the gunfire rang in her head. She stepped forward to see Davies load another magazine in his rifle.

“Is it over?”

“Well, they’ve buggered off for now, if that’s what you mean,” the lanky man said. “I can’t see them anymore. Maybe the corporal knows more.”

Davies stayed at his post as Maggie went out along the corridor again to the front of the building and the main doorway. Wiggins was likewise reloading. She looked out to see a dozen or more of the spiders lying in scattered pieces and gore in the courtyard.

“Is it over?” she asked.

“For now, I think so. But I don’t understand it. There were at least fifty of the fuckers and they had us bang to rights,” Wiggins said. “I was getting ready to retreat back to you and the lad for a last stand, when they all buggered off.”

Before Maggie could reply, more gunshots echoed across the old town, coming from somewhere to the north, several weapons firing at once.

“Now, that’s our lads and they’re in trouble,” Wiggins replied.

He tried his radio.

“Cap? Come in?”

All he heard in answer was more gunfire.

“Stay here,” he said.

“Bugger that for a game of soldiers, Corporal,” she replied. “Do you have a handgun?”

Wiggins grinned.

“I knew we were compatible,” he replied and took a pistol from his hip, handing it over to her. “Safety’s off. Point and shoot and keep shooting until the fuckers go away.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” she said and followed Wiggins as he set off at a run across the square in the direction of the gunfire.

They didn’t have to run far, only across the courtyard and along one alleyway to a smaller yard. It contained the mangled torso of a dead man on the ground and a huge spider, one much larger than the others, facing away from them and blocking the mouth of the route north. Gunfire came from beyond the beast and looking up, Maggie saw a wave of the smaller spiders coming down from the rooftops.

Wiggins took in the situation immediately and didn’t hesitate. He fired three quick rounds into the large beast’s rear.

“Three up the arse. How’d you like that, wanker?”

The spider’s back end crumpled, its rear legs giving way beneath it. But the front was working well enough and it turned at Wiggins’ attack and scuttled forward. Wiggins put three more rounds into its eyes and Maggie fired twice into its body. At the same time, four men came at a run out of the alleyway, all firing into the bulk of the spider which finally collapsed in a heap in the small courtyard, oozing fluids from multiple wounds.

There was no time for warm welcomes. The smaller spiders swarmed in the alleyway from which the four men had emerged. The squad lined up in the alley mouth and send wave after wave of shots into the squirming mass of legs and bodies, blowing limbs, eyes, fangs, and bodies apart in a spray of viscous gore that smelled as bad as it looked.

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.”