Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
“What kind of fucking spider made that?” Tessie exclaims.
“The annoyed kind that doesn’t like people very much,” I say.
“It’s getting dark,” Tessie comments. She looks uncomfortable. I don’t blame her.
“They don’t come out in the daytime.”
Tessie glances over at me with suspicious brown eyes. “Listen. I thought…”
Before she can finish her sentence, Obigor starts barking ferociously, snarling and yapping with hackles raised. He is facing the wrong direction entirely, but I appreciate his effort.
“Alright. So. What are we looking for? This doesn’t feel like a terribly inhabited sort of place.”
“Just wait. We need to get around this thing…”
I start trying to clear away the spider web. This, I quickly discover, is a Very Big Mistake. Normal spider webs are slightly sticky and somewhat gather up together in a gooey kind of way when you put your hand through them. The fibers of this web are about double the thickness of a typical one, and they are much, much stickier. It is like having put my hand into some spun goo, a sort of biological slime. When I try to pull it away, it does tear a little, but it also gets tangled around my hand.
“Ah, fuck!”
I lift my leg, I don’t even know why, it’s kind of a pulling away reflex, but somehow my toe gets caught in the lower part of the web, and then my knee. I put my full weight against the webbing, but all that happens is a brief low bounce and then a rebound which sticks a lot more of me to the strands. I twist myself to try to get free, which only succeeds in getting me more wound up as fresh bits of web stick to new parts of my body.
Tessie is watching me with what I’m just going to call a dour and unimpressed expression. Obigor is still barking in the wrong direction. I continue to fight the web, worsening my situation until I am nearly entirely upside down at a 45 degree angle.
“Are you alright?” She asks the question more as a formality than anything. Clearly I am not alright. Not even remotely.
“Tessie?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
She lies directly to my face. She has her phone out and I am 99.999% sure she is filming my predicament.
“Don’t fucking put that on social media,” I warn her. “I don’t give a shit how many likes you might get for it, this is top secret.”
“Oh, so, live-streaming this would be a problem?”
I’m pretty sure she’s kidding, but just in case she isn’t, I pull the fingers. Both hands. Only one of them can really be seen from her angle.
“Fucking help me, Tessie.”
“How am I supposed to help you?” She asks the question very practically. “Does me getting trapped in the same web help you somehow?”
“JUSTICE!” I yell for the mothman.
“I think this kind of is justice,” Tessie says, grinning. She doesn’t know his name. She just thinks I am crying out for the concept of the thing. This is what happens when you don’t communicate well with your partner.
“What are you doing?” The question raps from the darkness that has gathered around the shipping containers. It is night, and the monster has risen.
Not the one I want, though. Justice is not here. Instead, it is Order who speaks from the darkness.
“Tessie, you’re about to see something really fucking weird,” I tell her. “Put your phone away, and don’t freak out.”
I’m so glad to see her listen. We do not want pics of these creatures. I don’t want them being uploaded to the cloud somewhere and ending up hacked or just found when they’re trawled through by the half a dozen agencies free to sift through private data as and when they please.
“I knew you were trouble,” Order says, emerging from the darkness in a slow strolling gait. “I told Justice you’d be back. And that you’d be looking for trouble.”
“So you set a web trap for me?”
“The only way to be trapped by a web is to walk into it,” he growls, displeased. He’s getting closer now, and the rising moon is highlighting him in all his six-armed glory. He’s still wearing his sunglasses, the mirrored surfaces hiding what must be an absolute plethora of eyes. His jaw is hard and strong, clenched because he’s annoyed.
I can only imagine the way Tessie is reacting to seeing this strange man-creature emerging from the depths of the night. Each of his pairs of arms are engaged in a different activity. The lowest pair hang loose, the middle pair are rubbing together, in a way that strongly puts me in mind of a man about to indulge some punitive urges. The top two are clapping sarcastically as he approaches me, trussed up in what I have to assume is his butt silk.
“What the fuck,” Tessie breathes. Obigor has fallen silent. I glance over at him and see that he’s actually gone to sleep in her arms. It’s hard being an ancient tiny dog. You can only bark the alert for so long before you need a nap.