Some of them were no bigger than sparrows, others close to the size of a rat. Ryan remembered what J.R had said about the sealing-off of the section of the redoubt, seeing more of the spiders pouring through the wide-mesh grilles of the vent system.
Nobody had opened fire, recognizing the pointlessness of trying to shoot thousands of the scuttling arachnids.
“Get Abe out,” Ryan snapped, bolstering the blaster, drawing the panga from the sheath on his belt.
“They’ll get out into the rest of the redoubt,” Krysty shouted. “Me and Mildred’ll try to chill any that make the door.”
Trader, J.B. and Jak started to move across the rippling layer of hairy spiders, crushing them beneath their boots. Abe’s bare feet had disappeared beneath waves of the mutie creatures. There was blood dappling his hands and arms, showing that the spiders had a vicious bite.
It passed through Ryan’s mind, as he started to hack at the seething mass, that if the spiders were venomous, then Abe’s life was already measured in minutes.
Now that he was in the middle of them, he could see that most were the size of a baseball, with dark brown furred legs that almost tripled their size. They had tiny black stalked eyes and large barbed pincers.
The three friends were only just in time to save Abe. His eyes had rolled back white in their sockets, and he’d almost stopped fighting for life.
Jak, as agile as an acrobat, was first to his side, grabbing his arm and sweeping off the most insistent of the spiders, holding the fainting little gunner upright until J.B. and Trader arrived to help him.
Ryan used the panga like a brush, slicing back and forth through the mass of scuttling insects. Liquid sprayed over his fingers, making them burn, but he carried on with the remorseless slaughter.
Out of the corner of his eye Ryan noticed that Dean was standing near the automatic door, just inside the toilets, using his turquoise-hilted knife to stab any of the spiders that threatened him.
“Get outside, son! Help Krysty and Mildred keep the shitters out of the rest of the complex.”
The doors hissed and Dean vanished.
Fresh waves of the mutie creatures poured in through the grilles, dropping softly to the floor, joining the throng that was still surging forward to attack the invading humans.
Trader and J.B. had lifted the semiconscious figure of Abe clear off the floor, while Jak methodically swept away the spiders from his body.
The bath area was almost silent, the only sounds the grunting of the men, and the hiss of Ryan’s scything blade as it decimated the mutated insects.
“Get him outside,” Ryan panted. “I’ll hold ’em off long as I can.”
One of the largest of the horrors had climbed all the way up his back into his hair, dropping over his face with a sticky web projecting from its abdomen, blinding and choking him.
As Ryan plucked at it with his left hand, it bit him near the bridge of the nose, the needled pincers narrowly missing his good right eye.
The pain was agonizing, and he very nearly dropped the panga. But he grabbed the spider and squeezed, feeling the soft, brittle body turn to mushy pulp between his fingers. Ryan cast the squashed corpse away from him, where its fellows scrabbled around it, starting to devour the twitching legs.
Ryan rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, trying to avoid spreading any of the virulent ichor and blinding himself. The thought of being blind and helpless among the rippling carpet of spiders was so abhorrent that he came close for a few moments to losing control and sliding into panic.
But Ryan’s combat experience surged forth and saved him. He turned, seeing that the others had managed to drag Abe to safety, leaving him alone for a moment.
But it was all right.
Control was back again.
Using the panga with devastating skill, he butchered dozens of the furry creatures.
Ryan slowly moved toward the exit from the bath and toilet area. He jumped at a sudden noise, but it was only the automatic water flush of the urinals, operating as it had hundreds of thousands of times since skydark.
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