Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) (28 page)

46

Wes slid through the first doorway and into the underground. Light from a fixture in the ceiling flooded the space beyond the portal. Jeremy had turned the shelter’s lighting system up as bright as it would go. He had set the lights to alternate between on and off. The Bigs’ eyes wouldn’t be able to adjust. Wes adjusted the light filter on his facemask. He was set for light or dark.

The plan was for him to go down first and scope the place out. He would relay information to Bud via their psychic connection. They were as hooked up mentally as they had been when Grandfather had led them.

When he slipped through the first doorway, Wes stood perfectly still, scouting the battlefield. The underground was a world of concrete and steel. The stairway into its heart passed through a series of foot-thick round metal doors that screwed shut. They were set in steel housings surrounded by cement. Every door had a generous landing on both sides. The landings were heavy steel mesh with welded staircases going down to the next level. Even though the doorways were only three feet in diameter, the tunnels leading to them allowed plenty of room to stand.

Standing at the top and looking through the first doorway, Wes could see all the way to the seventh, and lowest, level of the shelter. The Bigs had opened their home to them. Wesley’s jaw clenched.

Jeremy had blown the first four levels open. The first two landings were wrecks, doors blown off and lying in the rubble below. Their landings and stairways were twisted and hanging, an impediment to getting in or out. Rescuing Sam’s people would be hard if anyone was chasing them.

In the next two levels, the doors and surrounding steel framing were blown open, but the landings and walls around the stairways weren’t so damaged. This made the doorways much more dangerous. A dozen Bigs could be hiding out of sight on the platform behind the walls.

Wes realized something was wrong right away. The lights were alternating light and dark, as he knew they would. When they first went on, the Bigs howled, but then they fell silent and stayed that way. The lights kept cycling. Why were they silent?

He used a tiny periscope to check what was on the other side of the fourth doorway. The first of two maintenance walkways were supposed to be on the other side. Another maintenance scaffold circled the floor below. The plan was that he should use the walkway to make his way around the perimeter until he was above Sam Big’s chair. There were openings in the ventilation system there; he could go through one and reach the main floor. If he could kill Sam Big and his chiefs, he would. Then he’d call the others down to rescue people.

Sam Big’s Voice rolled past Wes and out the top of the stairs. He could imagine it covering the grassy field like a lethal toxin. Sam Big found each person’s weak spots and hammered them, but he didn’t seem to notice Wesley or the fact that he was in the underground. Why?

Wes paused, listening before going through the doorway. Sound was reverberating incorrectly. He had become an architect because he loved building things and also because he was acutely aware of space and volume, and the physical world around him. The vibration of the landing and rail beneath his hand was wrong for a solid space.

When Jeremy handed out the plans to the underground shelter, Wesley had inhaled them. He could read plans like others read comic books. He knew the layout of each of the levels, where the mechanical, electrical, and other systems were. He knew the shelter, as Jeremy had designed it.

The place below him wasn’t what Jeremy had constructed. In the original plans, the three lowest levels were
floors
with eight-foot ceilings at most. Above the main hall were two floors of rooms accessible from the levels below. Jeremy said that he had built the extra floors to give the inhabitants of the shelter more space as the radiation cleared. When the instruments said it was safe, they could open a door in the ceiling and have more legroom.

Using the periscope, he took a careful look at the other side. A vast space greeted him. The second and third floors of the underground had been removed, creating a huge cavern three stories high. Its ceiling was supported by a lacy confection of metal rods that the most sophisticated engineer would have admired.

What was going on?

This had to be the work of some advanced civilization. Sam had said that at one point in the shelter’s long history, everyone could read and use computers. Then that died out. Made sense. Only an advanced society could accomplish the engineering feat the ceiling supports represented.

How did they make that open space? Where did they get the steel framing? Where did they put the dirt? He could hear the sound of the ocean. How could that be?

Wes couldn’t figure it out, but he had to move.

He stuck his periscope through the doorway again. Whoever had removed the floors had left the doorways and their cement supports up. The metal stairways connected the landings, swinging almost whimsically across space. The maintenance corridor was a steel catwalk attached to the cavern’s outer wall, not a hallway within a building.

The lights went off again. His night vision glasses gave him better vision than he would have without them, but not much. He could see Sam Big and a dozen or so of his henchmen sitting against the far wall. They sat like they were holding court. Sam occupied a throne of a chair with a few others arrayed along the wall with him. Still more were seated on the floor like loyal subjects. The pit where they kept the women lay in front of them and to the left. He could see moving forms within it, but nothing clearly. Black holes in the far walls must be passages to other chambers, or tunnels that Sam dug.

Bud, he thought furiously, sending Bud a thought message, there’s something wrong. Ask Sam how high the highest part of the main hall is.

As high as two Bigs, Sam’s answer came via Bud’s thoughts. Most of it is the height of just one Big.

Wesley realized that the excavation must have happened after Sam left. He thought one more question, Are there levels lower than the main floor?

Again, Bud relayed the answer from Sam, No.

Wes slipped through the opening and onto the catwalk. He was on red alert the instant his foot hit the metal. He knew how a suspended metal corridor of the type that he was standing on should feel if he were the only person on it. He knew how the sound of his movement and breath would echo in an empty chamber. This place was not empty. The Bigs were not its only occupants.

He ran as fast as he could toward the Bigs. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw bulbous white forms swarming over the railings, heading for him. Multi-faceted red eyes reflected his form. Enormous split mandibles snapped like the blades on hedge clippers.

Wes shot energy beams from his hands at the creatures. They dropped, to be replaced by others. He aimed his palms at Sam Big and the others. Light sliced the Bigs in two. He sliced them again, and again. They were motionless, as though nothing had happened. He realized that they were paralyzed. Or dead.

He looked across the hall. The white creatures were dropping from the scaffolding on silken cables, swarming over women in the pit. The women didn’t resist, acting as though they were drugged.

They were spiders! White spiders with bodies five feet long and legs extending twice that span filled the hall. They raced toward him, dropping down the scaffoldings, crossing the vast space, swarming.

Silken threads fell around him. Wes slashed with his bright blue lights, striking as hard and as fast as he could. A curtain of silk fibers dropped around him.

Something bit him at the back of the neck. Everything went black.

47

“They got Wes.” Bud stood with his feet spread, fingers on his temples. “We got to get down there, fast.” Everyone jumped. Bud kept fingering his forehead. “Grace, you got flame throwers? We need them, and as much gun power as you got. And explosives.”

“I have an incendiary device—what used to be called a flamethrower,” Grace said.

“You know how to use it?” Bud said.

“Yes.”

“And I’ve got plastics and what I need to use them,” Jeremy added.

“Those might get us in and out of there alive. Let’s go, they’re killing him.” Bud ran toward the opening. Mel, Henry, and James followed him. “No. Only me, Jeremy, Grace, and Sam are going. If you don’t hear from us in ten minutes, go back and get Lena and get as many of those kids as you can carry. Run back to the cliff and be prepared to defend it with your lives.”

“There are that many Bigs?”

“It’s not Bigs. I don’t know what they are. I been trying to reach Wes all the time he was in there. Nothing. Then
they
tell me they’ve got him.”

“It’s a setup,” Henry said.

“Yeah. But they don’t know what I can do when I’m mad. And they don’t know about them,” Bud waved his hand in the air. Outlines of warriors in war paint and bonnets appeared. “I will not let them kill a spirit warrior.”

They saw what Wes had seen when he went in, the two ruined landings that would make rescue or retreat hard. They saw the opened doorways and went through them until they reached the landing of the fourth level.

When he stepped on the platform, Sam froze. “This is not right. Let me do something.” He stood by the side of the door and made a deep noise, something like Grace’s throat-singing Buddhist monks might have made. It was very brief.

Sam stood there. Finally he said, “It’s not safe.”

“We know that,” Bud said pulling out his periscope in preparation for going through the door.

“No. We must not do what they want.” Sam looked at the cement wall of the passageway behind them, tapping it with his fingers. “Jeremy, can you make a small explosion here?” He pointed to a specific spot. “Like this?” He indicated about three feet square.

“The air vent. You knew it was there.” Jeremy grinned.

“Yes, by the sound in the wall. My people have found it, but we couldn’t get to it through this.”

“Well, I can.”

“Not too much, Jeremy,” Sam entreated. “My people are not far behind the wall.”

Jeremy blew a hole into the vent and they made their way on their bellies through the duct system, traveling in a large circle around the hall.

After what seemed like miles, they came to an arm of the duct system poking toward the center of the hall. Grace dragged herself into it. She was the smallest and lightest. She left her weapons behind: no room for them in the pipe. At the first vent aperture, she peered through the slatted opening into the room below. She was about a fourth of the way over a huge hall, which was at least three stories high. The ceiling was held up by an elaborate metal frame. The walkway was a bridge draped between the doorways. Everything else had been removed.

The floor looked as it had in Jeremy’s photo composites and floor plans: a living area, the pit with the women, the Bigs’ court at the back of the room. All was exactly as she expected, except that everything was hung with gauzy ropes as thick as her thumb. She could see forms moving under the gauze.

And then she saw them: Hundreds of huge spiders massed around the opening of the fourth door, ready to attack when they came through.

Sam Big was still caterwauling, but his Voice had a pleading quality, as though he were singing to save his life. Her eyes went to the source of the sound, an opening on the far side of the hall next to the Bigs’ court. She saw the human figures sitting on chairs, draped with spider silk. Red bled through it. They were dead. Wesley must have shot them while they were alive, or they wouldn’t have bled. How long did they sit there alive?

Sam Big’s voice came from the wide opening next to the dead bodies. She could see a ramp going down.

The shelter had an eighth level! She could see daylight coming from it and had the crazy idea that she heard the ocean. Sam Big was down there, lobbing halfhearted insults at them. That’s where Wesley was!

Grace backed out of the vent as quietly as she could. She knew that spiders didn’t have ears, but were acutely aware of vibrations. If they knew she and the others were there, they’d mass around the vent where they’d have to exit, the one above the dead Bigs.

“No, is not so!” Sam whispered into his radio mic when she told them what she’d found. “The hall is the height of two Bigs in the middle. The rest is just above the Bigs’ heads. Some of them hit the ceiling. It’s not high. This is not the underground.”

“What else is it? How’d the ceiling get so high?” Bud asked.

“I don’t know. When I left, the ceiling was low. Rooms were above it, but sealed off. It’s where we put the dirt from our tunneling. And there is no other level below the seventh. There is not.”

“I was tryin’ to get ahold of Wes all the time he was gone,” Bud said. “I couldn’t reach him. It was like his mind was turned off. He would have noticed that the ceiling wasn’t what was in your plans—he’s an architect. He would ‘a’ sent me a message asking about it. I didn’t get any.”

“They did something to him.”

“Yeah.” Bud’s eyebrows pulled in and down. His face reddened. He looked like he wanted to bite. “They tricked him.”

“We have to be careful they don’t trick us.” Grace said. “The simplest thing would be to go over to the exit, firebomb the place, and wipe out everything in it, then rappel down into the hall and find Wes.”

“But that would kill the women and my people in burrows,” Sam said.

“Do you think they’re still alive?” Bud asked.

“They could be,” Jeremy said. “Some spiders inject their food with venom, then wrap it up to eat later. They only eat live food.”

“We need to get out of here,” Grace said. “The spiders will find us. They can go out through the hole Jeremy blew. Let’s head for the vent on the other side and see what happens.”

The spiders were in the tube when the group got to the vent above the dead Bigs. They could feel the spiders’ legs skittering inside the vent and see them traveling along the scaffolding of the hall. They finally reached the opening above Sam Big’s throne.

“Fasten your line here, on the post, balance yourself on the wall with your feet and drop.” Grace rappelled into the room. Jeremy followed her. Both had rappelled down everything from boulders to mountain faces with the general. Sam was slower, but made it down.

“Wait just a minute, I want to send a message.” Bud crouched inside the vent tube, set to back off the edge. He let out a scream of defiance that echoed down the pipe and around the hall. Bud Creeman had declared war. Something came out of his palms. Whereas his Power usually displayed as cool blue beams, this was explosive and hot. A firebomb flew back up the tube they’d just exited. Shrieks followed. The tapping and sliding of spiders’ limbs on the vent’s interior ceased. The spiders behind him were dead. Bud leapt off the hot vent and slid down to the main floor.

The spiders attacked, coming from under the scaffolding, their perches around the fifth doorway. From all around the hall. Even from under the silken mantel covering the women’s pit.

Bud shot flames everywhere. None of the rest did anything for fear of getting in his way. Dead arachnids piled up, twitching and scratching their pointed legs on the floor.

“Get down there and get Wesley,” Bud said, pointing at the opening to the lower level. “Look sharp. These boys are fast.” He intercepted some about to head off the group. The minute they moved toward the opening, the spiders leapt in that direction, abandoning their fight with Bud.

“Watch it. There’s somethin’ real important to them down there.” He sidled over and scorched them as they crowded into the opening. He blasted, and kept blasting, turning around as intuition or his ancestors prompted him. The hall boiled with Bud’s rage. He kept firing, and whatever energy was coming off him kept coming.

And so did the spiders. They kept coming, climbing over the bodies of their friends. There seemed to be no end to them.

Grace, Sam, and Jeremy slid down the incline to the lower level. It wasn’t made of cement and steel like the rest of the underground. The ramp was newly excavated earth. It looked like a gigantic bulldozer had created it only hours before.

When they raised their eyes, they stopped abruptly. She sat on the opposite side of the grotto on a silky throne, her enormous pearly abdomen hanging over the edge. Jagged hairs ran along its ridges. She looked at them with multifaceted red eyes, a white queen. Spiked arms and legs ferried the lower portion of a human leg to her mouth. Her split mandible clicked as it scissored open and shut. Her bulk filled half of the thirty-foot wide tunnel. Far beyond her, the surf crashed and blue sky glistened. The tunnel extended under the meadow and opened to the sea.

Spiders skittered down the ramp into the queen’s chamber. Why, was easy to discern … her egg sack was bigger than she was. Eggs squeezed out of her abdomen as they watched.

To her right, in the corner of the freshly excavated cavern, long cocoons hung. People were in them, the Bigs by the size of them. One was darker, indicating something black inside. Wesley in his commando suit was packaged for later consumption.

Sam Big was hanging from the ceiling, spider web holding him up. His body swung freely, exposed. His eyes bulged and sweat poured off his face. He squawked in the Voice, now just a wail. Both of his hands were cleanly nipped off. The stubs didn’t bleed; the queen’s venom must have stopped it.

“Oh, Sam! Kill me! Kill me if y’ can find it in yer heart. If y’ ever loved me, kill me. She’s eatin’ me piece by piece.”

His freshly cut lower leg dribbled a bit. The queen held the leg to her mouth for a suspended instant.

Sam raised his gun and raked Sam Big up the trunk, and then across. And then he turned the gun on the queen.

“Get back, Sam, this is better.” Grace fired up the flamethrower. The queen leapt at her, screaming. Grace stood her ground. Jeremy tossed a bit of plastic explosive at her and they all ran for the hanging bodies. The queen caught what Jeremy threw in her mouth. When the plastic exploded, she splattered the walls of the cave and everything in it.

The spiders shrieked. Bud took them on, while Grace cooked the remains of the queen and her egg sack.

Jeremy tried to cut through Wesley’s sac with a knife. He couldn’t. The spiders rushed him.

“Mom! Bud!” he cried, not wanting to use his machine gun for fear of hitting Wesley.

Bud turned and sliced the spiders in half with the blue beams, leaving Wesley unharmed. Grace and Sam covered his back. The grotto rang with shots and surging flames, and then it seemed to be over. Sam and Grace stood down, backs to Jeremy and Bud who stood by Wes.

“Can you cut through the cocoon?” Jeremy said, “I couldn’t.”

Bud narrowed the beams coming from his palms and sliced Wesley’s cocoon top to bottom. Jeremy pulled his feet out and he slipped to the ground.

He looked dead. Bud leaned over him and pushed on his chest, breathing into his mouth. “Come on, Wes. This is not a good day to die.”

Bud did more with his hands, and the small cave roiled with spirits. “Come on, Wes.”

Wes’s eyes opened. He blinked. He rolled over on his side and threw up. “Oh, God, I feel so sick.” He saw Bud. “Spiders, Bud!”

“We found them, buddy. We need to get you out of here.” Wesley’s eyes rolled back and he lost consciousness again.

“Come on, Jeremy, let’s get him out of here. We’ll tell the others to get ready to go.” Bud looked at Sam. “Are any of your people left alive? We can get them out.”

“Yes, they are alive. I can find them.”

“OK, we’ll get Wes up top, and bring the others down to help. I’ll get the horses ready to pull them with travois. We’ll be right back.”

Jeremy and Bud lifted Wes and headed up the stairs.

Grace pulled up her facemask and looked around. “We did it, Sam. We won.”

He opened his mask and smiled at her. “Yes. We won.”

“Let’s get out of here, Sam,” Grace said.

“We must finish.” He turned his gun on the web-shrouded forms hanging from the ceiling. They were Bigs. If they escaped, they’d kill them in a minute. And if they were left there, they’d die a slow death of spider venom and suffocation.

They moved methodically over the hall, killing the surviving spiders. Finally, they stood in the middle of the hall, the stairs to the surface in front of them. They pulled their masks up again.

“I love you, Sam. I will love you forever.”

He smiled. “I love thee, my Lady Grace.” He kissed her. Then he put her gloved hand on his heart. He wrapped her in his arms. They could have stayed there a long time, but the scaffolding creaked ominously.

“I need to get my people, lady.” He looked upward. “Will ye be all right?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine, Sam. I doubt there’s anything down here that I can’t handle with a flamethrower and a machine gun.