Spawn of Man (23 page)

Robert felt the chair begin to vibrate beneath his body, pulsing in time with his own heartbeat, swelling and falling in unison with his own irregular, desperate breaths. Then the wood began to fracture, lengths curling and turning like vines, sprouting like buds as they gravitated towards Robert’s flesh. As the fragments and slivers broke the surface of Robert’s skin and sought the veins below, he felt nothing, save for a detached sense of pain, as if he were feeling the agonies in his mind and not through the nerve endings in his body. And now, in front of the chair, as if superimposed on the wall, another tear was building in energy and size.

This opening was different though. The colors were more intense, reds, blues and harsh whites, and the pungent stench that issued from the developing hole was death and decay. Robert’s skin tingled as if charged and the opening flourished with layers of folded air shedding to reveal a black, cold and ancient emptiness. From this, something was pushing in the throes of birth as it fought to exist and to become. Robert knew what it was before it protruded from the opening. The head extended on its steel umbilical cord, the throbbing matter was both grown and grafted and its breath was labored.

Then the thin mouth spoke. ‘Hello Robert, it is good to see you again.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Time passed and Alex and Frank were unaware of the events that filled the hours. Missiles had destroyed the section of trench where Alex and Frank had been and now they were buried under tens of dead bodies. But the trench had not actually been an objective. The missiles were fired in an arbitrary style and the generals had no more of a plan formulated than the hordes that swept across the plains below them. The machine had introduced electrical technology to this realm of the dead and weapons had been produced. But there was no real enemy, no empirical ambition or ideology behind the war, just the futile staging of half-remembered battles.

The trench was two-thirds full of carcasses at this section and the giant spiders made their way over the bodies, as if stealthily picking their way through a room full of sleeping librarians. Their huge engorged bodies crawled over the fallen bodies with infinite patience, flexing the metallic legs with needle sharp points and lightly treading on the corpses as they searched. Then one would detect movement, slight and momentary, but substantial enough to divert the spider’s attention, and it would then nimbly and slyly creep to within feet of its quarry, like a cat tracking a doomed bird.

In this instance it was one of the organic, mechanic hybrid creatures that had been thrown into the trench when a missile had hit nearby. The thing had been blown thirty feet through the air by the explosion and now sat on the top layer of the fallen horde. It had lost both legs and one of its crab-like arms and now sat dazed, quizzically watching the spider approach, frozen in childlike wonder. The spider edged nearer and the injured creature extended its remaining knurled, crusted arm. Its neck had been torn and ripped and was now kept in place only by virtue of several relays and coils, although bone and tissue were also visible through the wound.

The spider regarded the proffered arm by tilting its eye-less, face-less body and yawning wide its ferociously armed mouth. Then it sliced the outstretched limb off with a single sweep of one of its bladed legs. The hybrid creature continued to rotate the useless and bloodied stump and small fountains of blood and lubricants spilled out from the clean-cut stub. Then the spider crouched and moved in closer, biting the creature’s head from its shoulders in a sudden dipping, darting motion.

Just then Alex opened her eyes and tried to judge her position. She recalled the explosion and she realized she was now buried in the aftermath of that event. Bodies in various states of destruction and dismemberment weighed her down and the stench was palpable, but she was confident she had not suffered anything more serious than cuts and bruises. She tried to push against the thing on top of her but only succeeded in shifting its position.

She heard slight movement as the spider turned. She waited for a second then whispered, ‘Frank, Frank?’

Alex tried again but with more urgency and the huge spider began to glide towards her position. She estimated she was beneath three to four bodies, but it may as well have been a hundred, and she shoved and kicked hopelessly. The spider hovered over her position now and calculated. Its arachnid legs, steel tipped but motored by flesh and bone, jabbed and prodded at the bodies that covered Alex and she heard the turmoil above her.

‘Frank? Frank, down here, get me out!’ Alex shouted and the spider redoubled its efforts, piercing and pulling bodies, cutting and threshing until Alex realized it was not a pair of hands attempting to liberate her at all and definitely not Frank.

Chinks of light dropped into Alex’s tomb and blood flowed over her like an underground stream as the spider hacked and chopped. Alex was frantically trying to dig her way out in the opposite direction but as her arms broke through the top stratum of corpses, the spider arrived at her legs and sent a tapered, metal leg-blade carving through the muscle of one thigh. Alex screamed and the foul creature made a gleeful hissing noise as it shuffled backwards, dragging Alex under the sea of bodies again. Alex grabbed hold of legs and arms, some dissected or mutilated but none able to help her resist the spider’s progress. When she surfaced again Alex saw Frank, dazed and stumbling across the corpse-strewn trench, on a collision course with the spider.

Alex willed the pain searing through her thigh away, but the capacity to do so was eluding her and she realized that panic was overriding her new abilities. The spider kept Alex pinned by her leg, as it turned its body in the direction of Frank. Its legs were ten feet in length and the blade section at the tips occupied two feet of this. As the spider rotated ninety degrees, the steel blade in Alex’s thigh twisted, slicing more muscle tissue, and Alex grasped the thing’s leg desperately. Anger welled up inside Alex, blended with frustration, the dreadful longing to help her child, and injected through with a sense of terrible injustice. She wrenched the spider’s leg from its socket and was showered in a red-green gunk that hemorrhaged from the cavity created.

The spider squealed pitifully and Alex removed the barbed limb from her leg with a yell. The spider scurried in a circle, confused at its imbalance, as it tried to plant a phantom limb on the ground. Completely unaware of Alex and Frank now, it assumed the behavior of a wounded animal, lowered its profile and began to skulk in retreat towards the blasted area of the trench. Alex sprang to her feet, still wielding the severed spider leg and ran towards the monster, leaping into the air as she neared the thing and landing on its back.

She steadied herself, jeering, ‘I’m getting my son, you fucking freak!’ Then she plunged the blade-tipped leg deep into the spider’s plump back.

The spider tried to buck her, rotating one way, then the other and even reversing into the side of the trench. But Alex held on, driving the tip deeper, until three feet of the spider’s dismembered limb was implanted in its back. There was a gushing sound and a spring of black blood erupted from the creature’s back as if the thing had burst and Alex had to jump from the spider as it perceptibly began to deflate. Alex landed near where Frank had now tumbled, and although he looked weak and disorientated he managed to stand and grab Alex’s arm, speaking hoarsely. ‘You are very brave, Alexandra.’

‘Not really, Frank, I just want my child back and these bastards are standing in my way.’

Frank smiled at the profanity, and then looked back over the stack of dead bodies, at the other spiders that were dispersed along the length of the trench, and his smile vanished. ‘I don’t think we can make it any further, Alexandra. We may have followed the trench as far as we can.’

The words of the man in black came back to Alex and she suddenly glimpsed their import, ‘Do not follow the way blindly forever, Alexandra, look up, always up’. The trench continued winding through this landscape ceaselessly and she and Frank were following it as if wearing blinkers. She now appreciated the significance of the situation, Frank would never find his peace on this path and she would not find Jake. She had to look up.

The country that fell away from the other side of the trench was dark, cloaked in an inky gloom that could be mistaken as night at first perusal. But the shroud of night stopped at the lip of the trench, soaring into the sky in a sheer, flat cliff-face, and it hung like a great tidal wave frozen at the precise moment before it broke and swept away everything beneath it.

Alex put out a hand and touched the night and found it had a gelatinous quality, sticky and malleable, not unlike the material the whole environment was shaped from. But as she retracted her hand, the blackness clung, adhering to her skin and gently pulling her towards it. She felt a child-like appeal within its dark folds, an essence clutching her hand, and she thought of Jake again.

Frank’s voice shook her from her fixation and she realized that he had been saying her name repeatedly and that her hand and arm had now been gently tugged into the still, dark curtain. ‘Alexandra? Alexandra?’

Alex dragged her arm from the blackness, feeling the loss that accompanied the act, a hunger that sat in her stomach, unfilled and aching, a connection to the blackness that had seemed mutually dependent.

‘Alexandra?’ repeated Frank.

‘I’m fine, Francis, but you’re right, we must go no further, the trench is your prison, not a route to your salvation, Francis. I realize that now.’

‘You’re saying that we should give up, Alexandra, after coming this far? Just turn around and return to my post? And then what?’

‘No, Francis, that’s not what I’m saying. We can’t go on, so,’ and she lifted her head back and gazed at the perpendicular wall of blackness, ‘so we will go up.’

Frank followed her gaze up at the black wall. Then he looked back at Alexandra and said, ‘After you, Alexandra!’

So they began to climb the sheer vertical barricade and initially Frank did not comprehend how they could achieve such a feat, as the surface was not solid. But Alex tutored him in the manipulating of the matter that surrounded them, enabling them to convert the material into hand- and foot-holds. But two issues became clear as they began to ascend hesitantly, they had no idea how far the obstacle extended, or if indeed it had an end, having only Alex’s conviction to base their decisions on. But of more immediate concern was the wall itself. The longing in the blackness was tangible, an explicit, flagrant need that emanated from the substance and tugged at their souls.

The temptation was great and the blackness poured liquid persuasion into their ears, sighing like a lover or a child, ‘Lose yourself in me, be part of me, be fulfilled in me, all the answers to your questions are on the other side of me.’

‘Don’t listen, Frank,’ shouted Alex as she watched Frank stop climbing and close his eyes. ‘Fight it, Frank, fight it, it’s a lie, a lie!’

But the blackness persisted, sensing Frank’s willingness to listen and eagerness to hear. ‘Francis, Francis, you have hurt for so long. There is nothing for you on that side. I have everything you need, everything, I can end your pain, Francis.’

Inside Frank’s head there was an explosion of memories. Hundreds of recollected moments filled the empty spaces inside him, sounds, smells, all imploding and folding into a kaleidoscope of images, like reflections bouncing off thousands of fragments of shattered glass. And so many wonderful promises melting over his soul, as sweet and familiar as the Sunday morning bells of his youth, drifting across the hills, ghost-like and captivating him.

Alex was moving crab-like towards the soldier, screaming, ‘Frank, Frank, no, please don’t listen!’

Then there was a shrill hiss from below Alex and she turned quickly to face the sound, having to realign her tenuous hold on the wall. One of the huge spiders was following them, its legs skimming across the sticky blackness as if it was navigating its way across a diaphanous web.

Alex looked at Frank again and cried, ‘Frank, snap out of it soldier! We’re under attack for Christ’s sake!’

Frank stared at her, but his eyes still seemed vacant, as they followed her pointing finger towards the spider. Then, almost as a reflex action he slipped the rifle from his back and took aim at the creature with one hand as it climbed nearer. The spider was deliberating between its two targets, its teeth chattering, the razor points dovetailing together and separating again in rapid succession. Frank waited, letting his breathing slow and feeling his heart lessen its pace as he squeezed the trigger, keeping the rifle as in line with the thing as was possible from his precarious position.

The bullet scythed through one of the spider’s fore legs, completely removing it as a thin gush of oily black filth sprayed from the vestiges of its limb. The spider was sent into a frenzied circling motion, teeth snapping, spitting and with legs dancing as it tried to compensate for the loss. Then it steadied and began to climb again.

Frank began to aim a second time, then turned to look up towards Alex and shouted, his voice resolute now, ‘Don’t give up, Alexandra, keep on climbing, don’t let it all be in vain!’

And he fired again, this time the bullet entering the spider’s bloated body and causing another jet of the black liquid to rise into the air.

Alex screamed, ‘Frank, climb to me, climb up to me! You can make it!’

But the spider was now close to Frank and he had shouldered his weapon and was facing it, his feet planted on footholds and one hand gripping a small ledge.

Alex cried again, ‘Frank, no!’ as the spider crawled onto Frank, two dagger-like legs poised above him, teeth crashing together like the retort of a machinegun. Then Frank clasped the spider’s legs, even as they speared his shoulder and chest, holding onto them tightly as blood flowed from his wounds. The two figures swayed as equilibrium transferred and exchanged and they appeared engaged in a tender embrace until Frank fell backwards, pulling the spider with him into the void.

‘
No
!’ wailed Alex as the nothingness accepted Frank and the spider, embracing them just as readily as Frank had held the spider.

Alex held onto her fragile grip and her legs and back arched as they became increasingly inflexible due to the unforgiving demands of the climb. She looked down and could not estimate how far she had climbed, probably further than she thought, as her arms and legs had moved as if motorized, propelling her ever upwards, and she felt like one of the spiders scaling improbable angles.

There was a sound like crisp folded paper being torn in two and the blackness where Frank had been enveloped yawned open several feet. Alex swung to face the aperture, almost losing her footing, and caught a glimpse of white, a flash of bleached bone, crumpled and folded. And the void ejected the picked and stripped skeleton of the giant spider, spewing it out like a bad taste, and it fell away, turning and drifting, breaking to pieces, no more substantial now than a handful of petals.