Page 376 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

“That would be Mr. Russell’s car.”

“If there’s a road up there, what are we doing way down here?”

Morgan patted her shoulder. “Blame the script.”

The climb was steep, but not difficult and Morgan took the lead to show her the easiest places to put her hands and feet. About a hundred feet up, the wall gave way to a ledge of a road that supported Mr. Russell’s car and the crowning feature, the spider’s cave. Complete with a lot of gossamer webbing across the rocks, Audrey noted as she grabbed Morgan’s hand and heaved herself over the lip of the ledge. She supposed that meant a spider must be at home.

No longer making faces, she fell into step behind Morgan again. But while he skirted around the car, heading for the cave, she paused to look inside the driver’s window. Sure enough, the clawed tarsus was still lying across the passenger seat.

Audrey glanced up at the cave and swallowed hard. “We live through this,” she whispered as she followed Morgan. “We live through this.”

A chill due more to just the change in temperature trickled down her spine as she passed beyond the sunlight and into the shadows of the cave. Once, this had been a mining shaft. Old railway tracks lined the ground, strewn with wood debris and the odd and end strip of rebar. There was only one tunnel to take and that descended down a gradual slope farther than the fading sunlight would follow. Like a perpetually leaky faucet, a soft plink of falling water drops echoed up from somewhere below.

Audrey would never have described herself as cowardly or excessively girlish, but knowing somewhere inside this tunnel there lurked a man-eating arachnid had her creeping as close to Morgan as she could get without fusing their bodies into one. She all but pushed him ahead of her while she clung to the shirt at his back and stumbled over the cocoon-like bundles of spider silk that littered their path.

“Be careful,” he cautioned, half turning to place a hand on top of her head and helping her to duck beneath a web that stretched the width of the tunnel. He must have known it was there by experience. Now that she was looking for it, she could see it in the darkness. “We don’t want another repeat of last night.”

Audrey shivered and touched her shoulder where she’d been bitten. “No,” she agreed, and as if their voices triggered the next cue, in the distance the soft shifting of pebbles whispered up through the tunnel. Not twenty feet directly ahead of them, the darkness shifted and the shadows began to move.

Audrey’s hands became claws in Morgan’s shirt. “Please tell me that’s my eyes.”

“Pay attention,” Morgan told her as the shadows solidified into a thorax, eight eyes and legs, and the largest pair of fangs that she’d ever seen in her life. “This is where you can read ‘Tonka’ on the underbelly. Kind of makes you wonder if anyone even bothered to edit this film, doesn’t it?”

Tonka, like in the toy-makers? Audrey couldn’t have cared less if it had ‘Made in Taiwan’ stamped in gold letters on every one of its hairy legs. It was a spider. A huge, living, breathing spider, extending at least eight feet from the end to end and growing ever bigger as it lowered itself from the ceiling to the ground and faced them.

Audrey’s mouth ran dry. She wanted to scream, but her breath came out a barely audible whimper.

“When it comes charging at us, we’re going to run like hell back to the surface,” Morgan said. “Don’t worry about the cave in; I’ll start that. You just try not to get caught in the webs, okay? Audrey?”

Her eyes widening the bigger the spider seemed to get, she trembled and backed up a step. Then two, and then kept going until she felt the cool stone of the cave wall at her back. Her hand touched something metallic and, out of reflex, she closed her fingers around it. She looked down at the length of rebar in her hand.

“Audrey?” Morgan said, a touch of impatience creeping into his tone. “Did you hear me?”

Lifting the length of rebar, Audrey held it in front of her like a club. “Yes,” she choked, her fear leaving her panting. “Run like hell. Don’t get caught. Cave-in. I heard you.”

A clicking of clawed leg-tips tapped against the rocks as the spider shifted closer, the whisper of feeler hairs rubbing together as it stroked its fangs with its mouth palps. All eight of its dreadful eyes fixed intently on her and Morgan.

“Get ready,” he said.

Audrey backed fully against the wall, pressing herself against the rocks as the spider stalked them and then crouched as if preparing to spring.

“Run!” Morgan snapped.

He turned, but Audrey didn’t follow. When the spider jumped after him, she let out a blood-curdling scream, hefted the pipe and brought it crashing back down again on the spider’s head. She drove the rebar like a spike all the way through it and into the hard ground.

“Jesus!” Morgan shouted.

The spider crumpled in on itself, its legs folding, its fangs clicking weakly, its body sinking lifeless to the rocks. Slowly, Audrey let go of the rebar and stumbled backwards until she fell against the wall again. Her hands shook. Her legs felt as though they were about to give out any second.

“What did you do that for?” Morgan demanded.

She looked at him in shock, barely able to distinguish him from the rest of the darkness. “What do you mean? I’ve killed it! The movie’s over!”

Hands on hips, he glared at her. “That was not the plan!”

“That’s the object of the whole, damn film, isn’t it? Kill the spider and save the day?”

“We’re only thirty minutes into it!”

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