Page 378 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

“But we are in the movie!” She thumped her chest with both hands for emphasis. “The way you keep throwing us in front of the spiders makes us prime targets.”

“Is everything all right down there?” one of the impatiently waiting police officers called down at them.

They both turned to look up the hillside. Morgan waved; Audrey just frowned. “We could be in here forever.”

“The way you keep fumbling your lines,” Morgan said, “it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Yeah, well, as long as we’re going to be trapped here forever, I’d rather spend my forever sitting quietly and not getting eaten, thank you very much. And you’re not going to spank me anymore either. I’ve had enough of that.”

Morgan snorted. “If you’d really had enough, you’d be obediently working your way back through the script right now.”

“I’m serious,” she snapped. “Your belt put bruises on me. I can feel them.”

“You brought that on yourself.”

“Yeah,” she snorted. “Sure I did. I remember it all clearly now. I threw myself down on the rocks, yanked my own pants and panties down to my ankles and blistered my own butt with your belt. Using that twisted stream of logic, you must be responsible then for biting your own leg.”

“If I get tetanus from that, by the way, you’re really going to get it,” he growled at her. They glared at one another for a moment in silence, then Morgan said, “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, you’re going to be waiting a very long time.”

She folded her arms back across her chest and faced forward again, scowling even more blackly than before. “Guess you’re going to be waiting a long time before I cooperate, too.”

He sighed. “You can’t stay in there forever. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to eat.”

As if in agreement, her stomach rumbled. Audrey folded her arms tighter across it and pretended to ignore the grumbling. “I could stand to lose some weight, anyway.”

“You’re a stick as it is,” Morgan grumbled. He took hold of the locked door handle and shook it. “Get out of the cussed truck!”

“All right,” Audrey snapped. “I’ll get out, but only if you promise not to spank me anymore.”

His eyes narrowed at her. Leaning his hands against the vehicle’s frame, he said, “I can make that promise. I can make it easily. In fact, let me spell it out for you. I will one hundred percent promise never to spank you ever again, as long as you follow the stupid script so we can both get the hell out of this damn movie!”

“Fine!” Audrey unlocked the door and shoved it open. She pointed one finger at him sternly, a smug grin curling her mouth as she said, “But I’m going to hold you to that promise, buster! And you’d better not break it!”

She was halfway up the hill to the waiting police officers before she realized that she’d just hung herself in his carefully worded loophole. She stopped, frozen in tightly fisted surprise at her own stupidity, and Morgan passed right by her, giving her a smug smile of his own.

Sure enough, there it was: the words ‘Tonka’ written as bold as day along the underside and down one leg of the spider. Despite her promises to behave, Morgan kept her very close at hand. Unfortunately, that also meant getting very close to the spider.

No other part of this rotten film had special effects remotely as good as it did with the spider. Knowing that the props guy out in the real world had cobbled the thing together out of truck parts and latex was of precious little consolation to Audrey now, as she huddled against Morgan’s back in the spider’s lair. No, sir. Right now, right here, in whatever movie generated and lightning induced space she was presently occupying, this spider was one-hundred-percent real—wiry legs and swollen belly, rotten egg-yolk eyes and bony mandibles dripping with goo—and the way the word TONKA pulsed and stretched as the spider groped and scratched restlessly at the cave ceiling did absolutely nothing for her peace of mind.

“Get ready to run,” he murmured somewhere to the right of her in the cave’s darkness.

Run, she thought wildly. Sure, she’d run. Just as soon as she regained mastery over her legs. Right now, it was a wonder she could stand. Her knees were shaking so badly that, from the ankle upward, it felt as though she were standing on Jell-O.

“And don’t forget,” he said, “you want to drop the bracelet at the entrance, right before I start the cave-in.”

The spider’s mandibles were making an awful clicking noise, a sound which made her spine prickle and every hair she possessed stand straight up on end out of sheer alarm.

The spider’s legs unfolded and the thorax slightly scraped the rocks as it dropped from the ceiling to the floor. All of its eight legs remained steady and stable beneath it as the spider stalked them in the near darkness of the cave; in contrast, hers nearly gave out beneath her.

“I’m going to die,” she quavered fearfully.

“We can’t die,” Morgan reminded her, but his warm hand found her stomach in the dark, pressing flat against it and pushing her protectively behind him. “Even if we get killed, we can’t die. So, relax and get ready to run.”

The spider inched forward, then crouched, the swollen abdomen bobbing as the spinners twitched to make their silk.

“Run!” Morgan barked.

Audrey turned and ran smack into the wall before she reoriented herself in the darkness. She tripped over a broken barrel and the junk strips of rebar and nearly fell except for Morgan, who grabbed her arm and practically dragged her before she got her feet under her. After that, she had no trouble out-distancing either him or the spider. She ran all the way back up the steep incline to the mouth of the cave and the warm sunshine of the desert beyond. It was a beacon of welcoming heat that she embraced with both arms as she dashed out into the light.

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