And yet…
The scars, the aggression, the combat skills. The cold confidence the creature seemed to exude — collectively, perhaps they did tell me something. They suggested something.
These were different from the other spiders. These were clearly warriors of some kind. Perhaps these were the special operators who did for their race what guys like Top, Bunny and I did for ours. Maybe I was letting my imagination run amok, or maybe I was seeing what was in front of me. Seeing what was actually there, rather than the horror-show image suggested by their alien appearance. Or, maybe it was the warrior in my head, the killer in my soul, who saw and recognized some kind of kindred spirit.
The spider turned and leaned toward my dead right hand. It bent low toward the bloodstains on my skin and on the cuff of my right sleeve. It sniffed at the blood; then bent closer and tasted it.
The chittering sound rose higher and higher for a moment, then faded away.
It turned quickly and looked at me again. The dark eyes fixed mine and for a moment we looked at each other with a kind of shared understanding that I’ve only ever had with fellow warriors on a battlefield. The kind of shared awareness that cannot be spoken, but which speaks volumes in that private language of the true warrior. Alexander the Great could have looked into the eyes of General Patton, and they despite a million differences they would have nodded to one another, understand something that cannot be expressed in actual words. I’ve even had that exchange with enemies, when catching the eye of the man you have come to kill, but fate opens a window in the smoke and fire and for just a moment you both realize something that no one else could ever grasp. Maybe not even most of your own troops. It’s reserved for those people who are defined by war, who are born to it, and who know that they will walk forever on the blood-soaked ground while a black and featureless flag ripples in the wind above them.
The spider studied me, and then slowly, slowly, it backed away, crawling off my body until it stood in the trampled grass. The younger spider looked from his older companion, to me, and back again. Confused. Not sharing in that moment of insight.
Forty yards away the Serbians had recovered from the explosion of light and sound and were firing at the metal ball. My guys were returning fire, but it was a fight they couldn’t win. The Serbs were spreading out, sending squads out in a flanking maneuver that was very quickly going to catch my guys and the remaining spiders down by the ball in a shooting box.
“Do something,” I snarled to the older spider. Sure, I know it’s stupid. I don’t speak spider and he clearly didn’t speak English. But he turned to watch the Serbs.
He did two things.
First he snapped out at me with one of his legs and the round tip of it struck me on the shoulder. In a nerve cluster. He hit me really hard and the pain was ex-fucking-quisite. I screamed and flopped around like a beach mackerel.
Then he twisted a leg so that he touched a fitting on his helmet. Immediately he and the other spider dropped down flat and curled their arms around their heads.
I had a half second to do the same, and as I did I realized that my arms were no longer dead weight. I wrapped them around my head and squeezed my eyes shut and screamed.
Another big fucking white light.
Another wave of the vibration that shook me all the way down to the bones.
Maybe their version of a flash-bang grenade.
Alien shock and awe.
I could hear, somewhere beyond the wall of blistering light and sound, the Serbians screaming. Maybe my own guys were, too. Probably.
Then the spiders were up and moving, the two of them flashing down the slope at incredible speeds. They raced toward the dazed Serbians and then they were among them.
I fought to get to my knees, to grab the AK47 and fire it. To join the fight.
All I managed to do was fall face-forward onto the ground.
A big black well seemed to open up beneath me and I fell and fell and fell.
-10-
I woke up to see that the sun was a dying red ball behind the treetops.
A voice said, “Welcome back to the world, boss.”
I turned my head. Just a simple thing like that took a lot of goddamn effort. Bunny sat with his back to a tree. His face was bruised and bloody. His shirt was torn to rags and there were crude bandages wrapped around his huge arms and chest. Beside him, Top Sims lay asleep. He looked fevered and weak.
“Is he…?”
“He’s bad,” said Bunny. “Shock. And his leg’s a mess. They’re going to have to be creative on it. I set it the best I could, but it’s going to need more than that.”
I looked around.
“I was able to salvage a sat phone from one of the Serbians. I made a call. Mr. Church is sending an extraction team. Should be here in a couple of hours.”
“Thank god.”
“Yeah.”
We were on the highest point of a clear slope. There was a campfire burning, the smoke spiraling up into the darkening sky. Farther down the slope was a dark, lumpy tangle of things that might have been human beings. Might have been. Bunny followed the line of my gaze.
“The Serbians.”
“Oh.”
“They did that.”
“They?”
He nodded up at the sky. “They.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
I looked around. “What about the briefcase?”
Bunny snorted. “They melted it.”
“Melted it?”
“Yup. One of them opened it and suddenly made that weird high-pitched noise they make. And then they pointed some kind of thing at it. Maybe it was a ray gun, the fuck do I know? Next thing the whole case and about ten feet of ground around it is a puddle of boiling mud and liquid metal.” He shrugged. “Guess they’re not big on bioweapons.”
“Points for that,” I said.
We sat in silence for a long time. Real long.
“Not sure how to talk about this,” Bunny finally admitted.
“Me neither.”
“At the end there, before everything went to shit… I saw two more of them spider things. Like the others, but…different.”
“I know.”
He cut me a sharp look.
“I saw them, too,” I said.
“You saw that they were different, right?”
“Oh yes.”
Bunny started to say something several times and stopped each time. Finally he gave it up shook his head.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
After maybe five minutes of silence during which the forest grew darker and the fire grew brighter, he tried it again. “This is going to sound stupid but…”
“Say it.”
“I think they were like us.”
“I know.”
“I mean, I think they were soldiers.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“Like us.”
I nodded.
He nodded back. After a while. Above us the first stars ignited. Somehow it made the sky look bigger. Farther away. Stranger.
“Those things,” he said. “The ones that were getting killed, not the ones that came after. They weren’t fighters.”
“No,” I agreed. “They weren’t fighters.”
“So the others. The two that came in later? What were they? Some kind of extraction team?”
I thought about it. Nodded.
He nodded again, too. The answer seemed to offer him some measure of relief. It was a theory and it made a kind of sense. Enough sense that you could tie a rope around it and use it to keep your sanity from flying off into the air.
“Boss—?” he asked much later.