Burgles

Chapter 7

          Raine finished flinging off what she could of the blood from her shoe, and we continued down the tunnel. The smell didn't lessen, only worsened, and my nose didn't get used to it. By the looks of it, neither did Raine's. The tunnel darkened as we went, and the floors grew more damp. I hoped with water but wouldn't have been surprised if it was more blood or some other bodily secretion. The end of the tunnel revealed a fork in the road. A four-pronged fork. Hallways broke to the left and right and looked like they continued all the way around the structure in the same oval path as the hallway above. A staircase and elevator offered a way up or down. We needed to go down. An elevator or the stairs. I almost decided on the elevator, considering the recent success with them, but it didn't make sense. No power for lights probably meant no power for elevators. So, unless we could find a way to shimmy down the shaft, the stairs were our only option. An easy decision according to Raine's impatience.

           I shrugged my shoulders and gestured toward the elevator with an open palm. "What? I like elevators. What can I say?"

          She looked hard at me. "We're taking the stairs."

          I beamed back at her and headed to the stairs. "I know. I'm not a moron."

          The stairs went down one more floor into a basement like area. It reminded me of the Colosseum's hypogeum that I read about in one of Papi's books. Hypogeum or not, the place was dark with no windows to light the way. However, someone had lit torches that sporadically lined the walls. I grabbed one at the bottom of the stairs.

          JJ sat in the middle of the structure. If the basement was laid out like the floors above, then the hallway straight ahead should lead us right to her. Worth a shot. The hallway, like the tunnel above, felt damp. Our pace had to be reduced to a near crawl because of the squishy sounds the liquid made beneath our shoes. Slowly walking heel to toe helped some, but it still proved difficult to move in silence. We might remain undetected by people, but by animals I couldn't say. Can spiders hear? Apparently not well, or, at least, this one couldn't. That is if it was a spider. The thing would have stood up to my waist and must have weighed no less than seventy-five pounds. Looking closer, I could tell it definitely was not a spider. It had eight legs, but they looked to be extra appendages protruding out its side. The four legs underneath it was how it moved around, and it had fur like a mammal. So much of my attention was fixed on this thing. I paid no mind to anything else. Raine's nudge removed me from my tunnel vision.

          She leaned in next to my ear and pointed at the thing. "Look," she said.

          I turned my head and whispered. "I'm not blind. It's a huge spider thing. What we gonna do?"

          She shook her head. "Na, not that. Behind it. It's JJ."

          I looked again and focused on the wall past the creature. Sure enough, there was JJ. She had been hoisted about four feet up and plastered to the wall by webs. I couldn't begin to understand how she found herself in that situation. However it had happened, it now left me with a bit of a paradox. I needed to save JJ, before I could kill her. I could have let her get taken out by this enormous freaky spider-looking creature, but I wanted her to understand what she had done, and I wanted to find out why she did it.

          I saw JJ and forgot to whisper. "Yeah. I see her."

          The thing heard me this time and began to turn around. Luckily, JJ heard me too. "Who's there? Help me, please." She wiggled violently in her web casing and the creature turned its attention back to her. "It's a spoarder," she said.

          Knowing the thing was called a spoarder did nothing to help me or Raine. We'd never seen one before. JJ probably didn't know it was us.