“Check it out,” said Li on the ninth morning of our eleventh expedition, as she crouched over something on the ground ahead.
The three of us had settled into a familiar rhythm. As always, Li carried the SCAR-17. By far the best shot in our trio, and quite possibly the best marksman out of all active rangers, Li had an unquestionable right to wield our rifle. All my hours at the firing range during training had brought my aim to a level I could comfortably call proficient, but Li was three or four plateaus above me. She’d been practicing since the age of eight.
I took a deep breath of clean forest air. Delicious.
“It’s a creeper vine,” said Li.
I knelt beside her. Zip maintained a lookout.
“Huh,” I said. The vine was thick and sinewy, like an inert green snake. I could see where it trailed off into the underworld through a crevice a few feet away.
“Doesn’t look so scary,” said Li. She gave the vine a poke with a nearby stick.
In a flash, the vine snarled itself around the stick, tugged it from her hand, and hissed out of sight.
A year or two earlier, this would have filled me with shivering dread. Now I just grinned, imagining the plant’s frustration when it discovered that its tendril had been fooled. No tasty morsel this time.
“So they have those down here, too,” said Zip.
This expedition, we’d set out much further down the coast, near San Diego. Apart from it being a bit warmer, it was more or less the same old forest. That was one of the longest-standing mysteries: why, when terrestrial plant life varied so greatly depending on the climate, was the forest nearly identical no matter where you went?
“Same old story, same old song and da-ance,” sang Li under her breath. All our voices were low, a habit long-established.
“Aerosmith?” I guessed.
“Yup,” said Li. “You remember Guitar Hero? That was my favorite song on there. Guitar Hero 3, I think.”
I shrugged. “Never played those games.”
“What? They were huge, for a while.”
“I only ever had an N64.”
“Well,” said Li, “if you could only have one console, that’s probably the best one.”
“NERDS,” said Zip.
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You’re the one who’s always begging to play Mario Kart.”
We were back to walking. Up ahead, Li nudged fluorescent foliage out of the way with the barrel of the SCAR.
“Making up for lost time,” said Zip. “I never had video games as a kid. Dad had me working at the funeral home from age eight.”
I broke a leaf off a fern and twirled it between my callused fingers.
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“Nah, it didn’t get fucked up until I was fifteen. That’s when I started helping with the embalming.”
“Jesus.”
“You don’t want to know what we had to do to those bodies,” said Zip.
“Not particularly.”
He told me anyway.
“First you suck all the blood out and replace it with embalming fluid. Fasten the eyes and mouth shut. All the leak-prone orifices have to be plugged. If a person’s been decapitated or something, you have to piece them back together.”
“I see.”
“A lot of the time when we pump the embalming fluid in, the deceased gets an erection. If it’s a dude. We have to, like, tape it to his leg.”
I imagined a mourning family crowded around an open casket, everyone studiously ignoring the tent in the pants of the silver-haired occupant.
“The worst I saw was a guy who got run over by a forklift.”
“Um.”
“Tore his legs off. Dragged his top half face-down across ten yards of gravel.”
“How’s that even happen?” I asked. I tried and failed to avoid imagining it happening to me.
“Dunno. Runaway forklift.”
“Forklift can’t possibly go more than ten, fifteen miles an hour.”
“My dad was an artist. Sewed the two halves together, repaired the skin, and rebuilt the skull with putty. Looking at the guy in the casket, you would have thought he died of a heart attack.”
I thought of my brother, small and bald and cold in the casket. No twelve-year-old kid should have to see that. It was one of those sights you could never get out of your head.
“People say the forest’s so dangerous,” said Zip, “but out on land you can get torn to shreds by a forklift. You can slip off a grapple-gun course and fall to your death. You can trip getting off the bus and break your neck on the sidewalk. How’s that any less dangerous?”
“Wow, you might be on to something, there, Zip,” I said. “Wait, remind me — which is the place with snakes the size of subway trains, again?”
“Dead is dead,” said Zip. “When you’re dead, it doesn’t matter whether it was a drunk driver or a subway snake that killed you.”
We edged around a ravine. In the distance, something screeched.
“What you really have to watch out for,” said Li, “is an inebriated subway snake.”
Zip had just opened his mouth to respond when we heard the clattering sound of chitinous legs on the tangled infrastructure below. We drew our grapple guns and rocketed to a branch high above.
A flood of giant spiders burst through the floor, scrabbling over each other and onto the trunk of our tree.
Up they climbed, zeroing in like bloodhounds drawn to a scent.
“There!” shouted Li, pointing at a tree some distance away. We fired our grapple guns and swung across. The rush of air made my eyes water, but I kept them open, taking in the situation below. The flood of spiders followed us along the ground, the noise intensifying to a chittering roar. So many spiders. There must have been tens of thousands of them down there. I’d never seen anything like it. My heart pounded, but despite my fear I couldn’t help but wonder how valuable the footage our bodycams were capturing would be.
The swarm of spiders rolled along the ground, pulverizing it, hundreds of the creatures tumbling through newly-formed ravines only to be replaced by more of their fellows. We’d hardly disengaged and rearmed our grapple guns when the spiders were halfway up this tree as well, bulging black eyes lasered in on us.
“We’ve gotta go higher,” said Zip.
Only sunlight could stop these things, drive them away. It was worth the risk of brushing the canopy. If we stayed here, we’d be devoured in moments.
Our grapple guns fired, one after the other, and we zipped toward a thick branch far above.
“I bet it was the creeper vine,” said Li grimly as we watched the spiders continue to make their way up the trunk. “That must have set them off.”
Another jump upward and we’d be in the canopy proper, where the grapple guns wouldn’t be any use - the branches grew thicker, spider-webbing here and there. Try to go higher than that and we’d be forced to use the climbing picks. If the spiders followed us that far, we’d be trapped.
“They’ll stop climbing,” said Zip.
The spiders kept coming.
“Maybe these aren’t Tropico spiders at all,” said Li. “You’d think the light would have turned them away by now.”
It was almost comical, the way the spiders knocked one another off as they flowed up the trunk, hundreds flailing through empty air at any given time, crunching on the forest floor below. Their affection for each other, it seemed, extended only far enough to prevent them from devouring one another.
“Another tree,” I said. “They’ll have to climb the whole thing again.”
We swung to another tree. Sure enough, the flood of spiders followed and began scaling this one. From this height, their individual shapes were difficult to make out. They were a shiny black mass with a single-minded purpose.
To my horror, I saw that the spiders on our previous tree continued to climb. They intended to reach the network of branches above and skitter across, come to our tree, and sandwich us from above.
“Why don’t they give up?” asked Zip. My stomach tumbled, but I forced myself to maintain control.
“They’ll give up,” snarled Li, pointing out another tree. “There.”
But as she pointed, I saw that spiders were already scaling that tree in preparation, along with every other tree in the vicinity.
The net closed around us.
Suddenly, a keening shriek joined the assault of sounds, and the tree shuddered beneath our feet.
The spider-covered ground puckered upward and exploded. Out burst the twirling maw of a creature so immense it could have swallowed the Washington monument. All mouth and neck, with no eyes I could see, the worm didn’t eat the spiders so much as drink them, sucking them down its bright pink throat.
Our tree teetered, its root network upended.
“Go!” screamed Li, and we fired our grapple guns, swinging free just as the tree went crashing down behind us. Its fall added another thundering noise to the chaos. The impact sent other trees tumbling like gigantic, groaning dominoes. Above us, denizens of the canopy shrieked and roared, rushing to find a stable place to take hold. I saw a dragonfly zip by in a panic, and a disorganized swarm of enormous mosquitoes cruised aimlessly overhead.
On the next branch, we prepared our grapple guns again. The spiders no longer pursued us. Now they were the prey. Away they scurried, searching for a safe passage back to the tangled depths below, but the creature’s maw sought them relentlessly, slurping thousands down like droplets of water rolling off a leaf.
Later, as we sat on a branch catching our breath, the forest grumbling quietly hundreds of feet below, I began to shudder with laughter. I tried to suppress it, clamping my mouth shut, but my chest shook harder and harder, until finally it all came spilling out, a deluge of painful, hiccupping laughter. Whatever it was, Zip and Li must have felt it too, because instead of gaping at me they just grinned.
“Those stupid fucking spiders,” I choked, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “Did you see — did you see?”
Zip clapped a hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong with us, huh? Why aren’t we pissing our pants right now?”
Li spat. The three of us watched her glob of spittle tumble, shrink, and vanish.
“Fuck,” she said, savoring the word, drawing it out like a death row inmate taking her last drag of a cigar. “I love you guys.”
Zip snickered. “Careful. We’re a couple of weirdos.”
“Nobody else could do this job,” I said, feeling a swell of pride.
Zip leaned against the trunk of the tree, unwrapping a protein bar and taking a bite.
“I’ve got a story,” he said with his mouth full.
“Always bragging about your Tinder exploits,” said Li.
“Not that kind of story,” said Zip.
I grabbed a protein bar of my own.
“The other week,” said Zip, “Sunday afternoon, I rolled out of bed, put on my flip-flops, and headed to the gas station for a bite to eat.”
“I hope you know that you’re the only person making half a million dollars a year who’s ever used ‘gas station’ and ‘bite to eat’ in the same sentence,” said Li.
“I’m saving for retirement,” said Zip. “Anyway, I grab the usual — a hot dog, a Snickers bar, some onion rings, a 76-oz blue Icee — and I’ve got all this shit cradled in my arms as I go flip-flopping up to the register.”
Before he continued, Zip took a big gulp from his canteen.
“So I’m standing there with my arms full, trying to figure out how I’m going to retrieve my wallet from the pocket of my pajama pants, and the cashier is giving me a dirty look. Normal every-day situation. Until a skinhead with tattoos all up his arm walks in and pulls a gun.
“Standard citizen, at this point, would get scared, right? But I’m three feet from this thug, as he swings the pistol back and forth between me and the cashier, bellowing about money, and all I can do is stare at his twiggy little legs. Up top he’s got biceps, shoulders, the whole package. Except that he’s never heard of squats, never tried a dead lift, and he looks like you could knock him over with a Super Soaker.
“Well, I must have chuckled, because this Neo-Nazi gentleman gets right up in my face, leans over me, and positively shrieks the N-word.
“‘Did you think something was funny?’ he screams.
“He jams the pistol in my sternum, which knocks the Icee out of my arms, and it splatters all over the floor. Up to this point I’ve been more amused than anything, but that Icee had me salivating. I’ve been craving it since I woke up, and now it’s ruined.
“I tell him no problem, I’ll give him my wallet. I lean down and slowly place the hot dog, the onion rings, and the Snickers bar on the floor next to the Icee puddle. Then I straighten up, produce my wallet, and hand it to him. The whole time, we’re staring right in each other’s eyes, it’s like the fucking Notebook.
“He’s got my wallet now, and this is when he makes a mistake, because he pulls that Glock back just a little bit and flips the wallet open with his other hand to see what’s in there. Soon as he breaks eye contact I leap to the side and grab his arm — the gun goes off, BLAM! Shatters the glass in front of the beer section — and I snap his wrist. Gun falls into the Icee puddle, I kick it away, and as this dude’s starting to scream I shove his legs out from under him and SLAM his face on the linoleum. And I swear to you, friends — I swear to you that this man’s head bounced.”
Li eyed him coolly. “I think you’re making that whole thing up,” she said.
“I have the police report to prove it,” said Zip. “Remind me to show you when we get back.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“The thug was out cold in a puddle of blue-raspberry blood. Cashier let me grab another Icee for free, so I sipped on that until the police arrived. Not a bad afternoon, all things considered.”
“You crack his skull open?” I asked.
Zip shrugged.
“I didn’t hang around long. Had to meet a Tinder date for coffee that afternoon, you see.”
“Oh, of course,” said Li.
“Point is,” said Zip, “I think this job changes us. Like, in a real kind of way. I wasn’t scared, you know? Even with that gun against my chest. I was in just as much danger as I am out here, but I wasn’t scared. It felt like a dream, or like I was watching a TV show starring me.”
“I bet the guy’s skull cracked wide open,” I said. “I bet he died. Serves him right.”
“Hmm,” said Zip, and took another drink from his canteen.
NEXT CHAPTER