Silver Bullet (7 page)

Don’t think about him down here
. I pushed the previous night out of my mind.

There was an old, rusted elevator waiting for us on the opposite side of the room. I nudged it with my foot. It groaned and trembled dangerously.

“I’m not going down that,” I said.

“I think we can pull it out of the way,” Suzy said, holstering her gun, jamming the flashlight under her arm. “Grab the other side.”

Together, we yanked the elevator platform out of the shaft, and I unhooked the chains. Once that was gone, I could see that the distance to the bottom wasn’t very long—just about fifteen feet. I could jump that without a problem. But I was hesitant to try it.

Once we got down there, we’d have to climb back out again. That would take longer.

If we needed to run, scaling the wall would take a long time.

My thoughts got stuck on that point.
If we need to run.
It was crazy. Irrational. What would we be running from in an empty mine?

Suzy wasn’t bogged down by crazy thoughts. She was already sitting, swinging her legs over the side, flipping over onto her stomach to lower herself. She dropped to the bottom. “Huh,” she said, shining her flashlight around the other side. “You should see this.”

Muttering a few choice words about nightmare demons and OPA agents under my breath, I jumped down with Suzy. The air was even warmer at the bottom. Starting to feel kind of like a sauna. It was so quiet that every step and motion was amplified, even as it seemed to be smothered by the rocks around us.

There were two tunnels branching off from the elevator. Both had divergent mine cart tracks, and both were too long for our Maglites to make much of an impression on the darkness.

“Split up to search?” Suzy asked.

I’d watched too many horror movies. No way I’d let Suzy out of my sight down here. “We’ll check them one at a time. Together.”

“It would be faster to—”

“Together,” I said firmly.

Suzy shook her head, but didn’t argue. She headed down the right fork.

The tunnel kept narrowing, not just in width but also in height. My head started brushing the wooden support beams, so I stooped. Started sidling sideways to watch Suzy in front and keep my flashlight going behind us, watching the elevator shaft rapidly disappear.

It was too quiet. Too tense.

“Feels kind of like Indiana Jones, don’t you think?” I asked, breaking the silence. “I just need a fedora and a whip.” I mimicked snapping a bullwhip down the tunnel, taking a few quick steps, like I was dodging poisoned darts

Suzy snorted. “You’re no Harrison Ford.”

“More like Benjamin Bratt,” I said. “The steamy Latin Indiana Jones.”

“Steamy,” she echoed, her eyes dancing with silent laughter.

Hey, I could be steamy. I arched an eyebrow. “
Hola, amiga
.
Donde esta el
ancient treasure?” Okay, I didn’t actually speak any Spanish, and my accent sucked. But it got Suzy chuckling.

It felt good to hear her laugh. That was usually all we did at work on the boring days—find increasingly stupid ways to get the other smiling. Sure, we weren’t in cubeville anymore, but this was still work. No matter how weird it got, it was just a job. Even if we were about a half a mile underground now.

And totally alone.

In the dark.

Don’t think about David Nicholas.

Suzy’s smile faded too fast. She was distracted.

“Still thinking about David Nicholas?” I asked, because that was definitely who I was thinking about, no matter how hard I tried not to.

“No,” she said. “Well, yes, but not just him. I keep thinking about the detention center.”

I pulled the Bluetooth earpiece out of my pocket to make sure it was turned off. We were probably too far underground for communication, but this wasn’t a conversation for the OPA’s ears. “I know it had to be bad, but…how bad?”

Suzy’s frown carved lines into her face that aged her a good ten years. “What did they tell you about the Union when you signed up for the OPA?”

“Fritz said that the Union’s kind of like Special Ops. The demon-hunting Marines. Another department like ours.”

“That’s what they told me, too,” she said. “I think they lied. I don’t think the Union’s just some department. I think it’s bigger than the OPA, or maybe bigger than our whole damn government.” Suzy stopped walking, staring blankly at the boards holding up the sagging wall. “It was enormous. The detention center, I mean. What they had underground—it was bigger than the OPA campus. There are hundreds of demons under there. Thousands.” She touched my sleeve, gave me an urgent look. “I think we made a mistake signing up for this.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask if she meant Fritz’s special team or the OPA in general.

A distant shuffling sound echoed up the tunnel.

Suzy’s gun was out again in an instant, aimed into the darkness ahead of us. I kept my gun toward the floor. Watched our backs. It was hard to tell where the noise had come from—ahead or behind—because of the way everything echoed against the rocks.

My partner saw it first.

“Dammit,” she said.

I think she said something else, but it was drowned out by the sound of her gun firing.

AFTER SUZY FIRED HER gun, I spent a moment recalling the cute little harvestman spider in the Soup Express building. I remembered how delicate its legs were and how harmless it had looked skittering across the broad surface of my hand.

I remembered thinking about how spiders were good to have in the house, and how Pops had once told me that they were bad luck to kill. I’d laughed at him over that part. Stupid superstitious Pops. Spiders weren’t lucky; they were just bugs.

Pops had smacked me upside the head when I shared that sentiment with him. They weren’t merely bugs, he’d said. They were the apex predators of the bug world. And, he’d grudgingly admitted, it would make our ant infestation problem worse if we killed the bugs that ate them, which would definitely be unlucky.

I remembered all of that in the span of a heartbeat.

Then that heartbeat passed, and I realized that Suzy and I were the infestation problem that the apex predators were out to fix that day.

The demon came hurtling out of the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

Seeing Connie’s ghost hadn’t prepared me for the sight of an arachnid the size of an eight-legged pony. It was brown, leathery, wrinkled, covered in hair. Reddish stripes marked its legs and back. It looked kind of like a wolf spider. A huge fucking wolf spider.

And it moved like lightning.

It hit Suzy. She fell under it with a scream that rattled inside the tight mineshaft. Her Maglite went flying, lighting up the roof in a brief flash before it hit the ground.

The light went out.

It was on top of her, and apparently, it was stronger than its size suggested. Suzy kicked and shoved and couldn’t get it off of her.

I slammed my shoe into the daimarachnid’s head—did spiders even have heads?—and smashed it against the wall. One of its flailing legs knocked me off balance.

Yeah, it was strong. Really fucking strong. Like getting kneecapped by a baseball bat.

Suzy fired again.
Bang!
Black blood sprayed up the wall.

It didn’t deter the spider.

I dropped my Maglite as I hurried to my feet. From the floor, the flashlight magnified all of the shadows a dozen times, casting the scurrying spider in a dark silhouette that consumed most of the tunnel.

I could only make out Suzy’s struggle in brief flashes between the moments of light and darkness as the flashlight spun.

She kicked the demon in the pincers.

Got her shoe caught in its mouth.

Fangs glistened, dripped poison.

A dainty-boned fist slammed into one of the gleaming red eyes. The eyeball erupted. Fluid gushed down the side of its face.

She shot again.
Bang!

Another spray of blood.

I leveled my Desert Eagle but couldn’t get a clear shot, not with Suzy still fighting underneath it.

“Shoot the fucker in the fucking face!” she roared. She swung another punch. The demon released her foot and bit down on her sleeve.

I wanted to shoot it. I did. I’d finally found the circumstances under which my inner pacifist was subdued by my much more hidden inner warrior, and I’d never wanted to shoot anything as much as I wanted to shoot that spider.

But my aim sucked, and there was no clear shot.

“I can’t—I might hit you!”

Suzy screamed as she emptied her magazine into its belly with her free hand. The exoskeleton cracked. Stinging blood sprayed over me.

The demon jerked with every impact, but didn’t get off of her. Didn’t let go of her arm.

My left ear, unprotected by the noise-canceling Bluetooth earpiece, was ringing sharply. The handguns were too loud in an enclosed space and I could barely hear the scuffle now. Could have been more daimarachnids coming at us and I never would have known.

A jerking leg smacked my flashlight, spun it in the opposite direction. Now I couldn’t see Suzy and the spider at all.

Her muffled voice penetrated my ringing skull. “Shoot, Cèsar!” Even half-deaf, I could feel her panic right through my guts.

I launched myself at the spider, wrapping my arms around its massive body. Kind of like hugging an angry mastiff. Fangs pressed against my shoulder, but didn’t puncture the leather jacket. I hauled it off of Suzy with every drop of magically reinforced strength that flowed through my muscles.

We flipped, and I ended up on its back, straddling the spider like the ugliest motorcycle I’d ever seen in my life. It thrashed underneath me.

I’d ridden mechanical broncos a few times in my day. It’s a fun bar activity for teetotalers.

Not so fun with a demon.

It just about tossed me into the wall, but I managed to cling to it, wrapping one fist in its wiry hair. My head bounced off a wooden beam.

Dazed, I pushed my Desert Eagle against the carapace behind its eyes.

And I fired.

Blam!

The Desert Eagle was a fucking hand-cannon in comparison to Suzy’s new Beretta 9mm. She might as well have been shooting BBs at it. My hollow-point bullet, however, punched through its head segment and ripped out the other side.

It collapsed under me.

The spider had finally been squished.

My legs were shaking as I stood. Hands were shaking, too. I tried to turn on the safety but couldn’t seem to find it.

Fuck.
This was not me.

I should have been writing up magical usage reports. Should have been sneaking Dilbert cartoons onto Fritz’s door while he was in the seventieth phone meeting of the week. Should have been bribing the administrative assistants with donuts to get a fresh supply of essential oils delivered faster.

I should
not
have been shooting demons in abandoned mines.

When I kept fumbling with Desert Eagle, Suzy gently removed it from my grasp and flipped on the safety for me.

“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

I think she mouthed, “No problem.”

She shucked her jacket, then pointed at me. I looked down. The daimarachnid had drizzled blood and venom all over me.

The mines were much too stuffy to wear jackets anyway. I dropped it.

When I spoke again, my hearing was a little bit better. I could actually tell that I was trying to talk, anyway. “Next time, let’s requisition shotguns,” I said.

Suzy leaned heavily on me, wiping her sleeve over her forehead. “Shotguns? How about a nuclear bomb?”

Better and better.

WE FOUND WHERE THE daimarachnid had come from at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately.

A few yards down, the ancient wood had given up and allowed the walls to collapse into rubble. The rocks were covered in a stringy white substance that stretched from ceiling to floor. Reminded me of Halloween decorations. Except that this wasn’t fluffy cotton.

It was webbing. Huge goddamn spider webs shit out of a demon’s goddamn ass.

“That’s something I didn’t want to see, ever,” I said. Not that I’d ever given a lot of thought to the possibility. But if I had, “demon shit-webs” would have been really high on the list.

Suzy grimaced and lifted her flashlight higher. The glass covering the bulb had shattered when she dropped it, but it still worked. “There’s something inside of that stuff.”

I looked closer. She was right—there were two large masses submerged in the webbing, each almost as big as I was. They looked like cocoons. “If those are eggs, I’m fucking done,” I said. “I will quit my job and walk out of here. I will move to fucking Costa Rica. I will spend the rest of my life as a bartender serving fruity umbrella drinks to fat tourists. I swear it, honest to God, right this moment.”

Suzy grinned. “I’ll take that bet. You gonna cut one of those open, or should I?”

Cut it open? What if whatever was inside was still alive? I wasn’t sure how many bullets remained in my Desert Eagle, but I was willing to bet that there weren’t enough for an egg sac filled with demon babies. In fact, I didn’t think there were enough bullets in the world to deal with all the daimarachnids I now suspected to be hiding in the Nevada desert.

Ah, hell. Why not? How much worse could this day get?

Rhetorical question. Don’t answer that.

The webbing was thick. I wrapped my sleeve around my hand and beat at it, tearing the largest supports free. It was tough, like sturdy strands of woven silk, and sticky to boot; once the web cleaved to my sleeve, I couldn’t peel it off again. If I kept trying to tear it away by hand, I was going to end up in a cocoon myself.

“Help would be fantastic,” I said.

Suzy whipped out a serrated hunting knife. It made short work of the tendons holding the cocoons to the rest of the web.

The two big masses fell to the ground.
Thump, thump
.

“Gimme that knife,” I said, holding my hand up.

She did.

I hacked through one pod, and then the other. I realized what they were about halfway through the first one. Tried not to think about it too much. Just kept cutting away, revealing white t-shirts, jeans, and colorless faces.