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Page 31.
 Amela Brunvik had better plans. She picked up her net-bag and slung it over one shoulder. Her prison jumpsuit was just a little more torn and tattered, but it was a sturdy garment meant to be worn for years. On one arm, she carried the merk rifle.
Amela made for high ground. She had no idea where she was, and her best bet was to overnight in those looming cliffs with wicked, fluted faces glowering over the sea.
Amela climbed up an increasingly steep sandy slope that turned into gravel and then solid rock as she kept climbing. In the last daylight, she clambered over boulders lying around the foothills, where they had tumbled over the eons, to be blasted and polished by occasional ocean storms and daily grinding by the dust-laden wind.
She paused often to smell, to listen, to grimace as she tried to fathom the unknown air around her. All she got was the faint buzz of macab insects. She caught a dull, garbage smell of desert tainted by as many dead or dying and defecating little bugs as there were stars in the night sky.
The last few effortful paces, she used the built-in red spectrum light of the rifle, sometimes switching to visible light, as she located a hollow in the cliff facing. Sheltered by stone and krummholz on either side, she crawled in backwards and oriented herself facing outward, with the rifle across her knees. On her left, she packed the net bag to lean on it as she slept. She took one last sip from a ceramic canteen. Smelling water, a sword plant in the crevace between stone and sand to her right leaned over and snatched at her hand. She clubbed it with her rifle butt, and stitched a short burst of whackers down the line to kill about six of the carnivorous plants. Too exhausted to run any further, she fell into a deep sleep.
In painful dreams, a colorless woman with snakes in her hair danced in a cave to a throbbing beat. The colorless woman had Denla's beautiful face, but a spider's body, crawling toward a paralyzed Amela seeking to sting, to poison, and to devour her. The page turned, as it does in crazy-scary dreams, and the spider-Denla resolved into a young human or humanian whose lithe blue body danced some immemorial genesis dream of how human kind came to be, and how its frail but wily men and women survived in a hostile universe. Solan and Solanalos beckoned to Amela—the man's wife and the boy's mother. Nally was a child again, crying for his momma. She thought about her escape, and how she would reach them somehow someday, across the aching light years: Hang on, sweetheart, I'll get there, I'll hold you, my baby...mommy make it all better…
As the pages of her dream kept turning, Amela herself became the spider, the avenger, the killer, as she stalked on sixteen long, articulated legs through snowy Aerag-78. Everyone was asleep. Spider Amela had two faces that looked at each other. One was Amela's and the other was Denla's. The twin-faced spider flowed silently along, leaving thousands of sleeping POWs unharmed but bringing the death sting to any trusties, Sekurita, and other traitors she found. She rippled silently onward, killing as many as she could before crossing the camp's boundaries and racing across the snow, toward the equator, seeking the unforgiving sun.
During the night—she heard, but did not wake—came a low booming sound. The sound spread like viscous fluid over the planet. In the deep spectrum of sound, its higher notes seemed as if they wanted to tear the very atmosphere itself like giant hands ripping a thick veil. Its lower notes seemed to come from the core of the planet itself, the hadean core of molten star-heat mixed with the heaviest of elements.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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