Page 14 of Backpacking through Bedlam

It seemed like a terribly isolated way to live. I couldn’t judge too harshly, though; I hadn’t been much better. For fifty years, I’d been forming social bonds only when I couldn’t escape them, preferring to run free and unfettered in my unending quest for my missing husband.

Well, it was ending now. If we were lucky, it would end today, when we met the locals and they were willing to let our strays settle here. We were almost finished. We were almost, after all these years and all these miles, finally on the road home.

Distances can be deceiving. The termite mound had looked large and distant, maybe a day’s walk, maybe more. After we’d gone what I estimated to be roughly three miles across the fields, I amended my estimates to “fucking massive” and “only about ten miles away.” We kept moving.

Some of the children were hungry, and their parents fed them from their stores, not wanting to stop and forage for food in a strange place, and not with that unnerving, white-wrapped forest so close to hand. The individual trees were visible now, surprisingly Earth-like in form and array, and wrapped in sheets of gauzy white that looked way too much like webbing.

Maybe this was one of the giant spider dimensions. It would make sense to have two megafauna worlds stacked right on top of one another. Unlike prime-time science fiction shows, where every episode is an excuse to give the special effects team a new challenge and the fandom a new obsession, real dimensions tend to assemble in clusters of similarity. Find one dimension where the dominant life form has six limbs and has repurposed one of them into wings, find three more before you get back to something with a more quadrupedal floor plan. And so on.

(And yeah, sometimes I’m saying “dimension” when what I mean is “world,” because not every world in a dimension can be accessed from every other dimension, and we’re limited to the worlds we can reach when we’re starting from Earth. Each dimension has as many worlds as ours does if not more, and for the most part, we can’t use this form of travel to replace spaceships. Which is almost certainly for the best. If you start from Earth, every “dimension” is effectively represented by a single world, and if that sounds confusing, well. There’s a reason Naga was a professor of making people understand how all this stuff works. He was also a traitorous, lying bastard, and I’m glad he’s dead, but that doesn’t mean the man wasn’t wicked smart.)

I eyed the forest as we walked, hands on the grips of my guns, unable to keep from tensing every time I heard a sound. Since the mice were running quiet catechisms from my backpack, that meant I was basically tense all the time, which was a sadly familiar state. The children were staying remarkably quiet, but this many people will make a lot of noise even when they try not to.

As if triggered by that thought, some of the infants started to sniffle, then to outright wail. It should have seemed like a good thing. They were feeling healthy enough to cry. When all this started, they had been too weak and malnourished to do much more than cling to their caretakers and stare at the world. Now they cried and fussed and did all the other things I expected babies to do, and that was wonderful, that was amazing, that was exactly what we wanted from babies . . . only maybe not right now.

I fell back to pace Sally. “I haven’t seen any wildlife, and it’s making me nervous.”

“Maybe we’re scaring them off, what with being a big procession and all.”

“Or maybe something ate everything that was worth eating.”

Sally gave me a measuring look. “What are you thinking?”

I didn’t want to say it out loud. Not only because speaking a thing into being can sometimes make it happen: because Thomas was still running a constant translation charm to keep us from being a traveling recreation of the Tower of Babel, and the last thing I wanted to do was spark a panic. I made a hopefully evocative gesture with my hands instead.

Sally blinked. Her eyes narrowed. “You really think so?”

“I think it would make sense after the land of giant rodents, and it would explain that forest.”

“I’ll go talk to the boss.” And she sped up, moving through the crowd with practiced grace.

Adjusting to life on Earth was going to be difficult for Thomas. Adjusting to life without the need to run from danger every five minutes was going to be hard for me. Both those things were likely to be borderline impossible for Sally. She’d been seventeen when she made her deal with the crossroads. She’d spent her adult life so far fighting to survive in a hostile, non-Earth world. Readjusting to running water and plentiful food and sleeping without setting guards was going to be real, real hard.

I looked forward to it. For all three of us. All we had to do was get there.

Some of our people were drifting closer to the tree line than I liked. I frowned and stopped walking. This wasn’t just me being paranoid. This was me having common sense. What does a silent, cobweb-draped forest have in common with a trap?

Absolutely everything. Because it is a trap.

Something moved in the cottony shadows of the trees. It didn’t move like a mammal. I stiffened, opening my mouth to yell.

I wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t have been fast enough—nothing human could have. By the time I started to shout, the spider that had been stalking on the other side of the trees was lunging into the open, grabbing one of the men and dragging him, kicking and screaming, into the shadows. The people he’d been walking with stopped dead and stood there in open-mouthed, frozen terror.

I bolted toward them, drawing my revolvers. “Get out of the way!” I snapped. “Get to safety!” With a series of screams, they bolted back toward the group as I ducked into the shadows on the other side of the wood.

Under the trees, that cottony webbing was everywhere, sticky and all-enveloping. Nothing moved. I narrowed my eyes, peering into the shadows. The man the spider had taken was already gone, most likely dead before he understood what had happened to him. It occurred to me, abruptly, just how bad an idea it was to follow a giant spider into a nest of giant spiders. Were these spiders the solitary kind, or the kind that formed massive social units? Either way, I probably shouldn’t be in here.

Aware of how exposed my position was, I took a step backward, just as I heard the distinctive, crinkling cellophane sound of flames off to one side. I glanced over. A sheet of fire was leaping along the spiderwebbing, quickly consuming it. Any spiders in the area would be distracted for at least a little while. I spun around and bolted back into the open, nearly colliding with Sally.

She grabbed my arm, pulling me farther from the trees. “Don’t give the boss heart attacks because you think it’s funny,” she snapped. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, letting her pull me along. “I was trying to get that man back before something happened to him.”

“You mean something worse than getting grabbed by a fuck-off enormous spider?” Sally let go of my arm. “Don’t know what kind of places you’ve been hanging out, princess, but where I come from, a spider that big means somebody’s dead.”

“Where you come from, spiders that big only happen in horror movies,” I said.

Thomas was trotting toward us, fingers still smoking. “Alice!”