AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re right,” she says after a brief moment of struggling with the notion of what I’m asking. “But if it involves going outside, I’d rather not.”
“We can take your car,” I tell her. “That’s a kind of inside.”
“Alright,” she says, frowning. “But only because this is an emergency.”
5
Tessie’s car is a nifty little bubble-shaped thing with a faded red paint job. It’s the sort of car that annoys people in parking lots because they think a space is open, but nope, Tessie is there. She has disabled parking tags because of her gunshot injury, and a special carseat for the dog in the front passenger seat. That means I’m stuck in the back of the car with my knees up to my chin.
When we get to where we’re going, things have changed. There is now a large web strung out all the way in front of the pair of shipping containers that bookend their little hidey-hole. Ordinarily, I’d be creeped out by the sight of such a massive web, but because I’m now passingly familiar with the creature who made it, it’s now even more creepy.
“What kind of fucking spider made that?” Tessie exclaims.
“The annoyed kind that doesn’t like people very much,” I say.
“It’s getting dark,” Tessie comments. She looks uncomfortable. I don’t blame her.
“They don’t come out in the daytime.”
Tessie glances over at me with suspicious brown eyes. “Listen. I thought…”
Before she can finish her sentence, Obigor starts barking ferociously, snarling and yapping with hackles raised. He is facing the wrong direction entirely, but I appreciate his effort.
“Alright. So. What are we looking for? This doesn’t feel like a terribly inhabited sort of place.”
“Just wait. We need to get around this thing…”
I start trying to clear away the spider web. This, I quickly discover, is a Very Big Mistake. Normal spider webs are slightly sticky and somewhat gather up together in a gooey kind of way when you put your hand through them. The fibers of this web are about double the thickness of a typical one, and they are much, much stickier. It is like having put my hand into some spun goo, a sort of biological slime. When I try to pull it away, it does tear a little, but it also gets tangled around my hand.
“Ah, fuck!”
I lift my leg, I don’t even know why, it’s kind of a pulling away reflex, but somehow my toe gets caught in the lower part of the web, and then my knee. I put my full weight against the webbing, but all that happens is a brief low bounce and then a rebound which sticks a lot more of me to the strands. I twist myself to try to get free, which only succeeds in getting me more wound up as fresh bits of web stick to new parts of my body.
Tessie is watching me with what I’m just going to call a dour and unimpressed expression. Obigor is still barking in the wrong direction. I continue to fight the web, worsening my situation until I am nearly entirely upside down at a 45 degree angle.
“Are you alright?” She asks the question more as a formality than anything. Clearly I am not alright. Not even remotely.
“Tessie?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
She lies directly to my face. She has her phone out and I am 99.999% sure she is filming my predicament.
“Don’t fucking put that on social media,” I warn her. “I don’t give a shit how many likes you might get for it, this is top secret.”
“Oh, so, live-streaming this would be a problem?”
I’m pretty sure she’s kidding, but just in case she isn’t, I pull the fingers. Both hands. Only one of them can really be seen from her angle.
“Fucking help me, Tessie.”
“How am I supposed to help you?” She asks the question very practically. “Does me getting trapped in the same web help you somehow?”
“JUSTICE!” I yell for the mothman.
