Beach Day

51: Tiff Munches The Bones

"Shit! Go." Matt pushes on Drew's shoulder.

This isn't great. Drew seems to be having the same reaction he did before— shaking hands, falling into a pattern of hyperventilating, almost stuck to the spot— and Tiff knows that isn't great. Even as she uses his shoulder as a way to prop herself up while she hops up into her boot, she assesses it and knows: she needs a way to snap him out of it, if he can't do it himself.

Tiff pops up to her toes and whispers in his ear, "Hey, Drew. Quit looking at the undead spiders. We have to go."

He nods.

"Breathe, pelase." She grabs his hand for a second to tug him along as she runs, up until the point he throws off her hand.

Oh. Right. The rage. She should have known. She lets go and lets him push past her in the narrow cavern so he can take the front. He's angry enough— she can see it in his set jaw and his steeled eyes— that she doesn't want to get in his way. The bat in his hand seems a little more dangerous than it did before; the way he mutters, under his breath, about goddamn spiders that don't make any goddamn sense helps that particular image.

Feet behind them— tens, dozens— Matt seems to have figured out the same thing that she has. They're not going to be able to outrun these things. They're on the walls, the ceiling, coming closer and closer and ever closer.

No way. No way is she going to let one of these things touch her. Or bite her.

She reloads the gun. She expected one large bone creature. She didn't expect three hundred tiny, slightly-different goddamn bone creatures to come after her and her cousins. A pang of worry hits her in the chest. Is Andy okay? Is he also going to get overtaken by a wave of skeletal spiders? Is he going to get bit? Is he going to be okay?

She thinks rationally for a second. If the three of them are drawing all the attention to themselves, there's no way Andy is in danger. All the rational thought in the world doesn't stop that weird, protective alarm from going off in her head.

Matt takes the first shot. Feed, chamber, lock, fire: it snaps her out of the quick older sister spiral and back to the present. Right. The spiders are real and an imminent threat. He pumps the action again reloads— another shot.

Down the tunnel, Tiff can hear Drew screech to a stop, tennis shoes squeaking on the wet floor like skin on a waxed basketball court. Footsteps approach at the end of his about face.

There isn't time for her to wait for him to come back. There's a spider climbing up the barrel of Matt's shotgun and one climbing up the jagged, semi-curved ceiling to drop down onto him from some sticky green web-like substance. It's definitely not spider's silk.

She finishes loading the six chambers, slaps the gun back together, cocks the hammer— goddamn single action firearms! Why did Matt think this was a good idea? She aims for the spiders above his head out of strategy and spite. Three in a row, at least, are shattered by the projectile. Maybe more. It's hard to count when she can barely see because her flashlight is in her teeth. That isn't a great place for it.

She feels the spider drop from the ceiling onto her head before she can see it. And, before she can react, the whiff of a bat going through her hair and not her skull whacks it against the wall, turning it to nothing but snake-eaten mouse bones. (Or maybe the mouse just dies. Tiff doesn't know. She wasn't there for it.)

He swings more, wedged between Tiff and the wall, trying to bring it down on a small cohort still skittering across the floor. He misses, hits stone with metal— freezes as a spider climbs from the adjacent wall to his shoulder.