The cave is dark and wet; it's warm in a way she hasn't felt in years. The downward slope takes them down to a point; the beam of Tiff's flashlight warns her that, up ahead, the path will get a little more narrow and the squeeze will be a little tighter.
When the path levels and the steadily panning beam of Tiff's flashlight (and Matt and Drew's behind her) reveals the walls themselves, she can see toolmarks and burns along the stone. This place was carved out of the ground, partially— an opening widened by pick and claws and explosions, a place of desperately needing to descend deeper, to get to whatever's at the bottom.
Something's coming. She isn't sure what. She can hear it echoing off the walls, can feel it in the pit of her sloshing stomach. Something's following. Something is watching. Something is going to find them. Something is skittering along the walls and the stone above them, swinging on bone fingers from moss patch to mold patch. Tiff swings her flashlight upward, convinced that, at the front of the group and seasoned as she is, she's just being paranoid.
She isn't.
There's a spider up there— or a facsimile of one. It's made entirely of bone and rot. Its eyes are glistening rocks covered with algae; its mandibles drip some sort of green-black swirl swirl of necromantic rotting venom. She swings the beam back, then points up to it with one finger. "Anyone got a shoe?"
"What the fuck is that?" Drew's voice rises to a quiet fever pitch.
Right. He doesn't like spiders. She's heard him shrieking in the shower. He would probably like this one less if he knew it were made of bone in a way he couldn't rationalize.
"It's a normal spider," she lies. "Nothing more. I wish I had a gun."
"For the spider?"
Matt unclips the holster and hands it slowly to Tiff. He definitely got the memo she didn't send. "Here. It should be loaded."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah. I brought extra."
She accepts it gently. It isn't the kind of pistol she's used to. It's a revolver with odd, pearlescent grip. Breakaway. Neat. She doesn't know much about gun terminology, just how they work— but she thinks this is neat as hell. A sword isn't great for killing a spider. Honestly, neither is a gun. She checks the safety, unloads it, and sticks it in her bag's side pocket. This was a stupid idea, but she's kind of a stupid person.
Slowly, excruciatingly, she reaches down to untie her boot. She remembers the zipper on the side. She tends not to use it— it's broken— but it's going to be easier to kill it if she can get that bonus surprise round. She's no rogue, but she knows the importance of a good sneak attack. She gently, slowly takes the shoe from her foot—
And she strikes.
She smashes the sole against the spider above her head and it squishes beneath, delicate and jagged bones breaking under sturdy rubber and body falling down past and around it. Cave water seeping into her star-spangled sock, she raise her other foot and stomps it. There's no way in hell she's letting that thing come back to life. Not here, not now, not with Drew in the area.
More skittering. She can hear it behind the three of them, coming closer. She whirls around, spots movement, and puts two and two together. "Oh, shit. Guys, there's a whole wave of them."
At the back of the group, Matt swings his flashlight around and shines it down the hole they've climbed down. Sure enough, there it is. Hundreds of little bone spiders, dripping venom from their mouths, approaching quicker than they should be able to. Delicate and amazing and definitely here to kill them, the bone spiders approach.
"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.
That's stupid bullshit, that it got on him. Another falls on Tiff's head and crawls down her face, but she largely ignores the uncomfortable tickling of feet on flesh and the pricking on bones catching on uneven pores and the metal frame of her glasses. She grabs the spider from her cousin's shoulder, pats Drew in the same spot, and nonverbally urges him to fight instead. They need Drew here and not frozen in place.
She crushes one spider in her hand, taken from slightly damp black shit sleeve and leather breastplate strap. Bones give way under her fingers as she ignores the other on her chest between her collarbone and one of her ribs.
It's an odd pain, bones biting into her. The venom is worse. It starts coursing almost immediately, tearing through her veins like vegetable oil dripping down the side of a hot pan. She squeaks around the metal between her teeth, then smacks the spider through her shirt until it dies. It takes the firm, frantic smacks, but the damage is already done.
Well, that isn't great. At least Matt and Drew appear to be making some headway. At least, she thinks they are.
She looks again, through the sudden haze blurring her vision: they are. Another shot from Matt takes out a chunk of them. His eyes steeled, nothing about him fazed or panicking, he takes out another large chunk with some well-shot balls. Drew, terrified and enraged as he may be, though, seems to be doing way more damage.
She tucks the gun away, spits the flashlight into her hand, and yells, "Matt! Hit them! That's going to kill them easier than more of what you're doing!"
He shoots her a quick, confused salute, adjusts his grip, and brings the butt of the shotgun down on the spiders in front of him like he's churning some old-fashioned butter. Tiff adjusts her own grip on the flashlight, remembering how this and a homemade bomb were the only weapons she had back in March. It was a different piece of glass over the bulb back then— but it's still the same sturdy metal body, and she's going to put it to good use.
It's bloody work. It's stupid and frantic and tedious. But they get it done, until all that's left is a pile of bones and two more bites on Tiff's arm and hand, venom in her veins, sweat all over the three of them.
It's a wet cave. She knows that now. And if there's one thing she knwos about wet caves, it's that they're hard to escape.
She takes in a slow, steady breath, one hand ready to sink her down the wall at the first signal of swooning. "Nobody else got bit, right?
"No, none— I didn't." Drew takes in a breath of his own, his barbarian-like rage subsiding a little bit without any enemies to fight. His chest still heaves. (She really has to stop thinking about all of this in terms of Pathfinder mechanics when she's dying. It's a really bad habit.)
Matt shakes his head by way of answering the question. "What do you mean, anyone else? You didn't get bit, did you?"
"Oh, I definitely got bit. Three whole times. I know you guys—" And there's the signal. She takes a seat on the ground. "I know they scraped you up pretty bad so, Matt, you could try to take care of it with your— You could take care of it with your portable first aid kit, while I try to whip up some sort of magi-science antidote from what I have on me. You don't have a mortar and pestle, do you?"
"No, why the hell would I—"
"That's fine. I can use one of these weird mouse skull fragments. It's better than nothing." She grabs one from near her. It probably isn't great that she feels so entirely disconnected from her own arm. It'll be fine, though. She can do this.
She pushes her glasses up into her hair; she takes some of the stuff from her bag, grows impatient with how slow the process of what she's doing is, and dumps everything out onto the ground. Three ray gun cartridges, some batteries, the weird secondary magazine-shaped battery pack for her lightning gun, and bottle after bottle of pills hits the ground among other items she definitely doesn't need right now. Ibuprofen, the stuff she was working on for Denny (and still hasn't finished), a hopeful suppressant for Kay's weird cravings that didn't work, some weird shit she made under Dr. Deseret just for fun, the healing reagents— there has to be something here that can purge her veins of the poison, right? This is close enough to whatever Drake does and what comes so naturally to Eddy; it's just a workaround she has become incredibly familiar and semi-adept at. This is fine. She opens up two pills from one bottle, dumps them into the mouse skull, and adds powder from others.
She looks up at Matt, feeling the clock tick ever down and down to dying. She asks, voice weaker than she would like, "Do you have Gatorade?"
He's in the middle of patching up Drew's arm. He reaches into one pouch on his belt, produces a small bottle of grape Gatorade (how silly, considering that she doesn't want to die) and hands it back to her without a word.
She nods, regards the powder in the mouse skull and the Powerade in her other hand to wash it down with. "Bottoms up, I guess."
She drinks it, down the hatch in two quick drinking motions. She wipes her mouth with the back of one sweaty, spider-bit hand. "Now that's the grape flavor I crave-or."
Drew, who wasn't looking, clocks the color of the liquid and frowns at her. "If you die out here, so help me God—"
"There are exactly zero grapes in grape Gatorade." Her hand throbs gently, but her throat feels fine. "See? I'm not choking or anything. I think we have to give it a few seconds to kick in so we can see whether or not it works. It's— Dr. Deseret helped me on some of these. They absorb and disperse faster than other stuff, so we'll see. In a few minutes, I'll either be perfectly fine or incredibly dead, so I guess we'll see."
"We'll see, indeed." Matt turns, still on his haunches. "Let me see your hand and wherever else you were bit, so I can bandage it and do first aid and shit while we wait, just in case."
"I don't want to take off my shirt, though."
"I've seen you without a shirt on before. This is medical. if you got bit under there—"
"I did, that was the first one."
"Then I'm going to have to see, Tiff. Quit being so stubborn about it."
"Fuck you!"
"Fuck you!" He takes her hand and turns it over so he can see the back and one of the bites. "This is weird as hell. Why is it already turning green?"
"Necromancy, perhaps. Probably. I would assume so, at least, since they were animated the same way as the bone creature."
"I'm sorry, but that's dumb as hell." He pauses, in words only, considers something. "Has it kicked in yet?"
"I mean— maybe? I don't seem dead yet, so I don't know." Her mouth feels dry suddenly. She pops the lid of the Gatorade off and takes another swig. That doesn't hit the spot. Why the hell does she suddenly want milk? Another second passes. She looks down at the mouse skull on her knees, considers it. She shouldn't. That's an easy way to get sick.
Her hands aren't really her, though, and neither is her mouth. When it comes down to it, she has such little control over either. She pops the broken skull into her mouth; she chews and swallows it before she has the presence of mind to stop herself.
Right in front of her, Matt gives her an entirely bewildered look. "Tiff, what the hell?"
She smiles weakly because she can't think of anything else to do. Throat shredded from the shards of bone, she offers,"Well, to answer your question— I think it worked?"
"We're keeping an eye on you, Tiff."
Behind him, standing with his back to the scene, Drew nods. "Both of us."
She flaps her hand while Matt bandages her wrist bite. "Oh, please. We're barely in here. I guarantee that I'm going to get hurt worse."
"That's not reassuring. You get that, right?"
"Come on, Drew. I've never actually died out here."
Affixing medical tape to hold the gauze in loose place, Matt shakes his head. "I don't feel like incurring Aunt Esther's wrath."
"I'm not a damsel. I killed the—"
"You killed the nightmare king. We know. We heard."
"And we're not saying you're a damsel, Tiff. Don't put words in our mouths." Drew turns to look at her a little. "We know you're not. But— We know you would step in to do the same for us, and we're not about to let you get killed. There's nothing anti-feminist about making sure your cousin doesn't die in a hole in the ground."
"Well, when you put it that way..." She sighs. "I still don't like it, but I get it."
"Good. I'm glad." Matt pats her wrist like the roof of a car. (She winces.) "Now lift up your shirt."