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Chapter 55 – Desert Fury“Crap.” That was Jack.
“Oh, holy fuck.” That was Jo.
“Eww!” That was Alex, even if it didn’t sound very superheroic.
Jack asked, “Do tarantulas by any chance have two claws on the bottom of each foot?”
Dr. Deemer said, “Yes, although some species have three claws. They’re extendable. They use them primarily to get a grip on surfaces, like when they’re climbing.”
Jack asked, “And how does a tarantula eat, say, a really teeny mammal it catches?”
Dr. Deemer said, “Well, it doesn’t have teeth like a mammal. It has to extrude digestive juices from its chelicerae to dissolve the flesh of the prey, which it then sucks up. Despite rather large chelicerae and pedipalps, its mouth is quite tiny.”
Jack sarcastically said, “Great. Just great. Well, at least now we know how the cows got skeletonized.” He turned to Riley and Jo. “Get the chopper in the air. Start a search pattern centered on this house, and look for anything. This sucker could be the size of a house by now. And keep an eye out for the giant cricket, too.” He turned back to the doctor. “Okay, doc, another question. Male or female?”
“What?”
“The tarantula. Male or female?”
Dr. Deemer said, “One was male and one was female. But we kept them segregated. There is no chance the female was impregnated.”
Jack asked, “What do tarantulas do for a nest?”
Dr. Deemer said, “They’re diggers. They line the tunnel with silk.”
Riley said, “We saw a big cave with what we thought was mine spoil outside it. That’s a possible.”
Jack pushed, “And when they lay eggs, how many eggs?”
Riley groaned. “I know this one. My friend Pete had a pet tarantula when we were kids. The females lay between 50 and 2000 eggs, depending on species, and they guard it for about a month and a half. The female gets really territorial then.”
Dr. Deemer said, “These are Brachypelma. They would have clutches of 600 eggs at most.”
“Six hundred? No sweat!” Jack complained. “Doc, this thing is now big enough to eat entire herds of cattle at one sitting! Six hundred of these things could wipe humans off this continent!”
Riley and Jo made a dash for the chopper. Jack called out, “Get that GAU up and mounted!”
“Yes, sir!” Riley yelled back as they ran toward the helicopter.
Hanna must have noticed the look of puzzlement in Alex’s eyes, because she explained, “The GAU-2/A is a six-barreled gatling gun that has mounts for a craft like our Bell UH-1Y Venom.”
Jack stared coldly at Dr. Deemer. “Anything else you wanna tell us? Because I’m guessing you’re going to need a ton of medical help to keep you from turning into something as horrific as what Eric Jacobs ended up as before he finally died. You wanna see pictures? Miller and Lupo took some. Of the body you never bothered to identify.”
Dr. Deemer just flatly said, “There is no way you could have gotten past me to rampage through my private papers in my bedroom.”
Jack just looked at Grover and mouthed, “Good job.”
Jack said, “Okay, doc, we’re leaving. I highly recommend you come with us. We’re gonna go into town, warn Sheriff Codger, who won’t believe us even if you tell him, and then try to find your giant spider before it realizes the next big food source is Desert Rock.”
Professor Lee insisted, “A spider can’t grow to this size and still move! Or even lift its body off the ground.”
Jack said, “Maybe you could tell it that, so we don’t have to keep it from eating everything else within a couple hundred miles. Like the city of Phoenix.”
Dr. Deemer said, “It’s the radium in the serum. It’s changing the calcium biochemistries in the animals. That’s how it was able to grow to six feet across here in the lab and still be viable. The legs and joints are growing thicker and stronger, due to the radium-calcium interactions in the exoskeleton materials. The new compounds are lighter and stronger than the standard structures, with some unusual properties. Its feet are growing comparatively wider, to support its weight. It was exhibiting growth behaviors we’ve never seen before. I really don’t know how large it can grow.”
Jack made sure Alex and Hanna had their comm systems on and connected to the sat phone system Jack had, before they moved out of the building and took watch. Alex flew up to about four hundred feet, so she could see over the ridge way out north of the house, just in case. She knew she was too high to be in danger. But she was still really worried. Nobody else was safe, except probably Riley and Jo in the helicopter. Unless they ran into that desert cricket and it was the size of an elephant and it leapt up a few hundred feet in the air and knocked the helicopter out of the sky.
It took like half an hour to get Miss Clayton and Dr. Deemer packed and into Dr. Hastings’ car, and Alex spent the whole time flying in wide circles around the institute, hoping there wouldn’t be anything coming. By then, Dr. Deemer was gathering up the last of the papers with Grover and Professor Lee’s help, and riding in Graham’s car with Graham and Professor Lee and Grover and Jack.
Jack had Hanna hop into the rear seat of Dr. Hastings’ convertible, and they moved off toward the town with Alex flying overwatch.
“Finn to base. Finn to base. Come in, please.”
“Base here. Go on, Finn.”
“Spotted carcass of cricket. It looks emaciated, and it’s still the size of a buffalo. I’m guessing our threat found it and ate it. Moving north now to check out that cave, and … Oh, holy shit.”
In the background, Alex could hear the pilot and Jo really cursing. A lot.
“Finn to base. It’s … it must be at least a hundred fifty feet across. Making strafing run now with Lieutenant Lupo as door gunner.”
Alex flew above the cars as she listened. Over the comm system, she could hear a loud noise that was like someone ripping fabric, but in front of a megaphone.
“Finn to base. A thousand 7.62 rounds had no effect. Except now it’s really mad. Leading it west away from Desert Rock, because it appears to be after us even if it can’t reach us.”
“Base to Finn. You can’t go too far in that direction, or you’ll lead it to something else we don’t want spidered.”
“Roger that. We can lead it in circles for another few hours, but eventually we’ll have to head out and shut down.”
“Base to Finn. Super Hueys have an endurance of about three and a third hours. Confuse it for one hour. Then move at top speed and lose it, so you can get clear and get back to Luke AFB.”
“Roger that.”
Alex asked, “Terawatt to Finn. What’s its top speed?”
“Finn to Tera. Maybe fifty, sixty miles an hour.”
“Terawatt to base. Request permission to engage. I may not be as fast as a helicopter, but I don’t have an endurance limit like one, either.” Well, she didn’t think she had an endurance limit like a helicopter, but she’d never tried flying as fast as she could for maybe five hours straight.
There was a long pause before Jack finally came back. He sounded really unhappy, but he said, “Base to Terawatt. Permission granted. Do not get killed. I am a hundred percent serious on this. Base to Finn. Vector her in. And I swear, next time out, we are mounting rockets on that Venom. I will contact Luke and get more firepower up here ASAP.”
She almost asked ‘Luke who’ before she remembered they flew into Luke Air Force Base. Crud, had that been just a few hours ago?
She headed off in the direction Riley gave her, using her Terawatt phone as a compass and GPS unit. But pretty soon, she was out of range of Jack’s comm system, so she was pretty much on her own. In the middle of nowhere. And she was off to attack a giant spider the size of a warehouse. She shuddered again just thinking about that icky dead tarantula that was about six feet across. She hadn’t thought she was afraid of spiders, but she was definitely afraid of spiders the size of a building.
She guessed from the elapsed time on her phone that she had flown almost fifteen miles when she found the chopper and the spider.
Oh, crud, that thing was huge! It made the helicopter look like a tiny toy out of a Crackerjack box! It was enormous, and hairy, and scary, and just horribly gross. And it was moving like a big, dangerous spider. Her automatic reaction was to turn around and fly off as fast as she could. Or maybe to scream. She didn’t do either. But she thought about it.
The helicopter pilot was flying low and slow, teasing the spider into following it. Okay, ‘low’ meant about two hundred feet in the air, so it was out of range even when the spider waved one of its massive front legs up at the chopper, and ‘slow’ meant poking along at maybe fifty miles an hour, but that was low and slow for a helicopter Jack said could do over two hundred miles an hour in an emergency, and could go up thousands of feet.
The closer she got, the bigger it looked. Oh, crud, it was massive. Gigantic. It was covered in icky hairs and the hairs were as long as she was. It had enormous fangs that looked too big to use on anything except elephants and whales. And it was hideous.
She flew up behind the spider and gave it her biggest lightning blast. The energy lit up the whole area, and the spider convulsed.
Then it stopped and turned around to go after her. She hadn’t killed it. She hadn’t injured it. She hadn’t even slowed it down! “Oh, crud.”
It seemed to have a lot of trouble finding her. How come it could follow the helicopter but not see her?
Oh, wait. Science lessons. What did she know about spiders? Eight eyes, but not great vision. Lots of them hunted by touch. By feeling vibration or motion. It was probably following the helicopter by … by the downdraft the thing cranked out!
She had an idea.
She flew up to the helicopter while the spider froze and tried to locate her. The helicopter had just swooped up to maybe a thousand feet when she flew in to attack, so the spider might not be able to feel any downdraft anymore, either. She had no idea about its hearing or its sense of smell.
Jo was at the open side door with a huge gatling gun and a massive box of ammo. She gave Alex a thumbs-up as Alex flew in and grabbed a spare comm headset. Alex said, “Whoever moved this thing up? Good work. It’s probably tracking you by the downdraft and not the noise. I’ve got a plan. I’m gonna lure it off to that ridge over there, and then …”
Jo and Riley gave her a thumbs-up on her plan, so she went for it. She flew out of the chopper’s open door and headed right for the biggest, hairiest, scariest thing she had ever seen in her life.
Okay, giant-sized D’Lazza and Dark Willow were bigger and scarier than this bug. This was only the third-scariest thing she had ever seen. She could do this.
And what was wrong with her life that this was only the third scariest thing she’d ever seen?
She flew down until she was a hundred feet in front of the spider’s head, and she hit it with a big blast of lightning right in the eyes.
She flew backward as fast as she could. The spider reacted violently, charging at her and waving its front legs as much as it could. It had to keep putting the front legs down to move forward, though. She figured it couldn’t really move like it was used to, since it was way too big for its shape. And she was pretty sure she had destroyed half of its eyes. The other half probably wouldn’t be seeing anything but spots for a while.
The chopper flew past her, ‘dusting’ the spider and moving off toward the ridge. Jo fired her machine gun into the ground in little short bursts, so it was like something big stepping on the ground there. The spider froze and moved into a pretty darn scary posture as it prepared to attack whatever was making those vibrations.
And suddenly it rushed forward. Yikes! She flew straight up, and it rushed in the direction of the chopper, frantically trying to find whatever dinner was making those vibrations. The chopper led it right toward the ridge.
Alex zoomed past the helicopter and checked out the ridge. She found one spot that was perfect. It was maybe three hundred feet nearly straight up, with loose boulders scattered all the way to the top, and some really ginormous boulders at the top, just waiting for a big storm or something to knock them over. She set off a big flash of lightning to get the chopper moving her way.
Then it was all up to Jo and her really big gun. Jo kept putting little bursts of gunfire into the ground, luring the big spider right up to the edge of the ridge. Then she put some rounds into the steep slope, so the spider tried climbing up toward the ridgetop.
As soon as the thing was completely on the side of the ridge there, Alex blasted the heck out of the edge of the ridge, right where it was holding up some really huge rocks. And she got a rockslide going. The spider just shrugged off the first boulders that smashed into its legs, but in no time there were more boulders. Bigger boulders. And they knocked the spider down the steep slope, onto its back, where more boulders came down, pounding on its legs and its underside as it writhed angrily on its back.
When the rockslide finally stopped and all the dust settled, Alex could see the spider was in trouble. It was pinned on its back with tons and tons of boulders on it, and it looked like maybe three of its legs were buried under boulders. If it could get out of that, she was really going to be worried.
She flew back into the helicopter and grabbed a headset so she could talk and hear over the sound of the engines.
Riley said, “Good work, Tera. The colonel has some big munitions on the way, so we need to move back out of range.”
Alex said, “Works for me.”
Jo said, “When I get home, I’m killing every single bug in my backyard.”
Alex admitted, “Yeah, I’m thinking bug bomb for my house. Lots and lots of bug bomb.” Like her mom would let her do that, anyway.
The spider writhed helplessly for about half an hour, while Riley reported to Jack and then they waited impatiently in case the thing managed to work its way free.
But after what felt like a year, but was only thirty-seven minutes according to her phone, a squadron of jets came screaming their way from Luke Air Force Base. It was almost funny how the big, tough pilots went from ‘oh what are you wasting our important time on’ to ‘eeeeeeek it’s a spider!’
“Fuckin’ Chair Force weenies,” Jo muttered.
“You might want to turn off your mike before you say anything else, lieutenant,” Riley stiffly pointed out.
But the Air Force guys did their jobs, even if it was from thousands of feet up. First, a couple of missiles that pretty much turned the spider into spider chutney, and then enough napalm-y stuff to turn the entire thing into a giant pile of ashes.
Jo said, “Glad that’s got it.”
Riley said, “Except for checking out whether it laid six hundred giant spider eggs down in that tunnel and we’ve got a tidal wave of pony-sized hungry spider babies boiling up out of that hole we found.”
Alex shuddered.
The Super Huey flew back toward Desert Rock. And the more Alex thought about it, the more she knew how they were going to have to check that tunnel for spiders. It was going to have to be a Terawatt operation. Yuck. After this stupid incident, she was never going to be able to look at a spider again.
And why did Maggie Walsh have to be such a nightmare? Alex couldn’t imagine how awful it would be if Walsh was in the SRI now. She would probably be experimenting on Riley and Graham, and cutting up all the super-powered people like they were lab animals. Or worse. Considering what she did with guinea pigs and spider DNA, it could be way worse. Why didn’t that Professor Locke guy just kick her out of grad school and save the whole world a ton of problems? Other than the whole ‘she was probably his smartest grad student ever’ deal. Still, couldn’t he tell she was a crazed psychopath?