Deep Ark 6 - chapter 6

                                    Chapter 6

                               Page 67

Loxosceles reclusa. Better known as the brown recluse spider.

It has a distinctive violin-shaped marking on its brown, hairy body, which makes it a member of the fiddleback spider clan. Although, as my dad told me once, it's easy to mistake it for a wolf spider or some other brown, hairy variety.

In fact, there's only one absolutely sure way to identify a genuine Loxosceles reclusa — count its eyes. A recluse has six eyes, arranged in pairs. Other spiders have eight. And you need to be very sure you count those eyes correctly. Why? Because the bite of the brown recluse can make your flesh rot on your body. And here I am with a hundred or so of them crawling over my face!

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I'd gone tearing off down tunnel seven, running on instinct more than anything else.

The lighting in that part of DA6 is deliberately dimmer than elsewhere. Octo Serp told me that once. Helps the spiders to breed or something. That guy is like a spider himself.

The cage doors were all closed because I'd flicked the switches back at the power station, but it hardly mattered. The arachnids had left their little prison cells a long time ago. All along the tunnel, I saw movement — crawling, running, climbing.

More than once I hit something dangling — a fat body or a web. I felt the splat and just smeared it off my face mask with a gloved hand. Sometimes I heard crunching and squishing sounds beneath my boots. I just kept moving.

There was a time I hated wearing the puke-coloured protective suit — not then.

My face mask was splattered with spider gunge, like a dirty windshield. It was getting harder and harder to see, but there was no way I

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was about to take it off to clean it. Then a large spider — the size of a baseball glove — swung down at me. I swatted at it as I ran and its fat, hairy body plopped into my face mask.

Splat!

A huge, yellowish smear of spider guts blurred the last of my vision.

That's when I stumbled. To make matters worse, that section of the tunnel was almost entirely dark. I knew why. It houses the nocturnal spiders.

I was on my knees, frantically trying to scrape my mask clear of spider goo. But, with my gloved hands already covered with gunk, I was having no luck. There was only one thing for it. I had to take off my protective mask and gloves and wipe them clean. If only I'd had a rag or an old T-shirt.

In the gloom, I suddenly caught sight of something white lying on the tunnel floor, where the roadway met the wall. A discarded cloth. Perfect!

Without thinking, I reached over with my bare hands and scooped it up. It was soft to the touch, kind of like cotton wool. But, as I held it, I

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felt something else. The white stuff was moving. I dropped it fast.

It was a gigantic spider egg sac!

The little spiderlings I had disturbed were swarming all over the place. They were small and brown, that much I could tell. I peered up at the nearest cage. In the dim light, I could just make out the typed label slotted into a holder at the front. As I read what it said, my heart began to pound.

Loxosceles reclusa. Brown recluse spider.

Of all the spiders to mistake for a rag!

The cage was empty. That would explain the egg sac on the ground. Correction, egg sacs. Looking around, I saw that there were hundreds of them.

Which meant that the mums of all those eggs must be nearby ...

That's when something dropped into my hair.

I leapt to my feet, flicking at the top of my head. My face mask was lying somewhere in the darkness, along with my gloves. Without them, I was prey to one of the most poisonous spiders on the planet!

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I felt another sensation in my hair ... then something on my bare neck ... something crawling over my ear ... across my face!

I swatted and smacked and shook my head like a madman. Every time I flicked one spider away, another dozen dropped down on me. The whole ceiling was alive with them — big, leggy brutes.

"Count the eyes;' Dad would've said, "then you'll know if they're venomous!" Fat chance of that. I'm not sticking around to calmly count arachnid eyeballs!

Anyway, by now, I'm pretty much covered with brown recluses. It's all I can do to keep them out of my eyes and mouth. At any moment, I'm expecting to feel the sharp pain of a fang bite. My arms are still flicking and waving like crazy, but I'm fast running out of steam. I'm drained, exhausted ... alone.

I sink to the ground and, of all the things imaginable at this moment, I think of my mum. I wish she were here. She would've known what

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to do. My arms flop wearily to the ground. I've had enough. My eyes close ...

I don't even hear the jeep approaching.

It isn't until the bright light of its headlamps burns through my closed eyelids that I realise someone is there. The next thing I know, there is a withering jet of white, a torrential hiss, and I'm lost in a cloud of smoke.

My rescuer is blasting the spider swarm with what looks like a fire extinguisher. When the smoke clears, a hand reaches down and grabs me by the collar. I'm lifted to my feet, coughing and spluttering, and dragged back to the jeep.

There, in the blinding glare of the headlights, I'm swatted clear of any remaining spiders. A few more bursts of the extinguisher take care of the stubborn ones entangled in my hair.

I'm still blinking in the light, trying to see who's come to my rescue. Is it Old Joe? Hammerhead?

A shadowy figure steps between me and the lights and I hear a voice. My heart almost stops.

"Rom, what the blazes are you doing out here at DA6?"

It's my dad!