School Nathaniel Hardman (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📖

Jeremiah made a final scooting, wriggling effort and got himself under the spider’s belly.

The beast eventually calmed down, and then it lowered itself for Lori to climb on, nearly giving Jeremiah a panic attack. Finally, he heard his wife’s voice from above. “All right. Ready? Are you comfortable?”

He almost laughed. He was pinned to the underside of a giant, alien spider, his face pressed up against the rough hairs and the weird ridges that smelled like rotten spinach and were, for some horrible reason, WET. His body was pressing against bumps and body structures he didn’t even want to think about. And his legs were bent at such an awkward angle that he feared he might be doing real damage to them.

No, he was not comfortable.

But as Lori had said, they needed to go, and to get his kids back, he would suffer worse. “Yes,” he growled out through clenched teeth, “I’m good. Let’s go.” And with a lurch, they did.

The next hour was a blur. He heard screams and car horns, sometimes in the distance, sometimes close, and he didn’t know if they were for the spider of for something else. He caught snatches of Lori’s voice sometimes and knew that she was having trouble steering. Once he heard a gunshot. By the time they finally stopped, he felt exhausted, totally wrung out.

Above him, Lori whispered, “We’re at the blockade. Are you ready?”

He pulled the detonator out of his sleeve. “Ready. Here we go.” He pushed it. There was just enough time for him to worry that the device wouldn’t have enough range, and their plan was a bust, and then a boom sounded.

Jeremiah had placed the firework cache on the opposite side of the blockade in a streambed he HOPED no one would be near. He couldn’t worry about that now. He felt the spider moving, and from the glimpses he could get through the fur, he knew they were passing through the blockade now. He heard shouting. About the fireworks, he hoped.

“Hey, someone stop that spider!” This brought out a cry from Lori above, and suddenly, the spider accelerated. More shouting, and now, Jeremiah really began to sweat. Now they were going to get shot. Or if they somehow made it through the blockade without getting shot, they were going to catch on fire in the no-man’s land around the castle.

More explosions, and bigger, and Jeremiah could hear, could sense, the men’s attention turning away from them. Thank you, long fuses, he thought.

They were almost through the blockade, and now his hands twitched to the knots, wanting to bail off before it was too late. Talking to Lori, he had been so SURE that crossing the parking lot on a spider would protect them. He had shown her all the clips of the spiders and the aliens walking across the lot while all things from Earth burned. All these assurances ran through his head now and rang hollow, insane. How could he have believed this would work?

And then the spider was through the blockade and running full-tilt across the parking lot toward the castle, and Jeremiah felt nothing warmer than the Georgia autumn air blowing past his face. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

The spider stopped. Jeremiah could see the garbage pile at its feet. Perfect.

He had watched the castle for weeks, and he knew this place, this side door, was their best chance for getting into the castle. It was the door that opened the most often, the door about which the aliens seemed most casual. He was pretty sure it was the kitchen.

Lori’s hand reached over the side of the spider, holding out the tranquillizer pistol for him. He took it, took a deep breath, and yanked on the release knot of the rope.

The rope supporting his head went slack, but nothing else did. He muttered savagely as he pulled the knife from his sleeve and began to cut. The ropes around his body snapped, and his back and head dropped to the ground.

His legs were still tied to the spider.

Still muttering, he cut the last of the ropes and finally scrambled around the garbage pile to the door. That had worked a lot better in his head. He tried the door.

It wasn’t locked.

“Come on,” Jeremiah waved to his wife. Beyond her, he could see soldiers with raised guns pointing directly at them.

“Jeeze!” he exclaimed, and he grabbed her hand and yanked her from the spider to the door. He burst into the castle waiting for the sound of guns or the bite of bullets, but they didn’t come, and he slammed the door behind them.

In front of him, holding a basket of vegetables, looking extremely surprised, stood an alien.

Jeremiah raised the tranquillizer gun and fired. The feathered dart bounced harmlessly off an invisible shield a foot from the man. “Dang it!” Jeremiah cried as he dropped the gun and launched himself at the alien.

He had had three theories about why bullets didn’t hit the aliens, and it looked like they were all wrong. So much wasted effort finding a weapon that didn’t use gun powder, that didn’t intend to cause harm, and that launched plastic projectiles.

In the second it took Jeremiah to close the distance with the alien, he wondered if he would even be able to touch the man.

He could.

He hit the man at a run in a full-on football tackle, his shoulder in the alien’s belly as the two went down. They hit the ground in an explosion of vegetables, and the alien slammed his elbow down on Jeremiah’s head. Jeremiah jerked back reflexively.

The alien punched hard, twice, directly on Jeremiah’s nose. He felt the pop, and his eyes filled with tears, but he ignored them and started punching wildly at the man.