Salticidae (10 page)

In the water, Banga reached down to his
feet and lifted a wad of mud from the river bottom. He hurled it at the nearest hippo. Its head was under the water. In fact, Jack finally noticed, all their heads were under water.

The mud hit the hippo’s back but it did not stir.
He waited for it to rear up and attack. A beat passed with no movement at all.

Banga came back. “There are too few.”

Jack studied the calm scene. “Meaning?”

“Mean, I think this family is missing members. Usually the hippos are many but this is too small.”

“Could they have been scared away or just out foraging?”

“No, they stay in the water most of the time. They control the river here.” Banga now
bent down at the water’s edge and ran his hands through the water, rubbing the coppery water between his fingers.

Jack saw the red in the water before Banga could say anything. It was blood, for sure, but whether or
not that was out of sorts Jack wasn’t qualified to know.

“Something bad happened here,” Banga reiterated.

“Could just be poachers, right?” Derek asked. He was still snapping photos, wading into the water now to get a closer look.

“Derek, don’t be an idiot,” Jack said. “Get back here.”

“It’s cool. They’re dead.” He turned back to Banga. “They are dead, right?”

Jack was going to argue this point, but noticed Banga staring at the treetops across the river. He looked up and followed the guide’s line of sight, saw something up there,
hidden in the fronds that definitely should not be there. Something large and dark, bending the tree’s branches down at unnatural angles.

“What the hell is that up there?”

Derek looked up now too, used his camera to zoom in on the object. What he saw made his jaw drop. Slowly he lowered his camera and looked up at the treetops all around them, noticing similar objects in each of them, finally pointing to the massive tree above Jack and Banga. Jack and Banga looked up and froze.

It took a second before D
erek found his voice: “Hippos.”

***

“Go!” Gellis shouted. “Down!”

But J
anet was already climbing up, slinging the rope over her foot and using it to haul herself back toward the ledge above. Her head came up and met Gellis’ shoe as he slid down on top of her, the heel of his boot thunking her hard enough to make her see stars. She lost her grip and slipped down a good five feet, screaming and grasping for the rope once again, finally catching it and feeling the skin on her palms slice open.

“They’re coming up!” She screamed
, trying to fight both the throbbing behind her eyes and the searing pain around her fingers. “Go back go back!”

Gellis l
et himself slide down once again. He either hadn’t realized he’d kicked her or he didn’t care. “We will never make it back up. Go down. Just slide as far as possible. Hurry!”

She looked down again and saw the black orbs of the spiders throwing back
the reflection of her headlight. Their hairy legs seemed to move of their own accord, yet in some kind in perfect offbeat rhythm that pitched them upwards faster than Janet could keep track. Now, for the first time, she could truly see just how many of the creatures were coming, and it was far too many to outrun.

“Watch out!” Gellis yelled

Instinctively, Janet swung herself sideways just as one of the black beasts launched itself from the opposite side of the cliff. It landed on the rock where she’d just been, and now she was swinging back toward it.

It rotated on the wall with gunfire rapidity. Facing her now, waiting for her to
pendulate into its legs.

Gellis slid
down and kicked the creature’s back legs. It rotated back and looked up at the large worker.

Without thought, Janet
let the rope carry her back and kicked out with all her strength, catching the monster in the abdomen, nearly letting go of the rope altogether as the thing’s giant hairy legs inadvertently wrapped around her.

But the kick was strong, and the beast lost its grip on the rock and fell backwards, legs out in front like kite streamers. It had barely fallen ten feet when a ghostly strand of silk shot from its back and secured itself on the pit wall again.

“Keep sliding,” Gellis yelled. “Go! Go!”

Janet
loosened her grip, slid into the darkness, stampeding spiders on all sides of her. As she flew past them, they spun and began chasing her down the rock walls.

Above her, Gell
is followed suit, moaning as the rope sliced into his hands, leaving a trail of blood that may or may not have had any enticing effects on the spiders. He felt one of the beasts hit the wall just above him. It began charging down the rope as if it were a web. Another spider launched from the side and hit Gellis’ back as he descended, but it misjudged its prey’s speed and rolled off into the wall again.

As Janet and Gellis
fell, they saw hundreds of large black eyes turning toward them, as if mesmerized by the sudden chase. It almost seemed a worse idea to move, Janet thought, because these things outpaced them, their innate need to hunt kicking into high gear.

With her hands nearly ripped to tattered threads, she let out a final cry and kicked out her legs, pushing away another leaping beast. A
s she watched it fall, she saw the end of the rope just below her. In another second there’d be nothing left to hang onto, and they’d be dangling in the middle of all the spiders, nothing but a long drop into darkness beneath them. It was no use, they were going to die.

“Jump,” Gellis yelled, his feet just about to ram into her head. “
To the left! Now!”

Janet didn’t care anymore. She’d rather be dashed to death on jagged rocks than eaten alive by something
as horrific as these monsters. With a sudden breath of resignation she pushed off the rocks, let go of the rope and let herself fall helplessly to her left.

The ledge came up and hit her with the force of a train, knocking the wind from her lungs. She rolled onto her side, went fetal, praying for a quick death, still hearing
an army of hairy legs beating their rapid tattoo down the pit walls as they came for her.

When the first two legs grabbed her, she didn’t even scream. She just prayed it would be quick, prayed the sharp fangs would kill her instantly so she wouldn’t suffer some kind of paralyzing venom and a slow, agonizing death under smacking
mandibles. The two legs dragged her across the wet rocky ledge, into yet another of the inner mountains numerous tunnels, this one warm and damp and rich in sulfur. Probably where the spiders dragged their victims before they ate them, she thought. And now she was thinking of her father, and how he’d never know what happened to her. She had a brief thought about a man she’d dated two years ago, Vincent, and how they’d discussed having children before he’d finally left her for some whore of a model he’d met on holiday. She’d since given up on marriage and kids and settled on raking in profits from her job. But still, maybe in this last moment of her life, it would have been nice to have left a legacy behind that was her own.

“
Get up, Ma’am, move your legs. We have to get out of the open.”

Gellis’ face swam into view of her headlamp, and she saw that it was not hairy legs that had grabbed her but her employee’s muscular arms. The man was still carrying a quivering Moyo on his back as he dragged her farther into the tunnel. His face was slick with sweat and his eyes were bulging. Even in the darkness she could see the blood on his chin and his hands. Realizing she might have a second chance to live after all, she got to her feet and walked as quickly as
her bruised body would allow. “Where’re we going? Where are we?”

“I don’t know. We
hit the ledge, and I saw the tunnel. I didn’t wait to see if it was safe or not, just prayed that it would give us some coverage. It seems to have worked. Those things out there haven’t come in yet. I don’t know if we dropped too fast for them or if they lost sight of us in here.”

“God, my legs hurt. And my hands…” Janet held her palms up in front of her light. They were torn and bleeding profusely.
Something that resembled gristle, perhaps a tendon, showed white around the middle fingers of her right hand. She flexed them once to test the pain, and the fire that lanced across her fingers almost made her double over. As bad as that was, the pain in her legs was worse. She was sure she’d sprained something when she hit the ledge, and if this were any other situation she’d simply lay down and wait for a stretcher. But she would be damned to stop moving now.

“We
are all hurting,” Gellis said, perhaps reading her thoughts. “But we will be dead if we stay here. We must move.”

We are all hurting.
It was a mildly condescending tone, Janet noted. At least, she read it that way. Her defensive nature wanted to kick in, but she wasn’t going to alienate herself now, not after Gellis had hauled her ass in here away from the spiders; she owed him one for that. “Maybe we should just stay still and see if they go away,” she said. “Aren’t they attracted to vibrations? Spiders and other bugs?”

“Possibly
, but I don’t want to wait and find out. And Moyo here is getting worse, I fear his rib may have cut into his lung.”

She looked at Moyo, saw he was still sweating from some deep pain.
“What are you, a doctor all of a sudden? Thought you guys prayed to little tree gods when you got sick.”

“It is the Congo, Ma’am, we have many ways to heal ourselves, but some of us are not as
stupid as you think.”

That tone again, Janet realized. It was getting to her. But before she could retor
t a giant black star went falling by the tunnel opening, headed somewhere further down the pit.

“They’re coming,” Gellis said, pushing past her. “That one missed us but others might not. Please, let’s go.”

The ceiling of the tunnel began to drop dust on their heads, the sides vibrating. The spiders were getting closer. “Yeah. Okay.”

***

Derek shimmied down from the treetop where he’d just snapped several photos of a giant hippo wrapped up in the top branches. The photographer’s face was flushed from the effort, but his eyes seemed to portray a different type of fatigue. In his hand he carried a strand of white rope the width of a baseball bat.

“
Lemme see that.” Jack motioned for it. Derek handed it over, but not without some effort as it stuck fast to his hand. “Some kind of military netting?” Jack asked, turning it over.

“I doubt it,” Derek said. He was cycling through the photos on the camera. “Look at this.” He handed the camera over to Jack
, who bent over the viewer to block out the sun. The photo was a close-up of the hippo’s back. Two large red holes had been punctured into the animal’s hide and were leaking thick blood.

“The hell is that?” Jack asked. He scanned the hippos in the river to see if they also had the puncture wounds.

“Something stabbed it. Used that rope to hold it in place and kill it. Here, give it back.”

Jack handed the sticky rope back and Derek used his survival knife to cut off a small piece, which he stuck down in his camera bag. 

Now Jack began cycling through the other photos. They were amazing shots, many of them up close with the dead animal, and others pointed to the trees across the water where other hippos had been hauled up and killed. Jack couldn’t even begin to think of what kind of story this was going to turn into. High tech poachers, distress signals in the jungle. Shit, maybe this little side quest was a bad idea after all. “What I don’t get is, why drag them into the trees to kill them? Seems to me if these poachers have something big enough to stab the animals’ backs they could just do it in the water. Am I right?”

Derek took the camera back. “I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just kinda want to move on from here. If it
’s poachers and they’re launching hippos into trees I don’t want to be here when they get back.”

Banga was walking into the water again, gun out in front. He waded
in up to his knees and put his hand on the head of a dead hippo, rubbed the animal between the eyes, as if petting a family dog. With his gun, he poked it hard to make sure it wasn’t going to move. Then, he slipped his hand into the beast’s mouth and heaved it open to reveal a maw large enough to be classified as a studio apartment in some small Asian countries. He studied the hippo’s massive tongue and teeth. “It was not poachers.” He let the massive jaw fall closed with a baritone thud.

Jack stepped closer, his pen and pad out now. “How do you know?”

“The poachers take the teeth, sell them on the black market. Whoever did this was not interested in keeping trophies.”

“And is it me,” Derek said, “or do they
all look a little…thinner?”

There was a sudden crack. F
rom one of the tall trees across the river, a dead hippo fell from the branches, covered in the white strands, and crashed into the water, sending birds into frightful flight from nearby treetops.