Doomsday Warrior 03 - The Last American Read Free Page A

as the spiders slid down them like commandos at a training camp. For such big and apparently ungainly creatures they were weirdly graceful, their twelve legs gripping the silk webbing and shooting down nearly three hundred feet from the top. Rock set the pistol on close-pattern shot and began firing straight up in the air, trying to blast the carnivores before they could reach the ground. Each shot knocked one of the squirming hairy red mutations from its strand, and the air was filled with high-pitched squeals of pain as they dropped. Rockson had eliminated six more of the things when his sixth sense told him to spin to the right. He moved without knowing why and felt himself suddenly caught by the fabric of his shirt by the mandibles of one of the Blood Spiders sneaking up from behind. The damn thing had him! For all the strength of his six-foot-three two-hundred-fourty pound frame of purest chiseled iron, the Doomsday Warrior couldn’t break free. The Spider reached forward with two hairy legs and wrapped them around Rockson’s calf, pulling him to the ground. His arm had become jammed under him, the shotgun pistol wedged between his chest and the dank cave floor. The Blood Spider lowered itself down on top of him, and the Doomsday Warrior could see dark, dripping jaws filled with what looked like a thousand fingernail-sized teeth, a threshing machine for flesh coming down at him. A long, needlelike protruberance came out of the ugly mouth and pierced Rock at the shoulder. He felt the instantaneous stinging acidity of the poison. Great! The thing didn’t want just to eat him, it had to poison him first. He could feel his shoulder burn as if branded with a white-hot iron. Then his upper arm began growing numb as the poison spread.
    The Blood Spider shifted its weight for a second to get a better balance to eat. That was all Rock needed. With the weight of the creature off him even for a millisecond he was able to swing the hand with the .12 gauge pistol up and into the guts of the horror now only inches from his chest where it was preparing to rip out his heart. He pulled the trigger and felt the satisfying jerk in his hand as the metal death tool spat out a storm of shot into the face and mouth of his would-be eater. The spider stopped in its tracks, blinked its eyes a few times as if puzzled, and then fell in a bloody heap on top of Rock.
    The squishy weight of the dead monstrosity nearly suffocated him, its foul smelling innards oozing, dripping down onto his face. With an incredible effort of will and strength, Rock was able to squeeze his way out from under the dead carnivore. Everywhere around him Rockson could hear screams and blasts from Detroit’s grenades—a full-scale battle was going on between humans and spiders, with the homo sapiens definitely on the losing side. Rock scanned the wide cavern and could see only three of the crew left—plus Detroit, who was peeling off grenade after grenade from his bandolier and tossing them at the army of hairy killers. The Doomsday Warrior ran across the blood-soaked silt of the cave, searching frantically for any surviving members who might be still alive, trapped beneath one of the things.
    A Blood Spider had one of the geologist’s, Avner’s, legs halfway up its mouth, like the thigh of a crisply fried chicken. Rock ran alongside and pushed the shotgun pistol against one of the large, unblinking green eyes and pulled the trigger. The eye disappeared into a splatter of egglike slop and the spider, although assuredly not dead, pulled back and let out a thunderous gurgle of pain. Shrill as a piece of glass grating on rock, the sound startled the other spiders as well. They took stock suddenly of themselves like an army that has been battling for hours and hears the trumpet call to retreat. Even spiders, with brains surely not larger than grapes, had to realize that their kind lay dead and splattered everywhere. Detroit let off with two more grenades at a group of