Salticidae Read Free Page A

on it.
    Then she was up again, being dragged by Gellis. “Hurry!”
    A pygmy worker was tackled beside her, hairy legs wrapping tightly around him as he screamed into the black bulbous eyes sealing his fate. The man reached up and got a fistful of Janet’s shirt, trying to save himself but instead pulling her toward the monstrosity that held him.
    “Let go!” She slapped at his hands, fighting to free herself from his gripping fingers. One of the mighty arachnid’s legs stepped on her thigh. It weighed as much as a man and the hairs on the tip stabbed through her safari shorts and pierced her skin. The worker thrashed to get free, but the fangs came down and stabbed home through his neck and his blood shot out in spurts, coating Janet’s face.
    The man’s death grip on her shirt went slack and she rolled free.
    She found her legs now, started to run, had only a second to see Winston following her and Gellis toward the cave entrance, firing his weapon as dozens more of the giant spiders scurried over the rock face and leapt at the myriad workers running in panic. She turned back as the coolness of the cave swept over her, looking again for the SATphone. Winston crouched in front of her, just inside the cave entrance, his gun rocking him back and forth as he fired into the madness unfolding outside.
    With a rush, one of the giant spiders flew out of the melee and fired itself at the cave entrance, legs splayed out. Winston unloaded his weapon, caught the monster in mid leap with a volley of rounds that sent it crashing into the rock outside the cave, its legs falling over the entrance like prison bars.
    Through those legs Janet watched as the giant black and brown spiders leapt from worker to worker, jumping with such lightning speed they were nothing but massive dark blurs. As they leapt they left cables of silk web in their wake. It covered most of the ground and vehicles, as well as a couple of tents that remained half completed.
    “What the fuck are these things?” Winston yelled, checking his magazine and finding that he was out of bullets. “Where did they come from?”
    Janet searched her pockets for her cell phone. “Call Dad. Gotta get help.”
    “Give me this.” Winston grabbed her pistol from its holster. He checked the rounds. Six shots. He looked at Gellis, whose ebony face was all but lost in the darkness of the cave. Outside, men continued to scream as the giant black spiders tackled them and dragged them into the trees. “What did you do?”
    “I did nothing, sir. I have never seen such monsters.”
    “Shit. My cellphone’s not here,” Janet said. “I think it’s in the Jeep.”
    “ Forget it. There’s no service here.” Winston began scooting them farther into the cave. “Move back. Go. You’re not going out there. C’mon. Move. We need to find a place to hide.”
    Janet opened her hip pack to search for her phone, in hopes she had absentmindedly put it inside. In the darkness she couldn’t see the little bits of useless materials the pack held, but it was pointless; she didn’t feel her phone anywhere amongst its contents.
    “Hold up.” Gellis was behind her, deepest in the tunnel of the mountain entrance now. He was the only one wearing a hardhat and he switched on the light affixed to the front of it. “There is a slope here. It looks steep. We must be careful.”
    Janet turned and saw the dropoff.  She could hear the water running down its sides, down toward the gold. They would need ropes to get down it without breaking their legs.
    Gellis suddenly looked up past her, shocked, thrusting his hand out toward Winston. “No!”
    Janet turned back in time to see Winston get ripped from the cave by a collection of hairy legs wrapped around his head. The security chief fired the pistol aimlessly in panic, the bullets zipping around Janet and Gellis, as he was drawn out into the open afternoon jungle heat and engulfed in a furry spider embrace, fangs already coming down on his