CHAPTER 33: UNIVERSE OF SPIDERS

Cool wind surged in the city, waving and pulling torn newspapers and discarded rubbers in the air, flying and stopping at light poles that had turned into a birthplace for spiders. Spider webs stretched and covered the bulbs, turning it into a universe of spiders and a hostile zone for flying insects.

Door slammed shut, silencing the streets and leaving only the newspapers and the rubbers to be the only source of noise. Shadows moved, stretching long on the corridors and crossing the road from the wall and outside the wall, hopping from the canopies of the trees.

Two paired lights blinked at where the shadows moved, but vanished completely when long heels slammed on the dark road, moving from the tree-filled land to the clear road. One step after another, the steps continued, changing and turning into a full-grown lady with big boobs and wearing a blue crop top and a mini skirt.

"Haaa... why did I even follow them to their city?" she said, tightening her grip on the brown handbag swinging freely in the air as she continued moving in unbalanced stances as if being in the first stage of paralysis.

Reaching two miles away from the guards at the entrance, she stopped, stretched herself, and tightened the belt tied against the skirt and her waist.

"I’m lucky today," she said, squeezing her eyes and lending her ears to the noise coming from the people at the entrance. After listening for a while, she smiled, opened her bag, and began scrubbing the tools inside it, but stopped and turned, hearing a sudden grinding sound behind her.

Her eyes widened, seeing long, sharp metallic teeth open wide, and she shouted. The sound came out once, but the rest echoed inside the creature as her body trembled after being sucked by the creature, which seemed to be of the same color as the darkness. Her legs paddled while her other parts under the creature’s teeth shifted forward and crumpled inside.

When she got pulled up to her hands, the open handbag dropped and crashed on the ground, pouring out all the objects inside it, from lip gloss, a round pocket mirror, and the identity card.

The creature crushed its sharp teeth, which shimmered under the fireflies moving about between the trees beside them, as it crunched the lady into two, swallowing one half and leaving the other half on the ground.

Warm blood seeped out of the reddish skin, flowing on the ground and lining up like a river as it paved its own path before joining in with the cracks visible on the road.

...

"Hey Rodney, did you hear or see or notice something shimmering at the far distance, or was I just drowsing?" Mark said, positioning the sickle and letting it lean on the wall as he sipped red wine from the jar bottle being passed around.

"Nah, I think you have taken too much wine," Rodney said, cunningly tapping on Mark’s shoulder and teasing him.

They laughed, pouring and sharing the wine until the last drop in it fell on Mark’s tongue.

The street behind them stretched so wide it looked as if no human had been there. Shadows moved wherever light flickered, as cats meowed and roamed about on the street, jumping from one veranda to another, scratching their furs on the wooden fences.

Inside the walls of the barracks and in the medical room, surgeons moved, sewing and brushing foamy brushes on the corpses, cleaning the skin, and placing the brushes back into a glass jar, then into a large cooling storage system that had countless jars of the same size as the glass jar but with different objects placed inside.

Three of the surgeons rushed toward Lily, who kept on screaming whenever she tried closing her eyes, and also resisting being injected with another dose of the sleeping pills after already taking five doses in her body.

After five minutes of struggle, her body gave up, enabling the surgeons to add the last dose into her vein.

...

On the last day of the last month of the year, Lily, who had been in a coma for two months, returned to normal and began to talk normally.

Gray and Max entered the room she was in, and sat in the seat placed beside her bed.

"Lily, how are you feeling now?" Gray said, placing his hand on her forehead, checking her temperature, and brushing his fingers in her hair after feeling slightly cold in her skin.

"I’m doing fine, sir."

"That’s nice. Per the medical reports, you will be discharged and sent back to your post."

"Sir, please, can I not join the guards?"

"Ooh yeah, if you wish to be in the office, I can arrange that for you. That wouldn’t be a problem; we all know and have seen what you’ve been through, so that’s an easy task to do."

"Thank you, sir. But, I just wanted to quit."

"Don’t worry, all you need now is to be fully strong," Gray said, tilting his gaze from Lily and focusing on Max.

"Did you see the monsters that attacked and killed both the citizens and the guards? And how come you’re the only person still alive?" Max said, placing his hand in the black bag on the bed and pulling sheets of papers that had names and pictures printed on them out of it.

"Yes," Lily said.

"Did you see their faces?" Max said, his eyes widening as he countered Lily’s sentence and changed the environment with his sudden change in expression.

Gray tilted his head, gazed at Max’s face, and grinned slightly without saying a word or showing any gesture.

"Sorry, can you recall the type of monsters that tore them into pieces?" Max said, speaking calmly and shifting his posture to a normal stance.

"I didn’t see any monster. Maybe some were there, but I only saw a black van moving out from the entrance, and when I crawled under the cart Lieutenant Gray pushed aside, a man wearing a black uniform alighted from the van and began chasing me.

"A man... huh, can you identify him in these pictures?" Max said, placing five sheets on the mini table fixed around Lily’s bed.

The moment Lily’s upper body jolted, she pointed at the first image of a person with four marks on each side of his cheeks without hesitation.

"This is the person who chased after me!" she said, breathing sharply.

"It’s okay, relax, we will take care of the rest," Gray said, standing from the chair and walking to the door.

Max, who should have been the first to move, stood there, strangely looking at Lily, but moved when he saw Gray’s shadow still lingering behind the door.