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Another morning, another struggle to get out of bed. But it wasn’t morning, and I didn’t keep rocks in my bed—especially jagged ones that dug into my back. My head hurt. I tried to blink away the pain. A haze replaced the darkness. Air rushed into my lungs—why wasn’t it in there before?

I coughed, spitting out blood and sand. My eyes focused. Not a haze, but dust filtering through the moonlight. The same moonlight that shone down the mouth of the tube I’d just fallen down to get away from the spiders.

Spiders.

I rolled over to my hands and stood. Or I tried to. Halfway to my feet, black filled my vision and I fell hard, my face flat in the wet sand.

Collapsed on the ground, I felt like I was spinning. Between the dizziness and metallic taste of blood and gritty sand, my stomach threatened to empty its contents. I didn’t have time to worry about that. Why was I even alive still?

We’d learned the hard way in Brunning that the spiders were attracted to sound, vibrations.

I lay quiet, just for seconds. No other sounds? The occasional water drip from the rain. Was that it? No, only a little louder than my heartbeat pounding in my ears, the spiders’ chittering trickled down from above. Maybe the chimney proved too small for their bulk. Not a comforting thought.

Way to go, Xander. My father always said shortcuts would be the death of me. Ha.

Although in double, the faint lights from Brunning beckoned from the chimney ground-entrance behind me. Only a body length beyond my feet. So close. I needed out of the dark, death tube. Now.

I pushed my body back with my hands, scooting backwards as quiet as possible. Not an easy task in the rain-soaked silt. Any wetter and I could have swam out, if I knew how to swim. Which I didn’t—not a whole lot of ways to practice on a desert planet. My vision settled into one version of everything. Unfortunately, the pain in my head wasn’t going anywhere. Warm blood crept from my scalp and down my face, running into my eyes. Hooray for potential concussions.

Bit by bit, I moved my body toward outside and hopefully freedom. I didn’t know what my chances were out there, but they had to be better than in the chimney. My feet met resistance, but not rock. I pushed harder and when my feet broke through I realized my mistake.

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Webs. And I’d just broken through them. A general rule when trying to evade spiders is ‘don’t touch their webs.’ With every fiber I’d broken I’d practically screamed out to my worst nightmare ‘Here I am! Dinner’s ready.’

So much for caution. I pushed myself out of the tunnel as fast as possible, breaking through more web strands. When my head cleared the tunnel I ignored any physical protest from my body and shot to my feet.

Turning from the cliff wall, my heart sunk. Spiders. A dozen four foot tall monsters surrounded me. Dimmed lights from Brunning glinted off all the barbed spikes on the spiders’ bulbous bodies and legs, but cast their heads in darkness. Purple moonlight reflected off their eyes shrouded in shadow.

Bile tickled my throat. Cold tremors assaulted my body. I felt six years old again—small and helpless. This time I didn’t even have a broken rifle for false security. I could have at least used that as a club, maybe. I scrambled around with my hands, looking for anything. My fingers found the palm light. I switched it on. Nothing. I stashed the palm light in my clima-jacket. Maybe I could throw it. Little good that would have done against desert-hardened exoskeletons.

By all means, I should have been dead already. What were they waiting for? With the valley wall behind me, only one means of escape lay before me—try to break through their line and run to Brunning. Probability of success? Next to nothing, but throwing my arms in the air in surrender wasn’t an option. Spiders didn’t understand mercy. I flexed my legs, making sure I wouldn’t simply fall over when I bolted.

The spiders clicked their weird chitter and stared at me, at least I think they did. With eight eyes each, who knew what the damn things were looking at. I bent my knees, ready to run. The chittering stopped and the spiders lowered their bodies, legs flexed, ready to spring at me.

“Don’t… move.”

The spiders already had me terrified, but that gravelly voice from nowhere sliced through any reserves of courage like a hot razor blade.

“Wha…” the word spilled half formed from my trembling lips. Spiders didn’t talk. How hard had I hit my head falling down the chimney?

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. I looked over the spiders creeping toward me, in two seconds I was making a run for it.

I launched and something cracked me across the back of the head. Again, my face met the ground, the thin layer of silt not giving any cushion to the hard, sun-baked dirt below. Blackness encroached upon my vision. Pain lanced through my side, something flung me on to my back.

In my fading sight, a new monster stood above me, silhouetted in the moonlight—a mixture of spider and man. A demon.

“Said… don’t move,” it snarled and brought its freak spider man foot down on my face.