I needed to kill this sucker, and kill it now. I was going to run over and start beating on it again with my trustee frying pan, but that's when I saw Ellie smash his head in with her Negan bat. She'd already incapacitated the other baby spider, having bashed its legs right off.

Huh? That was cool.

But then Mama spider suddenly reeled around and smacked Ellie with one of her legs, sending her flying through the air, and right into Wood. They crashed into each other and fell to the ground in a jumble.

Something inside me just went off. Everything went red. The spider was dead. I was going to kill the fucking hell out of it.

I ran towards it, my frying pan held high in my hand, and no idea what I was going to do to kill this thing. Maybe I could run up one of its legs and try smashing its head in like I did that one monster?

But then suddenly a really bad idea popped into my head. I was really going to have to stop having bad ideas like this. But before I could overthink it, I simply ran toward the spider, jumped up onto a big rock, used it to propel myself up in the air, and then I pulled Georgina's grenade out of inventory and threw it right into the spider's open jaws.

I don't remember how many seconds had passed between when Georgina took the pin out of the grenade and threw it, and then I caught it and put it in my inventory. But… luckily it was long enough that I got it out of my hands and into her mouth. I hit the ground running and ran right past her, barely missing one of her big, long legs as she tried to smash me again.

And then…

BOOM!!!

I looked back just in time to see big pixelated chunks of spider raining down from above, and all over all of us.

Ellie had dispatched two of the baby spiders, but there was still a third dancing about, as chunks of his mother rained down upon it.

Seeing its fallen siblings, and its combusted Mommy, the thing decided to take off into the woods. That was a pretty good choice on its part. But if we let it go, how long would it be before we had more Minecraft spiders on our hands?

Fuck that!

I threw my mom's frying pan at it, really winging it with all my might. Amazingly, when it landed, it broke two of the spider's legs off as it was skittering away. It stumbled and flailed, and before it got to its feet again, Wood, Ellie and Teddy were there to start beating on it and ripping it apart.

Good, I felt a rush of relaxation. Hopefully we won't have any more of those things around.

That's when we heard an ominous moving of gravel over by the big pile of gravel the spiders came out of. Crap on toast. We all turned to see the gravel cascading down the sides of the pile as something emerged from the top. We all had our weapons in hand, ready to fight whatever came out. After a few beats, a lop-eared bunny emerge from the top of the pile. It shook its soft looking, pink fur, and its adorable little ears twitched on top of its head. It turned its head toward us, twitched its little nose, and then its entire face split open, exposing huge razor sharp teeth on every single part of it's now completely open face. It looked like a flower made out of slimy teeth, with a hideous red tongue poking out. It roared its outrage at us.

We all stood there, completely in shock. Its face closed, it twitched its cute little nose at us again. It turned around, flicking its fluffy tail and darted down the pile of gravel and off into the woods.

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“Holy fucking shit,” Teddy said, shaking his head.

“Holy fucking shit, indeed,” agreed wood.

Ellie's mouth was open, and then it snapped shut. She took a breath, turned to us and said, “Maybe we should call it a day.”

“I second that,” I said, and Wood and Teddy nodded. We made a beeline through town straight for the pizzeria. We had definitely had enough monsters for one day.

***

After we returned to the pizzeria, Ellie started a large pepperoni pizza for everybody. I started looking at everybody's stats boxes. I received a lot of experience points for blowing up the spider, and for using a confiscated weapon against a mob. I also received a Things That Go Boom prize box, which was funny that the AI had named it after my Things That Go Boom file. I decided to wait until later to open it, though. I was more interested in everybody else's leveling up.

Wood went up an entire level on many fronts, and was now a level 7 Man-at-Arms. He even got some extra mana points. Nobody in our group had much magic, so it was good that we were starting to build the mana points up.

Teddy was still the highest level in the group by a long shot, and from the way he had been leveling up the last couple of days (he was now a level 27 thief, and his archer skill was at 25) no one was going to be catching up with him anytime soon.

Ellie had risen two levels in her barbarian class, making her level 8. It seemed that whenever she used her Negan baseball bat, the system AI really enjoyed it. While she was making the pizza for everybody, she made a thoughtful sound and then announced that she had a Savage prize box and that she was going to open it right then and there.

Whatever was in it wasn't something that physically popped up in reality, but Ellie did glow all over for about five seconds, and then her stats box suddenly had a new skill. It was called The Itsy Bitsy Spider Killer.

I blinked. Then it suddenly hit me. “Holy crap,” I said. I’d forgotten. “You're an arachnophobe, aren't you?”

She turned to look at me, and then opened the door to the pizza oven, reaching in with her bare hand and turned the pizza. Obviously her hands were inured to the heat of the ovens. That was impressive… and a little gross. How long had she gone turning pizzas by hand, instead of using the actual pizza flipping spatula?

Then I started thinking exactly how often had they cleaned that spatula? I mean, it was used hundreds of times a day, shoveling pizzas in and out of the oven. But in all the time I had spent hanging around this place, had I ever seen anyone take it to the side and scrub it?

I was suddenly a little glad I didn't eat.

I do remember though, from my time with Ellie, having to kill at least a dozen spiders over the last years. One time she actually called me to come over to kill one in her bathroom. It had been one in the morning and I had to sneak out of my house, ride my bike all the way over to her house, sneak into her house because her father was home and passed out in the living room, kill the spider, collect a quick peck on the lips as my reward, and then ride my bike all the way back home and sneak back into my room. That had turned out to be kind of a dinky prize for killing what turned out to be a one inch in diameter wood spider.

But now look at her. She’d killed two of the Minecraft spiders single-handed, and helped to kill the huge mama, too. Not to mention in the three days I'd been back, I hadn't heard her so much as mention a spider being around. I wondered if she was killing her own spiders now, or if she was just able to kill Minecraft spiders.

I think I was getting tired. I was rambling in my head.

***

It was Teddy's turn to keep watch tonight. I had wanted to say Hey, since I don't sleep, why not have me do it? But I was pretty sure Wood and Ellie would balk at the suggestion. Especially Wood.

I noticed that Teddy and Wood had a very intense conversation outside before they ended up boarding up the front door as usual. Wood had gone back to sleep in the corner that he most preferred. It was underneath the dishwasher, and had sort of a roof to it because of the stainless steel work area connected to the dishwasher.

Teddy hadn’t been very talkative today. I think it had something to do with what he was talking to his brother about, but I wasn't about to nib. I had no business asking what they were talking about, but I did feel a little jealous. Jealous that they both had family here. The only family I had now were them, and Ellie, and Oz.

It felt strange to think of Oz. It was as if he was other. Being a vampire at the beginning of the Apocalypse is definitely an other kind of thing.