Arachnophobia

Thanks to the video feed granted by my three not-so-blind mice, we were able to discover a lot of very interesting caches hidden throughout this manor. Old backpacks and sacks full of survival equipment along with other gear were stuffed under beds and stored in closets. No bodies though.

“Something isn’t right…”

We hadn’t found a hint of Ben or Sadie, but all of this equipment suggested that there were plenty of people in here at some point. The freaky part was that it was all stashed away, as if somebody was hoarding stolen loot. No wonder there was a rumor of treasure in this creepy place… It was all the stuff left behind by people that probably went missing.

My instincts were telling me we needed to get the hell out of here. To make matters worse, Moukia was MIA, and I completely lost his signal. I didn’t prefer leaving him behind, but it was a loss we needed to take.

“Yuri, get our exit unlocked. We're leaving,” I told him.

“Right…” he started messing with the phone. “What about your friends we came here for?”

They weren’t my friends. And even if they were, we needed a different approach before coming back in here. Something was causing people to disappear in this house and I didn’t want us to be another pair of victims with our only remains being luggage.

We made it back to the exit, but Yuri struggled to get it unlocked through the app.

“Any day now,” I encouraged, keeping my rifle trained on the hallway.

“I’m trying, but the app isn’t getting through.”

I was too freaked out that something was going to come at us from the hallway to confirm what he was saying, but he was a tech guy, and I trusted if he couldn’t get it figured out, my efforts would have been in vain.

“Think we could shoot the windows out?” I suggested.

“The security alarm would go off.”

Raising awareness of that also made me realize that the windows were probably fortified with bullet proof glass. This house was fortified like a castle.

Some explosives might have breached the door. It would still trip the alarm, but we wouldn’t be trapped anymore.

Now the rumors were making sense to me. The reason nobody left this house was because they couldn’t, not conventionally. Once you were in, you didn’t come out. But if that had been the only worry, we’d eventually be able to blow our way out given enough time.

Something suddenly started skittering around inside the walls.

My first thought was to keep an eye on the vents. That was the most likely spot for something small to crawl around the inner structure of the home.

“What is that?” Yuri asked, now raising his own gun.

There was a very light, cold tap of something sharp on my neck. I froze as my sensitive skin detected the unusual sensation.

Next thing I knew, a loud pop burst in my left ear, accompanied by a flash of light. All I could hear was ringing after that.

I turned to Yuri, seeing absolute terror on his face as he gazed at something on the floor, his gun smoking as if he'd just dispatched it. Then even more fear filled him as he looked up to the corner of the hallway. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear him well.

Following the trail of his gaze, robotic-like parts that resembled a large spider were scattered across the ground. Above us was a cluster of those same things, but intact and staring down on us.

Those glowing red eyes told me they were bots, but the awful black and furry skin made them frighteningly real.

Unable to hear my own voice completely, I shouted for us to run. Yuri followed me down the hall, and he was followed by those spider bots. There had to have been dozens of them, and more continued jumping us from the vents.

I fired a few bullets until my rifle refused to squeeze off any more rounds. An empty cartridge ejected from its inner workings, not making the ping sound it was so famous for.

Did that spider do something to my hearing, or was it Yuri’s gunshot close to my ear that caused me to go almost completely deaf? It seemed like sound was returning to my right ear, which was the one opposite of where Yuri shot.

“Are you alright?” I finally heard him speak. “Let me see if that thing bit you!”

Disorientation caused me to wobble around as my adrenaline faded, but I shook my head a few times until the dizziness died down.

“I’m… I’m fine.”

I wasn’t sure if that was true or not. It could have been a mix of things overwhelming my senses at that moment, but I was definitely recovering from something. All I could do was pray that I wasn’t poisoned, and hope Yuri’s gunshot close to my ear was what caused this to me.

Regardless of whether a deadly poison burned through my body, or if the loud bang of a gun burst my eardrum, my focus tightened on escaping our tiny pursuers. My eight round girl wasn’t going to pop enough of those arachnids to mean anything, so I slung that over my shoulder and whipped out a mini uzy.

Using short controlled bursts and a steady backwards pace down a long hall, I shot off enough rounds to suppress the spider bots and give us a few feet to work with. They were fast little buggers, and only got quicker by the second.

Each corner turn was a gamble on whether Yuri and I would encounter more of them. Before long it almost seemed like they were funneling us around, keeping just enough of a distance and menacing collective presence to push us down a specific path of their choosing.

“Squeak Squeak!”

That muffled noise was familiar, and followed by a nostalgic ringtone. It was Moukia. He scampered down a hallway and met up with us, eagerly squeaking until we followed him.

His fur was scruffy and his armor was wrecked, but that little sonuvabitch was still kicking like a baby in his mother’s belly. My guy won’t get FUBAR'd that easy!

“Keep up, Yuri!”

Putting all my faith into my mouse toy, we found ourselves inside of a locker room where we quickly shut and barricaded the door. There wasn’t zero chance those spider bots wouldn’t find another way in, but this place gave us a moment to catch our breath.

Yuri quickly checked the back of my neck in search of any bites or wounds. He couldn’t find anything. Just to be sure, I checked his neck too, which was clear.

“Lift up your hat…” I ordered.

He did so. A spider bot was sitting on his head.

I used my mini uzy to smack it away, then fired a round into it.

“Can we call us even?” he nervously laughed.

“Try not to shoot so close to my ear next time,” I sighed. “Jesus Christ… What the hell did we get ourselves into?”

There wasn't any going back from this. Whatever was going on here, we had to continue charging head first, not looking back, or we'd be robo spider chow.

“Squeak Squeak!” Went Moukia as he bumped into my feet a few times.

“What are you doing?” I went to go pick him up so he could reunite with his friends, but he scampered straight under a big metal door.

Now that I was thinking about it, he’d been exploring this area the whole time he was missing. This locker room had thick stone walls with metal all over, so his signal was probably getting blocked by them.

Wherever he was going right now, it was clearly interesting enough to follow.