Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
“Justice! Let me go!”
His arms tighten around me, and when the next slash comes for my guts, I sustain a light scratch across the actual bared skin of my belly. A fraction of an inch deeper, and he’ll be in the fat layer. A fraction more, and my insides are going to be outside.
Just as I am almost certain that I am going to die from a botched monster sting, Order launches himself from the top of the shipping containers. I didn’t see him up there. He must have climbed up in the dark and been waiting for the right moment.
I watch, amazed, as he comes sailing down from that vantage point, webs emerging from his fingers in a splay of material that goes absolutely fucking everywhere.
He lands on Rage, tackling him to the ground, doing his best to coat the angry monster in his sticky web. But Rage is not going to go down that easy. He fights back with his cuffed hands, doing more damage to the webbing and potentially, to Order himself. The spider is agile, used to capturing struggling prey, and Rage is somewhat hobbled by his cuffs, though not as much as I am in Justice’s arms.
It’s a struggle for him to hold onto me, because I am also trying to break free. The detective and the criminal are both stuck in a battle for what feels like our lives.
“Help me!” Order calls out to Justice. It would seem there are limits to his silk reserves, with Rage cutting through them as quickly as they go on, beating his wings furiously with a rattling, hissing, growling sound. The ambiance is evocative of the very end of the world.
Justice needs to drop me and help Order, or else Rage is about to escape. But Justice doesn’t. He just keeps holding onto me, and within the next thirty seconds, Rage gets his wings free and takes to the skies, fleeing with loud cursing.
Order turns to Justice, panting and furious, his sharp teeth exposed with panting breaths. I let out a shriek. His sunglasses have been knocked off his face, and now eight bright blue human eyes blink at us. He has two normal size eyes, another two stacked above them, and then four more that go around the sides of his head at a slightly smaller scale. The effect is nothing short of absolutely fucking terrifying, and it is not helped by the mood he is in, which is furious.
“We lost him because you won’t put down your human cuddle toy.”
Finally, when it no longer really matters, Justice relinquishes me. I scramble away from the pair of them and make a run not for freedom, but to the gap in the storage containers. I squeeze through that as fast as possible and find myself facing one open door.
“Tessie!”
“Sally!”
“Don’t call me that!”
I run into the container and find Tessie wrapped up in web, suspended from both the ceiling and the floor. I wonder if Order would have had enough web to catch Rage if he hadn’t already blown his spider load on her. She seems otherwise unharmed, just sort of hanging there with her head exposed and most of her body encased.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “This is more comfy than it looks.”
Obigor is sleeping on a pillow nearby. He seems unperturbed, but he is both deaf and exhausted, so he doesn’t care.
I look around. This shipping container is not a filthy old empty space. This is an outfitted home with high end but outdated furniture. The style is retro, not quite teal blue with a lot of leathery beige accents that make the space masculine without being aggressive about it. Tall arm chairs are set around a CRT television set resplendent in wooden paneling. The rug beneath my feet has to be handwoven. It is that same blue with white accents of large insect motifs. I have the feeling that I have stepped into a single chamber of what is a very large and expansive above ground burrow that runs back quite deep and branches off all over the place.
“The shipping container was developed later than we were by almost a decade, but when it was, our creator realized it provided the perfect cover. We could be present in plain sight almost anywhere. All we needed was some industrial use space and a few cranes operated by humans who did not know precisely what they were transporting.”
I turn around again to see Justice standing in front of me. I do not give a flying moth fuck about the history of shipping containers right now. I have a bigger bone to pick with him.
“You almost let him kill me!”
Justice has the gall to look confused.
“I did tell you that you were going to be bait. You begged to be bait. You do know what happens to bait, correct?”