The shaft was pitch black and a torturous heat sucked up every morsel of moisture. Taylor battled his way up the ladder, struggling to keep his eyes open and his bloody fingers around the rungs.
A crunching sound came from behind his right ear and pus began to slide down the back of his neck.
After a flood of nausea, a momentary blackout caused Taylor to fall down several rungs of the ladder. He took a steel bar to the chin and swore the throbbing pain away. Anger was his fuel, and foul-mouthed vitriol carried him all the way up the ladder.
His ascent was clumsy, but he cared little for his clattering torch and the sentries it may have alerted to his position. At the top of the ladder, his bloated head pushed against an elastic barrier. Taylor punched his fingers through the membrane and hauled himself out of the shaft. For a moment he lay flat on his back, closing his eyes and catching his breath.
"Up,” he wheezed. “Open your eyes. Don't die.”
Taylor activated the torch's light and felt his throat tighten. He appeared to be in a vast moist sack, filled with pulsating white eggs in every direction.
Taylor slapped his face, struggled to his knees. “Clear route to interrogation, Jack? You fucking wanker.”
His voice stirred the inhabitants of the eggs, as next to him, a newborn creature's spindly leg broke free from it's fibrous home. Taylor's torch dimmed to darkness as a grotesque storm of breaking eggs resounded around him.
He listened to starved sounds and creeping legs as he scrolled his finger across the torch. His muscles went into instant spasm when the light flashed over hairy bodies, beady eyes, twitching teeth and salivating mouths. As they hissed and crawled for his aqua light, Taylor had only one plan left in his bag of tricks. He sprinted through a quagmire of arachnids, kicking and squishing, flailing, shrieking and swearing.
One pounced on his shoulders and clung its legs around his face. Just before it sank its teeth into his head, Taylor yelled and put his shoulder through a wall of hardened silk. He broke out of the sack in an explosion of old silk. An invigorating gust hit him and a sharp drop in temperature chilled his breath.
On his stomach, he glared at his heels, amazed to see spiders bunched up at the crack, an invisible line they refused to cross, as if somehow forbidden.
“If you don't wana eat me,” he heaved, “then what does?”
Ahead was a black steel wall with a sealed circular door. According to Jack, this mounted manhole cover was the first of two tanks. After another cautious look over his shoulder, Taylor slunk up and moved forwards, expecting something yet hoping for nothing.
The spiders snarled behind him as he parted through webs, thick like bed sheets. Yet still they did not pursue him. After swiping the webbing from his face and back, Taylor noticed a high lever near the door. Both the lever and the door out of reach.
His head dropped. "Of course.”
Climbing wasn't an option, as he was likely to fall. Taylor decided instead to form a makeshift rope from the web, hoping to snag the lever like some cheap carnival game. A stupid idea maybe, but it was all he had. Tugging and gathering the web, a liquid spray shot from the rafters and Taylor cried out and jolted back. A hungry corrosive ate through his shirt and into his torso. Acting fast through searing pain, Taylor grimaced and peeled away the fabric mixed with several layers of his skin.
"Second degree burns,” he snarled, examining his already blistered skin. It hurt like hell but so did everything else. He scurried on his ass from any further shots when an eight legged monster dropped like a bomb in front of the door.
Taylor squinted at the towering arachnid blocking his path. The majority of the creature was concealed by web rustling in the icy wind, but Taylor could still make out a glistening ripple over its swollen abdomen, and the twelve twinkling lights in its eyes.
With nothing but baubles in his satchel, he searched the environment for the tools to save him. Finding nothing but web and clotted balls of silk, Taylor set his hands on his hips, sucked the blood streaming down his nose and sensed his body shutting down. This was it.
Morbid curiosity inspired him to examine the size of his skull, and doing so, he heaved to find his hands short of the circumference. The spider opened its mouth and slammed down a thunderous leg. Steadying himself against the tremor, an idea came to Taylor when he noticed the shock-waves knocking over a silk sack. The spherical cocoon was the size of a football, with an unfortunate creature churning alive inside it.
A spark of hopeful life returned to Taylor's eyes, enough to get his gears going. He eyed up the lever some 35 yards away. He could have made that shot in his prime, and he relished the opportunity to relive it.
The spider stirred, Taylor honed eyes on the ball and heard the crowd, his brother, mother and father cheer him on from the stands of Ibrox stadium. He raised his hand and the crowd fell deathly silent. Only the ball and the target existed as Taylor held his breath, drew back his right foot and pulled the trigger. His form was good and the strike was accurate. The ball curved and Taylor crouched to watch it bend around the arachnid and strike the lever upwards.
"You fuckin' beauty!”
The crowd roared, he threw up his arms and drank in the applause. The door blew open and an excremental torrent rushed out of the wall, snapping Taylor out of his dream and delirium as gallons and gallons swept him and the spider along, carrying them all the way back to the nest.
The spider squealed as it fought to right itself against the current. Taylor found his footing and began wading knee deep toward the billowing door.
The stench was horrific. The water was thick, almost gelatinous, and he panted through his mouth to keep him from inhaling the fumes. The shit was at his chest when he reached the hole. He locked his fingers around a steel loop in the wall and turned to watch the drowning spider and hatchlings. When the sewage reached his chin, Taylor dunked his head into the shit and pulled himself through the door.
He broke through the other side, gasping and grasping at the rung of a ladder. A short climb later, Taylor lay on a ledge, forcing fingers into his mouth and emptying out his stomach. He would be tasting that for a week, if he saw out the day.
Swiping on the torch light, he watched the excrement level off with the adjoining room. He was in an industrial steel tank with the ladder below and a hatch beside him. He was close. Just a little further.
Digging into his satchel, he set all 10 baubles carefully over his lap. He tossed nine into the waste and they splashed and sank. He caressed the last bauble but instinct urged him to save it. He returned it to the satchel and stood to crank the hatch. When both hands turned the wheel, he felt a tingling sensation up his left side and prepared himself for a heart attack.
Before he could react, his entire left side went numb. Cold. Dead.
The worrying trickle ran up his right side as the poison overwhelmed him. Losing sensation, Taylor took hold of the hatch and yanked open the wheel. He pulled it back and his legs buckled. His face hit the door and the sound echoed through the draining tank. As the world blurred and stretched, Taylor could no longer tell if it was blood or pus dribbling down his forehead.
Legs completely gone, he crawled forward on his belly, fingers clinging into a narrow, corrugated bridge leading to another ladder.
There was no shit or snapping spiders in this tank, only a serene dark and unsettling quiet. Taylor did not wait for any surprises but could feel one coming in the bridge supporting his weight. The structure rattled and creaked, so Taylor dragged himself in a reckless hurry, forcing everything he had to the other side.
When he could almost touch the other side, the tail of the bridge gave way, dropping five feet to a gelatinous pool. Taylor winced and clung like a cat onto the vertical bridge, which hung by two nuts and bolts.
His lower legs were submerged in gunk, but sheer terror was enough to inspire grit. He worked through numbness to pull himself up a handful at a time, and when his feet emerged from the slime, he felt something
clinging around his leg. Looking back, he shrieked at a jelly skinned mesomite roped around his shin and slithering up his body in search of an orifice. Panic stricken, Taylor lashed his legs to shake it off. The nuts loosened above as the mite coiled around Taylor's satchel. It tugged him back so Taylor threw the strap over his head to send the mite, the bag, and the last bauble into the bubbling pool.
He clamoured up the corrugated surface and gripped the ladder as the bridge gave way at his heels. Taylor locked his elbow around the rung, trying to recall Yellow Jack's plan, but he could barely remember his own name.
"It's Ham Taylor, dumbass!”
Slowly, doggedly, he climbed the ladder and heaved himself into the first vent. Without rest, he crawled to a grate and loudly exhaled when he saw the centre table, mirrored glass window and puddle of blood covering the interrogation room floor. He smashed his thick fists into the grill, pounding and pounding until finally, he dropped through the vent like a hunk of meat.
He landed badly, and thought he heard a ligament tear in his right leg. Head spinning, he crawled as if through mud to the corner of the room, where five mites were coiled and stacked. There was no way of knowing which of them had infected him.
"Fuck.”
Taylor shrivelled and slunk, realizing he would have to consume them all if he wanted to live. Pus seeped down his head as he picked up the first mite. It was heavy and he could see his palms through its translucent flesh. Taylor wore a sickly scowl as he studied its warty mouth, multicoloured muscles, gut and gonads.
"Urgh.”
He bit into the mite and his teeth popped its flesh, releasing a foul gas directly into his mouth. The gristly texture was difficult to swallow but the only way through it was by getting through it. Taylor forced the creature into his face and sucked at his putrid milkshake until there was nothing in his palms but a drained corpse and chunks too big to swallow.
He burped and his stomach churned, his body screaming in protest when he picked up the second mite. He chomped down and a combination of lard and vomit slid down his neck. Still he sucked it dry and moved onto the third, then the fourth. He looked at the fifth and final mite but could no longer move his limbs. Bubbles popped from his lips and nose, eyes glazing over. Flat on his stomach, and with one last mite to eat, Taylor pushed his face into the mite and gnawed at the fat until his jaw seized.
Having done everything in his power to beat back the dark, Taylor waited for either a fresh start...or a miserable end.