Spider Attack

Tassi crouched on one knee, back to the wall. Her M-16 rifle level and slowly moving the 180 degree arc up and down the corridor. Her right eye to the rear sight post, cheek to the stock. Tassi’s reserve of nerve was evaporating rapidly as desperate screams and panicked orders came through over the net into her earpiece. She did not speak into her mouthpiece. She would be just one more sound in the cacophony. Her huge chest expanded as she breathed rapidly, nearly bursting her black combat fatigues open.

Movement on her right, near the ceiling. A shape the size of a small Volkswagen. Tassi did not think or check her fire, she sighted on and instantly fired two 3 round bursts. Then she was up and moving, on pure instinct. Sprinting down the corridor she heard Evans die, then Rogers was cut off mid sentence. The net was quieting down, her team was being wiped out. Tassi had joined the Marines at age 16. After 3 years active duty, she transferred to the reserve corp. so she could settle down state side. Her dad was a Vietnam vet, and with Tassi’s exemplary military record, he hooked her up with her job on the city’s elite SWAT unit. Still a teenager for a few more months, she yet impressed her team as being one of the cooler heads in the unit. Her own military experience was backed by her father’s extensive stories from Nam.

“When in doubt, empty your magazine.” her father had told her.

Tassi ran as a flash on her steel muscled legs past two more bodies. Both in lab coats. There is an instinctual feeling when one is being watched. This instinct was being turned up multiple fold down here, contributing to Tassi’s haggard emotional state.

Through an arch. A stairwell leading up and down. An explosion from the second floor shook the building. Looking up, Tassi sees heavy smoke and something else. Two more black shapes approaching from the smoke. She vaults down over the steps to the next landing. Lands on her feet hard and rolls down and over in a parachutist landing. Her body absorbing the landing impact.

On her feet, in a flash she decides on the double doors rather than descending further underground. Another corridor. More bodies. Some small fires but not as much smoke.

“God, this is Tassi.”

Her little girl voice over the silent headset. Standing only 5’2″ with her boots on, Tassi hated sounding like a little girl, but right now that did not matter. Less then 100 pounds, she was called “little girl” by her team mates. With her rich brown skin, almond shaped eyes, hard muscled body with a chest so large on her small frame it severely slowed her marathon running times, all the team secretly wanted to have the ‘little girl’ for their own. But she was alive now, and they were dead.

“Tassi, this is God.” Helplessness weighed the male voice like a stone. The team commander was in the SWAT van outside the burning research facility. “I think you are alone now.” The team was gone.

Tassi was moving with bent knees down the center of the corridor. It was lined with doorways, almost all open, many broken open. She passed each doorway by training her rifle on the opening as she did so. The dead technicians and engineers were a terrible sight, worse yet, the females were thoroughly dismembered.

“I don’t know where I am.” Tassi stopped to rest again, kneeling with her back to a wall. She paid extra attention to where she had come from, as she had visually seen two of them back there.

“Dammit, my floor plans say that place only had two floors. This whole thing stinks to hell. Saunders has been reviewing all the radio traffic, it goes back 10 hours. He says an EMT named Sally, one of the first on the scene commented that some of the bodies were possibly a day old.”

Where was Sally now? Thought Tassi. The local police and firefighters who initially responded were strewn over the first floor.

“Tassi, can you see any numbers on the doors near you.”

Tassi moved to the nearest doorway. The number 415 on the smashed door. The gargantuan spider moving towards her across the room’s floor. It hulked 7′ tall as its 8 legs glided over broken furniture and equipment, directly towards Tassi. From its bulbous abdomen hung what was clearly a penis of over a foot in length. It grew larger and lifted up to point directly at Tassi as the beast hungrily approached.

Tassi could not speak.