The Gender End by Bella Forrest (the giving tree read aloud TXT) 📕

a while, the mist began to thin, and we came to a tunnel that was completely free of the blasted stuff. We moved down it, and relief streamed through my chest when I saw the massive airlock door at the end of it—and this one was closed. Apparently Elena hadn’t opened everything up in her mad gambit to rid herself of intruders.

Thomas knelt down and pulled out the same little box with the cables he had handed Owen earlier. I shone my light through the door’s small window, while Owen took position by the tunnel entrance, keeping an eye out for anything trying to get through.

The room beyond was slightly wider than the last chamber with an airlock door, but the walls were smooth and worn. I continued to look around, searching for any sign of movement, and felt a prickle of alarm go up my spine. I had an uncanny feeling that I was being watched.

The instinct was too strong to ignore. I turned around to face the tunnel again, and tightened my grip on the handle of my gun. I lifted it and my flashlight higher. The light hit the mineral-rich wall, chasing away some of the shadows, and I panned it slowly left and right, starting closer to the bottom and moving up.

About six feet up, the light cut across the toe of a boot, casting a shadow behind it.

“Viggo?” Owen’s voice was hushed from the other end of the tunnel, but it reached me as I slowly swung the flashlight farther up.

A leg came into view, covered in webbing, and I took a step back, my skin beginning to crawl. This caused the light to move up another foot or so, and three large arachnid legs—long, thin, and covered in coarse hair—came into view, draped over a man’s chest.

I became aware of a soft scratching sound, and lifted my flashlight higher, to find the giant spider crouching over the man’s face, its mandible tearing the flesh off in small rips and tears. A multitude of black eyes glittered from the top of the head, and it moved slightly, its fat, heavy body settling in place over its kill.

I fought back the urge to vomit, yanking my pistol up and firing round after silenced round. The bullets sank into the spider’s fat body as easily as cutting butter. Its prey fell from its legs, and the spider dropped onto the floor, rolling onto its back with a thump, its legs curling up and twitching. Immediately I heard something rustling overhead.

“Viggo?”

Ignoring Owen, I pulled the flashlight up and over, trying to track the source of the noise, and found two more sacks hanging from the tunnel’s walls—one with red organs already spilling out, but the other one moving under all those fine, delicate strands.

“Help me,” I said as I hurried over to the cocoon, pulling my knife from my boot. I began to cut the webs away, but could only reach up halfway to the man’s thigh due to the way he was hanging. Owen’s knife moved on the other side, and then we grabbed his ankles and began pulling.

The silk was strong—frightfully so—but with our combined strength, we managed to wrest the still-living man away. We caught him, and I sat him down as he frantically reached up and began peeling the webbing from his face.

Maxen’s blue eyes met mine as he peeled more of it off, and then he sucked in a deep breath, as if he had been suffocating, and began coughing.

“There’s two,” he wheezed, and I stepped back, redrawing my gun and looking around.

Owen caught my eye and wet his lips.

“Viggo, these are the spiders we harvest the silk from for the suits,” he said, his voice low and steady. “They’re normally quite shy, but if they’re starving, they’re deadly. We almost never discovered them or what their webbing could do, because—”

Something rippled into view behind Owen, and I fired without thinking, catching the spider with three bullets as it leapt through the air toward Owen. He flinched and ducked, turning back, and I heard him swallow audibly.

“They use it to hunt,” he finished.

“I’m not going to die in here!” Maxen screamed, ripping his arms free and running for the airlock door. I had time to wish we’d left him in the cocoon before I looked up to see a wave of spiders—the smallest one the size of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, the largest bigger than a horse—dangling from strands of silk attached to the ceiling, watching us. As soon as my light cut across them, they vibrated slightly, and the next thing I knew they had disappeared. I began blind firing at where some of them had been, and Owen stepped up next to me.

“HEY!” Thomas shouted.

I turned to see Maxen, who had pushed his way through the door Thomas had gotten open, and was now trying to slam it shut. Thomas was wedging his body into the opening, struggling against the king.

I moved to help when a spider fell on top of me, dropping me to the ground. Webbing, hot and slightly damp, began to shoot onto me from its backside. I struggled to bring my gun up, and then the creature went flying as Owen kicked it off of me and pulled me up. He gripped his rifle to fire a spray of bullets around the room, the sound reverberating loudly in the tunnel. As if the sounds had a physical effect, the spiders began to flicker in and out of visibility, the ones Owen caught in his spray falling dead to the floor or dangling ominously on their silk strands. The shots had obviously stunned them, but there were too many clinging to the walls. We needed to run.

“Damn you, MOVE!” Maxen roared, his shout punctuated by a deafening gunshot just as Owen’s gun clicked empty, filling the room with silence. The spiders scattered for the moment, seeming to decide that there was too much noise. I turned and