Free Salticidae by Ryan C. Thomas Page A

what I need right now, Janet thought. She was not here to try and solve a civil war, she was here to extract gold and get back to Cape Town where she could relax on the beach with a beer before driving home in her Maserati. Like her father always said, the world’s problems were not theirs to solve. It’s every man for himself.
    “ Tell you what, Gellis,” she sighed, “how about I pay you with a plane ticket. No one’ gonna take that from you. Then you can go anywhere you want. Get that rope secure and I’ll keep that promise.”
    “And what of my wife?”
    Janet didn’t respond. She’d never figured Gellis to be a married man. Truth was she didn’t think about him much at all. “I didn’t know you were married.”
    “For seven years. She is my love.”
    “Well, I suppose I could get you two tickets. But look, this is still an employer employee relationship, got me? Don’t think I care too much about your problems. We’ve all got problems.”
    “I suppose so.”
    A few seconds passed. Janet found the silence to be worse than the conversation. Staring at Moyo’s quietly rasping body was creepy. “So your wife…she, uh, like a housewife or something?”
    Gellis finally popped back out of the crack, one end of the rope in his hand. “No, she does not do much of anything, in fact.”
    “What? She lazy or something?”
    “I do not wish to talk about it. The rope is ready.” He threw it over the edge and waited until it settled. “I don’t know how far down it goes but if it can get us to a lower leve l somehow we can try to find the water again.”
    “Way ahead of you,” Janet said. “Give me the light. I’m going first and I want to see what’s before me.” She took the headlamp from Gellis and secured it tightly. She sat down on the edge of the pit, wrapped her leg around the rope and let it fall over her right foot. She put her left on top to create a support system and lowered herself down. Her headlamp threw circles of white on the dark rock surrounding her.
    With a grunt, Gellis came down above her, Moyo piggybacking him. Janet hoped the rope would hold all three of them, otherwise they’d fall to an unknown death.
    The going was slow, and every few feet Janet would look down the center again and try to see the bottom, but even her headlight was swallowed in a blackness so deep she might as well have had her eyes shut. The rope chafed her palms and the muscles in her legs grew tight and tired. She was in good shape but hadn’t expected to be climbing down pits when she’d agreed to head this project. When she got back home she was going to have to hit the gym some more.
    She dropped another two feet and heard something that made the hairs rise on her neck. She waited with bated breath, hoping against hope she’d heard wrong. Hoping it was just Gellis’ movements above her echoing off the rocky walls of this tunnel. Hoping it was just more scurrying cockroaches or a colony of bats. It grew more distinct now, and her hope died as the thudda thudda of marching feet became apparent.
    “Shh,” Gellis whispered.
    “Oh fuck,” she whispered back.
    She looked down, let her headlight trace the inner walls of the darkness below her. One hundred and eighty degrees behind her, on the opposite side of the pit, she saw them down below, coming up fast.
    Hordes of giant spiders, clinging to the walls, racing up in a shadowy wave that defied anything else in the animal kingdom.
     
    ***
     
    The paths through the rainforest were marked in ways that only Shumba and his tribe could discern. A marker here spoke of a good place to lay a snare, a marker there warned of unstable terrain. Shumba’s tribe was one of only a few that had chosen to live so high up and so far away from the Wild East in recent years, pushed further into the jungle by the rampant fighting and genocide. Sadly, even this high up in the mountains where there still existed a semblance of unchartered evolution, the jungle revealed the