I went back to running, slipping slightly on the eyeball residue. Whether he could stop the oversized spiders, with their hundreds of one-inch eyes and forearm sized legs, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to chance it. The dead were known to lie.
Finally I found myself at Bryant Park and whipped past the bench that Maximus and Ada would have been sitting at. I knew they weren’t there though, I knew they had moved on. The question was, where?
The toilets didn’t exist in the Veil side of the world, for one reason or another, so I had to kind of guess where they would be. I looked around, up and down, for any signs of weakness in the air, any shimmers or wavers, but couldn’t see anything.
Don’t panic, I told myself, though the reminder was ridiculous. Of course I was panicking. I used to have panic attacks over making phone calls to Pizza Hut.
And, I wasn’t alone. The man was still screaming over his loss of eyes and was out there – sightless but angry. And the spiders, well it seemed I had lost them for the moment but I knew it was a matter of time before they’d catch up. They too wished to come out to the other side. Or to eat me. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be too fussy about it.
“Ada!” I yelled, knowing that I’d already attracted enough attention already. “Ada I’m here, I’m going to come through.”
But try as I did, I could not get the air to shift. I closed my eyes, concentrating until my head felt like it was going to explode. I focused off and on, pretending I was looking at one of those Magic Eye painting that were everywhere in the nineties, but even that didn’t work.
Shit, shit, shit. Why wasn’t it working? Was I just not trying hard enough?
I took in a deep breath and attempted to count backward from ten. When I came through from the other side earlier, I felt I had time on my side. Here I didn’t. I needed to relax and trust that it would happen. I needed to calm the fuck down.
I only got as far as four though when I heard the scratching sound of overgrown spider legs, a sound I hoped I’d never hear again. I looked over my shoulder to see five of them coming around the corner, heading straight for me, all their eyes on their prize, their pincers clicking against each other as if they were imagining eating me already.
Fuck this shit. I let out a small cry, knowing that it would be impossible now for me to escape. I swatted at the air, tears threatening to spill down my face. I was so close to Dex, so close to my world, our life, and I was going to get stuck here.
The spiders began to give off a low, guttural growl, like a drooling dog on the attack. I looked behind at them again. At their pace, they’d be at me in ten seconds. I glanced around for plan B – did I even have enough time to find a weapon to fight them off? – when I saw yet another problem.
A creature emerged from the side of one of the buildings. She might have been a woman in another life, but here she could barely be called that. She pulled herself along the sidewalk, the lower part of her severed off, guts trailing behind her like a flowing tail.
Her head was on backward. I could see bald patches through her ratty, dark hair, as she crawled toward me, skeletal arms and fingers reaching my way, worn down to the bone.
I would have probably thrown up at the sight of her if it wasn’t for the fact that I was about to be eviscerated by giant spiders in a few seconds.
“Perry!”
I whirled around in time to see Ada emerge from the shimmering air, across the park, near the coffee kiosk we had gotten our lunch.
I couldn’t afford to be mad at her for coming through, not now. She was saving my ass.
I yelled back and quickly ran past the spiders, trying to avoid them. One leaped straight for me, tackling me from behind. Hairy legs tangled in my hair and the sheer weight of it threatened to pull me down.
Screaming, I ripped around, stumbling wildly in an attempt to get it off. Somehow it did, painfully taking out strands of my hair as it did so, and let out a high-pitched whine as it fell to the ground. There was no time to dwell on it – I kept running and running, now keenly aware that the spiders were in hot pursuit, coming faster now.
Just when I thought Ada was about to disappear – she was growing fainter before my eyes – she ran forward and grabbed my hand. I could barely feel her grip in mine, her body somewhere between solid and liquid. Her eyes darted over my shoulder and widened. I didn’t dare turn around again.
She yanked me toward her with all her might and in an instant I was being sucked into the shimmer, the familiar pressure kicking out from the inside of my brain.
My ears popped and there was a moment of blinding light and screams before I found myself tumbling forward and falling down into the dirt.