Apocalypse: 2.7 Burnout

Burnout 2.7

Shane Hayes
September 2015

Tracking the boys wasn’t hard. Thanks to Rocket’s Odor Sleuth, day or night made no difference to us. We stopped by their house, where Olive gave us an old t-shirt that Dennis hadn’t washed yet, before setting out into the Tahoe woods.

It took us several hours to trace their steps. They kept to the game trails for the most part but I saw places where they deviated a little, probably to take opportunistic potshots at a passing rabbit or squirrel.

Thankfully, at least one of them had been smart enough to mark their path with reflective tape on the tree trunks. Rocket and I didn’t need it to track them down, but I appreciated seeing that they weren’t being complete idiots about this.

Then, something strange happened. Rocket paused before setting off in a completely different direction. Game trails didn’t usually do that; they tended to gently curve or wind around, often in looping patterns that circled popular watering holes, not angle off elsewhere. 

“Lin, linoone,” he barked. He was using his tail as a pointer for me.

I pointed my flashlight in that direction and found several plants with broken branches. We walked that way a little bit and saw more of the same. “Not struggle, more… running? Excited for something? Did they spot a deer or something?”

“Linoone…”

“Yeah, they could be running from something, too. Let’s hurry.” I reached back and handed Swagsire my crossbow bolts. “Swagsire, build up Toxic, please. Coat each of the tips as best you can.”

“Oone.”

“Woop.”

We continued onward. I was starting to grow worried. Something got them running, and in a way that made them abandon basic common sense. Whoever had left those reflective trail markers up on the tree trunks had stopped.

It didn’t take long to find them. Four teenage boys were never going to run very far. A mile or so later, Rocket’s tail perked up again and I knew the scent was getting stronger.

We were close. Rocket was two feet ahead, scouting the area with his keen senses while I held my crossbow at the ready. Sir Swagsire was in my backpack and Scout perched on my shoulder. I would have loved to have him overhead, but his night vision wasn’t much better than my own. 

We were startled by Rocket’s sudden growling. It began at the back of his throat, a low and quiet vibration that carried anyway.

“Hostiles?” I asked softly. He tapped the ground once. Then, with his tail like a brush, he slanted it at an angle towards the darkness.

I couldn’t see that far but knew better than to doubt him. One hostile, roughly at my ten o’clock. It was almost certainly a pokemon. Nothing else would have made Rocket feel threatened like this.

Given I was wearing a flashlight, it certainly knew I was here. It wasn’t approaching though, just watching… and waiting…

Suddenly, I felt like the prey.

My mind moved a mile a minute. An herbivore wouldn’t have bothered to stick around and Rocket was still telling me that we were close to where Dennis was. That meant the boys were taken by a predator of some sort, but what?

The answer would determine if they were alive or dead. I could exclude packs hunters like mightyena. Probably avians like fearow, too.

I swallowed thickly. This was too much. Unknown pokemon were dangerous.

Sure, I’d fought a gligar in the dark before, but that was the closest I’d come to dying in a long time. One bite, one sting, coming from something that was a lot more comfortable in the dark than I was and it could have been all over. It sure as shit wasn’t a fight I would have chosen had I any voice in the matter.

If the predator was watching me, I could be sure I’d be at a similar disadvantage here. Whatever got the boys, I had to at least try to take the bodies back. But that didn’t mean we had to do it right this second. If they were alive by some miracle, then they’d still be alive when dawn came.

“We withdraw,” I said softly. “Not worth it. Not right now.”

“Lin,” Rocket chuffed. He made no complaints; he knew how vulnerable we were.

Slowly, we backed away. The boys would be here tomorrow, and so would whatever was watching me. If they weren’t, we’d just have to track them down again.

For now, our priority was rest.

X

Dawn broke and we made our way back to where we last paused our search. The light banished the shadows, revealing pristine, dew-ladden forest where unknown fears had lurked the night prior. It was at moments like these that I could fully understand why ancient civilizations almost universally had a sun deity of some stripe.

At first, it looked like any other glade, but we were stopped from approaching by a warning chirp from Scout. I looked closer.

There, between the trees, were thin, clear lines that glistened with the morning dew. Had it not been for the dewdrops, I wondered if I would have walked right into the trap.

My stomach sank. Plenty of bug types learned String Shot as a matter of course, but I could think of only two evolution lines that relied on the substance to hunt and preferred ambush tactics: galvantula and ariados. The boys had walked right into a giant web.

“Fuck…” I groaned. There were no words to describe how much I hated my life right now. I wasn’t arachnophobic per se, but I had no interest in finding out what a spider the size of a large bar stool could do to me.

“Lin? Linoone?” Rocket asked if I planned to go in.

“Well, that depends. Are they still in there? Can you tell?”

“Lin… Linoone,” he grumbled. The way he flicked his tail told me there was some confusion. Then, he tapped the dirt and made four scratches. He proceeded to erase one.

I frowned. There had been four boys. We had Dennis’ old shirt, which was the strongest scent source, but the other three trails should have been fairly obvious to him as well.

“Three are there? How? We started with four, Rocket.”

“Lin,” he shrugged and flicked his tail in a different direction. “Linoone.”

“You’re right, stupid question. One of them must have seen his buddies get caught and run scared.”

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. On one hand, he ditched his buddies. On the other hand, that probably was the smart move. Untrained, no pokemon, kid made the best decision he could, even if it was because of blind panic instead of prudence.

I wasn’t that kid. I had Rocket, Scout, and Swagsire to help me out. I wasn’t helpless. As a ranger, it was custom to confirm the deaths of our peers and bring back a keepsafe, the weapon or personal belonging, for the family to bury. Those kids weren’t rangers, but I felt an obligation to at least try.

There was also the chance that they could be alive. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I remembered my old biology teacher, an insect-buff named Mr. Shimizu, telling me how spiders could keep their prey paralyzed and wrapped up without killing them. For freshness, he said, like a cellar the spider could reach into for a snack.

That gave me two options:

First, I could go after the runner. I could find him and, assuming he hadn’t gotten himself into more trouble, drag him back to town. He could be the one to explain how his three friends ended up as a spider’s lunch.

But… that felt callous. The kids were sixteen? Seventeen? The world was a fucked up place, but that was no reason for me to add to the shitshow. He shouldn’t have to be the one to do that.

Or second, I could prioritize the boys here. They were alive or dead. But if they were alive, they wouldn’t be for much longer. I didn’t know how long an ariados or galvantula would keep prey “in the fridge,” but I doubted it’d be for very long. Even if the pokemon wasn’t in a killing mood, the paralytic could have negative consequences on humans.

It’d mean fighting a spider in its web. That sounded a lot like challenging a wizard in his tower, the kind of thing fantasy stories explicitly warned you not to do. My preference would have been to burn the whole glade and flush out the spider before engaging on my terms, but I couldn’t take the chance that the boys were still alive in there.

My mind flickered back to Jonah, Dennis’ uncle. He was a good man, a bit lazy and happy to sit on the wall, but a decent sort. It wasn’t lost on me how he picked the safe jobs so he could stay near his niece and nephew; his brother apparently wasn’t a responsible father.

And Olive… Fuck, I’d met her for five minutes but I didn’t want to tell her some half-assed story about how a giant spider turned her brother into a slushie.

I had to try, I realized. If nothing else, they deserved to know what happened definitively.

“We’re going in,” I said finally. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think I’d be happy with myself if I walked away. Besides, even if I chased the runner, there was no guarantee he was alive either so I’d be rolling the dice either way, better I roll for three than one. “Rocket, can you tell me where the spider is exactly?”

“Lin, linoone,” he nodded.

He licked his nose to “reset” before smelling the air. With a soft bark, he tilted his nose to my left. He was pointing somewhere up towards the trees near the outskirts of the glade.

That was good. Tarantulas tended to be burrowing, ambush predators. Pokemon often followed their animal counterparts in terms of general behavior, so I tentatively crossed them off my list of suspects. The electric type pokemon would have been hard to deal with, especially for Scout.

So, ariados. Or spinarak if I was lucky, but I didn’t think so. The web looked like it spanned the whole glade, rather large for the pre-evolution.

I wondered if someone had cleared a bug type dungeon somewhere in the world. Or worse, specifically a spider-themed dungeon. I pitied the poor bastard. That sounded like a very special type of nightmare fuel.

“Still just one?” I asked in confirmation.

“Linoone.”

“And the boys?”

“Lin.” Same direction. Probably got moved after being wrapped up. I was starting to think the glade was a big fishing net for unwary travelers.

I considered my options. Tracking down the spider was out of the question. Chasing it sounded like a quick way to get myself poisoned and last I checked, we didn’t have pecha berries yet.

“We force a confrontation,” I said. I pointed in the opposite direction, away from the spider and the kids. “We circle the glade, slowly inward. Rocket, Hone Claws and Slash. Cut through any strings you see.”

“Lin,” he barked in the affirmative.

“Scout, take the skies. We’re going to lure it out into the open. Once you have a clear shot, Air Cutter.”

“Tran,” he cooed before taking off.

Swagsire nudged my back. “Woop? Wooper.”

“On the ground. We won’t be moving very fast. Ready a Mud Slap. Your goal isn't to take the spider down. When it attacks, your goal is to block the Poison Sting for us. Can you do that?”

“Woop! Wooper-woop!”

“Okay. I’m counting on you.”

We began the slow, arduous process of ruining a spider pokemon’s web. As annoying as it was, I figured this spiral pattern was the best way to ensure we didn’t get caught. Eventually, the spider would have to show up to protect its nest. Either that, or it’d leave, abandoning its prey. I was fine with that option, too.

As we moved, I tried my hand at cutting through some of the silk. My survival knife had saw teeth at the base of the blade specifically to cut rope, but even that proved ineffective. I read somewhere that spider silk was stronger than steel. It must have been true because I could cut it, but only with both hands and significant effort.

Meanwhile, Rocket ripped through the damn things like the webs were any other rope. It was honestly a little unfair. Pokemon were just built different.

We were a third of the way through our first lap around the glade when the spider struck. It was deadly silent, its arrival masked perfectly by the rustling of the wind. 

I thought it would go for Poison Sting. Maybe String Shot, with webbing condensed into nuggets like Spider-Man sometimes had in his comics.

I was wrong, and I almost paid for it with my life.

There was the sudden brush of branches. Then, my shadow bubbled. A creature leapt out, more reminiscent of a shark than a spider in that moment. Its carapace was a matte-crimson like drying blood. Its spindly limbs were an alternating shade of red and purple. 

“Holy fuck!” I shouted in alarm. I tried to step back and bring my crossbow to bear, but I was too slow to pull the trigger.

Its mandibles closed around my crossbow. The spring was the first to go. Then, the bolt slipped from its slot as the massive spider wrenched its jaws back. A dull, snapping sound filled the air as it bit clean through the fiberglass and distorted the metal body. Just like that, I’d lost my primary weapon.

I threw myself back in desperation. This thing was smart, smart enough to know that I was the focal point of this team. Maybe it had even noticed Scout’s shadow circling the area and decided that close combat would keep the bird from raining wind blades down on it.

Whatever the case, I would have died then and there had it not been for Sir Swagsire. Rocket was up front, cutting webbing, but the little salamander had been walking by my side, his oversized bobblehead on a swivel.

Now, he let out an adorable, croaking war cry as he tackled the ariados away from me. His tail came up and slapped the spider with surprising force, sending it skittering back.

Sir Swagsire slapped the ground with his tail. He hastily condensed a ball of mud and over his tail before flicking it at the ariados. At the same time, Rocket turned with a vicious snarl, claws outstretched.

Neither blow connected. The ariados let out a chittering, rasping noise, like the grating of sandpaper and the clacking of blades, and sank into its own shadow. Rocket sailed right above where it had been, only narrowly avoiding getting beaned by Swagsire’s Mud Shot.

“Shadow Sneak, it has to be,” I muttered.

I didn’t know if ariados learned the move naturally or not, but game data was immaterial at the moment. I reached down and drew out a pair of survival knives. They probably wouldn’t help, but they were better than nothing.

Rocket let out a bark of warning and I hit the floor. A salvo of Poison Sting whiffed by above my head, close enough to make the hairs on my neck stand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it sink back into the shadow.

“Out, into the glade,” I barked. We needed more space to maneuver. The spider had the advantage in such a well-shaded, enclosed area. “Rocket, cut us a path to the center!”

“Lin!” he shouted in reply. Claws out and body covered in a telltale stream of aura, he became a dervish of blades. As he went, he dragged his claws along the ground, snapping any tripwires for us to follow.

I stumbled into the center of the glade. I wasn’t tired, that didn’t really happen ever since I unlocked my aura, but trying to keep up with a linoone was a bitch and a half. Not to mention, I had to step more or less exactly where he’d passed so that I could be sure I wasn’t going to get stuck.

And then there was the ariados. It obviously knew what we were thinking because it was loath to let us into its glade. It hopped from branch to branch, launching salvos of Poison Stings at us. I had to run stooped over, pausing every once in a while to let Swagsire deflect the hits for me.

Finally, we made it. The center of the glade had looked so peaceful this morning. Now that I was closer, I could see it for the killing field it was.

The whole place was littered with the bones of small animals, messily buried in the dirt. I had no idea why it had made a little graveyard for its past prey, but joining the pile wasn’t on my to-do list.

“Lin…” Rocket let out a keening whine. He found a clean patch of dirt to bury his nose in.

“Odor Sleuth. It’s not working here,” I realized. There were too many conflicting scents tied to various prey animals. Dirt. Venom. Rot. Scavengers. And of course, all muddled by the spider.

“Oone…”

“That’s fine. Rocket, Swagsire, Swift and Mud Shot. Guard against any ranged attacks. We’re going to continue to tear the webbing here.”

It was dawn. The sun was to the east, which meant my shadow was to the west. I kept that in mind as we worked. The ariados didn’t seem especially good at ranged attacks so if it wanted to keep us from ripping up its territory, it’d need to engage.

It was a spider. By default, it was a cautious pokemon that preferred to ambush its prey. And if it had a choice, my bet was that it’d choose to target me again, the weak link. Now, I just had to pray that I’d read the pokemon correctly because my life depended on it.

I quickly realized that there were two types of webbing. One was thin and comparatively delicate. It was always pulled taut so that the slightest brush would make it oscillate like a guitar string. It was a tripwire, meant to let the ariados know when something was nearby. It could be broken with considerable force.

The other was thicker and more elastic, almost like a bungee cord. It was coated in a sticky substance that made sawing away at it damn near impossible unless you happened to have supernaturally sharp claws and the strength of an evolved pokemon. 

The glade had a few such lines, though not nearly as many as the perimeter. Maybe it was to capture any scavengers who came for the graveyard. That was macabre as fuck; its own compost bin was also a trap.

Slowly, a serrated knife in both hands, I sawed through one of the thinner web lines. Then, softly whistling under my breath, I turned towards a thicker one. More importantly, I turned to face northeast, away from my shadow, and drew a second knife again.

I whipped around, fast enough that I felt my spine strain and pop. My heart hammered in my chest. My two knives were held in front of me, just in time to catch a set of razor-sharp mandibles pinching towards my throat. That shit would have snipped the back of my neck.

I’d guessed correctly; this fucker was watching for the moment my eyes left my shadow. Time slowed down as we caught each other in the bind. For that singular fraction of a second, we wrestled for dominance.

And I was losing. I could tell instantly. It was an instinctive feeling of dread, a chill that ran down my spine that told me that at most, I had two breaths of life left in me.

It pressed towards me. Its jaws closed around my knives. I was a strong man. Not the strongest, but fit and healthy. Good enough to try for the Olympics, Dr. Lansdowne had said.

And it didn’t matter. The difference between me and a pokemon, even one that was half my weight, was huge. It ducked its head and its neck alone exerted a persistent force on my knives, lowering my only weapons. And that was a death sentence.

Ariados had a fuck-massive horn on their foreheads. It didn’t look so big on my Gameboy, but when the spider was the size of a bar stool, that “little” horn was a spike of ivory-white as long as my forearm.

It glistened with venom. In my moment of hyperpreception, I could see a tiny pinprick at the tip of the horn that dripped a pale, violet fluid. It reached for me, inching closer and closer. It’d pierce deep into my neck and there was nothing I could do about it.

Then, almost like a rubber band snapping back into place, the moment passed. My team, ever attentive, heard my whistle. It was the first command I taught them: Come. Regroup.

Rocket was already turning back to me when my shadow began to bubble. So was Sir Swagsire. And before the spider’s horn could find my throat, they came to my rescue with all the ferocity of a pissed off puma.

Swagsire’s Poison Tail swung upward, slapping its head back and freeing my knives. The instant we were separated, Rocket’s Liftoff took them clean into the air.

A blade of wind, shaped into a buzzsaw, struck down. It cleaved through a portion of the ariados’ abdomen and one of its limbs. An unholy screech filled the air.

Rocket caught it on the way down. His claws found the cut Scout made. With a prying, wrenching motion that made my stomach flip, he disemboweled the spider.

Blue blood, not red, poured down alongside various viscera. Rocket took an experimental nibble and then promptly gagged, obviously deciding that spiders were not edible.

I stood slowly with a tired groan as tension left my body. The battle lasted only a few minutes, but I felt like I’d been fighting for hours. Worst of all, I just knew that cleaning up would be even more of a pain in the ass. I wasn’t arachnophobic, but Arceus clearly made a mistake designing that one.

“Good job, guys,” I said softly. It almost felt wrong to disturb the silence. Then again, we had work to do. “Let’s go see if the boys are still alive.”

Author’s Note

I thought about making the ariados hunt longer, but decided against it. Tactics are important. Shane doesn’t have the strongest pokemon, and he’s not a shonen magic swordsman like Aaron, but he’s smart and he’s got good instincts.

Animal Fact: Spiders can store live prey anywhere from several hours to several weeks. It all depends on the animal’s metabolism, abundance of prey, etc.