Spiders get Around, Benjamin Day [reading e books txt] 📗

The PEDSOT tanks were nightly rattling the windows of his dorm, rumbling down the cracked, wet streets, being chased by the little mean men in their dingy uniforms carrying fixed bayonets, though there had been no invading armies in this city for some three years now. Jones would watch them go by from his tenth floor tenement, sipping on the bitter local whiskey that tasted of fuel and burned as it went and he stared with bloodshot eyes that gouged down into the souls of the military servants who carried among their masses only one mind.
If I was a spider

, Jones thought, I wouldn’t have this problem

. The issue that had been troubling him for the past three weeks was one of logistics. There was simply no way to get over the wall without certain unpleasant authorities being alerted to his unfortunate presence in the wastelands of Barberio, where for the last two years things had moved in a decidedly downward trajectory.
With his employment-imposed internment in the dying city came the feeling of some invisible noose and its slow, yet unceasing, cinching was beginning to asphyxiate his spirit. They were looking for him, and they were getting closer. He could feel it. But for the first time in his life he was paralyzed by inability and could not seem to form a workable solution to an obvious problem. He was trapped.
He could just make out the wall in the distance, through the robed fog that came in every night with the loss of light, and would gaze for hours at that bleak barrier, wondering what to do. It lurked in his mind like a taunting vision, mocking his helplessness. If only I were a spider

, he thought again, and finished off a swig of drink and threw the glass against the wall, listening with pleasure to the sound of the shattering that echoed in his small room.

Since he had successfully carried out his last mission a month before and orchestrated the destruction of the Cormac St. Bridge, which had been the last refuge of the fleeing swamps of people, he had lost communication with his superiors, and now he had a dilemma. With the removal of the bridge from the traffic of society came his complete confinement to a hostile city where he had made more than a few enemies.
As well the demolition of the bridge had been no small affair, and there were too many people who knew of his involvement, and too many people that knew those people, and knew how to get them to talk. He had killed off the three most likely offenders, slitting their throats under the shroud of night. But he was worried that if he went any further it would serve as incentive to the rest, rather than the warning he intended. It was only a matter of time. To a spy, time is a precious commodity, and not one that Jones himself was used to running low on.
So he waited, as patiently as he was able, listening to the undercurrent of rumors about those who had knowledge of the city that he did not, and drank the clear brown acid, and ate what bread and rancid meat he could get a hold of, and listened some more. During the broad days he would slip on his pilled gray sweater that matched the concrete in the daylight and the fog at night, and wander through the crumbling back alleys, searching out the one person that he truly believed could help him. For, despite the abundant circulation of false stories about people with connections to connections, he found one tale so unbelievable that he was actually starting to believe it.
Not just a woman, but an old

woman. Not just an old woman, but an old blind

woman. And not just any old blind woman, but one that was reputed to be the last living witch in these parts or, according to some, the entire world. From what he had heard via reliable sources that he had paid well, and from unreliable ones that he had tortured extensively, if anyone could help him, it was her.
Most of them had sounded out-and-out scared of her, and it was all he could do to get them, even under threat of slow dismembered death, to give him any information at all.
Finally he had an address, but addresses were of little use in a city that he was not familiar with and that had long since misplaced every street sign and knocked every number placard off the buildings to lay among the slipping piles of rubble filling the roads. So he had to ask the way often, and the more people he talked to, the more likely he was to be found out. But then one day, one day after almost four years of being abandoned to the cruel fates that presided over this stretch of lonely hell, Jones had it.

He knocked three times on the peeling red door and paint flakes shook themselves loose and fell to floor. The door opened and Jones had to tilt his gaze down to meet the runny-egg eyes of the woman that stood there. She was at least a foot and a half shorter than him and she was the oldest person Jones had ever seen. Her face was a dried up lake-bed laced with cracks and crinkles. Strings of snow colored hair shot out in all directions. She did not smile and stared passively into the space to the right side of his head.
“Hello, Mr. Jones. I knew you would turn up here, eventually. Come in.” She moved to the side and Jones stepped past her into the one room unit with bulging, stained plaster walls and a claustrophobic ceiling that his head would have touched if he had stood on his toes.
“How do you know me?”
“Your reputation has preceded you, I have heard many accounts of your work. Including your responsibility for The Cormac.” She moved surprisingly swiftly for her state. Laboring with a hunched back and knees that popped, she waved him over to a small couch against the wall and sat in the chair perpendicular to it.
“Yes, but how did you know it was me? With…”
“I’m blind, Mr. Jones, not stupid, no one comes here unannounced. Besides, you stink like a stranger.” She held out a bony hand in his direction, one withered finger stretching out to point him in the eye. “Did you know that was the oldest bridge in the city? My great-grandfather was on the crew that built it, his own tired hands helping to place the girders and pour the concrete.” She did not look at him when she spoke, but directed her empty gaze toward the dreary light from the window.
“I was only following orders,” Jones said. “It was just my job.”
“Of course it was. Wars drive men to terrible things.” She nodded her head at the wall, and dropped her arm back to its resting place.
Jones shifted in his seat, bringing his hands together on his lap. “I don’t hold anything against anyone personally.” He looked at her, she looked at nothing. “If you don’t want to help me, I can’t really blame you.”
“What I want for you doesn’t amount to much,” she said. He did not understand what this meant, and her silence following the statement spurred him onward.
“I mean, if I stay here, I’ll just end up as one more dead body in the street.” He leaned forward in his seat a little. “And I have to say that if you think PEDSOT will ever bring peace to this town… from what I’ve seen of their tactics, and I’ve seen more than most, they won’t stop until everyone is under their thumb. Everyone. I have nothing against your people, but I have everything against them.”
“I understand you were just doing your duty,” she said. Her voice was rough, like radio static. “Many times monstrous acts are carried out in wartime, but it doesn’t matter because everyone is just doing their job.” She got up from the crumpled leather chair, waving one hand dismissively, and shuffled across the room, the hem of her faded yellow dress dragging in the dust on the warped floorboards. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Jones,” she said, over her shoulder as she approached a thinly lacquered sideboard, “I hold nothing against you either, only I wish that you were no longer in my city.”
Something about her loosened his lips more than even drink would. He did not know she had that effect on everyone. “Well, if you’ll believe me,” he said, “then that makes two of us. All I want is to go home. I haven’t been there in almost five years, and I am tired of fighting for every day like that’s what life is about.” He shook his head, though she could not see it. “Maybe I made a mistake ever coming here. You know, I actually thought I could help.”
She walked back over and threw a skinny arm out and grasped around the empty air in front of him until he held out his hand. This she grabbed quickly and pulled it to her lips and kissed the back of it once, with warm sandpaper lips, then turned it over and placed a glass vial in his palm and pressed his fingers closed around it. She looked him directly in the eyes for the first time and he wondered, for a split second. “Go to the wall,” she said, “drink this and think about birds. Birds are always the best for this.”
“I—I don’t understand,” Jones said. He looked at the small corked glass swirling with a cloudy blue liquid.
“You wanted my help. That is it. Do as I said.” She let go of his hand and straightened up, as much as was possible for her. “It is time for you to go now, it would do neither of us any good to be seen in the presence of the other.” She waved him off of the couch and he walked back over to the door, staring at the vial in his hand, brow wrinkled, eyes furrowed. When he touched the doorknob she placed a hand on his arm and pulled him around.
“One last thing, Mr. Jones, I also have no faith in the ability of PEDSOT to free the people of this town. My hope for the future lies in only in myself. I will free our people. I will be the one to bring peace to Barberio, one way or another.”
“You have a lot of confidence in yourself.” Jones twisted the handle and pulled the door open.
She pointed to the vial in his