The Undead Spider #89.
Consciousness came back in pieces. Sound first.
Then gravity.
He opened his eyes.
Dark. Not total -- there was a faint phosphorescence somewhere beneath him, or above him, depending on which way was up. He was suspended. He could feel that before he understood it, feel it in the slow, incremental drop that told him whatever held him was alive with tension, working to hold his weight and just barely winning.
Web.
He knew it before he touched it. Pressed his chin to his chest and felt the give -- strands against his jaw, layered, dense, the warmth coming through them faintly, enough to keep his core from giving out. A cocoon. He was sealed in one, head-down, and it was hanging from something above him that was slowly, very slowly, losing ground.
His mind went somewhere before he could catch it.
The vat. A different suspension. Himself upside down with nothing but green liquid below and the chains loosening and the last thing he'd felt before he'd hit the surface was --
He stopped breathing.
His pulse shot up before he could do anything about it. He could feel it in his neck, his temples, his wrists where the web pressed against the veins -- rapid and uneven, his body making decisions without consulting him. The cold sweat came next, immediate and total, soaking into the interior of the cocoon so fast it turned the warmth clammy.
Stop.
He pressed his teeth together. Held.
The last time he'd been upside down over something, over that specific dark, he'd gone under and not come back the same. He remembered that. He was going to keep remembering it. That was not the problem right now.
He made himself breathe -- slow, from the chest, not the throat. Once. Again. He listened to his pulse and waited and did not look at the dark below him. After a while, his heartbeat decided to be reasonable about things.
Better.
He rolled his shoulders -- or tried to. The web gave maybe three inches before it pushed back. He could feel the tensile load in it, the resistance calibrated to something close to his own strength, not quite equal but close enough to matter. Whoever had built this knew what was inside it.
He tried his legs. Same result. He could flex, he could shift weight, but breaking through wasn't going to happen fast or quietly, and the strand above him was already pulling longer.
He'd split the cocoon at the seam if he could find it. Spread his knees wide enough to stress the weave at the base. He got his legs working against each other, slow pressure outward, the web straining --
"Why do you still fight?"
The voice came from below him. Or above. Direction was still lying to him.
He didn't stop. Got another inch of give from the weave at his knees and pressed into it.
The voice didn't ask again. It spoke over him instead, unhurried, as if it had somewhere to be but had decided his answer wasn't required.
"You understood the cost from the beginning. You didn't stop." A pause. Not for breath -- something had replaced breath with something colder. "The first warning. The second. The city itself tried to end you multiple times, and you found reasons. You ran out of time and found reasons. You lost an arm and still found reasons."
Jake felt the strand give another centimeter. His shoulders were burning. He kept pushing.
"Is that pride?" The voice. "Fear? It cannot be fear. Fear creates hesitation and you have never hesitated when it mattered."
His knees were at the limit of what the weave would allow. He pulled his left arm hard against the interior, felt the cocoon flex --
The strand broke.
He dropped.
Not far -- maybe two meters, and the cocoon hit whatever was below with enough impact to rattle his teeth. He lay there on the cold metal floor, still wrapped, chest heaving, the impact ringing through the casing of the prosthetic arm.
"Impressive."
Flat. Not a compliment, not mockery. An observation, delivered like a reading off an instrument.
"Not the landing."
He got his right elbow under himself and pushed. The cocoon had cracked at the seam from the fall and he worked his fingers into it, got purchase, and started tearing.
"You survived everything I expected to end you." The voice moved -- or he could hear it from a different angle now, as if it had walked around him while he was working. "Every threshold where the reasonable outcome was cessation. You found another variable."
The cocoon split at the shoulder. He got his arm free, tore across the chest, and the whole front of it gave way. He came up onto his knees and then his feet in one push, shaking the last of the web off his face, and there was air -- stale, cold, but air -- and ahead of him, in the phosphorescent half-dark, a room.
His brain mapped it fast and came back unsatisfied. It was large. The ceiling was wrong -- too high, vanishing into dark before it reached a surface. The floor was metal, smooth, cold through his boots. And around him, receding into the dark in all directions, cocoons. Dozens. Hanging from threads he couldn't trace to any origin point, each one glowing faintly -- not phosphorescence, something slower, pulsing with the rhythm of a heartbeat that wasn't quite biological anymore.
He turned.
The figure stood at the edge of the light, and his body shifted before he thought about it -- weight forward, hands loose, every muscle tuning itself to the question of what this was going to become.
Taller than him, but only just. That was wrong. The last time --
He stopped.
The Grim Reaper. Robes that moved without air moving them. Hood pulled enough that the face was mostly void, mostly concept rather than feature. The scythe resting in one hand, the blade angled back, not raised.
It was looking at him.
"You look determined," it said.
"You were taller," Jake said.
A pause. Something in the hooded darkness that might have been recalibration. "Does my height factor into your decision to fight me?"
Jake took a slow breath through his nose. His muscles were still humming from the cocoon, his spider-sense running a steady low-level trace across every surface in the room. Nothing was screaming. He noted that too.
"You're a threat to my existence," he said. "That's reason enough."
The figure was still for a moment. Then -- and Jake almost missed it -- its body folded backward slightly, the hood dropping a fraction, a sound coming out of it that took him a second to place. Short. Percussive. Almost wet.
It was laughing.
"You discuss existence," the Reaper said, and the sound wound down to nothing, "when you detonated yourself into component matter mere moments ago."
Jake opened his mouth.
Closed it.
He looked at his left arm. At the prosthetic casing. Then past it, around the room, and then down at himself, and his mind ran the math it had been refusing to run since he'd woken up.
He'd been in the explosion. He'd felt the charge sequence start through the Space Hog's controls and he'd been close to the Hog when it went and the blast radius had been--
"I should be--"
He closed his mouth, unable to find the right word.
The Reaper watched him work through it with something that read as genuine attention. "Dead things don't breathe stale air, Jacob Cross."
The warmth went out of the air between them.
Jake's eyes came up from his arm. He stopped processing the explosion. He looked at the Reaper and at the scythe and at the room behind them both, and he asked, "Where am I?"
"Somewhere you are not supposed to be."
Jake's spider-sense was running clean -- a low, steady trace without urgency. The Reaper wasn't registering as a threat. He didn't know what to do with that yet.
His eyes went to the cocoons again -- all around him, all hanging, all pulsing faintly. He was counting before he could stop himself. Too many to count fast. He looked at their shapes instead. Different sizes. Different builds. And the web connecting them -- all of it converging, threading back toward the center of the ceiling where his own strand had been hanging from before he fell.
The Reaper knew he was looking.
"You have no intention of getting back into your cocoon."
"You tried to end me once, and failed," Jake said.
"Yes." Flat. Unapologetic. "So let's correct that."
The Reaper lifted the scythe off its shoulder, holding it at the grip, blade up. Jake's eyes followed the scythe. His body started to shift.
The Reaper threw it.
The scythe came across the air between them and Jake's hand went up before he decided to reach for it, caught it by the haft, and the weight of it drove his arm down two feet before he arrested it. He held on. Both hands now, because one wasn't enough -- the thing was dense beyond what its size should've allowed, the grip cold, the blade angled back over his shoulder. He planted his feet and absorbed what was left of the throw's momentum and stood there with the Grim Reaper's scythe in his hands.
He stared at the Reaper.
"You know what runs through your mind," the Reaper said. "I've been you. A very long time ago." The void where its face should have been was steady on him. "You have the means now. Don't miss the moment."
Jake looked down at the scythe. Then up.
His hands were still on it.
~MimicLord
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