Crawlers

8:47pm

'There,' said Josh, standing back from the bulging clump of maroon and charcoal-grey material he'd been wedging in the hole as best he could. 'That looks solid enough.' 

'If those things want to come in again,' said Samantha, 'it's going to take more than our blazers to stop them, don't you think?' 

'I told you,' said Josh, 'it's temporary. Just to give us a bit of warning so we can do something else.' 

'But what else?' asked Samantha. 'What do you think we're going to do? I mean, do you even know?' 

Josh pursed his lips. 

Ben was still feeling slightly humiliated after the creatures' sudden disappearance. But seeing how little Josh enjoyed having his leadership questioned cheered him up a bit. 

'I'm sorry,' Josh told Samantha, with a tight, fake smile that Ben knew meant he wasn't sorry at all, 'but I thought it was obvious. We'll keep an eye on the hole in case the spiders come back, of course. If necessary, we'll take shifts. But until they attack again, blocking that hole with anything bigger would mean we can't get to the taps and the sink. And if we stay here much longer,' he added, 'we're going to need those.' 

'What for, cups of tea?' asked Samantha. 'Oh yeah, I can see that'd be a big help.' 

'Tea,' said Josh, eyes narrowing, 'yes. Water too. But also... something else.' 

'What?' Samantha asked. 

By way of a reply, Josh looked away from Samantha. 'Hugo?' 

'Yes, mate?' 

'Are you still watching the screens? Are those people still outside the door?' 

'No change, mate,' Hugo called back. 'That teacher's gone, but the rest of them are still out there, just... standing there. Like they're waiting for something.' 

'Waiting for us,' said Josh, looking back at Samantha. 'They're on guard, in case we try to come out of these rooms.' 

'Yeah,' said Samantha. 'Maybe. So?' 

'So,' Jasmine answered for him grimly, from her place on the floor, 'do you notice a toilet in here?' 

There was a moment of scandalized silence as the full implications hit home. 

'No way,' Samantha announced. 'There is no way I'm going to go to the loo in that sink. Not with you lot right there.' 

'Then I hope you don't mind holding it in,' said Josh. 'We could be here a long time.' 

Samantha made a contemptuous sucking sound with her teeth, and turned to Jasmine. 'All right then, genius,' she said, changing the subject. 'What about you? Discovered anything yet?' 

'I'm... not sure,' said Jasmine. 

She had retrieved the flattened remains of the three dead creatures and was now using the notice board on her lap as a makeshift dissecting table. Well, strictly speaking she was poking at the creatures with a biro, but that was the best she could do in the circumstances. English might be Jasmine's weakest subject but Biology, supposedly, was her strongest. Examining the creatures seemed a sensible next step: it might give her an idea of what they were up against. But so far all that she had managed to do was disgust herself. 

Each spider-thing was about twenty centimetres across. Instead of eight legs though, weirdly, they had five - four long ones on one side of their wide, flattened bodies and only one, a thicker one, on the other. Also, apart from a thin band of red at the joints of each of their legs, they were almost transparent - like jellyfish. The creatures were almost as unpleasant dead as they had been alive. They gave off a faint fishy smell and they were sticky to the touch. There was something deeply wrong about their see-through legs and the little strips of blood at their joints. Jasmine was not squeamish, but the rubbery way the creatures' flesh resisted the push of her pen made her gorge rise.