The Undead Spider #88.
The first thing that came back was the cold.
Not like cold he'd known before -- not wind-chill on a rooftop, not the bite of an unheated room, not even the deep cold that came off water at night. This was something else. Something that had been waiting here long enough to stop being a temperature and become a condition of the place itself. It sat inside every breath and behind every heartbeat and made the concept of warmth feel like something he'd invented.
The second thing was the smell.
His nose came back online before the rest of him had fully decided to, and that was its own kind of cruelty. Rot that had moved past rot into something older and worse, something that had been sitting long enough to ferment into a smell with mass -- you didn't just breathe it, it got into you, pressed against the back of your throat and stayed there. His stomach heaved on reflex but there was nothing in him to bring up, and the heaving itself cost more than he had.
Then the weight of the fluid around him.
He was submerged. Not deeply, but enough -- his legs beneath, his chest at the surface, his arms trying to find purchase on something that wasn't there. The fluid wasn't water. It moved thick and dragging, like something between oil and mucus that had been sitting and settling for a long time. He could feel it on his skin. In his throat. He'd breathed it coming up, some of it had gotten in, and the lingering sensation of that was going to be with him for a while.
He got his face clear.
Pulled air in with a gasp that sounded worse than it felt, and then felt worse than it should have because the air down here was the source of the smell and he'd just taken a full lungful of it. His eyes opened to almost nothing -- ambient light, sourceless, the dim blue-grey of a space that had just enough illumination to make out shapes and nothing else. Not darkness exactly. The absence of any reason to be lit.
He could see maybe three feet.
The fluid stretched past that in every direction he could make out. He couldn't tell where the edges were. Couldn't tell how deep, couldn't tell how wide, couldn't tell if there was a far wall or if it just went on. His spider-sense was pulsing at a low register, catching something at the edge of its range -- not danger exactly, just data. The unmistakable sense of not being alone.
He didn't know what to do with that yet.
His left arm was still there. He became aware of it by its absence of sensation -- not the familiar weight of his own arm, but the mechanical weight, the dead-metal nothing of the prosthetic that had been with him when the Hog's payload went off. He tried to close the hand. Something in the joint responded, a faint twitch, like a signal crossing a damaged cable, but nothing more. The cold had gotten into the mechanics the way cold got into everything here. It wasn't an arm right now. It was a counterweight.
He tried a web.
Nothing. His wrist moved, the motion that had become so automatic he didn't have to think about it, and nothing happened. His fingers found the trigger points by memory and got silence in return. The cold had settled into his biology the way it had settled into the arm, and whatever made the webbing work had simply decided it wasn't equipped for this.
He started moving.
Not toward anything. Just moving, because staying still meant the cold won, and the cold was already winning enough ground without his cooperation. He pushed through the fluid and it pushed back, viscous and unhurried, and every stroke forward cost twice what it should have. His legs were underwater and he could feel them only as a general fact, the way you felt things that were very numb -- not absent, just far away.
His spider-sense caught it before he touched it.
Something solid. Just ahead and below the surface, shape resolving through the sense before his hand made contact -- and his hand did make contact, finding something hard enough that the cold had taken all the give out of it. He grabbed on. Whatever it was, it didn't shift or float, it was down there like it had been down there for a while, and he could use it. Step on it. Get some height out of the fluid.
He pulled himself forward and got his hands around it properly.
His fingers found shape.
He went still.
The recognition moved through him slower than it should have, slower than his mind wanted to process it, his brain presenting the data and then sitting with it while he decided whether to accept it. The shape under his palms. The specific geometry of a shoulder, the dip of a clavicle. The cold had made it solid and the fluid had preserved it into something that would stay like this indefinitely, and he was holding it the way you held a support beam because that was what he'd thought it was.
His hands let go.
He floated there for a moment.
His spider-sense had been telling him for the last minute and a half. The not-danger reading. The sense of presence, plural, the reading that said he wasn't alone in here -- and he'd filed it under unknown and kept moving and not asked what specifically it meant. He was asking now. The sense came back clear and thorough, painting the fluid around him with the patient honesty of a thing that didn't sugarcoat: the body he'd found wasn't an anomaly. It was the first one he'd touched. There were others. The sense didn't give him a number, just the understanding of many, scattered across the space he couldn't see, settled in the fluid that preserved them.
Something in the reading had an edge to it. Not grief, but adjacent to grief -- the preemptive weight of a conclusion. Like the fluid knew what it was for, and he was the most recent addition to a collection that had been accumulating for longer than he could account for.
He filed that.
He went back to moving.
He used the body. Not thinking about it, just using it, because the cold had moved past the point where thinking about it was something he could afford. He got a foothold, got his upper half out of the fluid for a moment, breathed air that was terrible but was air, and then slipped and went back under. Came up again. Found another solid shape a few feet forward and grabbed it without cataloguing what it was, just kept going.
He fell back twice more.
The second time he went under fully, the fluid filled his ears and the cold came up through his chest like something was sitting on it, and for a moment his body forgot what it was supposed to be doing. He came up on instinct alone. No thought involved, just the animal refusal that lived somewhere below conscious decision-making, the part that had been running him since the explosion.
He was getting paler. He couldn't see himself but he could feel it -- the cold stealing something from the surface of him, drawing the warmth inward toward whatever warmth was left, rationing. His body was doing math without consulting him. Deciding what to give up to keep the core going.
He bumped something with his left hand -- the dead prosthetic swinging wide and catching a shape in the fluid -- and this one felt wrong in a way that stopped him without him deciding to stop. He brought his functioning hand over and felt carefully, slowly, running the geometry in the dark.
An arm. Then another. Then a third.
He paused.
Felt again, the way you double-checked something because the first reading couldn't be right.
A fourth.
The cold had his thoughts moving slow enough that he didn't pursue it. Didn't have the bandwidth to wonder what it meant, what was in here with him that had four arms, whether it had come from somewhere he knew or somewhere he couldn't imagine. He let go. Kept moving.
His lungs were telling him things he didn't want to hear.
Not collapsed, not quite, but tight in a way that suggested the fluid he'd breathed coming up wasn't done with him. Every inhale had a catch in it, a slight resistance at the bottom of the breath, and the cold was making everything worse. He could feel his body spending resources it had already spent once today. Being blown apart and reassembled had cost him something he hadn't finished paying back yet, and this place was presenting a second bill before the first one cleared.
He reached for the next body.
His hand came down on something that wasn't one.
Solid. Flat. Colder than the fluid, which shouldn't have been possible but was -- the cold radiated up from it in a way that felt structural, like it was the source of the cold rather than a victim of it. A platform. He couldn't see it but he could feel the edge of it, the sharp geometry of something that had been made rather than grown or fallen.
He pulled.
His arms were the only things still working properly and even they were losing ground fast, but he got his chest onto the platform and then his ribs and then he was halfway out and the fluid was running off him in thick slow streams and the air down here was even worse without the fluid's particular insulation but it was air and it wasn't fluid and that mattered.
He tried to get his legs up.
They didn't answer.
He could feel them the way he'd felt the arm -- present, technically, registered on some instrument inside him, but remote. The cold had been working on them this whole time and the debt had come due. He tried again, focused everything remaining on the request, got a twitch, got nothing else.
He lay there.
His cheek on the platform, which was cold enough to ache on contact, his lower half still in the fluid, his lungs doing that stuttering thing with every breath. His spider-sense had gone quiet. Not dead, but retreated inward, conserving, the way it sometimes did when there was nothing left to respond with.
He started slipping.
Not in a dramatic way. Gradual, his upper body losing the friction that had gotten him this far, the fluid on his chest providing no grip and the platform providing no warmth to help him maintain it. He could feel himself going and he couldn't stop it, couldn't make his arms lock, couldn't make anything cooperate, and the fluid was right there waiting with the patience of something that had waited this long already.
He went back in.
The cold closed over him and the smell went away in that specific way where you'd been in something long enough that it stopped registering, and then there was just the fluid and the dark and the cold that was inside him now as much as outside, and his mind couldn't find anything to hold onto -- no image, no name, nothing, just the absence of everything he'd been trying to get back to.
Then something went into the fluid.
Not him. Something else, entering from above with a precision that sent no disturbance through the fluid -- no splash, no ripple, just presence where there hadn't been presence, feeling its way down to him without hesitation. He felt it before he could process it. Multiple contact points finding him, wrapping, the grip of something that knew exactly where he was and wasn't asking.
It pulled.
Up and out in one motion, fast enough that the fluid didn't have time to argue, and then he was in the air and the cold was now the cold of the space above the fluid rather than the fluid itself and something was around his chest and it squeezed.
Not gently.
The fluid came out of him wrong and violent, his chest compressing past the point he'd have allowed if he'd had any vote, and his eyes opened into darkness and whatever was holding him was there at the edge of the dim light, shape without detail, limbs that had found him in a black pool without needing to see and weren't letting go.
His mouth tried to form something. Words, maybe, or just the reflex of a person whose body had been handled without consent. His arms moved. Small, pathetic, hands that had nothing in them pushing against whatever was holding him with the conviction of someone who'd said it already, had said it in a different place with different things holding him, had said: I am not letting anyone capture me again, and had meant it.
The grip didn't loosen.
He pushed harder. The cold was still in his chest and his arms had nothing real in them but he kept pushing because stopping wasn't the option, wasn't going to be the option, not for someone who'd just crossed through an entire pool of what he now understood was evidence of what happened to people who stopped -- who'd made it through that on pure refusal, who'd come apart and come back together and breathed fluid that would've ended anything less --
His hands were still moving when his consciousness left.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
It watched what it was holding.
Beneath the hood there was no way to read what it felt about this. There may have been nothing to read. There may have been everything -- disappointment, frustration, the particular weight of a thing that had been tracking something across the geometry of several realities and had arrived to find it barely alive in a pool it had no business surviving. All of it possible. None of it visible.
It simply watched.
Calculating, perhaps. Determining. Running some internal process that had no external markers, arriving at conclusions without showing its work.
What it held had fought. Even at the end, even with nothing left, it had fought with the specific stubbornness of a man whose time -- despite all available evidence -- had not quite run out yet. It had fought like something that had been here before and not forgotten what here meant and was not going back without resistance.
The thing beneath the hood registered this.
And came to the closest thing it had to a decision.
It moved.
With him.
~MimicLord
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