Funnel Web Gully

A short story.

 You’d think a place called Funnel Web Gully would be full of spiders. I never minded the little bastards myself. At least they kept the flies away. There was nothing keeping the flies away here. No, Funnel Web Gully had once been called something else. I can’t remember what exactly. The new name came from the thick layer of fibre optic cable that had been cast across every surface like silicon candy floss, finer than a hair yet enough to cause the few trees that remained to sag under their weight. Layered underneath, like Shelob storing her prey, lay the carrion of war. I still have no idea how many bodies I walked over. 

Our point, a young guy called Tony, melted a path through the webbing with a backpack-mounted heat torch that could blast a steak well-done in about half a second. We left boot prints behind in the pools of black melted sludge. It made us easy to track and was slow going in the denser parts, but there was no other way through.

Behind Tony was Pru. I think she used to be a nurse, but we joke that she was a pack horse in a past life. She carried the antidrone pack - by far the heaviest - like it was a hiking daypack. And that didn’t even include the radshield. That was a new addition, a strange hybrid of medieval kite shield and personal computer. She’d painted our company sigil - the Swooping Magpies - across it against the advice of Serge. “You want to attach a flare as well maybe? Make sure they see?”

It was me then, and Serge behind me bringing up the rear. He was French, and a prick, and our squad leader. He had moved here decades ago before the war, and his accent swung wildly between occa drawl and musical clumsiness. I saw him reach out and pat the back of my neck. I could barely see the path in front me, overlaid behind the drone’s output in my helmet.

“Jockey, any creeps?”

I could see myself shake my helmet as I flicked the drone between infrared and ultraviolet. In truth, you couldn’t see shit through the webs, even twenty metres up. I couldn’t be too angry considering how many tendrils I’d added myself. Even now another tendril of fibre, almost as light as air, trickled out from my pack and up to the observer above. The gully was so thick with signal jammers that it was the only way.

“No sign of Erik?” That was the other squad leader. I think Serge wanted it to sound like he was concerned, but I knew him enough to know he was competitive. This hit came with a lot of prestige. Medals and parades and shit.

“No sign of nobody,” I said. “Gully’s quiet.”

“Bullshit,” muttered Pru ahead of me. “Gotta be dozens of creeps hiding out. There’s no way they haven’t got teams sweeping out here, not when the boss is coming to see his big win.”

She was right. Both sides had gotten a little too good at hiding. It was a war full of it. I remember seeing books of the grand old battles, where rows of men stood and delivered within shouting distance. That was a different type of war. I had lost count of the creeps I’d popped by that point, and I hadn’t done a single one face to face.

The observer pinged an alert in the bottom right of my goggles, automatically diving back down towards me as it spotted something drifting around a treeline. My gut twisted in a familiar nausea as I recognised the profile.

“Fuck. Bluebottle, half a click… that way. Southwest. Coming straight towards us.”

Everyone stopped and I took off my helmet. The observer whizzed back to my drone pack, dragged like a fish on the line. It never got less disorienting to be fully back on the ground. A bluebottle was bad.

“None of this shit on my back is going to help,” said Pru. “And I am not about to punt it all on this thing.” She held up the radshield.

Serge nodded. “Alright. The dugout we just passed is our best bet.”

“It’s not cleared, Serge,” said Tony. “Could be packed.”

“Shut the fuck up Tony and watch your corner. We can deal with a bluebottle probing us, we can’t if it’s right on our ass.”

I remembered passing the dugout the first time and thanking my stars we weren’t on a clearing mission. Funny how that works. Serge had me send the observer into the first room and clear it, but that didn’t mean anything. The first few rooms were always just welcoming parlours. When we flooded in, it all looked a little too clean. Piss bottles and MRE wrappers and bloody bandages and all other kinds of crap, but a path through it that looked like it had yet to be shaken loose by shelling. No bodies either.

That was enough for us to stack up butt-to-nuts and hug the wall, slinking through to the next chamber after the observer had taken a look. I didn’t have time to do a proper clear, and I couldn’t leave another observer at the entrance to make sure we weren’t wrapped on. We had no choice but to plunge deeper, deep enough to avoid the bluebottle’s detection, and hope that I didn’t miss some creep taking a nap underneath a thermal blanket.

I fucking hated clearing dugouts, and this was the worst kind of clear - a rushed one. I couldn’t see myself from the drone and the helmet overlay was useless in the dark, so Serge had to drag me from room to room while I tried to keep the observer from crashing.

We’d only reached the fourth room when the first thud came from above, sending dust streaming down the walls. No doubt the bluebottle. But not on top of us. Randomly shelling around our tracks maybe, or perhaps finding some other unfortunate soul.

It turned out to be a lucky thing. The sound woke the three creeps in the next and final room, suddenly visible to the observer as they wiggled to free themselves from their shielded sleeping bags. They barely had time to grab their guns before grenades sent them back to sleep. I couldn’t fault them for letting their discipline falter and not having anyone on watch. It looked like they’d been in here for months, cut off and alone, too scared to go out. They probably didn’t even know they’d won.

That was as far as the dugout went, but it was pretty deep. The red clay of the gully was perfect for making these deathtraps. We made a kind of curtain out of what was left of the sleeping bags to cover the door, and tried to shift the creeps to one side. Couldn’t put them in the room we’d come from - still too warm.

So we sat and waited. The shelling kept going, then stopped, then began again, sometimes close enough to cover us with a shower of loose dirt, sometimes far away enough to make you wonder if it was just the ever-present sound of distant artillery. Serge smoked a cigarette every fifteen minutes like clockwork, never looking away from the antidrone’s screen. Pru and Tony played with a deck of cards they’d found amongst the creeps. I found somewhere that was tolerable to lie down, putting my helmet back on and reviewing our journey. 

Almost a week of hard slog, harder and harder as we went, but we were almost there and in time for the big dance. Just one more click down the gully (if the satellites were to be believed) the arrogant bastards were clearing a space for their big showoff tomorrow morning. And the juiciest creep I’d ever had a chance on was coming to see. I almost couldn’t believe how stupid it all was. Come to the place where people get popped, General sir! Come see how good we got at popping them, sir! Might even get a demonstration.

After the shelling had stopped and the bodies had grown ice cold and Pru had thrown the cards across the room in a fit of frustration, Serge decided this was as good a place as any to stage for the boogie. Two and a half hours to haul our shit to General Creep’s Last Party from here, which meant a luxurious four hours of sleep - only three really, as one of us would always be up and watching the antidrone. Still, after a week it wasn’t hard to let exhaustion swallow you up for whatever it could get.

An alarm woke us and we prepped in the illumination of our headlamps. It was cold and our breath misted in front of our faces. The radshield had gotten some dirt somewhere deep in its innards and Serge cursed in French at the delay while Pru hurriedly ripped off a panel and blew into it with deep breaths, mashing the power button until its fans finally whizzed back into life. We said goodbye to our dead creep buddies and cautiously made our way back out into the gully.

Now, in the pitch black of a cloudy night, I was the one who took point. I sent one observer up about ten metres above to float, and another in front to poke around corners. The heat gun was no good this close, way too visible on infra, and so we hacked our way through the fibre webs only when we had to. It meant a winding and slow route down the gully and towards our prize. But no bluebottles or fizzers or anything else appeared above, and that’s what mattered. 

And then we crawled on our stomachs for the last hour, becoming slowly tangled up in fibre and having to cut ourselves free every so often. Until finally, we reached deep into a mass of webbing at least twenty metres across, draped on one of the few patches of trees still remaining. I drew the observers back into my pack. 

We didn’t need to say it. The stage was only two hundred metres away on the other side of that web. They wanted a good backdrop of the strange new battlefield of the future, something shiny for the news back home. We’d surely give it to them.

There was just enough clear space for the four of us to curl up in the underbrush. Tony draped a thermal blanket above us and we hunkered down to wait, breathing down into our jackets and not making a sound. This was the gambit. We had no shot outside the drone shield that followed old General Creep everywhere he went. We needed to be close enough that the pop would be over before they knew it was happening. It was closer than any of us had ever been. That’s how much it meant.

We heard trucks, and voices, and the whine of creep drones. But the cocoon of fibres around us was good, it was thick enough to keep the heat in a little, and the creeps didn’t see our hearts beating out of our chests.

We knew it was time from the music. Nobody plays music for grunts, let alone a live band. Serge gave me a grim nod and I put on my helmet. No observer this time. This time Tony took out the Magpie. Beauty, it was. Work of art. Not much more than a shotgun shell strapped to an almost completely silent drone the size of my fist. Nothing but the best (of what’s left) for this little punt. Tony cut a hole just big enough to poke it through, and I was off.

Easy does it. There was still a maze of fibres to fly through. But Maggie did good, flew like a dream, and the fibre spool unwound ever so quietly from my pack next to me. I crept closer and closer through the webs, slow and smooth.

The stage was tacky, covered from top to bottom with creep colours and flags and cameras. Not that I thought our brass would put on some kind of audiovisual masterpiece for their parade, if we survived this. But it all seemed a bit haphazard, as if the creeps who had to throw all this together had been just as sleep deprived as we were.

Twenty metres from the stage, I stopped at a two centimetre hover and took a deep breath. This was it - the quick draw. The others knew me well enough to murmur good luck.

Maggie swooped like a bolt of lightning, zipping up and around to face the stage for just long enough for me to see the face that had been bouncing around behind my eyes for the past week. I gaze-dove, the drone zipping towards where I looked, keeping my eyes fixed on General Creep as a moment later his surprised face filled my vision, and pop.

Close enough to hear the uproar, the panic, the shouts.

My squad had started moving the moment they’d heard it. Serge grabbed me and ripped the helmet off. “Allons-y, Jockey.”

Only a few moments after we threw ourselves out of the cocoon, a bluebottle hit us with a spotlight and screamed rockets out of the sky. Bangs came from all around, a chunk of shrapnel stuck me in the ass, and I screamed right back. I lay there stunned, cradling my bleeding ass, and watched Pru try out the radshield for the first time. She crouched down behind the emblem of the Swooping Magpies, its hardware whirring to life, and pointed it right at the drone. The bluebottle wobbled in the air for a moment, its lights dimming, and then fell like a pile of bricks almost on top of us.

“Allons-y, allons-y, go go! Tony’s gone.”

I looked to see Tony behind me. He’d probably saved the rest of my ass with his head. Quick, at least.

No crawling this time. We ripped and tore as fast as we could through the webs, and a buzzing grew behind us like we’d stirred a hornet’s nest. This was the bit none of us really expected to live through.

Pru got her hero moment, like she always wanted. Said she always wanted to go out looking cool, and she fucking nailed it. Took out another bluebottle and three fizzers with the radshield while we ran, and took care of a dozen poppers with the antidrone that would’ve punched all of our tickets. But that’s the thing. Always more poppers than you’ve got anti. Got her right on the temple.

Serge just kept pushing me along, taking shots at fizzers as they dived at us. I didn’t realise how bad he was cut up until he told me to keep going without him. Didn’t matter in the end - a shell hit him dead on and cut him up once and for all. Seems cursed to call it a lucky thing, but it sent me clean off the gully hill and crashing down with enough speed to tear through the webs. Smacked my head on something, and lights out.

It turns out there’s a creek down there, right at the bottom. It's spoiled with the runoff of the dead of course, nothing still living down there. But the creek flows a little. Woke up almost drowning. Crawled for a day through that damn septic water, and almost died from an infected ass because of it.

Nobody ever got a medal or a parade or anything. They gave me a case of whiskey and a booklet of ration cards. I shouldn’t complain, that was worth quite a bit at that point. It didn’t really matter, in the end, what we did there. General Creep got swapped out with General Creep II and the whole thing just kept on ticking. But I’ll never forget the webs. The dugouts. The creeps. The god-damned alienness of it all. I’ll never forget Funnel Web Gully.