Alex leaped to his feet, dislodging fifty of the crawlers, but hundreds more remained. He jumped as high as he could and landed hard on a smile pile of spiders, squishing them into dust. When he did, more and more of the spiders fell off him, unable to hold on.
He jumped again, squishing more spiders, and knocking more off him. He tapped Senta-eh and showed her what he was doing. She too jumped, knocking off a quarter of those who were crawling on her. Sekun-ak and others saw Alex and Senta-eh hopping madly around the cave and imitated him.
In moments, everyone did the same. It was an insane Stone Age square dance, with ‘Squish the zisla-ta’ replacing ‘Allemande left.’”
The jumping, bumping, squishing, and squashing went on for long minutes. The fire caught again, making a more complete barrier, and soon the only living creatures in the cave were humans who stood ankle-deep in the bodies, legs, and cast-off spore of the zisla-ta.
Once again, the bodies of the spiders slammed into the fire, popped, and filled the cave with the horrible odor.
“What happened?” Sekun-ak asked Alex.
Alex searched his brain for a way to explain that the fire had burned out the oxygen in the cave, but couldn’t find the best words in Winten-ah. Finally, he settled for, “The fire burned away what we need to breathe. That’s why I knocked part of the fire down. If I hadn’t, we would have all gone to sleep, the fire would have gone out, and the spiders would have filled the cave, feasting on us.”
“As they nearly did to you,” Sekun-ak observed, pointing at dozens of small bites all over Alex’s body. “What can we do, then? If we knock down the fire, they nearly overwhelm us. If we don’t knock down the fire, we fall asleep and soon they will overwhelm us.”
“We’ll have to do a little of both. When we see those around us showing signs of sleepiness, one of us will have to make a hole in the fire wall—a smaller one than what I did. The rest of us need to be on the sides of the hole, and deal with the zisla-ta as they come through.”
Alex glanced again at the dwindling woodpile and wished they had more.
“When everyone is clear-headed again, we’ll build up the fire again. We’ll keep doing that in cycles until they leave.”
It felt like an endless night for the Winten-ah trapped in the cave a hundred feet off the ground. An endless cycle of oxygen deprivation, flurries of jumping and stomping, rebuilding the fire, then waiting to start again.
The children and teens, who had started the night with such fervor and energy, had all but given up and were asleep on a section of the stone floor that had been swept clean of spider corpses.
Senta-eh pointed to them. “Children can adapt to anything. The zisla-ta make enough noise to wake the corpses of our ancestors and their burning bodies make a stench worse than Monda-ak’s scat, and they still manage to sleep through it.”
“I think they’re overloaded,” Alex said. He pointed at Tinka-eh, sleeping soundly on Reggie’s lap. “But think of this. In many, many solstices, that little one might be an old lady, advising her tribe on how we managed to survive this night.”
“You are assuming we will survive the night, then?”
“Of course,” Alex said, trying to summon a confident smile. His exhaustion was too great, though, and it came off as a sickly grin.
As everything does eventually, the plague of the zisla-ta passed.
Alex and Sekun-ak loaded the last of the wood on the fire line and were discussing what to do when it burned down when Alex held up a hand.
“Wait. Listen.”
Both men cocked an ear to the fire, and they realized that the explosion of spider bodies was slowing. The steady, machine gun rhythm was falling to a point that they could almost make out individual pops.
They had just opened a hole in the firewall, so they knew they had enough oxygen to get through another hour or two. They decided to just let the fire burn down and see where they were then.
The tribe members lined up twenty feet back from the fire line and watched it burn with morbid fascination. When the wall of fire burned down enough that there was space between the flames and the top of the opening, zisla-ta came through again. It wasn’t the torrent of bugs that it had been throughout the night, though. It went back to being a game for the kids to hop on the zisla-ta before they had a chance to jump onto someone.
It took several hours, but eventually the raging storm of floating spiders slowed to a trickle, then almost stopped. Normally, seeing a few dozen spiders drop from the sky at you would be cause to freak out. After the torrent they had witnessed for the previous long hours, a few of the parachuting arachnids seemed like nothing.
Sekun-ak decided they should stay in the cave until the fire burned completely down. Outside, a cold, gray light crept in, showing that a new day had finally dawned.
When the fire burned itself completely out—leaving a charred black line that would take many seasons to fade, Alex, Senta-eh and Sekun-ak stepped out to see what was left.
The devastation tore at their hearts. As far as they could see, there was no greenery at all. Grass and bushes were gone; leaves and small limbs had been eaten right off the trees.
Oddest of all, there was no sound other than the slight whisper of a breeze. Everything else—rustling leaves, skittering insects, waving grass, birds calling out overhead—were gone.
Sekun-ak gestured for Alex and Senta-eh to follow him and climbed up to the very top of the cliffside, where they normally posted guards to look out for attacks from their vulnerable rear approach. They climbed the ladder to the top of
