Survivors

Twenty minutes later that they found themselves in cockroach form crawling through the dirty air vents of the big building. Joe was muttering an almost constant stream of complaints and curses in a really squeaky cockroach voice while the other two did their best to ignore him. After a few minutes of scrambling they came to a grill that looked into the first of the rooms. They poked their little cockroach heads between the gaps in the grill and had a look around. The room was empty of people, but full of boxes. There were boxes that they could see appeared to be full of clothes. They could also see boxes of shoes, boxes of tins, boxes of dried foods and loads of other boxes that they couldn’t make out what the contents were. Luke pulled back from the grill, gave a waggle of his antenna and then scuttled off further along the air vent.

After a few more minutes scuttling they came to another grill. This time they didn’t need to poke their heads through to know that this room wasn’t empty, they could hear several voices. Luke poked just the tiniest bit of his head through the bars of the grill and took a look around. He could see six people, three men, two women and a child. They were sat round a table eating and talking. They were laughing and joking. It reminded Luke of the way they had used to sit round the campfire with Darius and the others.

Luke thought hard about his eye and it began to morph into a mix between a cockroach and an eagle eye. His vision went amazingly weird and fuzzy for a while and then it suddenly snapped into focus. He could now see everything in the room in absolute clarity. He scanned the room making a note of the important things he saw. Two cross-bows propped against the wall, a couple of large evil looking knives and a whole load of survival gear; ropes, water bottles, rucksacks and the like.

Luke was suddenly aware of two other little heads close to his. Luke waggled his antenna again and pulled back from the grill. The others followed his lead. From further down the air vent more voices echoed up at them. Joe nodded his head towards the noise and scuttled off. This time it was Joe who got to the grill first and stuck his head through the bars.

There were three men in this room. Two were standing facing each other having a heated discussion while the third was seated with his back to the grill. As Joe looked closer he could see that the seated man was tied to the chair. It was pretty obvious that this was the man they’d seen kneeling in the street the day before.

“Well I don’t trust him” shouted the bigger of the two men, before running his fingers through his long black shaggy beard.

“Why not!?” shrieked the other man. “Look at him, he’s pathetic!” (We will call this man Shorty).

“And do you know what” said Black Beard, “That’s what worries me. How can someone so pathetic get away from the Aliens. How could he have got so far up country without getting caught. Something’s not right. It stinks!”

“Look” said Shorty, he glanced at the man in the chair and then bent into Black Beard to whisper something in his ear, something he obviously didn’t want the seated man to hear. He’d only uttered a sentence or two when he suddenly looked round in surprise. He stared hard at the wall the air vent was in with a puzzled expression on his face.

“What?” asked Black Beard, somewhat startled.

“Err.. Nothing” replied Shorty “I thought I heard something” then with a shrug he lent back to Black Beard and started whispering again.

The noise Shorty had heard had been Joe. Cockroaches are not blessed with terribly good hearing and Joe, instead of adapting his ear like Luke had his eye, had attempted to hear the whispered conversation by leaning further and further out of the grill. In fact he had leant so far over that he had lost his footing and toppled out of the vent.

“Shhhhhhiiiitttttt” he’d squeaked in his little cockroach voice as he plummeted towards the floor.

Hitting the ground after a fall that was in human terms was the equivalent to a person falling off a block of flats, in all honesty didn’t hurt that much. However actual pain and the expectation of pain are two different things. Shock, fear, and anticipation that hitting the ground was really going to hurt all had the effect of making sure that Joe wasn’t thinking at all coherently by the time he crashed into the ground with a (to be honest miniscule) crunch! He lay on his little cockroach back for a few seconds not moving at all, while his brain tried to come to terms with what had just happened to him.

“Oh my god! Bugger!” he thought as his brain struggled to get back into some sort of working order. He flipped himself onto his front and scuttled towards the skirting board. He found a gap were the wood had rotted away and squeezed himself into it. Now he wasn’t in the open he tried to think, but this proved too difficult for him. All his brain would do was repeat the same fairly useless phrase over and over again “Oh god, oh god, oh god” etcetera etcetera....

Meanwhile Holly and Luke were staring open mouthed (or mandibled) at each other.

“What the hell are we going to do now” squeaked Luke “I can’t believe he did that”

“I don’t think he did it on purpose”

“Well how’s he going to get out of this one!?”

Unfortunately they didn’t have to wait very long to answer that question. I say unfortunately because what Joe chose to do was possibly the most stupid thing he had ever done in his long list of stupid things. Later even he couldn’t really explain why he had done it, “It just seemed like a good idea at the time”, was the best he could ever come up with.

At one moment there was a small room with three people in it, with one of them tied to a chair. The next instance there was a small room with three people in it, with one of them tied to a chair and a huge ten foot tall gorilla thing in one corner. By gorilla thing I mean a creature that was mostly shaped like a gorilla but had armour plating all down it’s back a bit like an armadillo. The gorilla thing roared and lunged at the man in the chair. Shorty and Black Beard screamed in terror and fought each other as they tried to be the first out of the room. Black Beard won the battle and flung the door open. He crashed into the hall with Shorty right behind him.

The Joegrila grabbed the man in the chair and tucked him (and the chair) under one big hairy arm and then leapt into the hallway. Glancing up and down the hall he made the sensible decision to go in the opposite direction to the way Black Beard and Shorty were running. Lolloping speedily down the corridor the Joegrilla looked for a way out of the building. Hearing a noise behind him he glanced back. Two more men were cautiously edging out of a room he had passed. Both were armed with crossbows and although they looked terrified Joe had no doubt that they meant business, real business. Joe also had no doubt that the business in question was doing him as much physical harm as possible. This one thought made up Joe’s mind, which was good because Joe was never good at making his mind if he had more than one thought. He sped up and simply crashed through the next door he came to splintering the wood effortlessly. Rushing headlong at the window he lowered his shoulder, tucked in his head and crashed through the double glazed window like a charging rhino...or gorilla...take your pick.

Unfortunately for Joe, and even more unfortunately for the man he was carrying he had forgotten that he was three floors up!

“SSSHHHIITTT” roared the Joegrilla as he began to plummet towards the earth. Joe without even really thinking consciously about what he was thinking began to turn into a giant spider. The spider shot long sticky strands of web towards the building opposite. As the web struck the building and stuck fast Joe suddenly felt his fall jolted violently to a halt. The jolt was so violent that the man was jerked free from his bonds and slipped off the chair. In a flash Joe targeted him with another strand of web. The strand struck the man square in the back. Joe braced himself as the web strand snapped tight as it took the man’s’ full weight. Unfortunately the man’s weight was somewhat amplified by the speed at which he was falling. So although Joe was super strong, the web was super strong, unfortunately the decorative brickwork around the window where Joe’s web had stuck wasn’t. As all the force was transferred up the strands of web into the brickwork. Instantly the brickwork shattered pulling several huge chunks of brickwork out of the wall. So the Joespider (as he was now) and the man began their plummet towards the ground again. This time even Joe wasn’t quick enough to react and fractions of a second later the man hit the ground, Joe hit the man and the bricks hit Joe.

“Oooppphh” gasped Joe, dazed for what seemed like the tenth time that day. He quickly regained his senses (or as much sense as he had) and picked himself up on his eight legs, shook some of the brick dust from his body, grabbed the man with two of his legs and scuttled as quickly as he could down the street. The man was completely unconscious and hung limply like a rag doll. He had a nasty cut over his left eye that was bleeding profusely making his face a bloody mask.

“I am in so much trouble” thought Joe, but at that particular moment he had no idea just how true that thought was.