We shot each other a perplexed look and froze.
"Did that sound like several very soft footsteps to you?" Dr. Kale asked.
The soft tapping echoed again.
"Any chance Darren and Justin are walking around like ballerinas in slippers?" I asked as I spun around, scanning for any sort of movement.
"Probably," Dr. Kale said in a whisper.
I watched as Dr. Kale was searching for the origin of the noise. That's when a thought struck me. We were both looking at the ground.
I began raising my head toward the ceiling, moving slowly because I was terrified of what I would see. When my sight reached the ceiling, my eyes immediately found the source of the noise. I could see those evil red eyes tearing into me. Eyes I would never forget.
I was being watched.
My eyes locked onto the ceiling, and my breathing stopped; all I could see were eight blood-red eyes burning through my eyes and tearing into my soul. These were the soulless eyes of a predator, of a conscience-free killer. Thanks to the glow of the mammoth machine, I was able to just make out the outline of a spider crawling along the ceiling, each long leg pushing the spider forward at a controlled pace.
It must have been aware that we had noticed its presence. It crept along the ceiling, lining itself up to be directly over me. Judging from the size of the spider, it was one of the more recently born. This spider was smaller than the last ones we had seen on camera. Even then, it was still approaching human-sized fast.
I tried to get Dr. Kale's attention, but any noise I made was just me stammering. Thankfully, my wild noises did manage to get his attention.
"What the heck are you doing?" he asked me. When I was unable to answer with more than a few blubbering, slurred words, he followed my eyes to locate the source of my sudden mental breakdown. Once he saw what I was looking at, he turned into a blubbering idiot, like me.
The spider hissed at us and continued to creep along the ceiling.
"What the hell do we do?" I said, finding my words. "Any chance this is one of those things where we don't move, and it can't see us?"
The spider hissed and clicked its pincers at me.
"I would say not," Dr. Kale said, on the verge of hyperventilating.
"If we die, my wife will kill us both," I said. Dr. Kale arched his neck to give me a strange look of disbelief or disapproval. It was hard to focus on his expression, but it was definitely dis-something.
I did some quick calculations between the time it would take us to reach the door and the time for the spider to eat our faces off. It did not look good. The amount of screwed that we were was approaching the most epic of levels. On a positive note, there was a decent chance one of us would escape through the door while the other one was being eaten.
With that thought in my head, I wish the spider would at least take its eyes off me for a second.
"Move slowly toward me," I said out of the side of my mouth.
"Why?!" he said with wide eyes.
"There's a chance the time it takes us to run to the door is less than the time it takes the spider to drop to the floor and run us down."
"A chance? No thanks," he said with a laugh, which led to another hiss from the spider. "Oh, okay. How much of a chance?"
"Uh, from the top of my head?... twenty percent?" I said.
"Probably higher than our chances just standing here," he said and started to slide his foot across the floor.
The spider started to click, and its eyes locked onto Dr. Kale instead of me. I was not going to lie, that was a bit of a relief.
"I said slowly!" I said through my clenched teeth.
"This is slowly!" he whispered back.
"Well, go slowly-er!"
"That's not a word!"
"It is when there's a spider on the ceiling about to eat us!"
He didn't answer. He just kept sliding one foot at a time until he was next to me.
"Okay, on my mark, we sprint for the door as hard as we can. We don't stop until the door closes behind us," I said, and my breaths started to become shorter. Fear was trickling from my palpitating heartbeat down to the pit of my stomach.
"Why do you decide when we run?" Dr. Kale asked.
"What?!"
"It's my lab; I should say when we go."
"You created these things. All of this is your fault! Besides---"
POP! POP! POP!
Three gunshots echoed just outside the door.
"Now!" I said and started running. Dr. Kale was at my heels, looking back as the spider pushed off from the ceiling. It was on the floor faster than I had calculated, and all its many feet launched it forward in our direction at an unreasonable speed that I couldn't believe.
In seconds, the spider had closed the distance between us. I saw its body tense as it prepared to lunge at Dr. Kale.