A week went by.
Every night, they would come for us. They would phase through that front door, and she would kill them. And then we would dispose of the bodies.
Late into the evening, we took turns staying awake until sunrise in case of an attack. She was having a hard time getting to sleep so we ended up staying awake all night long, sitting together, huddled up in the corner of the living room.
The knife would always be by her side.
We would sit there and we would wait.
Neither of us would say anything. We would sit and listen to the croaking of the bullfrogs outside.
We would do that every night—until sunrise.
The spiders usually arrived at ten, we knew that much.
But there was always that nagging fear that one of them would suddenly come down on us the moment we fell asleep.
A three-meter-tall Arachnoid abomination, with black long appendages carrying tips as sharp as javelins, and the animalistic drive to kill.
You either saw them and pulled out your knife in the first three seconds, or you got impaled through the head.
That was what our lives had come to.
The days ground along painfully until I realized we had been living here for a whole month.
I'd seen her kill so many spiders and in so many different ways, it was hard to remember all of them.
Their human faces were starting to blend together. So many different skin colors and ethnicities.
Although the corpses were not too heavy, I still had to put in the effort. I couldn't pile up the bodies so they just took up more space every day.
Although she was getting stronger, sometimes she would slip up and get hurt. I knew her body could heal much faster than an average human, but unlike the wounds that cleared up on the surface, the trauma stayed with her.
Once it was ten and a spider appeared, they wouldn't come back until the next evening. But that anxiety and fear always stayed the same.
I could get over the pain of rat bites when waking up every morning, but it was different with the spiders.
There were also nights when it was ten pm, and as Liz sat with her knife by her side and we waited for one of them to phase through that front door, and we waited and waited, hour after hour after hour, only for them to never show up.
Those were probably some of the worst nights we had.
All those hours of anticipation were torture. I imagined it could only be worse for her.
It was like to living in the wilderness as an animal. You ran from predators and you kept running, until the day they caught you.
I knew her hatred for the spiders was growing, because I was also feeling the same way.
Another raid under the roof of our new home. No, not home. A den would've been a more appropriate description. Nine out of ten marble tiles in the living room were already gone, baring the black cement underneath. Huge cracks lined the wall and ceiling like lightning filling the sky. On these thick cracks, some areas inside the wall were bulging, the paint flaking at the edges.
Liz finally managed to immobilize her target, a spider with a black man on the top half. The spider was pinned to the floor at the stomach with a metal rod.
"We will ask very nicely," she said, stepping in front of the spider. It flailed its legs around and stretched them toward her but she was just a few centimeters away, barely outside its reach. The ugly human head stared at her with a huge grin on its face.
"What is the cure?" She enunciated every word. "The cure for the curse." Her voice reverberated into the kitchen room.
The spider continued to flail its legs around. For the past whole minute it had not blinked even once.
Liz kicked the beast in the stomach.
"What is the cure?" The words were now so clearly exaggerated they almost resembled a different language.
No words came out.
Another kick in the same area.
It continued to stare at her, its eyes so wide they were almost squeezed out of their sockets.
Liz hissed under her breath.
She was shaking.
"Liz."
"I've got this."
She held the knife in front of the spider.
Nothing. Just the same expression on its human face.
The same stare.
She stood like that for a few seconds.
Phlfff—
The knife went into its stomach.
"Ahahahahahahaha!" The black man on the top half broke into maniacal laughter.
Its gaze of its eyes was fixed on hers.
"It must die!" the man screamed in a cold, raspy voice. The exertion of it was enough to make the head shake back and forth.
Right after that, the flailing suddenly stopped before the appendages went limp on the floor.
The head pulled back. Its bulging, glassy eyes turned toward the ceiling.
Usually she had to aim at the head to take them out. It was as if these monsters could just stop their heartbeat at will.
Liz just stood there.
Her shaking had stopped, but her whole body was rigid.
Then, very slowly, Liz pulled the knife from the beast.
"Robert, help me clean up."
A drop of sweat rolled down my temple.
She gave me a bitter smile.
The moon was beautiful.
It was only a thin crescent, but it glowed—the light was sharp and clear, emanating from its bright edges and faintly casting down on me. The Moon reflected light from the Sun, as if wanting to remind me that the Sun was still there, that it would always be there.
Although the Moon was hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Earth, when I looked at it from down here, it almost gave a different impression. It was as if the Moon was less than a kilometer from where I was sitting. If I could climb inside a hot-air balloon, I might be able to fly high enough to reach it.
The light was probably the reason behind the effect. I could never imagine that it could be coming from somewhere so far away. The moonlight was no different than the light from a bulb on a ceiling.
The sky was a giant dome, and somebody was painting over the surface every few hours.
Black to blue, blue to orange, orange to black.
The sight gave the impression that the world was much smaller than we thought. The world was a small and cozy place. The world was a safe place. Sometimes it was beautiful.
The moon was beautiful tonight.
Sometimes I wondered why it had to look that way.
I let out a long sigh.
I didn't want to get back inside the house.