Narrow Escape (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free PDF Page A

he was until dark. As he had learned to do in his early training, he retreated into himself, forcing his mind to ignore the signals from his body telling him how cold he was. Whenever his falling core temperature brought him close to shivering, he began flexing every muscle in his body in turn. He made small, imperceptible movements beginning with his fingers and toes and moving up his body until he had raised his temperature a little and then he went back into his state of semi-suspension, mind alert, but body motionless.
    Hard though he tried to still the anxiety gnawing at him, as he waited out the daylight hours, he knew that he was falling ever further behind his self-imposed schedule. He had hoped to reach the Live Letter Box that night but the brush with the hunter force and the hours lost lying up in the sump-hole made that problematic at best. He knew now that he was going to have to be less cautious if he was to have any chance of completing his task in the allotted time span.
    As soon as night fell, he emerged from his hiding place and set off. He kept moving fast over the ground but in the pitch blackness he was constantly stumbling, tripping and falling. He plunged into another sump hole, unseen in the darkness, and then found himself sliding out of control down a scree slope, with a small avalanche of dislodged rock crashing down around him.  He knew the noise of the rock-fall could have been heard a mile away and he increased his speed still more.
    He was exhausted by the time he reached the Live Letter Box, a derelict barn in a field that had once been a small meadow but had now reverted to moorland. It was just before first light and he set up an OP in a copse of brambles, worming his way in underneath them, breaking the stems off at ground level where necessary and obscuring the break marks by smearing mud over the stems. By the time the cut foliage wilted and died, he would be long gone. He spent the day observing the barn, willing away the hours until nightfall, when he could go down there and obtain the details of the next RV. All the time, the clock was ticking and he did not yet know how many more stages there would be before he reached the final RV.
    He observed the barn throughout the day. No one entered or left it and he saw no trace of movement, but half an hour after nightfall that evening he saw a gleam of light from inside. He emerged from cover and moved in complete silence over the ground, every sense straining for sound or movement as he approached the barn and crept in through the doorway, fists clenched, poised either for fight or flight.
     The light source was a hurricane lamp torch in a corner, with another held by the agent, who was sitting on a pile of fallen rubble watching the doorway. The man stood up, yawned and stretched as he caught sight of Shepherd. He gave his pass code number and Shepherd responded with his. ‘That’s the formalities out of the way,’ the agent said. ‘Here, take this.’
    He gave him a piece of stale bread and then produced a hip flask, poured a shot of rum into the cap and passed it to him. Shepherd ate the bread in half a dozen bites, ignoring the blue mould speckling its crust, and then gulped down the rum. He was desperate to get the coordinates of the next RV and get moving straightaway, but the agent showed no sign of urgency and began asking him all sorts of questions about the exercise. He was particularly interested in Shepherd’s account of evading the hunter force and asked him a string of questions about it. Grinding his teeth, but realising that this was just another way of ratcheting up the tension in the runner, Shepherd masked his impatience and gave answers, albeit rather terse ones, to each question.
    At length, the agent stopped toying with him and gave him the coordinates of his next RV. ‘It’s a linear RV in a wood,’ he said. ‘The next agent will be somewhere along the track and you will recognise him because he will be